Very cool, if true

I use FileZilla for an FTP client. And I tend to switch to the other app to control it. I mostly look for extensions that make browsing better, rather than things that allow Firefox to do entirely non-browsery things.

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About transferring firefox: there's a neat trick.

If you back up
c:\documents and settings\[username]\application data\Mozilla\
and
c:\documents and settings\[username]\local settings\application data\Mozilla\
from your old computer, there is a neat trick.

Install firefox on the new machine.
Start firefox once. Tell it not to import anything. It will create a profile. Close firefox.

Overwrite the new folders it just created on your new computer with the folders you copied from your old computer. Yes, the whole folders. Start firefox.

Presto! Your entire firefox data - add-ons, cookies, passwords, history, even your cache.

For bonus points: It works on XP -> vista or vista -> vista, too, although the paths are different. It's c:\user\[username]\application data\local\mozilla and
c:\user\[username]\application data\remoteapps\mozilla
or something very similar.

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Cheers - I should have thought to do that before wiping the old machine.

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It's a useful trick for next time.

Thunderbird does the exact same thing, for the record.

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Thunderbird I'm not so worried about, as I use IMAP for all my email, and synch my contacts with gmail.

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Also: Add Adblock Plus and Noscript to Firefox. Those two are important!

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Adblock Plus - good call!

NoScript I used for about 6 months and then got rid of - I use far too many sites that include scripting. If it had shared whitelists that were regularly updated I'd be tempted, but as it is the overhead was too much.

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Looking at what I actually use on my laptop:

VLC, as it handles DVDs and movies nicely, with sensible keyboard shortcuts (Ctrl+P my arse).

Media Player Classic, as it's not RealPlayer.

But while there's a few other things I use, like some PDF tools, document management, Inkscape, they're all a bit specialised.

Uh, OpenOffice? Nero?

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I was thinking of FF extensions - but VLC and Media Player Classic are both essentials! Off I go to install them now.

Ooh, and Virtual CloneDrive.

What do you use for editing PDFs?

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Foxit Reader is like Adobe reader, but fast, free, and not stupid.

PDFWriter is like a printer, but what comes out are PDFs.

Foxit Editor edits PDFs, but costs money and I don't actually use it since I almost never want to edit a PDF.

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I found Adobe 9 was as good as Foxit.

I only had one need for a PDF editor so far - for cutting down the list of Power Cards I was printing off. But it's always handy to have recommendations :->

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What he said. :)

Foxit Reader is far, far quicker, and doesn't bloat the way Adobe tend to. Most people don't use comments, bookmarking, etc, so Foxit's about all they need.

(in much the same way, it'd be neat if there was a beginner's Excel. I'm now an advanced Excel user, and it would be marvellous to have unlockable features for newbies)

The other Firefox extensions I use are Image Grabber and the Filterset.G Adblock list.

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The new Foxit handles comments and bookmarking, actually.

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Cool, I didn't know that.

I more meant that most people don't *use* that functionality, so the overabundance of toolbars, buttons and sidebars is unnecessary.

In much the same way that Styles in Word is useful, but hardly anyone uses it. So they just get confused when they assign fonts willy nilly that styling interferes with.

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Yeah, I'm one of those people in Word.

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That's what Wordpad is for!

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Yeah. But it's not back-compatible with .docs.

In much the same way you shouldnt be allowed fly unless you can manage the seatbelt yourself, so you should get unlockable Word features spread out over a year or two. ;)

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Adblock Plus has its own filter downloader - which seems to catch everything.

And, as I commented further down to the weasel king, I can't find any appreciable difference in speed between Adobe 9 and Foxit - they both open 20MB PDFs in just than two seconds and scroll pretty instantly.

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On whose machine? :)

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Julie's. Which is half-decent, but still about four years old.

Care to try a couple of tests on yours and let me know how big a difference there is?

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Hmm, ok.

Foxit's quicker, but not by as big a margin as I'd have imagined. Where Foxit might take 2 seconds to open a file, Adobe takes a fraction more.

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Adobe reader 9 has the same feature set, slightly better handling for a few edge cases like embedded movies and some form-filling, and is much larger and MUCH slower.

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Not in any tests I can do. I just downloaded a couple of 20MB PDFs and then opened them with the latest versions of both Foxit Reader (3) and Adobe Reader (9), and they both opened within 2 seconds, scroll about equally fast.

Got any examples which would show up the differences? Or would it only happen on machines with less than a Gig of memory?

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Do you have the "adobe reader sits in memory all day long" preloader running?

Also: Until a moment ago, I was using Foxit 2.3. Updating now, to see if it slows down.

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Nope, there's no process running that belongs to Adobe - are you sure that v9 does that?

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Nope, although I've never seen a modern Adobe Reader that doesn't.

Who knows, maybe they've fixed the problems - competition tends to be good, for apps like that.

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