about:config, set browser.tabs.loadDivertedInBackground to true

(I first tried renaming the profiles using firefox -ProfileManager. Renaming the default profile to “old” and the “firefox3″ profile to “default” had no effect.)

I found the solution here: Go to the URL about:config, search for browser.tabs.loadFolderAndReplace and set it to false.

Because of this, I had to create a symlink in that user-based Firefox’s plugin directory:

cd /home/user/firefox/plugins
ln -s /usr/lib/firefox/plugins/libjavaplugin.so

(I don’t recall installing Java. sudo aptitude search java shows I have following installed:)

sudo aptitude install sun-java6-bin sun-java6-jre sun-java6-plugin

1. Use Firefox shortcuts (just google for a list).
2. I’ve installed the mouseless browsing (MLB) Firefox extension. Every link in a page gets tagged with an ID. Type that ID, then hit ENTER. (For me, this works using “Find as you type” in the Firefox preferences).
3. I’ve set up some Firefox smart keywords for quick searching from the location bar.
4. I’ve installed the CustomizeGoogle extension to Firefox. Amongst other things, you can set it to “Give the searchbar focus”. This means that if you can immediately modify you search.
5. I already have Greasemonkey installed. This lets you modify websites using browser-based JavaScript. From userscripts.org, an online repository of user scripts, I’ve downloaded Google Search Box AccessKey. Now, on any Google search page, hitting the access key and the letter “s” puts the cursor in the search box.
6. The “access key” differs by browser. Generally, for Firefox under Linux, it is the ALT key. For me, it is apparently ALT+Shift, which is just as well, since I’m using ALT already for loads of XFCE shortcuts. It’s generally a great idea, and some websites have set it server-side for quick navigation to important links. I’ve now implemented it for this blog. Hitting your access key and “s” will put the cursor in the search box. From there, you can either search, or tab-navigate directly down the list of links along the right hand sidebar.
7. Generally, I try to navigate using the tab key. A big problem is that it is often hard to see which link has focus, or even whether the location bar or the main window have focus. In about:config, filter for “focus”, and set browser.display.focus_background_color and browser.display.focus_text_color. I’ve set the background color to #a2e88b and the foreground color to black. That’s helpful, but doesn’t show up on some elements, such as images. In Greasemonkey, I’ve set up Bright Focus (for buttons, links and textboxes). This gives a border, which also shows up around images and the like. I don’t like the default color, so I set it to be 2px #66CC00. This is also available as a script for the Firefox Stylish extension.
8. In the same spirit, I’ve added this to my userChrome.js:

   /* give urlbar background color when it has focus */
   #urlbar[focused="true"] { background-color:#A2E88B !important; }
   
   /* change focus rings around acitve tabs  */
   .tabbrowser-tabs > tab:focus .tab-middle {
     -moz-outline: solid 2px #66CC00 !important;
   }

9. Finally, I’ve set up my home page to be a local page containing a handful of frequently visited sites, so I can just load my home page and then quickly navigate to them.

sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

This gives me a list to pick from, and I can change to the system-wide Firefox or Opera, but ~/firefox/firefox is not in the list.

sudo rm /etc/alternativesx-www-browser
sudo ln -s /home/mpromber/firefox/firefox /etc/alternatives/x-www-browser

Links in xpdf didn’t open at all anymore, instead:

run-mozilla.sh: Cannot execute /home/mpromber/firefox/x-www-browser-bin

update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/x-www-browser x-www-browser /home/mpromber/firefox/firefox 10

The last number is the “priority”, I have no clue what the value should be here. I tried 90, 10, and 1, and it didn’t make a difference as far as I could tell. In all three cases, ~/firefox/firefox is last in the list given by update-alternatives --config

Then …

sudo update-alternatives --config x-www-browser

… and pick the newly created ~/firefox/firefox entry.

However, trying to open links from xpdf again didn’t work (same error as above).

So then I just picked /usr/bin/firefox from the list in update-alternatives --config. Surprisingly, this works fine, opening a new tab in my running ~/firefox/firefox process (maybe it will open the wrong system-wide Firefox if I don’t have the right one running).

An impressive instant favorite is 2g followed by two alternate spellings, to give a split pane view showing the results of the respective google searches — useful for an instant popular vote (it seems “definite” is still firmly in the lead, so far …).

How to use it in Firefox? Just install yubnub as a smart keyword:

• Go to http://yubnub.org
• Right click on the main search bar and select “Add a keyword for this search …”
• In the resulting dialogue, enter a name and a keyword (for example, y)

Now, typing: y 2g definite definate into the location bar uses the 2g yubnub search term. Still too much typing? Try this: You know how when you type a non-URL text into the location bar and hit enter, Firefox sends this to the Google “I’m feeling lucky” search? Just change this behavior to send the text to yubnub:

• Type about:config into the location bar, hit ENTER.
• Filter for keyword.URL.
• Change this to http://yubnub.org/parser/parse?command=
• Now, you can omit the y and type 2g definite definate instead.

Conveniently, if you have a smart keyword defined locally for your Firefox, this takes precedence over the “keyword.URL” and hence over yubnub. As a result, if someone has used a keyword on yubnub but you’d rather use it for something else, you can still define it locally to your liking. However, I guess this could be a challenge for yubnub in the long run. What if someone defines an easy-to-ermember popular keyword for an obscure, unpopular command, then hardly ever uses it, but blocks that keyword from being used for a more popular command? Would be a shame. I guess some voting mechanism or, in the long run, user authenication with the possibility of customized deviations from some keywords could get around that.

Addendum

It seems that the problem I suspected in the last paragraph has already been solved: you can create personal aliases for yubnub commands (yubnub uses cookies for this). Just type man ! into a yubnub search to learn more.

Addendum

Make sure you get the development version.

I’ve finally started to look into this and wrote my first Greasemonkey user script. So far, this just works for a single journal. What it does: When I’m browsing the Journal of Behavioral Decision Making (JBDM) via the Penn library proxy server and click on the link to an abstract of an article, the greasemonkey script takes me to the abstract directly on the JBDM website. Once that has loaded, I can then click on my “Post to CiteULike” bookmark and the article gets posted. To get back to browsing JBDM via the Penn proxy, I have to use the dropdown menu of the Firefox back button and navigate a few steps back, to the page before I first loaded the abstract.

I hope to add a few more journals and then post the whole script online for download. I might also try to replace the URL that the abstract link on the Penn proxy JBDM site links to. I’m sure JavaScript can do that, but I don’t have time to figure it out right now.

In the meantime, this is what it looks like:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           PennJBDMabstract2JBDMabstract
// @namespace      http://www.promberger.de
// @description    Goes from penn proxy JBDM abstract to outside abstract
// @include        http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8125/cgi-bin/abstract/*
// ==/UserScript==

var proxy = new RegExp("proxy.library.upenn.edu:8125\/cgi-bin\/abstract");
var direct = "www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/abstract";
document.location.href=document.location.href.replace(proxy,direct) ;

Addendum

The script above seems to work not just for JBDM, but for all journals from Wiley Interscience.

Here’s one for journals from Blackwell Synergy:

// ==UserScript==
// @name           blackwell synergy
// @namespace      www.promberger.de
// @include        http://proxy.library.upenn.edu:8147/doi/abs/*
// ==/UserScript==

var proxy = new RegExp("proxy.library.upenn.edu:8147");
var direct = "www.blackwell-synergy.com";
document.location.href=document.location.href.replace(proxy,direct);

wiki: cycle path

it searches Wikipedia for that term (and I end up on the Wikpedia entry for segregated cycle facilities).

John Bokma has a good explanation on how to define these, both manually and somewhat automatically. As usual, the manual way to do this lets you implement more customized searches.

A few examples of searches I have defined: