Occasionally we receive email from someone who wants to remove or change the position of the Page Saver toolbar icon (for example, moving it to a different location on the navigation toolbar or moving it to another Firefox toolbar). It is not obvious to many people how to do this, so I thought I would write a short article that explains how to customize your Firefox toolbars.

From the View | Toolbars submenu, choose “Customize…” A toolbar customization dialog that shows all of the items you can add to one of the toolbars will be opened below the Firefox toolbars. With Firefox 3 on Mac I see a dialog that looks like this:

At this point, you can drag items out of the dialog to any location on a toolbar or you can drag items that are already on a toolbar to a different location or to another toolbar. To remove an item from a toolbar, simply drag it into the dialog. When you are finished, click the Done button.

That’s all there is to it! The only caveat is that some toolbars cannot be customized (but most can).

Some of the customizations I like to make are to add separators and spacers and to remove the Firefox search box (I define keywords so I can search directly from the location bar).

You can also read the official Mozilla documentation on toolbar customization.

We are pleased to announce a new product. Pearl Crescent Do Not Disturb is a Firefox add-on that suppresses prompts that interfere with unattended use of the browser. Many people use Firefox in a scripted or server environment where no one is available to dismiss annoying prompts that cause Firefox to pause and wait for input. For example, JavaScript code running on a web page can use window.alert() or window.prompt() to display modal windows. Do Not Disturb suppresses or automatically dismisses these kind of popup windows and prompts so that Firefox just keeps on going.

Do Not Disturb is very effective, and it is also simple to install and use. The various suppression behaviors may be controlled by changing settings on the Do Not Disturb options window.

Learn more by visiting the Do Not Disturb product page or dive in and read the manual.

Last October, we updated Page Saver to be compatible with the early releases of Firefox 3. However, we expected that we would need to make additional changes to Page Saver since new features were still being added to Firefox at that time.

Here at Pearl Crescent, we are proud to announce version 1.7.1 of Page Saver (both Basic and Pro editions). For this release we added a Greek translation (thank you Demetris Kikizas) and made some minor adjustments and fixes for Firefox 3. In addition, Page Saver Pro now allows file name patterns to be used with the -saveas command line option.

As always, if you have any questions, comments or compliments to share with us, feel free to leave a reply below or use our feedback form.

However, now that Firefox 3 will soon be available, we have good news to share with our Macintosh customers: Page Saver 1.7 (Basic and Pro editions) can capture Flash content in Firefox 3! When I heard this good news I immediately loaded a YouTube video in Firefox 3 release candidate 1 and captured it. Thrilled with my resulting image, I tried it a few more times! Woohoo! Hurray! Yippee!

Unfortunately I don’t know when this will be addressed in Firefox for other platforms (Windows and Linux). For now, if you control the web page you want to capture and you are on Windows, you can change the HTML to include transparency (wmode=”transparent”) on the <embed> tag. For example:

  <embed src="my.swf" wmode=”transparent”
         type=”application/x-shockwave-flash”>
  </embed>

If you want to try Firefox 3, download the release candidate here:

http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/all-rc.html

Here is a sample capture:

With Page Saver installed, from the command line, you can specify the width and height of the browser window and capture an image of the page for review in one step. For example:

Before Page Saver does its capture, it resizes the browser window to the specified size. (Note that this is the window size including all of the toolbars, not the size of the web page content.)

Please let us know if you use this feature or if you have suggestions for how to improve this feature to make your job easier.

• The URL of the page can be used in the captured image’s file name. Include %u in the file name pattern in the Page Saver Options window.
• The MD5 hash of the page URL can be included in file names. Use %5 in the file name pattern in the Options window. This is useful when integrating with services such as the del.icio.us JSON feeds.
• Polish and Brazilian Portuguese translations are now included. Thank you to Rodrigo Bergmann Laurindo and vatzec for providing these via Babelzilla.
• Page Saver Pro now includes the capability to add a new Header and/or Footer to a captured image. This feature may be used to record the URL of the captured page, the date and time the page was captured, and other information. The header and footer is configurable in the new Header and Footer tab in the Page Saver Options window.

• An option to replace your name with “me” when displaying
  comments.  You can adjust this option from the Pearl Comments
  options window.
• An option to show the URL of the page for each comment in the
  sidebar when the “Any Page” or “Recent” tab is active.  Set the hidden
  preference pearlcomments.showPageURLsInSidebar to “true” to enable this
  feature.  Each URL is displayed inside a <div> element that has
  the CSS class PearlCommentsPageURL.
• The capability to use a Pearl Comments stylesheet
  (pearlcomments.css) that is separate from userContent.css and
  userChrome.css.  For more information about customizing Pearl Comments for Firefox using CSS, see this blog posting.
• Firefox 3 compatibility.
• Russian translation.  Thank you Alexander Sokolov!

To upgrade the Pearl Comments browser extension, open Firefox’s Add-ons window and click “Find Updates” on the Extensions tab.

If you use the Pearl Comments Service, your server has already been upgraded for you.  If you have purchased a license for the Pearl Comments Server, please contact us to obtain the new server.

If you have any questions or suggestions for additional features, please contact us.

Page Saver Pro customers receive a frequently requested enhancement: from the command line, the -saveas flag now accepts an ftp://, http://, or https:// URL to allow you to upload a captured image to a server. On Windows and Mac OS, you can also use -saveas clipboard to place a copy of an image captured from the command line on the system clipboard. For more information, refer to the Page Saver documentation.

Other improvements we made to the Basic and Pro editions of Page Saver 1.6 include:

• Added fine-grained options to control exactly which Page Saver menu items appear in the browser context menu.
• Page Saver is now compatible with Firefox 3.0a8.
• When constructing file names, Page Saver now replaces the forward slash (/), back slash (\), and colon (:) characters with a hyphen character (instead of removing them).
• Added Turkish translation.
• Fixed a problem where Page Saver would sometimes show the PageSaver:CaptureComplete status message more than once for the same command-line capture.
• Fixed a problem on Linux that prevented pages taller than 32,766 pixels from being saved.

We also released an update to our developer product, The Page Saver Toolkit. Version 1.1 includes Firefox 3.0a8 compatibility and the capability to save to any server by specifying an URL in the capture API calls.

To upgrade your copy of Page Saver Basic, Pro, or Toolbox, use the Firefox Tools menu to open the Add-ons window and then click “Find Updates” on the Extensions panel.

Do you have a question for us? Please make a comment here, or contact us through our feedback form.

I am pleased to announce that one of the major enhancements we made in Page Saver 1.6 (available now) is the capability to easily capture the entire contents of a frame. To do so, choose the frame from the Save Image of Entire Frame menu within the Page Saver toolbar menu (as shown in the screenshot below), or use the Save Image of This Entire Frame… browser context menu item.

To upgrade your copy of Page Saver Basic or Pro, use the Firefox Tools menu to open the Add-ons window and then click “Find Updates” on the Extensions panel.

This week in particular we received many messages which made us smile. Here are some samples:

“Great product guys! love it. really useful.”

“I don’t know what to say other than IT IS SUPER! This is what I needed! You are great!”

“Awesome extension guys, the best of the screen-grabbing plug ins that I’ve seen (and I’ve just turned the internet upside down looking for a good one).”

And it is always nice to see blog postings like this one:

“Pearl Crescent Page Saver makes taking screenshots of websites a breeze….”

Of course we know we still have more work to do. So please contact us and let us know what we can do for you.