Help wanted: your knowledge of Firefox and Chrome browsers. Also RL.

[cimorene]

I'm attempting the painful process of switching browsers away from Opera after several years¹. So I'm trying to replace Opera's unique functionality with extensions and add-ons but haven't figured it all out yet. If you can help me out with any of these functions or something similar in either Firefox or Chrome, please say so!

• Tab stacks: Opera 11 lets you drag tabs on top of each other and collapse groups of them into "stacks". After using it for only like a month I already miss this functionality like crazy. I downloaded a tab grouping extension, but it added an extra toolbar on top, which wasn't what I wanted at all, so I deleted it again.


• Fit to width toolbar button: A button that forces the page to resize so it fits horizontally in the browser, eliminating any horizontal scrollbar.


• Author view toolbar button: disable the page's CSS with one click to view a page in plain html.


• Speed dial: My most-used bookmarks all accessible as thumbnails from my home page or each new blank tab opened. Bookmarks 1-9 accessible through keyboard shortcut ctrl+#.


• Dragonfly (developer view) toolbar button. Clicking the button opens a pane that analyzes the code and CSS of the page, letting you click and examine each element. Most useful for getting around pages that disable right-click, but also for fixing CSS.


• The tab bar above the navigation bar.

I've started work practice this week as well as installing a new OS (Ubuntu 11.045 Natty Narwhal beta) this weekend and subsequently switching over to it² so I'm kind of short on time until I get the hang of this new schedule (and like, leaving the house regularly and needing more sleep!). I'm really having fun so far though.

Also, I still remember 1st and 2nd grade with some clarity, and this school is so much better than mine were. (No surprise, I guess, since Finland has the best-performing primary/secondary education in the world and the US's is pretty far down the list, plus I'm pretty sure Alabama is far from the top of US performance.) I wish my school's pedagogical philosophy had been more like this.


1. I still love it, but the issues with flash are getting worse rather than better and it's started freezing during bookmark management and failing to import/export bookmarks, which is the last straw.

2. I accidentally slightly borked Mint with the Ubuntu install, but since I instantly liked the Ubuntu upgrade better and it seems stable enough, I decided not to reinstall Mint at all. Yet. If Ubuntu doesn't work out and neither does Gnome 3 - final release in a few days! - then I can always go back. I wasn't running the latest release, anyway.

Comments

[ursamajor]

Firefox 4 has something similar to tab-stacking, I think? Depending on what you mean by tab-stacking. You have to press a toolbar button, and that takes you to a screen where you can drag and drop your tabs into groups - then when you click on one of the thumbnails in a group, it brings you to that thumbnail's tab, and only the tabs in that group are displayed. (To access other groups, you click back into the tab group screen.) I'm not sure if that's what you mean, or if you just mean that you need to rearrange your tabs so that the food ones are next to each other, the video game ones are next to each other, but all tabs are still immediately accessible in the tab bar.

I'm positive there's a "speed dial" extension for FF, but I don't use that functionality, so I don't know what a good one would be.

Both Chrome and FF4 default to tabs above the navbar; in FF4, it's adjustable in Options.

[cimorene]

Thanks, I hadn't found that! It may be better than nothing, though it wasn't quite what I meant, as it happens.

In Opera, the collapsed tabs form a "stack" the size of one tab with a border drawn around it and an expand button, but all the stacks appear simultaneously with all the other tags. If all the stacks are expanded, the tabs either wrap or scroll, depending on your settings.

[flamebyrd]

Firebug (for Firefox) sounds a lot like Dragonfly, but I've never used Dragonfly so I don't know if it's fundamentally quite different? Anyway, I use Chrome for my browsing but Firebug for my web development because I cannot function without it, and Chrome's built-in developer tools just don't cut it.

For removing CSS, maybe try the Firefox web developer toolbar? It won't be quite one-click, though.

I wonder if you could do the CSS-removal and page-resize as a Javascript bookmarklet... Hmm. (Actually, this is a badly-phrased statement, this is certainly possible, the question is whether it's practical. XD)

[cimorene]

Thanks! I'll investigate the bookmarklet more, because it seems like something that probably does exist out there already. But in the meantime, the web developer bar has some drop-down buttons, so that's only two clicks!

[msilverstar]

Firefox 4 has tabs above by default. It has tab groups but I never use them.
I have bookmarklets for zap (clear colors), indent, and unjustify, as well as readability and readable. I like it pretty well, stopped the FF3 crashes.

[pineapplechild]

Firebug is a pretty good dev tool on Firefox.

As for speed dial, is the behavior you're looking to replicate sites you've chosen or the top calculated site? I use Fast Dial for the first, and it looks like there are add ons to replicate the second, such as Speed Dial.

[cimorene]

Fast Dial was just what I wanted, thank you!

[lim]

No CSS is a menu option in FF:

View > Page Style > No Page Style

You may also see alternative styles in that menu if the site specifies them.

To overlay your own styles and skins, install the extension Stylish.

You can give any bookmark a keyword in its Properties dialogue and call it by typing that keyword in the address bar (command L to go to the bar, then type). But in general you'll find the "awesomebar" feature will replace that for you. To go to my flist, I hit: cmd L L ↓ ↵

(ctrl instead of cmd for a PC hobv)

Web Developer extension is IMO better than Dragonfly. Hit cmd E to edit CSS live. You can saveout from the interface or paste your edits into Stylish to persist them. THis extension is worse than useless in Chrome, so FF only.

[cimorene]

Thank you! The Web Developer extension looks like it will be a good substitute for the CSS- and image-killing buttons as well as fit-to-width and Dragonfly.

[alafaye]

Issues with flash--like Adobe? I think that's actually flash itself...mine keeps crashing too.

[cimorene]

Nope, the disagreements between flash and Opera for Linux are well-documented and of looooooooong (years) standing.

[alafaye]

Well now it's happening with Firefox ._. WTF internets?