Preferences Toolbar 2Friday September 20th, 2002Bill Lynch writes: "You mentioned the redesigned XulPlanet today [Thursday], but didn't mention the excellent Preferences Toolbar they have — I just installed it and it works great and is very helpful for developers." The Preferences Toolbar allows you to quickly change many common user preferences without having to open a separate dialogue. It's recently been completely rewritten and a new version is now available. Preferences Toolbar 2 allows you to set even more prefs and adds user-agent string spoofing and several other useful features. This latest version is also completely customizable and can be easily toggled with a press of the F8 key. If that's not enough, there's also a button that takes you straight to MozillaZine. Go to the download page to install it now or get more information. What are the backup navigation buttons in the screenshot for? Its very customizable, and thats simply something you can add. Not automatic though (infact you even have to type the < > / as back, forward, reload is the automatic text for them. For some reason after I install it, There are no predifined elements in the customize list and I can't add anything to the list too. I have Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.2b) Gecko/20020919 Does prefbar support it? Same problem here, tried with 020917, 020918 and 020919 builds (win32). I got an empty toolbar and there's no buttons available in the preferences. If you get problems in Linux, you'll have to play with write access for the Mozilla folder, so every user that needs the Toolbar has write access. Then everyone has to install it for himself. (At least that's more or less what I had to do to get it working.) Bloody complicated! But I got it to work in the end, and it is a very useful too. Get the PrefBar2.1. You still have to install the prefbar from root, but the program now automatically rebuilds your config file when it doesn't exist so you won't have to copy it from one profile to anther anymore. As all these .XPI customizations proliferate, I can see problems with replacing old versions or just outright removing apps that don't work out. Mozilla absolutely must develop a common uninstall utility for all this stuff. Mucking around in sub-folders will work for the techies amongst us, but is really not the way to go in the long run. Nice new setup...I installed it on Moz 1.1 final and it worked perfectly once I restarted Mozilla. I definitely like the addition of the UA bar to the prefbar. Also, due to the large number of options available, its good that they add a configuration category under the Preferences window. Here is the list of options available to the new prefbar 2: Back, Forward, Reload, Stop, Home :), Fonts, Colors, Images, JavaScript, Java, Popups, Proxies, Proxy-Menulist, Cookies, Pipelining, Disk-Cache, Mem-Cache, XUL-Cache, Debug-XUL, Clear-Mem-Cache, Clear-Disk-Chahe, Clear-Cache, Clear-History, Clear-Location-Bar, User-Agent-List, Prefbar-Help, Whats-New, and a few links. I look forward to prefbar 3! Good work guys. I just finished (about five minutes ago) they PrefBar version 2.1. Changelog 2.1 * Enabled rebuilding of missing config files, allowing the prefbar to be used easier with multiple profiles. * Fixed the bug that was preventing the PrefBar from working on 1.2a. * Made the edit button and new button dialogs reziable, and sized in ems rather than pixels. * Fixed a bunch of typos in the documentation. * Fixed a dozen or so small bugs pointed out to me by users. That fixes all the PrefBar bugs that I currently know of. There are still some RFEs that didn't make it in, but I'm working on them too. I just backed out one of the bug fixes because I have heard that it causes a 100% cpu time crash in mailnews and chatzilla. PrefBar2.1.1 should correct that problem, and probably the location bar bug as well, since I think it was caused by the same thing. Aaron How do I remove this? Suddenly, I stopped being able to navigate to anywhere through the address bar, and now it's crashing all over the place, and I keep getting an error about not being able to use a Netscape Java plugin with IE. (?!?) Change your user agent back to the mozilla original one. When you mimic IE, things break. I've had very similar problems. I'm running 1.2a for linux (debian), the pref bar kills the location bar (aka, can't go to a new page). When I enter a URL and hit enter the current page reloads, not the page I typed in. I noticed some other issues... but those are inconsequential since I can't use it as-is. I got a crash when I tried to navigate once too. mozilla starts for me, but I have no idea how to remove this thing. I'm looking forward to a release that doesn't mozilla to show this issues for me, until then, how do I get rid of it? This happened to me as well. The preferences bar is a really cool idea, but it obviously still has a couple of bugs. I did NOT change the user agent, And the URL bar stopped working. This was on a Windows 2000 box, I haven't tried it on any of the Win 98 or Linux machines around here. The documentation describes how to remove it: delete the prefbar.xpi from your chrome directory, and prefbar.rdf from your profile. This seems to restore everything properly (doesn't seem to leave any other cruft around that's corrupting the install so you don't need to do a clean install fortunately). It acts like there are just a small number of issues with the toolbar; most of it seems to work great. Unfortunately, even though there don't seem to be a lot of problems, the ones that are there are fatal. Hopefully this will get fixed and would be a great thing to have. --Bruce I just downloaded the updated version of the preferences toolbar and most of the weirdness has gone away. I did have one sort-of lockup (it wasn't an infinite loop but the location bar history dropdown wouldn't drop down - the button would depress but never activate or pop back up). However after restarting the browser that's gone away; I'm not sure if it was an issue with the browser or with the toolbar but I've never seen it before. Definitely a great improvement -- kudos on a cool addition to Moz. --Bruce Remember, UA spoofing skews browser usage stats, and spoofing Moz as IE helps convince people they don't need to develop Moz-compatible pages. Don't spoof unless you must, and if the page works properly after spoofing but not before, contact the site to tell them their browser sniffer reaction needs to be updated. I'd love to use it, but it seemed to break the location bar pretty badly... Happens both with a 1.0.1+ build and 1.1 final on Linux. (Installed under a normal user's home directory, so there shouldn't be any problems with permissions etc.) The prefbar itself seemed to work fine, but I also need the location bar... Hi... I currently use Mozilla 1.1 (Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.0; en-US; rv:1.1) Gecko/20020826 MultiZilla/v1.1.22) and I installed your Toolbar. It looks great, but for some reason is not working for me. I tried clearing the cache with the "Clear Cache" button, but it didn't clean them up. Then I try to clean them with the normal option in Mozilla and it cleared it. Then I try Checking the "Popups" option (I'd have it unchecked) and loaded a page that has pop-ups, but it didn't showed them, in other words, it didn't worked neither. The same happened with the others buttons and checkboxes. If you need any other information, please let me know.... thanks This toolbar should *not* be installed with MultiZilla. MultiZilla already has these items in the Quick Prefs Menu. Version 2.1 of the Preferences Toolbar seems to work a lot better than 2.0. A couple of suggestions: 1) It would be good to be able to use more icons in the toolbar. For example, the "Hide Toolbar" button is pretty big if it has to have the entire text string on it; a simple "X" icon (as is used in the Tab bar for example) would be a good idea at least as an option. Similar comments could be made for things like the "Back", "Forward", "Reload", and "Stop" buttons (possibly others but those all have obvious icons). 2) If you implement #1 it would be nice if you could choose either text or icons in the Preferences panel. It looks like this is more-or-less possible now if you create custom buttons (the main issue looks like the use of special icons) but it would be nice to have this as a simple checkbox. 3) It might also be useful to be able to build a menu panel with a list of checkable items - ie, similar to View->Show/Hide or View->Text Zoom for menus with multiple true/false selections or "one of many" selections. These are all nits. Overall a great job! --Bruce How does one uninstall these applets, such as Prefs Toolbar? Maybe there should be a little UI for that? I've tried Multizilla, but it was too intrusive for my taste. After following their step for uninstallation, Moz never worked right, crashing and what not, until I reinstalled it. "I've tried Multizilla, but it was too intrusive for my taste" Intrusive? What was so intrusive about MultiZilla? Uninstalling MultiZilla is just a piece of cake btw: 1) delete the MultiZilla directory 2) delete mozilla/chrome.rdf. 3) restart mozilla note: restarting mozilla rebuilds chrome.rdf intrusive, what a joke... >>Intrusive? What was so intrusive about MultiZilla? First off it changes the on-load bitmap. Given that I had my own bitmap and the point of Multizilla is to provide better tabbing, it had no business changing the on-load bitmap. Secondly, the tabs have a look that's too active. You move the mouse over the tabs, and the screen goes jumping with the useless mouseovers. Thirdly (i guess this has nothing to do with being intrusive), I found that tabbing with MultiZilla is a tad bit slower that tabbing natively. And given that at work I have a fairly slow PC (p3/600) , I didn't want to slow me down further. >>Uninstalling MultiZilla is just a piece of cake btw: >>1) delete the MultiZilla directory 2) delete mozilla/chrome.rdf. >>3) restart mozilla note: restarting mozilla rebuilds chrome.rdf You want to tell users that??? Besides that is NOT what the FAQ on the multizilla site says. IMO, there should be a generic way to uninstall apps from mozilla. "First off it changes the on-load bitmap" Why didn't you ask us to change that behaviour in the newsgroup? This kind of information will always be considered. In fact, we can a) make a backup of the original file or b) ask the users permission for it. "Multizilla is to provide better tabbing" And so we do. "the tabs have a look that's too active" You can simply change your userChrome.css. You obviously didn't ask for it in the newsgroup. in "I found that tabbing with MultiZilla is a tad bit slower that tabbing natively" How can that be? MultiZilla makes use of the same native tabbed UI as mozilla does. We only extend the basic features, and that can't slow things doen. "You want to tell users that???" Yes, because mozilla and MultiZilla are testbeds only. It's not made for the general end-users. "Besides that is NOT what the FAQ on the multizilla site says." The FAQ also states that we're working on it... Ok, I didn't realize I was talking to the creator of MultiZ >>Why didn't you ask us to change that behaviour in the newsgroup? This kind of information will always be considered. In fact, we can a) make a backup of the original file or b) ask the users permission for it. << I didn't know there was a newsgroup devoted to MultiZ. But in general, as far as the bitmap is concerned, you shouldn't even be including it as part of the install. What's gonna happen when every applet on mozdev will replace the bitmap? >>"the tabs have a look that's too active" You can simply change your userChrome.css. You obviously didn't ask for it in the newsgroup. in << This definetely should be a setting. By the way, telling users to change the UserChrome.css file is futile. I don't know the structure of the file and neither do I know how it interacts with Mozilla. It is like making me recompile linux kernel to add a sound card to the system. IMO, you should provide a setting where the tabs are left as they look in Mozilla. The current setup where the active tab is higher than others, has a different font and so forth is superflous. It already obvious to me which tab is active without it having unique visual characteristics. >>"I found that tabbing with MultiZilla is a tad bit slower that tabbing natively" How can that be? MultiZilla makes use of the same native tabbed UI as mozilla does. We only extend the basic features, and that can't slow things doen. << I think the problem may actually be the active look. Because it eats up extra cycles, it simply makes the feel of tab switching a bit slower. >>mozilla and MultiZilla are testbeds only. It's not made for the general end-users.<< That maybe theory but doesn't pan out in the real world. On my site the logs for the last month show that Mozilla has more users and NS 6.x and 7.x combined. I hope this diatribe didn't sound harsh. MultiZ came to my attention after Moz changed the behavior of tabs after 1.1 alpha. Now it adds to the tabs instead of simply wiping them out. easy to use easy to understand and very instructive ;-) Great Bar. Working great on Mozilla 1.1, Win98 Has any one tried it with Netscape 7? I do not have NS on my system, but it would be nice to know... I've tried it on NS7 - works fine. --Bruce I've heard that popup blocking is not available in NS7. Now Netscape users can now avoid the popup stuff by using this bar. Popup blocking was, of course, always there - if you edited the your preferences manually. All that was removed was the UI checkbox in the Edit->Preferences menu. There's a page in the Netscape Unofficial FAQ at http://www.ufaq.org/ns7/adblocker.html which provides a .xpi file to restore the checkbox in the preferences dialog box. The toolbar is even easier though. --Bruce I have to say that the F8 for show/hide is one of the best parts of this toolbar. I don't like to keep toolbars because they minimize the browsing space too much for my taste (which is why I love the Little Mozilla theme). So I've been stuck with keeping it as a thin sliver and maximizing it as necessary then minimizing. Then I find that F8 does this which is far easier than trying to click that sliver (and shorter than View --> Show/Hide --> Perferences toolbar. My question is, isn't F8 used for anything else. It seems like all or most of the keyboard shortcuts are used for something. I have to say that the F8 for show/hide is one of the best parts of this toolbar. I don't like to keep toolbars because they minimize the browsing space too much for my taste (which is why I love the Little Mozilla theme). So I've been stuck with keeping it as a thin sliver and maximizing it as necessary then minimizing. Then I find that F8 does this which is far easier than trying to click that sliver (and shorter than View --> Show/Hide --> Perferences toolbar. My question is, isn't F8 used for anything else. It seems like all or most of the keyboard shortcuts are used for something. I understand that fromPref is used to turn the pref's value into the checkbox state and that toPref is used to turn the checkbox state into a pref value. However, since a checkbox is inherently only used to have two states, why not just have CheckedState and UnCheckedState entry fields (instead of the fromPref and toPref fields)?? In my opinion, the from/toPref method offers no better functionality than Un/CheckedState and adds another layer of difficulty to using the feature since you have to determine the formula for converting to/from the pref value. This formula would be unnecessary if Un/CheckedState fields were implemented. #41 "Preference Toolbar 2" compatible with Netscape 7?by DeepFreeze3 Wednesday October 9th, 2002 1:49 PM Does anybody know if this add-on is compatible with Netscape 7? Or is usage of it limited to Mozilla users? Being that their both based on the same Geko source code, I'm assuming that I wouldn't have a problem installing this into Netscape 7.0 and using it. |