Archive for the 'Tips & Tricks' Category
Share Your Knowledge: Firefox Screencast Contest
Get ready to participate in the Firefox Screencast contest! This is your chance to use your talents and passion for Firefox to create support screencasts for the Firefox Support (SUMO) knowledge base on support.mozilla.com.
We have prepared a list of the top 100 most popular support articles from the SUMO knowledge base and ask YOU to create screencasts for one, two, three, or all of them! You can enter as many screencasts as you like. With 100 different articles, anyone can choose whatever article for which they would like to create a screencast.
Mozilla will not be hosting the videos during this contest, so please use a third-party application like Jing to record your screencast and send us the link so we can view it. Ever used Jing? Here’s a great online demo. Click “Video Tour” on the front page to see how to use it…it couldn’t be easier! Just download and begin recording!
All entries will be judged by a team who will look at the submissions and pick the best one for each of the 100 articles. That’s 100 winners!!
What are you waiting for? Go to the Firefox Screencast Contest and start sharing your knowledge!
Any questions? We’ve got the answers.
Star-worthy: Firefox 3 Bookmarks
As promised, we’ll continue to highlight some of the incredibly cool and useful Firefox 3 features you can expect to see. Today’s installment on Firefox 3’s new bookmarking system is brought to you once again by Deb Richardson, the author of the about:mozilla newsletter. Deb provides a clear explanation of the many improvements you’ll see, including:
- bookmark stars which allow for one-click bookmarking
- tags that allow you to add extra relevant information to a bookmark so it’s easier to find and organize
- smart bookmark folders or “saved searches” that automatically update when you add new items matching that search to your bookmarks
Firefox 3’s bookmark dialog box
Take a look at her post for more details, as well as a great how-to. I’ve found that I am using Firefox 3’s bookmarking with renewed gusto thanks to the little star and intuitive organization and search!
A Little Something Awesome about Firefox 3
Deb Richardson, author of the about:mozilla newsletter, wrote one of the better explanations I’ve seen on the “AwesomeBar,” Firefox 3’s revamped URL bar. It’s not the most humble of names, but if you check out Deb’s post you’ll see why it’s earned it.
In Deb’s words, here’s a quick snapshot of what makes Firefox 3’s URL bar just so awesome:
Dubbed the “AwesomeBar”, it lets you use the URL field of your browser to do a keyword search of your history and bookmarks. No longer do you have to know the domain of the page you’re looking for — the AwesomeBar will match what you’re typing (even multiple words!) against the URLs, page titles, and tags in your bookmarks and history, returning results sorted by “frecency” (an algorithm combining frequency + recency).
Not only that, but the drop-list results show you the page’s favicon, the full title, the URL, and whether you have bookmarked and/or tagged the page in a richly formatted two-line display.
Example: I start by typing “ginger”, and AwesomeBar searches through my history and bookmarks to return everything that matches that keyword, showing the first six and letting me scroll through the rest. You’ll notice here that several of the results are bookmarked (blue star icon on the right), and tagged (tag icon). The sites’ favicons are displayed on the left, making it really easy to scan through the results if you know what site you’re looking for in particular.
Check out Deb’s post for more on the AwesomeBar and check back here for more on the cool things to expect in Firefox 3!