Once I was able to get the Splash options window working I made a visit to Mr Tech’s Firefox Splash Screens site and found a Splash Screen I liked. I also took a couple minutes (literally) to get and install the free FastStone Capture software thanks to an excellent recommendation from Ryan at CyberNet News. The quality is outstanding compared to the conventional Windows screen capture plus it allows me to save the files in PNG format. There are lot of other features with FastStone I have yet to try out. So with the FastStone Capture software I was able…

The standard About Firefox screen is pretty boring looking. It is even worse for those of us using the Bon Echo or Minefield nightlies since it uses a globe without the firefox as the image (Minefield’s globe has a stick of dynamite stuck in it). However, you can tweak your About Screen by changing the image, the color and font of the text as well as the size of the window. Here is my new & improved About Screen: Note: For this tweak I recommend using the ChromEdit Plus extension. Simply add and modify these lines to your userChrome.css file…

Some quick updates regarding A Splash Screen For Fx & TBird. First, the extension (here) also works with Flock, sort of. You will get an Incompatible Extension Warning. Just click ‘Yes’ and the extension will install. Further there is an options screen which is accessed from Tools, Add-ons (or Extensions), select Splash and then click Options. Note: If you are having trouble with the Options Window “rolling-up” this can be fixed via about:config by changing browser.preferences.animateFadeIn to False. With the options screen you can specify the image you want displayed, background text, size of splash screen, how long it is…

Another great find by Percy at Mozilla Links. SearchLoad Extension adds some much need options to the Firefox search bar (or search box). Once installed, to configure go to Tools and then select Search Options. There are two sections Searchbar and Tabs. The Searchbar section offer two options for the search bar. The first option well clear the searchbar after a specified amount of time (in seconds). This is a nice feature, but what I really like is the options to resent the search engine back to a default (in my case Google) after a a specified amount of time…

Thunderbird and Firefox more so (if you have lots of extensions), do take sometime to start up. This extension displays a “splash” (loading) screen for Firefox, Thunderbird and Sunbird (Mozilla’s calendar application) while the application starts. At the end of this article are samples of the Fx and Thunderbird splash screens. Oddly enough it does seem like the applications are launching a little faster with the splash screen. If anything at least you know the application is loading. I’ve had cases where Fx took so long to load from when I click the icon and I end up clicking again…