By Nigel McFarlane
First Edition
March 2005
Pages: 398
Series: Hacks
ISBN 10: 0-596-00928-3 |
ISBN 13: 9780596009281
(Average of 3 Customer Reviews)
Firefox Hacks is ideal for power users who want to maximize the effectiveness of Firefox, the next-generation web browser that is quickly gaining in popularity. This highly-focused book offers all the valuable tips and tools you need to enjoy a superior and safer browsing experience. Learn how to customize its deployment, appearance, features, and functionality.
Full Description
Cover | Table of Contents | Colophon
Featured customer reviews
Useful book for all levels of users, August 14 2005
Firefox has been around for several years and most of the hacks in the book are well documented on the web, but O'Reilly and Nigel McFarlane have brought you a book that brings the structure of the program and the usefulness of the hacks into one place.
The power of the “hacks” series is that you can benefit from this book even if you don't have time to read through the whole thing. If you picked up the book to help you with re-branding Firefox, then you can go just to that section. Maybe you are needing Firefox to be a test bed for standards compatibility of a particular web project you are working on, then just read the sections of the book which apply. On the other hand, if you don't know what Firefox is capable of then you need simply to browse through the whole book to see what a powerful program Firefox is.
The book covers a very wide variety of hacks. Many have to do with extensions that can be added onto Firefox. An extension can be considered as a pre-built hack with a nice installer. It is fitting then that many of these packaged hacks are covered in the book.
Outside of just general use of the book for learning what Firefox is capable of, the book has great appeal for web developers. With the extensions available to developers to help in their work, there are quite a few development tools built into Firefox. Not the least of which is its standards compatibility. To know if something is well written one simply needs to view it in Firefox to see how a standards compliant browser renders the underlying code.
The author used several phrases and vocabulary that would not be considered standard English. This is something that a company like O'Reilly, catering to their particular audience, might allow to become lax. Well written and edited books are hard to come by and often go unnoticed. It would have been better had the publisher spent a little more time on the editing of this work. It would be a shame that someone might be turned away from this book and its great content because of poor editing.
With hacks ranging in difficulty from easy to advanced, this 377 page guide will get just about anyone hacking Firefox.
I wish to offer condolences to the family of the author as he has since passed away.
Must have for branding and security, May 04 2005
If you're like me, you've downloaded Firefox to use as your browser then kept promising yourself you were really going to dig into it to find all its secrets. But you never really have time, do you? Firefox Hacks gives you 100 ways to make the most of Firefox. I especially liked the security tips. Everyone should take a few minutes and go through this book's steps on enhancing security. I've also always wanted to know more about chrome and this book gives me 2 chapters on it. If you are going to deploy Firefox with your own branding, perhaps as an internal browser or as a product's help system, then this book is a must. Even if you are only a casual browser user, this book has useful hacks for you.
Excellent!, January 26 2005
This book hasn't even been released yet, and I already love it!
Wait, maybe that's because I contributed to it.
Looking forward to its release...
Media reviews
"Browsing the Internet has changed dramatically from its early days of simple HTML. The browser has become an increasingly important and complex tool. Firefox Hacks is an excellent resource to help understand how to take full advantage of this increasingly popular browser."
-- Bill Crooke, Peninsula Linux Users Group (PenLUG)
"Nigel McFarlane's Firefox Hacks provides keys to understanding the open source web browser Friefox, from customizing its actions and appearance to using skins, themes, integration techniques, and toolbars to increasing security and using preferences. An excellent guide to all of Firefox's capabilities, both obvious and those lesser known."
-- Diane Donovan, The Bookwatch
"It’s an interesting book and if you use Firefox, it would be fun going through these hacks to see if they can help your installation. The best way to do it is to buy the book and try the hacks and modifications for yourself. It is a technical book and not one for beginners."
-- Dave Roman, Greater Cleveland PC Users Group
"While reading this book I was blown away by the sheer number of tweaks and customizations that Firefox supports... if you’re a power user, this is the best book out there on all things Firefox. It’s an excellent resource to make a very good browser even better."
--Mike George, Amazon.com review, July 2005
"Overall this book contains a real mix of content, with material designed to help everyone, from the Firefox newbie to the would-be hacker to the web developer wanting to get the most out of the browser everyone's talking about. For developers in particular there is a lot of useful content packed in these pages. "
--Tech Book Report, July 2005
"By the time I had read them all and tested several of the hacks, this book had become one of my favorite resources on Firefox (my personal browser of choice). McFarlane includes a great deal of valuable information on security, efficiency, web surfing, RSS feeds, and even web development and hacking the interface. Firefox Hacks is highly recommended to anyone wishing to use the browser to its fullest extent."
--Harold McFarland, Readers Preference Reviews, June 2005
