Change:

browser.tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent

to false.

To fix that, you need to go into about config and set the print_paper_data parameter to 9.

I like to use the keyboard. Point and click is not really my cup of tea. It just doesn’t work without a touch screen. (A while ago I had the opportunity to see an expensive tilt-able touch screen in action and I was quite impressed by how suddenly a GUI became less of a disaster.) I’m an avid VIM user. Although I’ve tried training myself to Emacs, I’ve never made the switch. Even if I would have, this wouldn’t have changed the fact that I’m a shell person, not a desktop person.

Editing in an external editor

I do a lot of writing from my web browser (Firefox). This is not the most enjoyable activity imaginable using the typical <textarea>. It’s not that HTML textareas are so bad, it’s just that I don’t like typing anything extensive without using VIM.

The It’s All Text! Firefox add-on is one way to solve this problem. It adds a small “edit” button to the bottom right of all textareas. (It also adds a context submenu, but this can only be used to edit the whole page’s source (which I found to be a little bit disappointing as I’d rather seen that this acted on just the textarea when going there from a textarea).) The button executes an external editor of choiseGVIM.

Using Vimperator, when in insert mode (inside a textarea), I just have to press Ctrl-i to execute GVIM. The It’s All Text! add-on has thus been deprecated.

Better WindowMaker integration

Due to my reluctance to switch to a tiling window manager, I’m still using WindowMaker. Starting Firefox in WindowMaker is a bit of a nuisance because the main window opens too far out beyond the top left of my workspace. The only way to change this is to tell it to start maximized. However, the main window and the dialogs have the same WM_CLASS and I was somehow annoyed with getting all the popups maximized as well.

Vimperator starts these windows within the browser tabs, so there’s no longer a good reason not to start Firefox maximized. This saves me another keystroke whenever I begin a new browsing session.

Modes

Normal mode

In normal mode, I can perform all navigational tasks quickly an concisely. Especially identifying and following links is revolutionary. No more remembering access keys for every web app. I can just press f and type a number. The View Access Keys extension is no longer necessary.

Insert mode

I had never considered how much a seperate insert mode would have made me feel more in control of Firefox. The fact that I can escape it and scroll a bit or follow a link before continuing to type is priceless.

Pass-through mode

There are many modern web applications such as Gmail that have keystrokes conflicting with Vimperator. The great thing about Vimperator is that it wins. But, by pressing Ctrl-z, you can make the web page win until you escape the mode.

There are more modes, but I’m not here to write a tutorial.

Scrolling

I have many of the scrolling options that I’m used to in VIM. Most importantly, I can scroll half a page instead of a whole page! Before, I’ve spent a lot of time mucking around trying to find out how to make Firefox do this and the only extension that seemed to be able to deliver was Firemacs which I shied away because it did away with many of Firefox’s default key bindings, which is ironic because Vimperator seems much more extreme in this regard.

Flash focus

On thing that I would really like Vimperator to do is to disable Flash content from stealing focus. That would remedy the last type of situation where I simply don’t feel in control of my web browser.

For those who want to truly stay on top, just pointing Firefox to Google Reader occasionally isn’t good enough. (I know: I’m slow. I like it that way.) I had heard of various Firefox add-ons to aggregate your RSS feeds in the sidebar, but the sis had thought of this already and didn’t like to have something permanently filling up space at the left. Ok, I can understand. I thought there must probably be some Firefox add-on to move the whole damn sidebar to the right and of course there is; it’s called RightBar.

Screenshot of the RightBar Firefox Addon

The extension is so simple that you could achieve the same by adding a few lines to the userChrome.css file in the chrome subdirectory of your Firefox profile directory:

/* Change the sidebar's position */
#browser {
-moz-box-direction: reverse;
}

(If the file doesn’t exist yet, create it from a copy of userChrome-example.css.)

What’s left now is to choose which feed aggregator extension for Mozilla Firefox to use. So far, I’ve only tried Sage (based on a five-star rating and familiarity with the name). It seems to work quite well, although, really, I still prefer just visiting Google Reader every once in a while. I mean: I’m a man, I don’t multi-task, I can hardly single-task.

I’m going to forward these suggestions to my sister, probably just to see them ignored for one crucial oversight: the sidebar doesn’t look very different. One of the things she liked about the Google Desktop, she told me, is that it looked very different from the rest of the stuff on her screen, causing a minimum of distraction. Probably I’ll end up recommending some kind of gDesktlet. (Or is there something better-looking these days?)

How cool is it then that I can just Control+K to my Google search box and enter: bypassing smart completion to get my own page on the top of the result list?

Since my blog is literally a log that I mostly use to keep track of what I think and do while problem-solving, it’s great that I can rely on Google to find my way through memory lane.