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.

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.

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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.

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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.

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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: Read the rest of this entry »

While Firefox 3’s location bar is perhaps my personal favorite new feature and the one I missed the most when I have to use Firefox 2 for some testing, there are a lot of people who find it weird, obtrusive and don’t like it including bookmarks and history among its results.

An option to restore its old behavior was available for a few weeks during Firefox 3 development but it was pulled basically because it would need a lot of testing and it was thought it was not worth it. The option may come back for Firefox 3.1.

In the meantime, for those who prefer the old way and those who want even more power, here are 9 easy tweaks you can try. Read the rest of this entry »

Have you noticed the new Google search favicon? I am not sure if Google intends to keep it forever but I like the refresh.

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

1. Locate the searchplugins folder in your Firefox install folder. (typically C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\ on Windows).
2. Open the google.xml file with a text editor.
3. Locate a section that starts with <Image width=”16″ height=”16″>. You will see it is followed by a long series of characters (the encoded Google icon).
4. Replace it with this equally unreadable code: the new encoded Google icon. Ensure the closing </Image> stays there.
5. Save the file and restart Firefox.

Enjoy a fresh new Google search icon!

If you tried last week’s tip for adding the iPhone version of Google Reader as a Firefox sidebar, you probably quickly noticed that it’s not perfect: an ugly blue border around the Google logo and too large item titles may discourage you from using as your default reader.

The How-to Geek has a nice post on how to further customize the Google Reader sidebar hiding the Google logo and excerpts and setting the titles’ font size to something more convenient.

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Google has updated the iPhone version of Google Reader, its online web feed aggregator.

This is good news even if you don’t have an iPhone. Like other web apps designed for the iPhone interface, it fits very well in Firefox (and other browsers) sidebar. Read the rest of this entry »

Today Facebook unveiled its new chat service and as you may suspect it is pretty simple to load it in your Firefox sidebar to have it always on hand.

• In the Bookmarks menu, select Organize Bookmarks…
• Click on the New Bookmark…
• Enter a name. Enter http://www.facebook.com/presence/popout.php for the location and check the Load this bookmark in the sidebar checkbox. Read the rest of this entry »