James's Weblog

Cool Firefox extensions I’ve recently discovered:

• Password Composer (video demo). Generates passwords based on a master password and on the domain name of a website, so you get a unique password for each site without having to remember each one. This is a really slick, simple, and effective solution to my complaint about e-commerce sites requiring accounts. Unlike other password generators, even though it generates strong passwords, they aren’t random, so you always can derive your passwords as needed, even if you don’t have the extension installed. (My friend Lior points out that a weaker, low-tech alternative is simply to incorporate the website name directly into your password, e.g. swordfish_gmail. If you do that, though, you should make it less obvious; perhaps use only every third letter of the site name.)
• Document Map (screenshot). Creates a nifty, navigatable outline of the current page’s headings in the sidebar. Works really well for wiki-generated pages, WordPress weblogs, and programming reference documents (such as w3.org’s HTML and CSS specs).
• Web Developer Extension. If I still were attempting to do web development, I’d be all over this. View tag and style hierarchies, make live CSS edits, and more.
• Keyconfig. Modify Firefox’s keybindings. I can’t count the number of times that I’ve accidentally hit backspace outside of a textbox and lost something I was in the middle of writing.

Another cool trick I discovered was how to run multiple Firefox profiles simultaneously. This can be useful if you want to have separate profiles for web development and for normal browsing and want different sets of extensions installed for each. It’s also useful if you want to try out new extensions and themes without screwing up your default profile. To do this on Windows, make a firefox.cmd script:

@echo off
setlocal
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1


:: Adjust the path to firefox.exe as appropriate.
start "" "C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe" -p %*
endlocal

Create a new profile by running the script with no arguments. Thereafter, you can load that profile by running firefox.cmd profile-name.