Thursday, November 17, 2005
Essential Firefox & Thunderbird Hacks
Back when Internet Explorer was being ravaged and you still had to pay for Opera, Firefox emerged and went on to become the darling of Browsers, quickly capturing our imagination. The timing was perfect as many such users were looking for simple alternatives to Internet Explorer without all the hassles that came along with it.
However, I switched to Firefox & Thunderbird for totally a different reason. Being the Linux lover that I’m, I was looking for a browser and email client that could be used seamlessly across Windows and Linux using a shared installation. I was so thrilled when I discovered this, especially seeing that my message store in Thunderbird could be displayed and updated in either Linux or Windows. I was even more thrilled to see all those glorious extensions and themes to Firefox that made it a complete browsing experience.
Think about it, not only can you potentially share your address book and email store, but you could completely avoid setting it up for every Linux distro or Windows reinstall that you did. What freedom! Firefox and all its extensions made it possible, to have every conceivable tweak that you could imagine all within the confines of your integrated browser. I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some of these tricks with the rest of the world. So here goes:
RSS Reader:
Though not known to most people, Firefox has been the RSS reader of my choice ever since it hit the browser scene. However, weird terminology and an unintuitive interface has confused users making them stay away from it. For starters, Firefox calls RSS feeds as Live Bookmarks. Though Firefox can detect RSS feeds in most websites (by displaying an orange icon at the lower right corner of your browser status bar), occasionally it fails! When this happens, you gotta copy the link for your feed, goto Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks->File->New Live Bookmark and then paste your feed. Yuck, how irritating and annoying.
However thanks to “Phil Ringnalda” for his “LiveBookmark This” firefox extension. Now you can right click on any feed link and select “Add Live Bookmark” to choose a bookmark location for your RSS feed. Combine this with “Manage Bookmarks” feature of Firefox to create folders within “Bookmarks Toolbar Folders”! These folders serve as category folders to hold your RSS feeds. For example, I have the following folders: News, Entertainment, Blogs, Technology, Security, Linux etc. Make sure your “Bookmarks Toolbar” is visible to neatly access all your feeds as menu items from any of your feed categories (folders). Nice!
Copying Firefox profile folders:
Usually I install lot of extensions and themes that I deem useful. However I hate the prospect of reinstalling all of them while creating a different Firefox profile or when creating a new profile from Linux. Thanks to this tip that I read on the internet, you can now simply copy your entire Firefox profile folder onto a new location, search and replace all hard coded paths in chrome.rdf (located in your profile folder) to that of your new location, modify your profile.ini to point to your newly copied profile folder and Voila! You have the exact same profile that you copied, complete with Bookmarks, Feeds, History and even your cache. Nice! It’s explained in detail here.
Sharing Thunderbird profiles:
Functionally almost identical to Outlook Express sans its hassles, Thunderbird has gone on to become my most favorite email client. One of the features I love about Thunderbird is that you can create a common message base (profile) and go-on to share that message base with other installations of Thunderbird.
Lets take an example, though am very happy with my gmail/yahoo for all of my personal email, I still need a common shared message base for all my family emails, newsletters etc. Not only does Thunderbird provide this exact feature, but it’s so flexible in that it lets me access the shared message base from different user accounts and even other OS installations including Linux.
Here is what I do:
In case you are wondering why I mentioned storing the Message Store in a FAT32 partition, the answer is Linux. That’s right; you can access FAT32 partitions in read/write mode from Linux. Hence you could mount your FAT32 partition (usually mounted at startup) and then create a new profiles.ini file to point to your shared message store folder created in step-1. That’ it, now you can access your message store without setting it up again in Linux. What’s more, you Get/Send mail from any profile, and it automatically reflects on all of the other profiles. Now, no more reboots to Windows to check ‘n update my emails. Nice! It’s explained in detail here.
While we are on the subject, take a look “MozBackup” which lets you backup ‘n restore Thunderbird/Firefox/Mozilla profiles using a simple Wizard based interface.
I hope you find the above tips useful and unleash the full power of your Firefox and Thunderbird installation. Go Mozilla!
¶ 20:08
However, I switched to Firefox & Thunderbird for totally a different reason. Being the Linux lover that I’m, I was looking for a browser and email client that could be used seamlessly across Windows and Linux using a shared installation. I was so thrilled when I discovered this, especially seeing that my message store in Thunderbird could be displayed and updated in either Linux or Windows. I was even more thrilled to see all those glorious extensions and themes to Firefox that made it a complete browsing experience.
Think about it, not only can you potentially share your address book and email store, but you could completely avoid setting it up for every Linux distro or Windows reinstall that you did. What freedom! Firefox and all its extensions made it possible, to have every conceivable tweak that you could imagine all within the confines of your integrated browser. I thought this would be a good opportunity to share some of these tricks with the rest of the world. So here goes:
RSS Reader:
Though not known to most people, Firefox has been the RSS reader of my choice ever since it hit the browser scene. However, weird terminology and an unintuitive interface has confused users making them stay away from it. For starters, Firefox calls RSS feeds as Live Bookmarks. Though Firefox can detect RSS feeds in most websites (by displaying an orange icon at the lower right corner of your browser status bar), occasionally it fails! When this happens, you gotta copy the link for your feed, goto Bookmarks->Manage Bookmarks->File->New Live Bookmark and then paste your feed. Yuck, how irritating and annoying.
However thanks to “Phil Ringnalda” for his “LiveBookmark This” firefox extension. Now you can right click on any feed link and select “Add Live Bookmark” to choose a bookmark location for your RSS feed. Combine this with “Manage Bookmarks” feature of Firefox to create folders within “Bookmarks Toolbar Folders”! These folders serve as category folders to hold your RSS feeds. For example, I have the following folders: News, Entertainment, Blogs, Technology, Security, Linux etc. Make sure your “Bookmarks Toolbar” is visible to neatly access all your feeds as menu items from any of your feed categories (folders). Nice!
Copying Firefox profile folders:
Usually I install lot of extensions and themes that I deem useful. However I hate the prospect of reinstalling all of them while creating a different Firefox profile or when creating a new profile from Linux. Thanks to this tip that I read on the internet, you can now simply copy your entire Firefox profile folder onto a new location, search and replace all hard coded paths in chrome.rdf (located in your profile folder) to that of your new location, modify your profile.ini to point to your newly copied profile folder and Voila! You have the exact same profile that you copied, complete with Bookmarks, Feeds, History and even your cache. Nice! It’s explained in detail here.
Sharing Thunderbird profiles:
Functionally almost identical to Outlook Express sans its hassles, Thunderbird has gone on to become my most favorite email client. One of the features I love about Thunderbird is that you can create a common message base (profile) and go-on to share that message base with other installations of Thunderbird.
Lets take an example, though am very happy with my gmail/yahoo for all of my personal email, I still need a common shared message base for all my family emails, newsletters etc. Not only does Thunderbird provide this exact feature, but it’s so flexible in that it lets me access the shared message base from different user accounts and even other OS installations including Linux.
Here is what I do:
- I create a profile using Thunderbird profile manager in a common shared drive (FAT32 partition), proceed to setup my accounts/pop/smtp server information etc.
- Close Thunderbird.
- Copy the profiles.ini to respective user account (alternatively let thunderbird create it by firing it up and closing it without creating anything).
- Modify the profiles.ini and change the relative path to an absolute path and make it the same as the folder location created in step-1.
- Change the line IsRelative=1 to IsRelative=0.
- Restart Thunderbird.
In case you are wondering why I mentioned storing the Message Store in a FAT32 partition, the answer is Linux. That’s right; you can access FAT32 partitions in read/write mode from Linux. Hence you could mount your FAT32 partition (usually mounted at startup) and then create a new profiles.ini file to point to your shared message store folder created in step-1. That’ it, now you can access your message store without setting it up again in Linux. What’s more, you Get/Send mail from any profile, and it automatically reflects on all of the other profiles. Now, no more reboots to Windows to check ‘n update my emails. Nice! It’s explained in detail here.
While we are on the subject, take a look “MozBackup” which lets you backup ‘n restore Thunderbird/Firefox/Mozilla profiles using a simple Wizard based interface.
I hope you find the above tips useful and unleash the full power of your Firefox and Thunderbird installation. Go Mozilla!
¶ 20:08