Mozilla and Netscape for Windows have a nice feature that keeps Mozilla running in the background processes so you don't have to wait for the browser to start up every time you close a window.

In Mac OS X, you can do something similar. Just create a Login item linked to Mozilla.app and select the "Hide" box. This will make Mozilla start up at login and you won't have to see the splash screen or a window until you're ready to click the Mozilla application icon in the Dock.

This won't help if you purposely quit Mozilla, of course, but you shouldn't have to, this is Mac OS X :).

[Editor's note: This hint can, of course, be extended to pretty much any application that you use regularly. If you want an app to be available as soon as you start up, but not necessarily open a window and dominate the screen, set it to hide in the Login Items panel.]

Like a lot of other people, Mozilla's tabbed browsing feature is what made me switch. Now that Mircrosoft finally came out with a driver for the Intellimouse series, I was able to program it so that I can control the tabs with the mouse. This is how I set it up (I left the left and right button alone):

• Wheel Button: Command + Click
  
• Left Side Button: Control-page up
  
• Right Side Button: Control-page down

This way, when I press the wheel button, it opens up the link in a new tab. That's a lot easier than right clicking and waiting for the contextual menu to pop up. The control-page up/down is something I picked up from an earlier hint on this site -- it will switch to the previous or next tab.

Other alternatives could include setting one of the side buttons to close a tab (command-w). I don't know if Mozilla offers a command to cycle windows (although it is built into OS X under Full Keyboard Access in system prefs -- it just isn't activated yet). Of course, if I could figure out a way to get Mozilla to always open new tabs instead of windows (for example from SlashDock) then I wouldn't have to cycle windows anymore...

If anyone else has figured out a good way to program the mouse for Mozilla or other Apps, let me know.

If Mozilla is open and you activate it through the dock, it doesn't open a new window. Metaclarity's freeware Mozilla AppleScripts remedy this problem.

Both scripts are identical (and quite easy to understand; take a look at them with ScriptEditor if you're new to AppleScript and want to see how they work), but the first is saved as an application so it can be put in the dock. Clicking the dock icon activates Mozilla and opens a new window. The second is saved as a Script for the AppleScript menu. Drop it in the ~/Library/Scripts folder on you drive and you can activate Mozilla and open a new window from wirthin any application.

[Editor's note: The script worked as expected when I tested it. In browsing MetaClarity's site, they also have free scripts for various tasks in BBEdit, the Finder, and iTunes.]

There's an easy but convoluted way to add keyword shortcuts to Mozilla's URL address bar. A convenient one to add enables searches with a search engine of your choice (Google, for example). Note that you can also set the search preference through the Prefs fields, but this method saves a keystroke or two.

First, you need to open Mozilla's preferences. Go to the Navigator -> Smart Browsing section and check the "Enable Internet Keywords" checkbox and hit OK.

Create a new bookmark (any page; it doesn't matter which one), and open the Bookmark Manager (command-B). Right- or control-click on the new bookmark and choose the "Properties" option in the popup contextual menu.

In the new window, with the "Info" tab in front, rename the bookmark as Google Search or something, and for the location, delete what's there and paste:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s&btnG=Google+Search

For the Keyword, put something that you want to use to preceed your searches; I use "?". Description doesn't matter. Now hit OK, and you should be groovin'. Go ahead and search Google using the new shortcut -- type "? search_term" and hit enter, and you should hop right to the results page for "search_term".

The more generic application of this example is the use of the keyword field. Want to quickly access macosxhints, for example? Just type an "x" in the "Keyword" field of the macosxhints bookmark property panel. Now you can get here by simply typing "x" in the address field. This trick is especially useful for sites that you'd like to get to quickly but not necessarily keep in the location bar at the top of the screen.

I hope you learned something today about Mozilla's Internet Keywords; now you can apply this in bettering your browsing experience in countless ways.

[Editor's note: The use of keywords was completely new to me ... but now that I've tried it, I've added a bunch in the last 24 hours! My personal toolbar was quite full, so now I've added one- or two-key access to a number of other sites.]

Over on the Macworld OS X Forums, 'd00d' published a pointer to a Mach-O build of Mozilla with a patch to enable ATSUI (Apple Type Services for Unicode Imaging). What does that mean in plain English, more or less? Mach-O can be faster than normal CFM coding, and ATSUI allows Carbon apps to have nicely anti-aliased text. [edited - see comments for a link about a Mach-O vs CFM speed discussion]

I downloaded the build and tried it out. It's notably faster and pages now render just as nicely as they do in OmniWeb. Not everything works (plug-ins and some CSS stuff gave me some trouble), but it is a peek at what Mozilla could be. Unfortunately, there's no indication that Mozilla 1.0 will follow this direction; it will still be a CFM-based non-ATSUI application.

If you'd like to check it out for yourself, you can download the Mach-O Mozilla build from the mac.com page of 'stevekstevek.' Make sure you download all three files and then read the README.rtf file for instructions on how to make it work.

It's a shame this won't make it into the 1.0 production tree for Mozilla; I guess that leaves Chimera as possibly the best bet for an anti-aliased, speedy, Mozilla-based browser at the moment. [edited]

With the recent proliferation of pop-ups (unders, overs, arounds, throughs, etc.) on Mac-related websites, I thought it might be worth a few minutes to let people know how to disable these most annoying of intrusions. I've got nothing against ads in general (although I prefer not to use them here), but the pop-ups and -unders are among the most annoying and intrusive objects on the web.

Read the rest of the article for a few pointers on various means of disabling them...

OmniWeb seems to lack a "resume download" feature. Instead of re-downloading the first part again, you can use wget with the -c (continue) option to resume the download.

1. In OmniWeb's Downloads window, click on the file to resume downloading. Then copy its URL.
   
   
2. Open a new window in Terminal.
   
   
3. cd to the directory that contains the partial file. It's probably Desktop.
   
   
4. Type wget -c and paste the URL after it. The download should resume.

[Editor's note: I haven't used OmniWeb's downloading facilities often enough to verify this behavior, but it does make sense that 'wget' would be able to continue, as long as it can find the first portion of the file.]

After months of using Mozilla and getting hooked on 'tabbing' web pages (as explained in this hint), my biggest frustration was the apparent lack of a keyboard shortcut to switch between tabs.

After numerous web searches and browsing the Bugzilla bug database on mozilla.org, I'd just about given up hope of finding a shortcut. Then tonight, a friend casually mentioned that you can switch tabs using control page-up (previous tab) and control page-down (next tab).

Wonderful!

Based on the Mozilla browser, Chimera has a Cocoa front-end with a Unix backend. It is still in it's infancy however, with even some of the most basic functionality missing, such as using text boxes.

Keep your eyes on this one, it really could be the best web browser for OS X ever.

You can see screenshots and get the current build here.

[Editor's Note: Even though this application is not really usable yet, I thought it worth mentioning. I for one will be intently watching the progress of this wonderful browser.]

This tip is primarily for those Mozilla users who switch between different profiles. I use my PowerBook at home and work, but work has a proxy server and home doesn't. So when I first started using Mozilla as my primary browser, I needed to access my preferences each time I launched to configure the proxy settings (it's unfortunate Mozilla doesn't use the System proxy settings, I could just change Location and be done). I was using this method because I didn't want to have 2 separate bookmarks, cookies and mime types files, etc.

Well, I kept forgetting to access preferences and would end up getting a failure accessing a web page so I decided to figure out if it was possible to share these settings between different profile users and found that it was. Read the rest of this article to find out how...