Pearl Wisdom

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.

Yesterday was a big day for Mozilla: Firefox 3 is now available. With Firefox 3 comes new features and improved security. There are many reasons to upgrade now. However, for some, the drawback to switching is that not all add-ons have been updated to work with Firefox 3.

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.

One of the most common questions we receive about Page Saver is “When will Page Saver be able to capture Flash?” Unfortunately this is a Firefox issue. See bugs 313462 and 317447.

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:

A new Page Saver user recently emailed us. He mentioned that we don’t emphasize a feature that would have been useful at his previous company. He and other quality assurance testers needed to verify that web pages designed by their company looked correct at specific screen resolutions. However, the testing was not being done well because nobody had figured out how to set the browser window to the right size.

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.