Community Relations Archive
Thread: How to use Firefox with the forums and make it better than IE! (updated 11/8/05)
How to use Firefox with the forums
For those of us who have tried Firefox and love it still have the occasional website that is painful to view or is broken in Firefox. Unfortunately, this site is one of them. Here is my guide on how you can make your Firefox / SWG Forums not only a tolerable experience, but a better experience than IE users. Most of these tips will work for other sites too, so your overall browsing experience is better as well.
Make sure you can post
While this sounds silly, if you don't disable wysiwyg, you can't post using Firefox. Here is how you do that:
Use WYSIWYG Message Editor and uncheck the box. Once you have done this, the submit button will work, but now you have lost your formatting...
Watch your url's
If you make a link and it wraps, and you have Automatically convert carriage returns to HTML line breaks checked, it will break your url. The link will go to some distant location, but not the one you wanted. If you have a long url, uncheck the Automatically convert carriage returns to HTML line breaks box. Of course, if you would like some line breaks, you will now be required to do it manually. The tags I use (because empty breaks and returns are ignored) are: <BR><B> </B> . You can use the next tip to generate this code so you don't have to type it.
Get your formatting back
As nice as a WYSIWYG interface is, it takes a very long time to load...and think about it.. How many times to you really want to bold, color, etc.. But what about the time you want to? Here is a link to BBCode which is an extension that will let you insert regular html formatting (including links) into your post! Make sure you change the settings to support the Lithium Forum. Click on the Tools menu (at the top) and then click on Extensions, then click on the BBCode Extension (with the orange bb) and click on Options. In the new window, uncheck the Enable BBCode, uncheck the Enable XHTML, and check the Enable HTML and check the Enable SYMBOLS (you can turn them on if you want to use them for other sites that support them). Also note that you can't insert a link with a title, so just use 'insert link'. For me this is better than IE since the pages load faster and you only use formatting when you need it.
Don't enter your userid or password anymore
This one may be on for you already, but make sure in Firefox under Privacy | Saved Passwords you have Remember Passwords checked. This is important for a tip a little later. Also, this is better than IE since you don't enter your password (in IE you have to enter your password every single time you visit the site).. Since 'save your password' does not save your password.
Spell check your post
The new way to do this is to grab the Firefox version of the Google toolbar. It has spell check inside. It is much nicer than the extension I used to use. Trolls love nothing more than to pick on your mispelt words.
Really make things better
The next few tips rely on an extension called Grease Monkey (GM). While it is really outside the scope of this post to dive into what it is and how it works, but if you don't have it you are missing out. Google grease monkey and learn what all the excitement is about. It is very, very cool. So... Before you get started with the rest of the tips, install GM and then come back here for the rest of the tips.
Completely login automatically
It is nice to see the form with your userid and password filled in already, but why feel the need to press the submit button? Computers were designed to take care of repetitive tasks like this one.. So put your browser to work. Install this script and the button will automatically be pushed for you (assuming you did the save password tip)! This is better than IE since at this point, you only have to click on the 'sign in' button from now on....and it logs you in automatically.
Press [control-enter] to submit posts instead of using the mouse
Ok.. This is a little annoyance of mine. I dislike clicking submit buttons. With this little GM script, you can press [control-enter] on all forms instead of clicking that darned submit button. It also adds some Unicode to text submitted (like (tm) becomes ™). I'm sure Thunderheart would love that for his 'SOON™' promises.
Get rid of the skin, never get logged out (new!) and more
I personally have a hard time reading white or light text on a dark background. It hurts my eyes over time. I am used to, and prefer black text on a white background. Using this script (right click here and click on install user script) which I wrote will make the skin any colors you choose. It will also change the color of the links so that you can easily see which forums you have already read! Feel free to make the colors anything you like if you want! Finally, the script will also remove the overly large header images since I don't like them. If I feel inclined, I might add some more functionality like adding a link underneath everyone's name to see their other posts or a persistent list of links to your favorite places on the forums. To make this work, you must choose "droid invasion" theme. I added a feature that will auto-reload the page every 44 minutes since Garva said that lithium will log you out otherwise (8/5/05) .
Make all URL's clickable (thanks Geral_Corasjo)
This extension will enable all text links to be clickable. I installed this, and it is fantastic. Here is a link to this script.
That's it for now! If you have a tip for Firefox users or a better way of accomplishing a tip I posted, let me know.
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Message Edited by MajorXP on 11-08-2005 02:00 PM
Message Edited by ChachiTron5000 on 07-19-2005 04:36 PM
Message Edited by Wolveryne40 on 07-20-2005 08:52 AM
sposey wrote:
I can't seem to find BBCode | settings and uncheck the Enable BBCode, uncheck the Enable XHTML, and check the Enable HTML and Enable SYMBOLS
Click on the Tools menu (at the top) and then click on Extensions, then click on the BBCode Extension (with the orange bb) and click on Options.
I'll add this to my documentation.
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My biggest annoyance are people who don't know how to make clicky links, but Firefox users can get round this
Just install the Plain Text Links Firefox extension, now all you have to is select the non-clickied link, then right click it and you can open it straight away, or even send it to a new tab so you can look at it later once you've read the whole of that post.