Blog - /Tech

I used and loved Galeon, until it was discontinued in favor of Epiphany, which I detested. I then switched to Kazehakase for the past year and a half, but was turned off by a combination of (1) blocking browsing of other tabs when a new tab was being opened, (2) authentication misbehavior of an RT website that I have to use for work, and (3) dealing with weird sites that block the use of wget, which Kazehakase uses for downloading files. Firefox is being kept up-to-date and does not suffer from these maladies, but by default it lacks some features that I absolutely must have.

1. Open Location bar entries into new tabs, rather than the current tab.
2. Open new tab after the current tab, rather than placing it at the end.
3. Write bookmarks in XBEL format, so that I retain the ability to share bookmarks with Kazehakase, or at least to import my bookmarks from Kazehakase. I also like XBEL because it allows me to publish my bookmarks to http://mwolson.org/bookmarks/ using the bk2site program.
4. Don't pop up that awful Download window. Ever. Instead, give me a quick status indicator at the bottom of the screen.

Items 1 and 2 are handily taken care of by the Tab Mix Plus extension. It even allows me to enable "Single Window mode", which forces items that would normally open in new windows (such as calling firefox <some link> from the console) to instead open in new tabs. To my great delight, it even allows me to prevent new tabs from some places (like the aforementioned console line) from taking the focus, while permitting URLs entered from the Location bar to take focus. This allows me to browse RSS feeds in LifeRea with impunity, opening links as I read my entries, and then reading the opened links later on once I'm caught up on RSS. This extension almost moves me to tears, due to the fine-grained control that I now have over my browsing experience. I also enjoy being able to allow tabs to spill over onto a second line.

Item 3 is alleviated by Bookmark Sync and Sort, which happens to be the only hit for the term "xbel" using the search feature on the Firefox Add-ons page. I'm using https to sync my bookmarks between instances of Firefox and home and work — this isn't working for me quite yet, due to needing to set up write access via DAV. Luckily, it is also possible to manually import and export bookmarks in the XBEL format. My only gripe is that it writes XBEL content with no newlines, which makes it tedious to track using git. Kazehakase did a much nicer job of writing XBEL, with newlines and properly indented tags. Maybe I'll have to write some git hooks to run the file through some XML indentation tool before commit. Or just get DAV write access working and forget about using revision control.

Item 4 is addressed with the Download Statusbar extension. I use this in Mini Mode, which shows the number of files being downloaded, the number of files already downloaded, and a pop-up list of files with their percentage of completion. That's good enough for my purposes, as it approximates Kazehakase's nice-looking per-file download indicators on the status bar. I'd like to be able to get info by hovering over the single indicator, however, rather than having to single-click on it.