The Fire Ant Gazette - A Midland, Texas Blog

Firefox Search Tip
Category: Internet...
Posted Tuesday, December 05, 2006 at 11:39 AM [GMT-6]

Those of you who've upgraded to Firefox 2 have no doubt already checked out the "Manage Search Engines" option when you click the little triangle in the search box on the tool bar. That option shows you which search engines are installed on your version of Firefox, and also provides a link to install additional search services. In my opinion, this powerful feature is one of Firefox's greatest strengths.

Did you also realize that when you change the default search engine in the tool bar that this carries over to the contextual search feature? That is, when you see a word or phrase on a web page that you want to use as a search term, you can select it, right-click on the selection, and choose the "Search for..." option to automatically fire up your chosen search engine.

Here's where I find this feature particularly helpful. When I write movie or book reviews, I often refer to other films or books. I generally try to link to those movies via IMDB.com and to the books via Amazon.com. With the Firefox search feature, I can write the entire review without getting distracted with embedding links as I go along. After I've finished the review, I can select the appropriate search engine and go back through my post, highlight each title, and find the right link to add to the post before publishing it. It's not a huge time saver, but it does make posting more efficient, and so you get more bloggy goodness from the Gazette. (However, try not to blame Mozilla/Firefox for that. After all, blogs don't bore people; bloggers do.)

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Comments

I had noticed that feature change; while I initially considered it an annoyance, it makes logical sense. Good tip.

Posted by: Stephen Shores at December 5, 2006 02:45 PM

An annoyance? Hmm...I'm trying to figure out how that might interfere with the way you're accustomed to working.

Posted by: Eric at December 5, 2006 02:51 PM

Wait a minute. You mean there are other internet browsers besides Mosaic?

I have got to get out more.

Signed,

Graduate Student

Posted by: Bret at December 5, 2006 04:05 PM

Based on what I recall about 1993, if IE worked as well with its contemporary websites as Mosaic did with its audience, all of us in web development would be a lot less stressed.

Posted by: Eric at December 5, 2006 05:36 PM

The Firefox 2.0 upgrade has been something of a mixed bag for me. In the plus column, the enhanced search features are kind of nice (I was a bit startled the first time the search bar started suggesting possible candidates based on my partially typed text), and I'm sure the phishing protection is a Good Thing™ (though I haven't actually bothered to figure out where it lives or how it works). In the minus column, none of my favorite themes is supported in v2.0, and the BlogThis extension is kaput—though the latter is probably more the fault of Blogger's forced march to its Beta Test "upgrade".

Currently, my two favorite extensions are MeasureIt and Leet Key. MeasureIt allows me to find the dimensions of any rectangular area displayed in the browser window, which I'm finding to be quite handy when coding CSS rules. Leet Key is more of a toy than anything, but in addition to converting keystrokes to |337 5p34k on the fly, it also does -- --- .-. ... . , EBG13 (ROT13), txet esrever, binay, hex, and URL encoding. Not everyday sorts of things, but when you need them, it's handy to have the extension turn the effort into a no brainer.

Posted by: Foo at December 6, 2006 07:41 AM

2.0 has been heaven-sent from my perspective, as 1.x was unstable -- on my particular system -- with any pages containing extensive Flash movies. You can imagine the chagrin I routinely experienced as a result. 2.0 has completely eliminated those problems.

Re: Leet Key...you're a geekier man than me, by far, amigo!

Posted by: Eric at December 6, 2006 04:30 PM

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