As you can see it’s fairly customised, mainly to cut down on space and makes use of some rather nifty extensions.

Adblock Plus
Mainly to stop those really annoying ones that play music or make a sound when your mouse passes over them.

Better Gmail 2
Used to slim down Gmail and hide some of the clutter from that interface. Works well with the Gmail Redesigned skin, created by Globex Designs and used through the Stylish extension.

ColorfulTabs
Helps you differentiate between tabs by colouring them based on the website icon. Also fades out the inactive tabs.

Download Statusbar
Replaces the Downloads window with a statusbar at the foot of the window. Configured properly this will show the download as it progresses, then disappears when the download is complete.

Extension List Dumper
Installed to get the list for this blog post! Simply outputs a list of the currently installed extensions. Configurable to show URL, versions and more.

Fast Dial
Opera fans will recognise this and I’m already a fan since discovering it! Once installed it replaces the about:blank page (the default page loaded when you create a new tab). You can add links to this page, and it will grab a screenshot to give you a graphical bookmark. Highly configurable, I keep mine to a 3 x 3 square.

FaviconizeTab
If you look at my screenshot, you’ll see three smaller tabs on the lefthand side on the tab bar which show this in action. Simply put, this extension cuts down the with of the tab to just show the “favicon” (the little website icon). You can add any website to the it’s list, and it will automatically shrink the tab size. Handy for those of us that keep a couple of tabs open all the time.

Firebug
A must have if you do any kind of web design or programming work.

Foxmarks Bookmark Synchronizer
I ditched this extension in favour of Google Bookmark Sync but Foxmarks doesn’t include session syncing, so not sure whether I’ll stick with it. I don’t really use bookmarks all that heavily. Mozilla Weave may replace this in the future (session syncing was basically a way to work between two browsers on different machines, closing the browser on my home PC would prompt the extension to remember which websites I had open so, when I opened a browser on my work PC, those same websites would be reloaded).

Gmail Notifier
Notifies me when I get new emails in my Gmail account.

Greasemonkey
Allows you to run website specific scripts to dynamically alter the website. Not something I use heavily, at present I only have a script called Gmail Signature Float installed.

Morning Coffee
An excellent little extension which adds a coffee cup icon to your menu bar. You can then add any website to it’s list and, with one click, open them all in one go. Simple and effective.

PDF Download
I use Foxit Reader to handle PDFs so prefer to download them rather than have them try to load within the browser. This extension captures the clicking of any PDF file and allows you to download the PDF, view it or convert it to HTML. Highly configurable.

Personal Menu
You’ll notice in my screenshot I have no menu. Instead, next to the home button, there is a button which gives me access to all of the menu options. This allows me to have the address and search bars up in the same area as those toolbar buttons. Right click this area and select Customise, and you can drag things where you want.

Searchbar Autosizer
Simple enough this one. As you type in the search bar, it will automatically expand to fit your search query. Useful if you are stringing together longer searches.

Smart Bookmarks Bar
Back to my screenshot and you’ll see a row of icons just above the tabs, they are bookmarks placed into the standard Bookmark area. This extension hides bookmarks names and only shows the website icons (favicons). Bookmark names are displayed on mouse over (the two bookmarks on the far left of the bar don’t have these as they are scripts).

Stylish
Used to apply CSS styles to a website or web application. I use this for Gmail and Google Calendar, both of which have some rather crisp, dark, skins greated by Globex Designs. There are hundreds of different skins available.

Web Developer
A must have if you do any kind of web design or programming work.

So, that’s the list of extensions I currently have. I’ve tried a few others but ditched them to try and keep things simple. As ever, YMMV when it comes to installing and running these, but most of the extensions listed above have been about for a few years now so are pretty stable.

And finally a couple of hints and hacks that I’ve found. Same deal here, these make Firefox work in a way that I want, YMMV:

• How to get the search box to open results in a new tab (rather than blatting over the current one).
• How to open email links from web pages in GMail

Right, that’s quite enough of that. I’ve got an iPhone to play with you know…

Now I’ve contacted them about this in the past, but I think they need to better “productise” their applications. By that I mean, almost solely, that they need to provide icons, distinct well designed icons, for their applications.

Why?

Well this came to light recently as I tried, yet again, to tweak and streamline my browser (the application I use more frequently than any other). It also highlighted why I’m still using Firefox, namely because I’ve yet to find a need that a Firefox extension won’t scratch… meet.. whatever.

I’m a big fan of maximising space, particularly as I use a lot of web-based applications these days, and the more space they can get the better. However, those self-same, often used, web-based apps provide a problem. How do I quickly and easily access them? Well Firefox has a bookmark toolbar which you can customise to your own needs (right-click an existing link to delete, drag from the address bar (or any web link) to create a new link in the toolbar), and so I have my most often used applications linked from there.

For the record, those applications are:

1. Google Mail
2. Google Reader
3. Google Calendar
4. Google Docs & Sheets
5. Google Calendar
6. Remember the Milk
7. 37signals TaDa List
8. Side Job Track
9. 37signals Highrise
10. 37signals Basecamp for current project
11. Google Reader Subscribe favelet

And here they are (with thanks to the Smart Bookmarks Bar and Favicon Picker extensions):

And yes, the order is quite specific. I use Mail and Reader multiple times a day, the Calendar and Docs & Sheets, and Remember the Milk a few times a week, the Ta Da list once a week or less. Side Job Track is used ad-hoc, I’m still testing Highrise, and the Basecamp link isn’t permanent. The Subscribe link on the far-right lets me “one-click” to add an RSS feed to Google Reader, and it’s easy to hit as it’s on the end of the list.

Ohh and the Smart Bookmarks Bar extension expands to show the text next to the icon, in case you were wondering.

So, having setup that toolbar, I immediately noticed that none of the 37signals links had icons attached to them. This is purely because they don’t have “favicons” assigned to their website, but it made me realise that Google are certainly taking the whole “product” thing seriously. There are plenty of rumours around that with a couple of extra purchases they will soon be placed, and may formally start to bundle, an Office equivalent. All free, all online.

Whilst the 37signals apps are all excellent, I think they are missing that leap. The leap that pulls people from their desktop apps, and it may just be that a simple icon is all that it takes.

If you start to think about your browser as a web desktop, then the bookmark toolbar becomes the place where your desktop icons live. It’s not a huge leap, and not an original thought either, I know others have pondered the same.

Whilst there is a mindshift required and a couple of missing applications to be created (drag and drop files to… where? if you are in a web browser that is pretending to your desktop??), it is feasible to think that your local computer will only ever really be used as a storage device, with all your applications running online. Certainly for most general tasks that is already possible.

Not everyone will embrace this idea, in fact I’d guess that most people are still against moving to web apps at all, but for those that have bitten the bullet, these small details could be all it takes between adoption and desertion. If another web app comes along that offers similar functionality, but makes its play from a “product” point of view then maybe the 37signals guys may have a bit of a fight on their hands.

For now though, they are still the best around at what they choose to do, and if you don’t read either of their blogs, then you should. Plus the Official Google Blog, obv.

Whilst it’s popularity is probably assured, Firefox is getting a little more heat from the competition these days, namely with the stream of news pouring from Redmond (Microsoft) about the version 7 of Internet Explorer. It looks like we’ll be back to some good old fashioned browser wars soon. Ohh and whilst I remember, and before certain people popup in the comments and remind me, there are other browsers available. Opera seems to have a good following but, for some reason, it’s never really broken through in the same way as Firefox. I’ve tried it a few times but never really felt at home using it.. not sure why, maybe it’s better aimed at the ‘more technical’? Dunno.

Tabbed browsing remains the core reason I stick with Firefox. It’s very easy to get used to, and once you learn some of the basic operations, and have tweaked the way tabs work to your requirements, it can be a real boon. To that end I’ll recommend Tab Mix Plus as my tab extension of choice, it includes a variety of useful options, including a session saver (remembers which sites you had open in which tabs when you close the browser), a loading status bar on the tab, rather than one common bar at the foot of your window (making it easy to see the sites that are taking an age to load), an “unread” indicator and a further swathe of options (you can download and import my options here to get you started – right-click, Save As…).

Onto the list then:

• Autofill – Automatically fill out HTML forms
• BugMeNot – Bypass compulsory web registration
• Copy URL + – Copies to clipboard the document’s URL along with the title or the selected text
• Download Statusbar – View and manage downloads from a tidy statusbar
• DownThemAll! – The mass downloader for Firefox
• Enhanced History Manager – Search Google for Enhanced History Manager
• Ext2Abc – Alphabetizes your extension manager list
• IE View – Open pages in IE via Firefox menus
• ListZilla – Outputs an alphabetical list of extensions to a text, vB code, or HTML file (used to produce this list!)
• Paste and Go – Lets you paste an URL from the clipboard and directly load it
• Resize Search Box – Allows you to use a resize the search box
• Sage – A lightweight RSS and Atom feed aggregator
• Slim Extension List – Makes items in extension list shorter, so you can see more at once. Also, sorts them by name
• Statusbar Clock – Display the date and time in your browser’s status bar (links to an old extension, but you can find an update one for 1.5… somewhere… maybe…
• Stop-or-Reload Button – Turns the stop and reload buttons into a single button
• Tab Mix Plus – Tab browsing with an added boost
• View Rendered Source Chart – Creates a Colorful Chart of a Webpage’s Rendered Source
• Web Developer – Adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools

So, there you have it. I’ve had many MANY more extensions installed, and looking back at my original post I’ve only got seven of that list still running which I’m sure tells you something… or not…

With 2.0 on the horizon I’m wondering if I’ll upgrade. At the moment I can’t think of anything that I’m missing, any one feature that would be a big enough draw. Security wise I’ve not had any problems, but I guess that’s only a matter of time (or usage) before I’m forced into an upgrade. Only time will tell I guess.

So I put aside a couple of hours* and fired up my web browser with the aim of getting better organised, wasn’t sure HOW exactly, but figured the organic “leap in and start” approach would serve me best. I think it did.

So let me talk you through the process, or better still, roll up your sleeves and try it yourself. As with most things the way you work and use the various technologies will differ from me, but hopefully this will be useful to someone. Always remember that YMMV.

* took a lot longer than this but you can do it in stages if you want.

Bookmarks
The overwhelming feeling was one of getting back to basics and sorting out my bookmarks/favourites seemed like a good place to start both because it was the largest chunk of work, and because it’s an area I use less frequently than before so having it better organised seemed to make sense. If you are anything like me you’ll have hundreds, maybe thousands of these dating back a LONG time, one key question here is “how many do you actually use?”. The prevalence of search engines is rendering bookmarks obsolete (to a degree) and influenced my thinking here quite radically.

First I used Bookmark Bridge to export all my Firefox bookmarks to .URL files (the same format that Internet Explorer uses) and merged them with my old IE favourites removing all folder structures along the way. I now had all the bookmarks I’ve ever collected in one large folder with no structure and hundreds of .URL files (683 to be precise). A quick visit back to Firefox to delete all the existing bookmarks there to give me a blank canvas, no bookmarks, to start with and then the big task.

Back to the folder and I started the slow process of going through them all, one by one, deleting the ones I didn’t think I’d use again and organising the ones I was keeping. I created a new bookmark (folder) structure to hold the sites I was keeping with the caveat that I’d only be “bookmarking” sites that are “useful/often used/essential” – online banking, currency converter, weather info, dictionaries, wikipedia, web design stuff and so on. In another folder I put all the “viewed once/interesting/may revisit” sites, we’ll come back to that folder in a moment. It sounds bad but it wasn’t, a lot of sites were easy to identify from the URL or title, and it was fun visiting sites I’ve not seen for a couple of years.

After that everything else got deleted and as I was fairly harsh that meant a LOT of bookmarks got the heave-ho. Typically they were sites I hadn’t visited for years or were sites I knew I could Google to find in the future. I was quite happy to trim as much of the debris as I could and it was quite liberating to watch the number of sites whittle down to the bare minimum.

Once that was done, it was back to Bookmark Bridge to load the newly organised bookmarks back into Firefox.

Back to the “viewed once/interesting/may revisit” sites which are now sitting in a separate folder – called TO BE DELISHED as it happens – in my Firefox bookmarks. Now, for those that don’t know, Firefox stores your bookmarks as one HTML file (buried away down in C:\ Documents and Settings\[USERNAME]\ Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[profilename]\ in case you were wondering). So first thing is to take a copy of the bookmark.html file and edit out all the other bookmarks except the ones in my TO BE DELISHED folder. Then, using the fabulous del.icio.us loader I added all the “viewed once/interesting/may revisit” sites to my del.icio.us account. With that done, and the sites safely tucked away in my del.icio.us account, I could now delete the TO BE DELISHED folder from my Firefox bookmarks.

And that’s the bookmarks done. They are now organised with the commonly re-used sites in my bookmarks – always available as it’s on my PC, and sync’d between work and home using the Bookmark Sync extension – and the other sites that I stumble across are now posted to my del.icio.us account using the wonderful Lazy Sheep bookmarklet. As a final (and possibly over-anal) step, I use Foxylicious to keep a local sync of my del.icio.us account (which stores the del.icio.us’d sites as bookmarks which are then sync’d between work and home! I did say it was anal).

Since I first drafted this post, I’ve added a few folders to give the bookmarks some structure but beyond that I’m quite happy. The next possible step is to add them ALL to del.icio.us, using the current folder names as tags to make finding them easy. Not done that yet, and might not to be honest as all I’d be doing is using the sync’d del.icio.us bookmarks anyway, why duplicate what I’ve already got?

Start page
Then I tackled my browser start page, something I use heavily because, to be frank, I have a short memory span and if something isn’t constantly in my view I tend to ignore it.

Now this could get a little confusing so it’ll be best if you have a quick glance at my start page (image generated by the lovely Screen Grab extension).

My start page is a mixture of static links, some of which mirror bookmarks, and a few blogrolls. The longest list you can see is the same as the one that currently appears on this site, but there is also a blogroll for photoblogs, the sites I’m “auditioning” (must think of a better term, that’s awful), and a “private blogroll” which is basically the more common sites that everyone links to anyway. I’m also giving away a few secrets on the right-hand side, as that’s where most of the content for the miniblog comes from.

Anyway, I ended up not doing much to this page. It’s something I’ve been using, in various forms, for the past ten years or so and is so ingrained in the way I use the internet that I couldn’t do without it. I removed a few sites, added a couple, re-jigged the order of a few sections but largely this didn’t change much. Phew!

Still reading? Well done. Almost there.

RSS Feeds
I was on a bit of a roll at this point so I decided to be bold and just delete every subscription in my Bloglines account (yes, I took a backup first) and only add in sites that I use… then I realised that I don’t really use RSS feeds as I still prefer (call me old-fashioned) VISITING sites and looking at the pretty design and pictures. Instead I’ve whittled it down to a few linklog and del.icio.us tag feeds and will probably start using it more to monitor “search terms” than any specific site. It’ll be the area which I’m happy to leave quite open and uncontrolled, and which I’ll dip into every now and again.

That is until such times as RSS finally “clicks” with me, which I must admit it has yet to do. I understand the technology but it seems an awfully soulless way of communicating. Is it just me?

Finished?
So, as well as having deleted a lot of old/dead information, I now have the following “information stores” which each deal with different types of information and have different usage patterns:

• Browser Start Page – Frequent/Daily accessed sites; Blogs, online applications and accounts.
• Bloglines – Infrequently accessed sites, an open capture area.
• del.icio.us – my “miscellaneous” bookmark holder.
• Miniblog – some crossover with del.icio.us account but not much, only for things I want to ‘comment’ on.
• The Blog – my “diary”, brain dump area, etc etc.
• Flickr – for the photos, obviously.

This system is working for me, so far, but there is one more thing which I’m introducing.

I have a habit of glancing over a linked article/site and thinking that I should bookmark it for later, you know, just in case. Well I’m going to be a lot more judicial about my decisions, and hopefully whilst I won’t be bookmarking/storing as many links as before the quality will be a lot more consistent. That way I won’t have to repeat the exercise of sifting through xxx links of chaff to find the good stuff I REALLY want to keep. Couple that with a fairly regular clear out of bookmarks and whatnot and I feel much more in control of the information than previously.

In closing I think there is actually more behind this post than I realised. The simple fact is that I wouldn’t be able to do any of this without Firefox and some very clever extensions, and some very nice web services. Both aspects have changed the way I use the internet, and whilst I am now kinda tied in to a certain way of “working” in this system, the important thing for me is that it’s MY system. I designed it, created it, tailored and tweaked it to my needs and the way my brain works. I really have rediscovered the web over the past year or so, although hopefully this streamlining of how I use it will leave me feeling a little less informationally overloaded than I was before.

I know I’ve been banging on about it for ages now, but evidence that it is being taken seriously can be gathered from the fact that there is a link to a story about it on the front page of the BBC News website, which follows on from articles in most of the American mainstream media.

The story states that 1 in 10 UK websites fail to work properly in Firefox, listing some examples:

• Odeon.co.uk
• Jobcentreplus.gov.uk
• Insurance.co.uk
• British American Tobacco
• Mansell.plc.uk
• Companieshouse.gov.uk
• Flybmi.com/cargo
• bssuk.co.uk

I’m sure we could add many more to that list.

However there is one thing I’d just like to throw into this discussion, namely web standards. At present Firefox has the most compliant rendering engine of all the browsers (sharing that claim with Opera I believe) and THAT’S what can make a difference. If sites are designed to be compliant with the W3 specifications then they stand a much better chance of functioning properly across all browsers.

I wonder if the success of Firefox is just the long tail of the WaSP campaign?