Pimp My Firefox

standards-compliant, ready for primetime, cross-platform, fun

• A standards compliant open source browser that has been "out of beta" for over three years and at version 2.0 since Oct 2007. Alpha 3.0 came out in Sept.
• The company: "All of our products are available free-of-charge for Windows, Mac and Linux computers in more than 35 languages."

Well, almost anything.
[click image for overkill, source]

• extensions - do more tasks from your browser
• search engines - search box & smart keywords
• themes - general look & feel
• greasemonkey + scripts - the way websites look & work
• also - iconpacks, dictionaries, plugins

Some librarians talk about what they use.

• Teri Vogel @ UCSD - long list of her favorite extensions
• Using LibX and Zotero - a tutorial
• CERIAS - security extensions
• Walk Like a Librarian - step by step guide to setting up and customizing FF.
• More on browser extensions from the Library Success wiki.

Let's install a script.
Let's look at some examples.

• Get the handout for this talk with linked examples: Doc or HTML
• Firefox Can Do That? - a very similar talk
• I want Firefox to... help with extension selection
• Get it: Firefox, Greasemonkey + Scripts, Add-ons, OpenSearch (find more, make your own)
• Library-specific helpers: LibX, Library Search, COinS extensions
• Some extensions you might not want to use, and why.

Jessamyn West is a community technology librarian in Vermont and the editor of the weblog librarian.net. She teaches email classes for seniors, builds tiny websites for tiny libraries and advocates for sensible technology use for everyone.

IM her at iamthebestartist.

This presentation was created in HTML using CSS. There was no PowerPoint involved in this presentation except as a nagging bad example. The layout and stylesheet are available to borrow via a share and share alike creative commons license. See source code for details.

slides version | printable version