Giving Flock some love

Okay, it’s time for a little more in depth post on why I’m loving Flock. The easy part of that answer is that it uses the Mozilla rendering engine while adding some very useful (to me) functionality (Twitter sidebar, blog tools, media stream…) and provides compatibility with most Firefox plugins. The more complex answer is that with a little effort, Flock can be customized to do way more than advertised…

Profile Management

I have a couple of sites I use that are affected by certain plugins. It was of great use to me to be able to work with multiple profiles, which Flock doesn’t support easily, and most of the profile switching plugins I found turned out to be incompatible. But no fear, a little trick will get that functionality up and running.

1. Quit Flock
2. Open Terminal and type “/Applications/Flock.app/Contents/MacOS/flock-bin -p”
3. Use the Profile Manager that comes up to create a clean profile
4. Uncheck the “ask this at startup” checkbox

Now when you start Flock you’ll get the Profile Manager screen. It’s an extra step when starting Flock, but it works.

Keywords

Search keywords were a favorite feature of mine in Firefox. If you type about:config in your address bar, you’ll get to the configuration variables (like Firefox). Type “keyword” into the filter and find “keyword.enabled”. Set it to true. For more flexibility, also find “flock.favorites.showKeyword” and enable that as well. Flock also allows a right click in a search field to select “Add keyword for this field”.

Multi-bookmarks

I recently covered a way to make bookmarks that will open multiple pages with a single click. Check out the Multi Bookmarks post for details and some helpful AppleScript.

Addons

Here’s where the fun starts. I’ve tested these and trimmed some fat from the list. These are my current extensions in Flock.

• Download Statusbar: If you use Firefox, you may be familiar with this one. It’s a great alternative to popping up the download window.
• Fast Dial: Allows for a grid of favorite sites on one page. Once it’s set up, it’s a handy start page. Also, Speed Dial.
• Firebug: If you develop web pages, you know what this is.
• Growl Notifications: As a Mac user, this was indispensable to me and I was extremely relieved that it was compatible.
• Linkification: Turns all the text-only addresses on a page into links. You forget it’s there until you realize you haven’t had to highlight, copy and paste an address for a while.
• Nagios Checker: If you run Nagios on a server, this gives quick updates on server health.
• S3Fox: A slick organizer for my Amazon S3 account. It’s actually one of the better means of quick file management on S3 that I’ve found on the Mac. Of course, I’ve ended up using a combination of JungleDisk, Interarchy and S3Fox…
• Screengrab!: Currently there are very few ways to capture full web pages to image or clipboard on a Mac; this one works quite well.
• Session Manager: you really shouldn’t browse without this one, on Firefox or Flock.
• Tab to Window: fixes some missing functionality in tab handling by adding move/copy tab to new window.
• Tab URL Copier, copies the urls of all the window’s tabs, handy when researching.
• Taboo, mark pages to read later without flooding your bookmarks. Gives thumbnail previews of saved sites in a grid and runs from the toolbar.
• Web Developer: Again, if you develop web pages, you already know this one
• Zotero: This is my favorite new plugin. It’s a super-slick research tool with automatic citations, snapshot and link capture and a great filing system similar to Yojimbo, but with nested folders. Great tagging interface and search functions.
• Quick Translation (qtl), A quick definition and translation plugin that is easy to turn on and off from the status bar.

Well, that’s what I’m doing with Flock right now. There are a lot more tweaks in the about:config that you can make at your own risk, like upping the number of simultaneous downloads, etc. I’m curious what else is possible, so if you’re in the same boat, leave some comments!

Also be sure to check out the Design bookmarklet… not a plugin, but very cool.

blogging» development» extensions» firefox» Flock» plugins» web»