My iBook died a few days ago, so now I have a MacBook and just got it setup last night. One of the first things I installed was Firefox.
There are 2 main reasons I use Firefox instead of Safari. The first is find-as-you-type search. This means as you type what you’re trying to find on a webpage, Firefox highlights matches as you type instead of waiting for you to press Enter.
The second reason I use Firefox is that there are a few indispensable extensions for web development. Here are all the details of my essential Firefox setup:
Essential preferences:
- In preferences, set my homepage: google ig -- not great, but loads quickly
- In preferences, save downloads to ~/downloads -- you need to create this directory if you want to do this
- * important * In preferences under security, set _Use a master password_ so your passwords are not stored in plain text
- setup delicious, a bookmarking tool that stores all your bookmarks on a web page you can access any time and organize using tags. go here and get the delicious bookmarklet. i like to rename the post bookmarklet to del.save and the my delicious to del.view
- i also like to add an rss feed of what my friends are looking at and my own recent posts. I name these del.friends and del.save respectively
- i also use a delicious tag my_bb to save a folder of bookmarks that are my favorites and that i want easy access to from my firefox bookmarks toolbar
Essential Extensions:
- firebug for javascript debugging and DOM inspection
- web developer for live css editing and other useful development tools
- backpack pages for quick links to your backpack pages
- backpack publish for quick posting to your backpack
Configuring Extensions:
- add the backpack buttons to the toolbar (and remove the rest of the buttons if you don't like them)
- hide the web developer toolbar if you don't like it at the top
- enter the api keys for the backpack extensions