Recently I was writing a mail to a friend of mine, who wanted to know how I customized Firefox to give me the same features as MYIE2 (which I used to love). So I thougth I'd share the content with you as well.
Actually there is nothing much to it, all you got to know is the proper extension to install.
My current list to duplicate most of MYIE2 (now known as Maxthon) functionality is
Other configurations that were needed
· to load images like in IE set browser.display.show_image_placeholders to false in about:config
The other big thing for me was to be able to do searches from the address bar. In MyIE2 (Maxthon) this was extremely customizable. You could setup wild cards to submit search strings typed in an address bar to a search engine. In FireFox the means of achieve this is through bookmarks. Each search engine you require to submit a string typed in the address bar needs to be saved as a bookmark with a keyword defined like so - http://devedge.netscape.com/viewsource/2002/bookmarks/
In addition to this, to send every other string to the google search page and not the ‘I am feeling lucky’ page the following change is needed
in about:config change browser.search.defaulturl to http://www.google.com/search?q=
You could also use the key config extension to bind CTRL+N to New Tab instead of new New Window.
And you could speed up firefox by making these changes.
What is still missing for me is
- An extension that would give you a button to close all tabs
- Have Blank Last Tab work in 1.0
- An Extension or hack that will let me do google search for strings with colons and dots in them. For instance at the moment I cant say google vs.net or google xsl:copy it gives me an error
- Have a better popup blocker. The FireFox popup blocker is good, but not as good as the one in MyIE2 (Maxthon)
- Have adblock preloaded with all the ads to block
- Have an extension that would provide translation services like WordLingo, BabelFish, and configurable options
- Still looking for an extension that will let me save open windows as a group and load/manage these groups
Well that does look like quite a few gaps that need filling. If any of you can provide insights post feedback on this blog.
Other than that the fact is you can achieve most of the MYIE2 functionality from Firefox and its extensions. So if you ask me what the chaps at Mysoft should do, right now I’d say pre-packaging and extension building. Why I say this is, because It took me quite some time and quite a bit of hunting around to setup all these extensions. The chaps at Mysoft could release pre-loaded versions of FireFox (call it MyFox or Foxthon or whaterver), with a few additional extensions to fill the gaps, and from what I've seen Maxthon is loosing ground to FireFox anyways.
*The extensions below used to be on the above list but lately I have found new extentions to replace them