Cochinoman tech, sushi, poker
With the launch of Firefox 3, and it’s supposed 15,000 or so bug fixes and new features, I joined everyone helping Mozilla obtain their download world record.
Some of the big new features are: one-click bookmarking, iPhone-line zooming, smart location bar, password manager, spell checker (YES!), keystroke find, better performance, and last but not least, mailto links to webmail.
What this means is, when you click on a link on a website that uses “mailto:”, you can have Firefox go to Yahoo webmail instead of Microsoft Outlook (the default). This can happen when you click on things like “Contact Us” or “email me” on a website.
The new Firefox comes with a setting for Yahoo webmail, but others are also available with more work. For Yahoo webmail, at the top, click on “Tools”, then “Options.” You’ll get a small window with a bunch of options. Click on “Applications” in the top area (see image below).
Next, scroll down to “mailto” in the list. Next to it, you’ll see “Use Microsoft Outlook (default).” Click on this to get the pull down menu and select “Use Yahoo Mail”, or “Always Ask” if you want to decide on the fly. And that’s it!
If you want to use Google mail, it’s a little bit trickier. For the entire info, see Lifehack or just read on. Type “ctrl-t” to open a new blank tab. Type “gmail.com” in the URL area to go to Gmail and login. Now, you have to type the following javascript code in the URL address bar, and press ENTER (one line, no spaces):
javascript:window.navigator.registerProtocolHandler("mailto",
"https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s","GMail")
This will bring a line right below the URL area asking the following: “Add Gmail as an application for mailto links?” Press the “Add application” button on the right. You’re done!
Now you can choose between Outlook, Yahoo or Gmail. Nice.
While we’re on the subject of Firefox 3, I’ve noticed a big speed improvement with AJAX websites like Google Docs, especially Google Spreadsheet. It’s noticably faster than IE7.
If that’s not enough goodies, the photo upload feature works properly with WordPress 2.5.1 as well, unlike IE7.
Okay, that convinced you, right?
