Get full screen native video in Firefox 3.5, then skin it

By now you probably know that one of Firefox 3.5 main features is the ability to show video encoded in Theora format natively, that is without the need of a plugin or any other software.

As good as this is, it has no option for showing the video in full screen. But as usual, it didn’t take much time before a extension came to the rescue to provide the necessary feature (in fact it has been available before Firefox 3.5 final).

Full Screen Video, by Dao Gottwald adds an option to video’s context menu to view a video in full screen mode. Right-click, select and watch.

There are a couple of caveats though: the video restarts when switching to full screen but I found it to be a problem much less annoying than I thought it would be. Also, full screen is only achieved on Windows. On other platforms it’s just a maximized window.

And if you don’t like the native video controls or get bored of them, you can customize them as almost everything else, Firefox audio and video controls are customizable (more work for theme authors!).

Long time community member, Ken Saunders, has released some cool skins you can try simply editing your userChrome.css file in your profile folder. Check Ken’s cool video player themes.

Disable tab tearing and six other Firefox 3.5 tab tweaks

With every Firefox release comes change, and Firefox 3.5 is no exception. While the changes are always well intentioned and aimed to make our web life easier, it’s not always like that for everyone, hence, there’s always something new to tweak.

Accessing about:config through the location bar, checking some setting, updating a file, or installing an extension, there’s usually a way to make things work your way.

Quickly find unread tabs in Firefox

Right-click on a link -> Open Link in New Tab, or simply middle-clicking, are pretty common tasks in a world of tabbed browsers, that allow us to differ some web content for a few minutes or even seconds. Unless you happen to forget where the tab actually opened or what was the page about and the unread tab goes unnoticed.

With a simple tweak to Firefox’s interface customization files, this becomes a thing of the past. In the image below, can you figure out which tabs I haven’t read yet?

Yeap, the ones with the italicized titles. To apply the same tweak, first locate your userChrome.css file, located in the chrome folder in your profile folder. If you don’t see it, just copy the provided userChrome-example.css file to the same location and rename it. Then add this line:

#content tab:not([selected]) {font-style: italic !important; }

Then restart Firefox and it will get much harder to miss a tab. Note that for some reason, moving tabs around set the font back to normal even if you haven’t clicked on it yet.

Update Firefox’s search bar with new Google favicon, again

So Google has updated its logo once again. If having different icons in the search bar and the location bar while on a Google results page makes you feel like there’s yet another item in your to-do list, here’s some relief.

You can update the Firefox’s default Google search plugin to show the new Google search icon:

1. Download this updated version of the Google search plugin. (Only change is the updated data: url for the favicon)
2. Copy it to your searchplugins folder in your Firefox install folder  (typically C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ on Windows), and overwrite the existing google.xml file.
3. Save the file and restart Firefox.

Now you have the current favicon and can rest.

Make Firefox look better on Vista

Firefox 3 introduced tighter OS integrating across all platforms, and even different Strata (Windows theme) flavors for Windows XP and Vista. However the result was not optimal and there is room to make Firefox feel more native.

Firefox 3 features you may not know

While the awesome bar, download pause and resume, malware protection, the new themes, and serious performance improvements are perhaps the most representative features introduced with Firefox 3, here are some other useful ones you may not be aware:

1. Duplicate tabs. Press Ctrl while dragging a tab to create a duplicate of the dragged tab including its history. Note that this feature doesn’t work on Mac.
2. Move tabs to another window. Just drag a tab and drop it on another window to move it. If the dragged tab is the last one in its window, it will be closed.
3. Resize the search bar. When the search bar is placed next to the location bar, you can drag the handler between them (invisible on Windows and Linux) to resize it.
4. Add keyword search. Select Manage Search Engines… in the search engines menu to open the Search Engines Manager, select a search engine, press Edit Keyword… and enter a few characters to define one. Now you can enter the keyword followed by your search terms in the location bar to search with that plugin.
5. Discontinuous selections. Make a selection with the mouse as you usually do. Then press and hold the Ctrl (Cmd on Mac) key to make additional selections and create a larger discontinuous one so you can copy or print just what you need.
6. Integrated add-ons. No need to visit Mozilla Add-ons because Firefox 3 brings it to you directly from the Add-ons Manager new Get Add-ons page: search, find and install with a single click.
7. Disable plugins. Crashing? It may be a plugin. To be sure, disable the suspect through the new Plugins page in the Add-ons Manager.
8. Check your crashes. Enter about:crashes in the location bar to get a list of crashes submitted by Breakpad (Mozilla’s crash reporter). Click on a crash report to get details provided by Socorro, Mozilla’s crash reports server.

The other Firefox 3 themes

As you may know, Firefox 3 introduces three different themes for all the officially supported operating systems: Firelight on Mac OS X, Tango on Linux, and Strata on Windows, which even comes in XP and Vista variations to better blend with Luna and Aero respectively.

If you are feeling envious of what the other platform or style got or just want to try a different look and have a couple of minutes to spare, you may want to give these themes a try.

Set Mibbit as your IRC client in Firefox

Do you know Mibbit? It’s an awesome web based IRC client. IRC, for those not old enough to recall, meant chat long before instant messaging entered the scene and is still a very reliable option for group and peer-to-peer text communication.

You can take advantage of Firefox 3’s support for web-based protocol handling to make it your default IRC client and handle irc:// links whenever you found one.

Mibbit added the necessary interface short before Firefox 3 final release and I’ve proposed it to be included with Firefox by default. But you can add it right now.

Tweak Firefox 3 full screen mode

Firefox 3 introduces real full screen mode where unlike Firefox 2 where the location bar and tab bar remained visible at all times, now they both automatically hide below the top edge of the screen.

If for some reason you prefer to see the location and tab bars, you can customize Firefox:

• Enter about:config in the location bar to access the advanced preferences.
• Look for browser.fullscreen.autohide and double click it to set it to false.

Tweak Firefox 3 full page zoom

Firefox 3 introduces full page zoom, that is, instead of just making text bigger or smaller, it resizes the full page including images and layout.

1. If you just want to zoom text, in the View menu, select Zoom and mark Zoom Text Only.

2. Firefox 3 remembers what zoom level you used for viewing pages in a domain and will automatically zoom them the next time you visit any page in the same domain. If you prefer Firefox not to remember it: