Nightly Tester Tools

I love Firefox. It's tabs, flexibility, and extensions have made it irreplaceable. When I heard that Firefox 2 was under development naturally I was very excited. The only concern I had -- verified by Alpha testers -- was the issue of plug-in compatibility. Armed with this knowledge and prepared for the unwelcome absence of a few extensions, I threw caution to the wind and downloaded Firefox 2 as soon as I heard it had been uploaded to the Mozilla servers. The built-in spell-checker alone was worth the installation. Yet, as time wore on, I began to miss my beloved tools. Oh, the functionality. The lack of one extension in particular was driving me crazy, Aardvark.

I was checking the Aardvark homepage religiously after the release of Firefox 2 to no avail. Withdrawal is painful and the time soon came when I tried re-writing the xpi file in the hopes of making it compatible. Needless to say, all of my efforts proved fruitless. And then came an article on Quickonlinetips.com entitled "50 Best Firefox Extensions for Power Surfing" in which an extension called Nightly Tester Tools was mentioned and touted as being able to coax older plug-ins to work with newer Firefox builds. Could it be? The feature set read as follows:

* Allows you to force the application to believe an extension is compatible with the current version and enable it.

* Allows copying the build identifier and a list of installed extensions to the clipboard.

* Adds a toolbar button to let you insert the build identifier into the current text box (Not supported in the Application Suite).

* Lets you customise the title bar to include the build identifier and other information.

* Provides talkback integration allowing you to quickly view recent incidents as well as a sidebar that shows all incidents still on your machine (you may be surprised at just how many there are).
* Adds a simple interface for parsing nspr log files for leaks.

* Lets you take a screenshot of any open window and save it as an image, copy it to the clipboard or submit it to Imageshack (not yet fully functional in cairo builds).

So far I have tried it successfully with Aardvark, the Rikaichan dictionary, Mozilla Archive, and Quicknote. A godsend.

Meet Aardvark

Aardvark -- for the uninitiated -- allows users to view web page sourcecode and alter the page itself. It's this last bit of functionalitythat attracted me to this extension, which I use to trim the fat offany given page before archiving or printing. Let's walk through anexample. Say you visit Tom's Hardware to catch up on the latest in DIYPC assembly. You might come across a page -- similar to the screenshot below -- and say, "Hey, this is print-worthy".



(a

print-

worthy

article)

Being a frugal geek, though, you don't want to waste money on paper and ink on Tom's graphics and banner bloat, do you? From the context menu youactivate Aardvark review the key stroke options and highlight therelevant page element in red.

(activated Aardvark)

(Aardvark's keystrokes)



















(highlighting the relevant element)


By depressing the "i" key you can isolate that element or exercise the "r" key to remove an unwanted frame.

(removing an ad from an isolated frame)















Once your finished hit "q" and your done. Your new page is ready forprinting or archiving. If you happen to make a mistake simply refresh the page and start over. It's that easy. As you can see, Aardvark is not just useful... it's addictive.