I have finally upgraded my firefox installation. I was on 3.6.16 and thought, buggrit, let’s goto version 4, then somewhere along the submenus I got lost and went to 3.6.18 first, and then went to 4.01 after that. I also discovered that 5.0 had just been released locally today. Proving once and for all, how behind the times I was. The main reason I’d been waiting so long to upgrade is that some of my key plugins hadn’t been updated for the new versions; though I have got round this in the past by hacking the MaxVersion number in the xml. While that hasn’t been a problem, as there were several affected plugins this time, I didn’t think it was worth chancing jumping straight to v5.

It remains the case however that one of my favourites is still not supported by versions 4.0+, that being “copy plain text“. I am very, very tempted to hack the version number and reports suggest that will be ok. Anyway, I have just upgraded, at long last to 4.01, as almost all my plugins are now compatible and the other remaining one, “Tab Kit” will be migrating in the next week or so.

When I’ve tweeted about upgrading, a few folk have said “chrome” as the answer to my problems. I’m guessing because most folk think in terms of lone browsers or browser wars. On my machine I currently have these browsers installed:

• Firefox 4.01
• IE 7.0.5730.13 (can’t upgrade due to compatibility issues with work’s content management system)
• Safari 5.05
• Opera 11.11
• Lynx 2.8.5rel.5
• Chrome 12.0.742.100

though compiling this list has meant I’ve just upgraded a couple of them :-) One of the big reasons that I have so many is that I do tech support for an online information provider, and it’s useful if I can test problems in the same browser that the customer is using. Of those, I need IE for some work stuff, however Firefox (at least in part due to its plugins) is my workhorse. Firefox is the browser I spend most time in, and seems most modifiable ie I’ve got it fairly tightly tailored to what I need. I currently have 28 extensions installed not counting disabled or out-of-date extensions. Of those, some of my favourites are:

• Add Bookmark here – so I can add bookmarks to the right folder
• Compact Menu (just changed to it as Tiny Menu needs updating) – I use my toolbars for quick linking and don’t want a row of menu headings taking up space
• DownThemAll! – for downloads
• Fireshot – for taking and editing screenshots.
• Foxclocks – for keeping track of timezones in the various company offices
• Remove Cookie(s) for Site – a button on the toolbar that removes all cookies related to the currently opened window. Great for when I’m testing authentication.
• URL Link – this is useful, for highlighting a word on a webpage and slotting it into a pre-formatted URL. I use it primarily to construct URLs for customers to access their databases with as I’ve set it up to insert the account ID into the right spot of a URL eg http://blah.blah/ID, and open a new tab with that URL.