Essential Firefox plug-ins for Netbooks

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Stereodude

Not really a
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Jan 22, 2002
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After I got my netbook I wasn't super thrilled with browsing the web on it's 1024x600 resolution screen. I ended up finding two very useful plug-ins that greatly improved the experience.

The first is Autohide. With if you can turn this small screen disaster



into



move your mouse to the top of the screen and the tabs and navigation appear



move your mouse to the bottom of the screen and the status bar reappears.






The second is Image Zoom. It can resize any oversize image to fit completely within your browser window.

Say your online looking at some wedding photos someone posted. You started with this



You use Autohide to get this. Better, but still not very good.



Set Image Zoom to Autofit Images and get this

 
I should point out that Autohide is not like the normal full screen mode in Firefox because it does not reduce the rendering area of the page. The bars are overlaid on top of the full screen rendering. The default Firefox full screen mode reduces the rendering area when the navigation and tab bars appear which causes more advanced webpages to rescale themselves as the bar appears and disappears.
 
In normal mode you can gain a couple of pixel rows by switching to small icons on the tool bar: View - Toolbars - Customize and check Use Small Icons.
 
After consolidating the various toolbars in Firefox this is what I get in the normal view



And this is the full screen view (with the top bar shown)

 
My bookmarks toolbar is filled with folders enough to stretch a 1680 pixel wide screen. That's space I feel justified in using.
 
Download works now. The sync just works though you can't transfer plugins and plugin settings. For the every day thing this is pretty damn good, can't wait for the iphone version.
 
Stereodude said:
I don't. It seems interesting, but I'd be curious to know exactly how compatible it really is with FireFox.
Click to expand...
As far as I can tell, it's just Firefox minus some non-critical stuff that most people don't use, with compiler optimizations. I didn't find any compatibility issues with my extensions and plugins.
 
MaxBurn said:
Anyone tried Firefox sync? I want to but the download is fubar atm. So much better than zipping up and moving the mozilla folder it seems.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/10868/
Click to expand...

Firefox synch is live and free in app store now. So much easier than emails with a bunch of links and creating bookmarks manually. If only it would transfer them to mobile safari directly but of course that will never be allowed.

ipod aside though I use this all the time between my work and home computer, it's fantastic.
 
Xmarks is a cross-browser tool that does the same thing Firefox Sync does. It works for FF, IE, Chrome and Safari (for Mac, at least). I would not be surprised if they did not have an iphone application for it in the near future.
 
If you have xmarks sync to IE on whatever computer you sync your iPhone to you can pull ie's bookmarks into safari on the phone.
 
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