The MacTrack – iPhone, iPod, iPod Touch and Mac News

Do you wish you could see thumbnail previews of all the tabs you have open in Firefox?  Well now you can with the great Firefox Showcase add-on.

This add-on allows you to display thumbnails of all open tabs in a variety of ways: single window, tab or in a sidebar.

To choose a tab just click on the preview image.  To access the preview thumbnails click on the tab drop-down on the far right of the tab bar.

Try it – you’ll love it!

If you’d like to keep one particular website separate, in it’s own window and in effect turn it into a mini application then take a look at a free program called Fluid.

Simple to set-up, all that’s required is the web address and you can then create a site specific browser:

Save it on your desktop (or wherever you wish) and you’ve now got an icon for the web site of your choice.

Sometimes is useful to keep sites in their place and locked to one window rather than loosing them in amongst many tabs.  For example, keep eBay, Facebook, or the BBC News web site in their own window allowing them to be located quickly, easily and efficiently.

Perhaps a niche application but a useful one nonetheless.

If you use Flickr and like to geotag your photos, storing map location info along with each shot then a great little utility to help you achieve this can be found at sumaato blog.

Simply drag the bookmarklet to your bookmark bar (most major browsers are supported), then when you are viewing one of your Flickr photos click the bookmarklet and Google Maps appears and off you go. A great time-saving tool that adds a feature lacking in Flickr (who sadly use Yahoo Maps) .

Thanks to my good friend Ian for this tip. His Flickr photos can be found here and mine can be found here.

By default Firefox only opens one connection at a time when loading a web page.

On fast broadband connections this isn’t usually too much of a problem but should your speed drop at busy times, or if pages seems to load slowly there’s a great little tweak you can implement called “Pipelining”.

It’s also beneficial to fast connections as speed increases can still be seen.

Once ‘pipelining’ is set-up Firefox, will (by default) open many connections simultaneously to the website and retrieve the all the page’s elements in one go. Even on my fast broadband connection this has made a huge difference to my browsing page load times.

To enable Pipelining follow the simple steps below (it looks harder than it really is, in fact it’s fairly simple):

1. In the Firefox address bar enter: about:config and press return/enter
   This displays the internal configuration and system settings of Firefox
2. If prompted, accept the warning message that cautions against modifying the system settings:

   

3. In the filter/search field enter: network.http
4. This restricts the list to the entries for the HTTP protocol

   Read the rest of this entry »

Just a quick note regarding web browsers (aimed mostly at new Mac users). When I used to/had to use Windows I used Internet Explorer (IE) and then progressed to Firefox. On Apple Macs IE is not available (hurrah!) so what are your choices?

My 3 main browsers of choice are:

Firefox – Available at getfirefox.com

Camino – Available at caminobrowser.org

Safari – Available at www.apple.com/safari

Depending on the website you visit you may find one of the above browsers more suited than others (for example, Camino for Wordprss blog editing).