Dumb initial questions (Firefox 1.0PR)

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I’ve just downloaded and installed this to play with, together with the “Googlebar” extension, but cannot seem to find the answers to the following:

1) How can you get rid of the short Google search box at the right of the navigation bar? (see Attachment)

2) “Customising Toolbars” has me fairly foxed , because the Help says to click on Customise (fine), but after that I can’t do anything much and cannot even find the Done (as in “Click on Done to finish”), and have to click on the big red top-right X!

3) I presume that the “My Country” option on the GoogleBar is to search pages in the UK only (in my instance), but the resulting Search still references google.com not google.co.uk. Any ideas?

4) Has anyone seen any indications about whether Google themselves are going to “take over” the Google Toolbar for Firefox, because the Googlebar is nowhere near as sophisticated as the IE version?

The rendering of the Lounge seems to give different size type in different areas than does IE6, but that’s no great problem.

John

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2] Where did you get your customize screen from?

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Leif

Not sure what you mean – are you saying that the “standard” Firefox screen doesn’t have the Google box at the end? All I’ve done (as far as I know!) is to put a line separator between the main search box and the Google search box at the end — and now I can’t even get rid of THAT, let alone the Google box…!

John

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Leif

Re #2, for some reason when I right-clicked on an empty area of the toolbar I wasn’t getting the drop-down box with all the options in it!
But now I am! And I’ve worked out that you have to drag the item you don’t want onto the “Cut” scissors — thanks!

John

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>> … you have to drag the item you don’t want onto the “Cut” scissors …

I think you’ll find you only need to drag it onto the selection area, not specifically the scissors.

Regarding the cursor blink speed: I notice that it can be related to animations showing on the screen. For example, when Lex is doing his morning jog, the cursor blinks fast in tempo with his arms. If you scroll the window so that Lex is not in view, it slows down to its normal pace.

(BTW, I’m convinced that FF is showing the ‘super-fast’ Lex-jog at the correct speed, going by the frame timing. I think that IE has a limitation somewhere that slows it down and makes it appear at the ‘correct’ speed.)

Finally, regarding the annoying cursor width and position – are you viewing on an LCD? There was a post in XP recently regarding a clear-type tweak – ClearType Tuner Power Toy which I found improved the image. I recall you dismissed it as being ineffective, but others may find some benefit with a quick tune-up.

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Leif

You may be correct about the “animation speed” of GIFs, becase the two mice in , the chatterers in , the Flea (!) in , the musicians in , just to give a few examples, are all going at breakneck speed!

The text cursor size and positioning – yes, it is an LCD screen and, completely unconnectedly, I went though the ClearType Tuner PowerToy wizard again, basically to give the darkest-possible image, but the text cursor seems still fractionally mispositioned.

And to Jefferson – thanks, doing Tab then Scroll Wheel movement works fine on this input/edit screen! So who is “right” — Firefox or IE?

John

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> So who is “right” — Firefox or IE?

Because Firefox seems to use a platform-independent scheme for rendering, it probably is not as consistent with Windows UI guidelines as IE is. But it probably looks a lot more like your Mac.

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Jefferson

Which Mac is this? I understand the only one in captivity belongs to Bowlie!

John

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3/ The option to select which google search page to use is on the “Google Site Options” tab.

4/ I have not heard of any plans by Google to either take over the toolbar or to create their own one for Firefox.

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Tony

Thanks, I missed the down arrow just to the right of the small g at the LHS of the screen!

John

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Continuing on:

5) Do you find that the mouse scroll wheel does not operate in circain circumstances? For example, while I am entering this post I can only click on the right-hand elevator, not scroll the screen up and down with the wheel.

6) Similarly, the position of the text-entry “vertical cursor line” seems to be a tiny, but disconcerting, fraction to the left of where it is placed in IE?

7) Is there any way to change the order of the user-specified bookmark “groups”, rather than the bookmarks themselves within a “group”? I imported all the Favorites from IE at installation time, which worked very well except that all the orders changed to alphabetical, and not to the carefully organised posiitons I had originally set up!

Thanks!

John

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5/ The operation of the scroll wheel is based on what part of the screen has focus. Whilst creating a post it is the edit box (aka text area) has focus so the scroll wheel will scroll the edit box. If you click outside of the edit box then the scroll wheel will scroll the main Firefox window.

6/ I also find the vertical cursor line to be a minor annoyance in Firefox.

7/ Select Bookmarks>Manage Bookmarks…
In the left hand pane click on Bookmarks. You can then drag & drop to re-order the folders in the right hand pane.

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Thanks, Tony!

in 5) It doesn’t seem to operate the same way as in IE! In fact when I’m typing this in this ‘ere edit box, the scroll wheel does nothing at all (except to cause the vertical cursor line to blink furiously!).

in 7) yes, that’s it!

How long have you been using Firefox?

John

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John

I have been using Firefox for 6 months.

I’ve just noticed your first question was not answered. You can remove the Google search box in the same way you remove other toolbar items. With the customize dialog displayed, drag and drop the Google search box into the customize dialog.

Before you remove the Google search box (or search bar as it is usually known) you can customize it by adding search plug-ins from Mycroft. This makes it far more versatile enabling you to search using one of the many search engines or to search a particular site such as dictionary sites.

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#5 is different than IE, and takes some getting used to. You can tab out of the main textarea field, and then the scroll wheel will be targeting the page rather than that one control. This may be less annoying than clicking. Or maybe not.

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John:
With respect to 4), I’m still using version 0.9.2. But the Google search bar there is just as sophisticated as IE’s, if not more so. What does the IE version of the Google toolbar have that Firefox doesn’t?
Thanks,

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Phil

Three tabs worth of options (admittedly most of which I don’t want!). Some exist in Firefox with the Googlebar, but my impression is that the Google Toolbar in IE has more.

John

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Really dumb question. Why do you want to get rid of the Google bar in “friefox” (sic) ?

Pat

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Pat

Assume you’re referring to one of my very early posts? Because the Googlebar extension has more useful features…

John

PS So far crashes in Firefox have been running at one or two a day, compared with IE6’s less than once a week. Still beta…!

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Touch wood, I haven’t suffered a single crash with FF since adopting it several months ago – that’s running it on three machines all with XP Pro, but without any Googlebars.

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John

What extensions do you have loaded? Tabbrowser Extensions for example in terms of features is the best tabbed browsing extension available but it is also known to cause Firefox to become less stable.

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The only extension I have loaded is Googlebar, but FF hasn’t crashed when I’ve actually been Googling, AFAIAA!

I can live with it falling over rarely, but I still hate

• text cursor positioning
• the inability to mouse-wheel-scroll an edit window without clicking or pressing Tab
• the too-close positioning of thin characters in large fonts (headlines)[/list]If I stop using FF it will be because these minor annoyances have got the better of me, rather than the crashes!

  John

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The 2 omissions from the Mozilla version of Googlebar that are mentioned the most are pagerank and autofill. If you select Googlebar options and go to the “New additions” tab it discusses why they have not been included and some alternatives.

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The only extension I had problems with was Tabbrowser Extensions and FF used to crash a couple of time a week. Since uninstalling that extension FF has not crashed. I have been using the Googlebar extension for about 6 months and have not had any problems with it.

Something you will not want to hear, your 3 annoyances are still present in Firefox 1.0 RC1 and will probably still be there when version 1.0 is released later this month.

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