Using Web and Technology to Enhance Your Life

Have you ever been in a situation in which you wanted to open multiple links on a page in different page.

If you are using firefox, there’s an easy way to do this without multiple middle-clicking (btw did you know middle-clicking on a link in firefox automatically opens it in a new tab).

The way to open more than one tab simultaneously is by using a nifty little add-on called tab mix plus.

Click here to install tab mix plus. You’ll need to restart firefox after installation.

Now go to a page with multiple links.

Select multiple links with a simple drag selection.

Now right-click on the selected are and click on “Open Links in New Tabs”

Tab mix plus has some other nifty features too, but we’ll discuss those sometime else.

Or you can use the comment box to discuss them right now.

If you’re a Google geek like I am, I’m sure you use all sorts of different searches. I’m talking about various prefixes that you can add in front of your search query to get such results as per your requirements. I’m talking about using google search operators.

There are various such modifications that you can use. Some that I use are:

site: <sitename.com>

e.g site: shypy.com  -> this will display all the pages indexed by google for the domain shypy.com

allintitle: <keyword>

e.g allintitle: dog training -> this will display all the pages that contain all of the words in the search string, “dog training” in this example, in the <title> tag of the webpage

filetype: <.filetype> <keyword>

e.g filetype: .mp3 “Beethoven Symphony No.9″ -> this will display all the pages that contain mp3 files with the words “Beethoven Symphony No.9″ in the file name.

allinanchor: <keyword>

e.g allinanchor: best laptop 2010 -> this will display only pages in which the anchor text on links to the pages contain the words “best,” “laptop,” and “2010”.

But for me, someone who uses these kinds of searches extensively, it is very inefficient to to type out all the text every time I want to use them.

So if you’re lazy person like me, what you can do is at these searches as bookmarks in Firefox and assign a keyword to them. This will allow you to use these searches by just typing in the keyword in the address bar.

Here’s how you do it in Firefox.

1. Open “Organize Bookmarks” from the bookmarks menu OR press ctrl+shift+B

2. Right-Click in the bookmarks window and select “New Bookmark”

3. Type in any name you want (doesnt matter)

4. Type in the following string in the Location textbox: http://www.google.com/search?q=link:%s

You can replace link: with allintitle: allinanchor: cache: site: filetype: or a dozen other google operators.

5. Type in your keyword. This is very important because you will be using this keyword to perform searches straight from the address bar.

6. Click on and you’re done.

Now go to the address bar (Ctrl + L) and type in “all: amazon kindle” and you will be shown all pages with the words amazon and kindle in the page title.

This can be used in a variety of ways.

Maybe you are an internet marketer like me and need to perform different types of searches to gauge competition for different keywords.

Maybe you are an avid reader and want to see if the pdf version of your favorite book is available online. Just perform a quick filetype search.

Maybe you want to see all the pages in the website.

You can now perform different types of google searches directly from the address bar using a single keyword.

Thanks to Mardeg from #firefox @irc.mozilla.org for helping with this article.

If you have a problem with Firefox showing garbled text on specific webpages and don’t know how to fix it, then I might have the answer for you.

It looks like the text is in a different language or font. This is what I’m talking about:

Note that this problem seems to appear on only certain websites. Also this issue does not appear in Internet Explorer.

This problem is due to the incompatibility of Helvetica font installation with Firefox. This might occur especially if you have acquired Helvetica by “alternative means”.

If your PC doesn’t have Helvetica installed, it should default to arial, but obviously that didn’t happen in our case.

But never mind, because this problem can be easily solved by removing Helvetica from a regedit.

Press Windows Key + R and type in regedit. Press enter.

Now browse to HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Fonts.

Right click on Helvetica and delete it.

Voila! Problem solved.

It’s been over 40 days and 28 million+ downloads since the launch Mozilla Firefox 3 and it’s not a surpirse Firefox has gotten that kind of response, since it is simply the best browser out there.

What surprises me though, is the number of firefox users who havent upgraded from Firefox 2.0.0.13 just because some of the addon’s are not compatible with FF3. As you might have noticed, almost all of the more famous ones have been made compatible for FF3 and so have many of the not-so-famous ones.

So if you’re among the few who are hesitant to lose their precious addons after updating, here’s a simple solution.

It’s called the MR Tech Toolkit Firefox Addon.

Here’s how you make your old extensions work with Firefox 3:

First of all, you’ll need to download Firefox 3.0.1.

Install the MR Tech Toolkit and restart firefox.

Click on the Tools Menu -> Addons.

Find the addon that is not compatible with FF3. Right click on it and select “Make compatible”. Restart Firefox.

There you have it – MR Tech Toolkit will make most of your old extensions work with Firefox 3.

Now I never want to hear any excuse for not updating to 3.0 again.

Have fun