Making the Most of Bookmarks in Firefox 3

I had considered writing a post on maximizing the new bookmark features in Firefox 3, but someone else already did a great job!

Especially helpful are the items on using tagging within your bookmarks, and "smart" bookmarks.

Firefox 3 and Your Online Research

If you're considering making the move to Firefox 3 (currently still in beta, but nearing full release), be aware that there are still lingering issues with Ancestry and the Enhanced Image Viewer. Currently, users are having difficulty with the plug-in, or, as in my case, are unable to install the plugin at all and are forced to use the Standard Viewer (which, in case you don't remember, really leaves alot to be desired).

Zotero is also not currently functioning in the 3.0b5 version, (though it did function in earlier versions). Zotero says it will be fully compatible with Firefox 3 when it is finally released.

Google Notebook remains buggy and unstable in 3.0b5, (and virtually unusable) though it looks to be an issue for Google to resolve.

I'll update as more issues come to light.

Bookmarking Tab Groups for Specific Projects

If you're like me, you spend alot of research time online bouncing around from site to site, meandering a little along the way, then returning time and time again to favorite (or important) websites.

Today I want to share with you a nifty feature available in most browsers, which you may or may not have noticed: bookmarking (or, in Internet Explorer, favoriting) groups of tabs. This is a great way to instantly launch a set of bookmarked websites that you may use whenever you are doing some online research. Here's how it works:

1. Open all the tabs you want to bookmark in a new browser window. In this instance, I'll be using Firefox. To start off, I open a group of the sites I use most often when doing online genealogy research, each with its own tab:



2. Bookmark (or Favorite) the tabs. In Firefox, the command to do this is "Bookmark All Tabs" found under the Bookmarks menu. In Internet Explorer, "Add Tab Group to Favorites" under the Favorites menu. In Safari, "Add Bookmark for These Tabs" under the Bookmarks menu.



3. Name the Tabs group. In this case, I'll call mine GenealogyResearch:



4. Test your new bookmarked tabs. Open a new browser window and test out your new tabs:



Voila! A quick and easy way to jumpstart your research by opening your most-used websites.

Happy researching!

Using Addons in Firefox to Expedite Online Searching

The WorldCAT blog featured an interesting video on making use of Firefox extensions to enhance online searching functions.

A particularly interesting nugget, for me, was the mention of the "Add to Search Bar" add-on available from--where else?--the Firefox Add-ons page.

The Add to Search Bar add-on allows you to add the search function of any page into the search bar within the Firefox browser, all with just a right-click:



I have played with this little add-on for the past week with mixed success. It was impossible to get my local library's search function to work properly, but I was able to add and use the search function from another local library just fine. I was also unable to get the search to function properly for the FHL catalog.

I played around with adding a search of ancestry.com using a keyword search, and had some limited success... Same with using the interment.net search... results were just a little too broad, and having to go back and delimit searches or refine them sort of lessens the usefulness of this add-on for such large sites with various datasets.

The add-on does work brilliantly for straightforward searches of limited datasets. Searching for a title in your local library without having to navigate to the library's catalog page is surely a top-notch application here. I'm sure there would be other applications for this add-on as well... is anyone else using this add-on in a particular way?