Take a look.

I had quite a few tabs open to things I thought I might post. But then I closed Firefox to install some software, then ran RegistryBooster 2 (installing any software seems to introduce 12-15 registry errors) and defragged the registry. Then when I opened Firefox again, all tabs were gone. So it goes.

Or, Firefox without all the great add-ons: beauty and utility are in the eye of user. Still this article by Brad Linder about K-Meleon in Download Squad is worth checking out. The attractive thing to me: the speed.

K-Meleon is a light weight web browser for folks who don’t need a ton of plugins, options, or much of anything except for a good utility for viewing web sites. The browser uses the same rendering engine as Firefox, so pretty much any page that you can access in Firefox can also be opened in K-Meleon. But don’t expect your Firefox add-ons or Greasemonkey scripts to place nice with K-Meleon.

Because K-Meleon lacks some of the bells and whistles you’d find in Firefox, Internet Explorer, or Opera, the browser is fast. Like really fast. It also doesn’t use as much RAM as Firefox, which is known to be something of a memory hog.

That’s not to say that K-Meleon is a one-trick pony. The browser is customizable, and you can choose from a variety of skins and themes. And K-Meleon supports tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, pop up blocking, and macros.

K-Meleon is Windows only. But if you’re looking for light weight Mac or Linux web browsers that use the same Gecko rendering engine as Firefox, check out Camino or Galeon.

Take a look—extremely useful for aging folks.

Via Lifehacker, Cybernet has some useful drag-and-drop Firefox tips. For example:

You can drag and drop…

• a URL (hyperlinked or not) onto the address bar to immediately be taken to that site in the current tab.
• a URL (hyperlinked or not) onto an existing tab or blank tab to immediately replace it with the new URL.
• a URL (hyperlinked or not) onto an empty area on the tab bar to immediately have that URL opened in a new background tab.

More tips here.

I love my Firefox add-ons, which have made the program so much more efficient. And now Mozilla has improved the Firefox add-on site to make it easy for you to find add-ons that are useful to you.

Add-ons are easy to install and, if they turn out not to work for you, easy to uninstall. And they’re free.

There are quite a few “community” facilities on the Web: Facebook, Flickr, Twitter, and the like. Flock, “the Social Web Broswer,” facilitates community interactions and also allows you to share items easily with friends. It’s really pretty slick, and it’s built directly on Firefox. When/if you install it, it imports your add-ons, bookmarks, and the like directly from Firefox (if you have Firefox installed and have been using it). I’m not so community oriented, so it’s not for me, but if you’re more inclined in that direction, it’s definitely worth a look. Firefox for young people, I calls it.

Good list: The most popular and most functional Firefox extensions:

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Take a look.

A bookmarklet is a little program you drag to your links bar. I use the TinyURL bookmarklet constantly, and now I’ve added a Wikipedia lookup and Google lookup from this list of 10 useful bookmarklets.

ScribeFire is a Firefox add-on for bloggers: you can compose and post directly from Firefox instead of opening the blog’s editor. One nice thing is that you can open it while looking at a Web page. Just getting started, but looks as though it might work out.

The Grocery List Generator great little Firefox add-on that I’ve lately started to use. The button to bring up the list is right on the Firefox toolbar, and it’s easy to add food items to the database (and to remove them). The comments field (which you can include in the printed list) lets you be specific (e.g., database item is “onions” and today I added the comment “large Spanish”). You can categorize the items by your own categories (e.g., to match the store layout).

It’s particularly nice in that you can enter a recipe and it will generate a grocery list from the recipe. But I usually look at the recipe and add the items I need by hand, since I already typically have most of what I need.

Grocery List Generator is free, of course, and the current version is 1.6 so it’s been around the block a few times. Check it out.

This morning both book tools delivered. First, I was reading a review of a new biography of Charles Schulz (creator of Peanuts). I clicked the link to buy simply to get to Amazon, and then clicked my library bookmarklet: yep, Monterey Public Library has it, and I placed a hold.

Second, I was reading an interesting review of a book on the role of narrative in memory. Again, clicked the link to get to Amazon, checked Book Burro, and saw I could buy a copy for $1.00 at Abebooks.com.

It certainly seems to be true, by the way, that people remember stories—that narrative accounts are very basic to our understanding of people and events. There’s a reason that the first explanations of the world and how it came to be were narratives. Those fit best with how we think. That’s probably why we tend to view and portray our own experience as narratives, come to think of it. We say/think, “The car refused to start” and perhaps we even get angry at it. The actors in a narrative are, of course, making decisions and what they do (and don’t do) stems from those decisions. So the car—a totally inanimate machine that simply functions (or not) from electrical/mechanical interactions—becomes an actor capable of “refusing” to do some things. That’s probably also why some people give names to their cars, which are actors in the daily narrative of their lives.

A friend once told me that the image people in my company had of me was based on stories about me, and that I should take care to ensure that the stories that could be told were favorable. People are always telling each other stories about their co-workers, and by your actions you are creating the narrative of your legend.

I also recall when I was listening to books on tape on my commutes between Santa Cruz and Monterey. The non-fiction books were almost impossible to follow, but a novel—a narrative account—was easy to follow and remember.

Good things to have. I have Book Burro already, and now I’m installing the Library Looup thing.

Book Burro - a Firefox extension that will show prices at the major online bookstores as well as some library availability (through WorldCat). When I’m browsing at Amazon, for example, I can click on the Book Burro panel to see if there’s a lower price elsewhere.

The LibraryLookup bookmarklet sits up on my bookmark toolbar. I can click it anytime I’m at a book page on Amazon to see whether my local library has it (since that library doesn’t show up on WorldCat).

The Library Lookup bookmarklet works great. It opens the catalog in a different window, though, so at first I didn’t realize it was working. Very nice tool.

I assume that this must count as separate downloads every update that you download — that is, 400 million downloads does not equal 400 million users. Still: a lot of users. Part of their secret is the tremendous array of (free, useful) add-ins. I don’t think I even remember what a plain vanilla Firefox is like. (The updates — even to a new version number, like Version 2 — bring along all the add-ins that will work with the update, and also tracks the ones that don’t so that you are informed when an update is available for those so that you can start using them again.) Great program.

The new release of Webroot Spysweeper, which on my computer deals with both spyware and viruses, did funny things to Firefox—like now I have to log in anew whenever I have closed a tab that held a forum, my blog, etc. Same thing happened to The Wife, and she found the (simple) fix: re-install Firefox.

Apparently, with Webroot now paying more attention to Firefox, the new version wrote over some settings. Reinstalling Firefox fixed everything up.

Via Lifehacker, 20 Firefox extensions that save you money so you can buy more shaving gear. For example:

4. Grocery List Generator 1.5: I was tickled pink when I found this one. Sad, but true… GLG organizes information by items (i.e. chicken), category ( i.e. meat), and dish (i.e. fried chicken). When you first install the extension, take some time and enter all the items you typically buy at the grocery store as ingredients. There’s even categories for ‘Household & Personal Hygiene’ and ‘Drugstore’, so you can enter those types of items, too.

The easiest way to explain how you can save money with GLG is with an example of how I would use it. I read a lot of blogs using an RSS reader, including one from a food stylist in LA (yeah, I know). In May he posted a great recipe for sopapillas. With GLG, I pop open the extension and enter a dish ’sopapillas’. If I don’t have any dishes that use the same ingredients, I first add the ingredients as items and then add them to the dish. I copy the link of the post into the comments of the dish so I can find the measurements later, and then forget about the whole thing.

Later in the week I open GLG when I go through the weekly sales papers online. If chicken is on sale, I click the plus sign next to chicken and include the store and the price in the comments. I browse through my list of dishes, and find sopapillas. Those sound good, so I add that dish. When I click ‘Generate List’, I get a printable grocery list. This list is organized by category and includes the items I’ve chosen along with their comments ( i.e. chicken, ‘Bloom, 49c per pound’); it also includes the ingredients for any recipes I’ve selected. Print it out, take it to my stores, and I’m good to go.

Genius.

And they’re useful, too.

Very useful knowledge. I hated it when I had so many tabs open some scrolled out of sight at the end. The linked post shows how to stop it, even if you have (as I do) Tab Mix Plus: with that, instead of scrolling out of sight, the tabs start a second row—or even a third if you’re out of control.

Arianna Huffington in the LA Times:

There is a subject being forgotten in the 2008 Democratic race for the White House.

While all the major candidates are vying for the black and Latino vote, they are completely ignoring one of the most pressing issues affecting those constituencies: the failed “war on drugs” — a war that has morphed into a war on people of color.

Consider this: According to a 2006 report by the American Civil Liberties Union, African Americans make up an estimated 15% of drug users, but they account for 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted and 74% of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Or consider this: The U.S. has 260,000 people in state prisons on nonviolent drug charges; 183,200 (more than 70%) of them are black or Latino.

Such facts have been bandied about for years. But our politicians have consistently failed to take action on what has become yet another third rail of American politics, a subject to be avoided at all costs by elected officials who fear being incinerated on contact for being soft on crime.

Perhaps you hoped this would change during a spirited Democratic presidential primary? Unfortunately, a quick search of the top Democratic hopefuls’ websites reveals that not one of them — not Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama, not John Edwards, not Joe Biden, not Chris Dodd, not Bill Richardson — even mentions the drug war, let alone offers any solutions.

The silence coming from Clinton and Obama is particularly deafening.

Obama has written eloquently about his own struggle with drugs but has not addressed the tragic effect the war on drugs is having on African American communities.

As for Clinton, she flew into Selma, Ala., to reinforce her image as the wife of the black community’s most beloved politician and has made much of her plan to attract female voters, but she has ignored the suffering of poor, black women right in her own backyard.

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