By now you’ve no doubt heard that Firefox 4 was released last week. I had used it through a few beta and release candidate releases and like it a lot. Here are a couple small tips that I thought I’d share. One specific to XP and the other to Windows 7 (and Vista?).
Firefox 4 on XP tip
At first, I wasn’t a huge fan of the redesigned menu but I’ve grown to like it, especially the amount of space it doesn’t take up. Here’s what it looks like on a Windows 7 machine:
When I first installed it on my little XP laptop I was initially appalled. The bar was gone! Blah, it looked like the previous release:
Fortunately, this is easily fixed. To get the snazzier menu, just go to View –> Toolbars and uncheck the “Menu Bar” option. Presto – problem fixed.
Windows 7
When hovering over Firefox in the task bar, wouldn’t it be nice if it would show a thumbnail of all tabs, not just the current one? I sure thought so – and turns out it is just a checkbox away (assuming, of course, your operating system supports it).
Just go to Options and then the Tabs tab. Check the bottom option:
Now hover over Firefox in the task bar:
From there you can click the tab you want to go to or even close them by hitting the little red “x”.
Search from the Address Bar
Bonus tip!
I’m not sure if this is a published feature or not, but I’ve noticed that I can type keyword searches straight into the address bar – instead of the search box – and it takes me to a Google search for those words. You know, like Chrome?
This doesn’t seem to be specifically listed on the Firefox Features page, but I sure like it. Also makes me think I could probably remove the search box altogether…
Possibly Related posts:
Re the searching in the address bar. Am I missing something? That function has been available in Firefox for ages.
Probably just me. I’ve known you could search for previously visited sites from the address bar, but until this release I’d never tried just entering keywords in there.
Keyword searching worked in FF3 too then? I’m bummed I missed it!
Another thing about the menu — once you’ve hidden the old-style menu, you can toggle it on and off with the Alt key. And if you don’t like the new-style menu and want to switch back, there’s no “View” menu on the new menu, so go to “Options” to re-check the menu bar option.
(Could I use “option” and “menu” any more times in one sentence?)
Oh yeah, reminds of something I left out: Another quick way to toggle menu bar on and off is to right-click on any toolbar and check/uncheck it from there.