Eric Bergen

Firefox uses a different command key on different platforms. I often switch between Linux and Mac OS. Having Mac OS use the command key and linux use control was quite confusing. Firefox offers a solution. Point your browser to about:config. This allows you to change settings that aren’t part of the regular options dialogs. In the filter text box type

ui.key.accelKey

Then change the value to one of the following by double clicking on the ui.key.accelKey label.

17 Control
18 Alt
224 Meta (Mac OS command).

You may have to restart firefox for the settings to take effect.

After writing Presenting Instant Search I thought a bit more about how I use search and decided that it’s a pain to have to move focus back to the text box on the search results page in order to change something. As a solution for firefox users I wrote a greasemonkey script to focus for us.

I often hear complaints about how bad the MySQL manual’s native search functions are. Wes recently posted an entry on using firefox key word searching to solve the problem. This is such a great post I have decided to share it with all of you. I also want to add that the MySQL’s questionable site search can be avoided all together by using yahoo’s site search. To use this search URL goto Bookmarks -> Manage Bookmarks. Navigate to your Wes style bookmark. Change the Location to this url:

http://search.yahoo.com/search?_adv_prop=web&ei=UTF-8&vs=dev.mysql.com&vl=lang_en&fl=1&va=%s

Now your keyword search will use yahoo to return more relevant pages only in english. If you want to use a different language change lang_en in the url to the language you prefer. Thanks Wes!

I personally like my firefox to not be so google heavy. Mistyping something in the address bar and having it send me to the first google “I’m Feeling Lucky” link is somewhat annoying. Here is how to switch firefox use another search or none at all if you want. I’m going to switch it to use yahoo but you can choose whatever you want. First let’s break into the secret firefox configuration. In the address bar type about:config as shown below:

Now we can change all kinds of neat things in firefox. In the filter area choose ‘search’ this will give us most of the search things we need to change. The things I change are

Next let’s switch up the keyword url. This is the annoying one that triggers when you type anything into the address bar that isn’t a valid url. In the about:config page change the filter from ‘search’ to ‘keyword’ Then you can either disable the keyword searching or change the url to be something else. I use changed it to use yahoo with “http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=UTF-8&fr=sfp&p=”

After making your changes restart firefox. It’s now Yahooized! or whatever you chose. Enjoy!

[update 6/11/2005: Try Yahoo Mindset instead of the normal yahoo search url: http://mindset.research.yahoo.com/search.php?p= ]

Tabbed browsers have made the target=_new _blank or _top style links annoying and useless. In the old days these links allowed visitors to easily return to your site after viewing a few pages of off site content. Now they are a sneaky surprise that shows up like a hand grenade for those of us that use modern tabbed browsers. There is nothing worse than a link that pops up a new window covering up my existing neatly organized tabs. After reading a few links in this new window I start creating new tabs in it. This leads to having my normal sites open multiple times. What a pain. A good link will give me enough information to decide if I want to choose to open it in a new tab or over the existing one. Having multiple browser windows open is a thing of the past.

Apologies to all of you IE users that have no clue what I’m talking about. It’s time.