Product Description
Firefox Hacks is ideal for power users who want to take full advantage of Firefox from Mozilla, the next-generation web browser that is rapidly subverting Internet Explorer's once-dominant audience. It's also the first book that specifically dedicates itself to this technology.
Firefox is winning such widespread approval for a number of reasons, including the fact that it lets users browse faster and more efficiently. Perhaps its most appealing strength, though, is its increased security something that is covered in great detail in Firefox Hacks.
Clearly the web browser of the future, Firefox includes most of the features that browser users are familiar with, along with several new features, such as a bookmarks toolbar and tabbed pages that allow users to quickly switch among several web sites.
Firefox Hacks offers all the valuable tips and tools you need to maximize the effectiveness of this hot web application. It's all covered, including how to customize its deployment, appearance, features, and functionality. You'll even learn how to install, use, and alter extensions and plug-ins. Aimed at clever people who may or may not be capable of basic programming tasks, this convenient resource describes 100 techniques for 100 strategies that effectively exploit Firefox.
Or, put another way, readers of every stripe will find all the user-friendly tips, tools, and tricks they need to make a productive switch to Firefox. With Firefox Hacks, a superior and safer browsing experience is truly only pages away.
The latest in O'Reilly's celebrated Hacks series, Firefox Hacks smartly complements other web-application titles such as Google Hacks and PayPal Hacks.
From the Publisher
About the Author
Nigel McFarlane is the author of Rapid Application Development with Mozilla (Prentice Hall, 2003) and Instant JavaScript (Wrox, 1997). As a freelance technology writer and an active member of the Mozilla community, he has also written over 50 articles and tips on Mozilla and related technologies and has written or contributed to a number of books.
Excerpt
Install a portable version of Firefox so that you can move from computer to computer.
This hack explains how to take Firefox with you wherever you go. You can install Firefox on a number of mobile devices. Whether it can run directly on the device, write data there, or merely be stored conveniently depends on the device. We’ll consider these devices:
• A laptop
• A server-based virtual private network (VPN)
• A roaming VPN
• A mobile consumer device, such as a digital camera, mobile phone, or PDA
• A USB drive
• A RAM drive
It’s the so-called removable media (USB and RAM drives) that are the interesting cases. Let’s briefly dispose of the other possibilities first.
Laptop
If you install Firefox on a laptop, you can surf the Web using that laptop from anywhere that TCP/IP connectivity is in place—a WiFi hotspot, for example. It’s up to you to ensure that the laptop acts as its own firewall, or else that it correctly establishes a VPN with the organization that you’re using as an Internet gateway. If that’s done, Firefox typically just needs to be set up direct connect with no proxy.
Server-Based VPN
A server-based VPN runs Firefox on your computer after the install area is loaded from the server disk. All you need is file-sharing access and perhaps server login [Hack #14].
Roaming VPN
A roaming VPN runs Firefox from a local or remote installation, but it also replicates your profile area from a central server to local disk. At the moment, this has to be set up using special network admin steps [Hack #28]. Automatic roaming is not supported in Firefox 1.0, but at the time of this writing, this functionality is close to being finished. Perhaps it will be available in Version 1.1.
Mobile Consumer Devices
Memory-rich consumer devices such as digital cameras can sometimes be recognized as USB or Bluetooth drives by a host computer. In this case, they operate just like a USB key drive and can perform the same way, as discussed in the following section.
The press has reported that a version of Mozilla is slated to run directly inside Nokia mobile phones, and possibly in another vendor’s mobile phones as well. Such versions aren’t strictly Firefox but do display pages using the same Gecko technology as Firefox.
USB Drive
Here’s where things start to get interesting. If you can carry Firefox on a USB drive, you can plug it in and run it wherever you go.
There are several options for USB-based Firefox installs. The simplest is to put the standard Firefox installer on the key drive and install it everywhere you go, like Johnny Appleseed planting apples. That puts both the install area and the profile area on the local hard disk, and none of your profile files move with you.
Get PortableFirefox. John Haller has repackaged and reconfigured the official Firefox 1.0 install into PortableFirefox, which can run entirely from USB. This means the install area and the profile area are both retained on the USB drive while Firefox runs.
This package is too large to fit on a floppy disk, but it will fit on a Zip drive. Zip drives, however, are slow to access. PortableFirefox contains official Firefox software.
Use a USB launcher.The Firefox Launcher is a small Windows program that starts up Firefox once you’ve installed the profile and install areas on the USB key. Install it on the USB key as well. A trivial launcher can also be made using a simple .bat file. It need only contain the following lines:
cd U:\
start \install\Firefox\Firefox.exe -profile \profiles\ProfileName
Here, the install and profile areas are preloaded to the equivalent directories on the USB drive.
Build a USB-aware Firefox. Finally, another alternative is to smarten Firefox up so that it scans for profiles on any USB drives that are plugged in. This leaves the install area on the local computer, and the profile data (your important data) follows you wherever you go. This link describes a customisation that provides this feature, but at the time of writing, you have to be able to compile Firefox with these changes in place yourself:
The Mozilla Thunderbird email product has formally planned support for USB drives. The benefits of that work will probably also benefit Firefox, but most likely not until a minor version later than 1.0. Read the release notes for Firefox 1.1 and later versions to see if that feature has arrived yet.
RAM Drive
If you can make Firefox run from a RAM drive, you’re one step closer to running it from any drive, anywhere. This URL describes how to put Portable Firefox on a RAM drive on Windows:
RAM drives are somewhat overkill on Linux/Unix. To put Firefox in RAM on Unix, simply execute these commands, which load all Firefox files into the disk buffer cache, where they are subsequently accessed at RAM speed:
find /path/to/firefox/install ! -type d | xargs cat > /dev/null
find /path/to/firefox/profile ! -type d | xargs cat > /dev/null
This will not, however, remove the need for a disk drive, and neither will it keep Firefox in memory if the system has heavy disk access.
At the time of writing, there is not yet a Knoppix-like CD distribution of Firefox alone, although Knoppix distributions exist that include Firefox. For a real, memory-locked Firefox on Linux or Solaris, create a tmpfs filesystem and install, copy, or load standard Firefox there each time you need to use it. Knoppix distributions automate that process but allow bookmarks to be stored only until the PC is rebooted.
