I had a real revelation on how you can shape your kids in tech potentially for life the other day, when my oldest son couldn’t get Firefox to work. I told him to try Internet Explorer, only to get asked, “What’s that?”

What’s Internet Explorer? What’s Internet Explorer! The words of my eight year old should send shudders down Microsoft’s spine. The default browser on Windows PCs, and my kid has no idea what it is? A sign of the future?

Perhaps. OK, we’re not a typical family. Firefox, last I saw stats, still had only a 10 percent share. But still, it’s funny how it can make gains.

In our house, I put Firefox on the family computer about two years ago and kept telling my wife to use it, especially when Internet Explorer had some problem as it would tend to do. Eventually, she switched over to using it permanently. That meant the kids started using it as well.

Still, I never realized how ingrained it had become until I was asked that question about two weeks ago. Both my sons are avid Club Penguin users now. They wanted to get going at the same time, so I fired up one of the many other computers littered around the house. Firefox wasn’t installed properly on one of them, so I’d gotten Club Penguin going using Internet Explorer until I could reinstall Firefox.

They never realized which browser I used. That’s why the second time, my oldest son came to me when Firefox failed to work. He found the icon, knew that Firefox = The Web, and that was it. He had no idea there was anything like Internet Explorer that you could use to also get on the web.

Interestingly, he does use a computer at school to go online. I’ll have to find out what browser they’re using there, since he clearly didn’t know IE.

Well, that’s just our family, right? Not so fast. I have a friend nearby who I got using Firefox. It’s one of those things that happens to anyone. You’re out for a nice dinner, just talking and enjoying not doing any work, when suddenly you’re asked why his band equipment rental site isn’t ranking in Google. Ulterior motive, eh, Nick? So next thing you know, you’re on the computer diagnosing the sandbox issue. And I ain’t gonna do that with IE. I installed Firefox, then went away. A few months later, I came back to find he was still using it.

So there you are, Firefox means reaching the web. The kids, of course, also think you find things on the web by going to Google.

I upgraded to Firefox 1.5 and soon after found all my work to make the browser save HTML pages using their title tags as the filename info had been lost. Sigh. And nope, there was no new built-in option that I could see in Firefox to make this happen. I sat down ready to do the things I covered before but decided to see if maybe, maybe someone had created an extension to do this. Hurray! Yes, a much easier solution to this problem is now at hand.

To recap, Getting Firefox To Save With Page Title As Filename from me previously covers how Firefox, unlike Internet Explorer, stupidly fails to use the HTML title tag when saving pages and why that’s useful. It also covers a hack I used on previous versions of Firefox to force it to use the title tag as the file name. Firefox and Page Title Saving Revisited from me was a follow-up post that made the process a little easier.

File Title is a Firefox extension that came out in for Firefox 1.5 or higher that does this. Just install this add-in and you’re off and running with no need to do any of the hassle I covered before. Thank you, Pavel Cvreck, for making it!

One I need to remember to download –
ScreenGrab, a Firefox plug-in
that Philip
pointed out, useful for making screenshots of web pages without having to
scroll.

Part of getting the new computer going was getting Firefox to save page
titles again. The full detailed method I explained before is
here. But since I didn’t have
WinZip installed yet on the machine, I tried this instead:

• Copied browser.jar to old browser.jar to have backup
   
• Renamed browser.jar to browser.zip
   
• Extracted the file to C:\content
   
• Changed the contentAreaUtils.js part as explained
  here
   
• Explored browser.zip and dragged-and-dropped the changed file to the right place
   
• Changed browser.zip back to browser.jar

Have fun with the steps above. Or, at your own risk, you can use my revised
browser.jar file. It works
with Firefox 1.0.6 and might do with other versions. I’ve compressed the file to
speed up downloading.

Postscript: A much easier solution now exists. See Extension For Getting Firefox To Save Pages Using Page Titles.

An annoyance was that Firefox can’t make MHT files. But spotted here and
here, the
MAF extension provides a similar feature that supports all-in-one rollup that Firefox
and IE can both read.

One of the biggest reasons I left Netscape Navigator for Internet Explorer years ago was because IE allowed me to save pages using their HTML title tags as the page’s file
name. I like having this long, descriptive title for the files I save. In contrast, Firefox — like Netscape before it — usually uses the page’s own file name, rather than
its title tag, as the file name when you save. That means you lose lots of descriptive info.

Sure, desktop search tools like Google Desktop make saving pages by page title less important — but I still like doing it. Firefox lacking this has been one of my biggest
problems, nor am I alone. Check out the comments here, here
or here, for
example.

I tried finding a solution through various searches via Google and Yahoo but came up with no luck, only some of the gripes noted above. But Ask Jeeves came through for me
with my search there, getting me to this
page with part of the answer that in turn led to this great
tutorial with a step-by-step part.

Two parts? That’s because the forum discussion I came across had instructions on how to modify a fix for Mozilla to work for Firefox. You can read both pages I’ve mentioned
to learn more. However, the steps I followed are also below. I’m sure there was a better way to do this, but hey, it worked for me.

Here’s what I did. WARNING! It may not work for you. It perhaps might screw up your Firefox installation.

1. Closed FireFox.
    
2. Went to C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox\chrome (if you use Windows, this is the typical location. If not, find where Firefox was installed and locate the chrome
   subdirectory).
    
3. Found browser.jar (the right file according to
   this).
    
4. Made copy of browser.jar called old browser.jar as an emergency backup.
    
5. Opened browser.jar and opened with WinZip by dragging-and-dropping the file on it.
   Don’t have Winzip? You can rename browser.jar to browser.zip, then right click
   and choose Extract.
    
6. Extracted browser.jar to my C Drive, so that all the files within it unfolded within a C:\content folder.
    
7. Closed WinZip, copied browser.jar to the C:\content folder.
    
8. Found within the C:\content\browser
   folder the contentAreaUtils.js file.
    
9. Moved lines of code within contentAreaUtils.js as explained
   here.
    
10. Opened the copy of browser.jar within the C:\content folder with WinZip
     
11. Drag-and-dropped contentAreaUtils.js into the copy of browser.jar opened with WinZip, using the Save full path info option. This ensured that the existing version was
    replaced. If you do it wrong, you’ll end up with two versions of the file.
     
12. Closed WinZip, then replaced old browser.jar with updated version of browser.jar

Obviously, a plug-in would be much nicer. If you know of one, let me know. Even better, if you build one, let me know, so I can sing your praises!

Postscript: A much easier solution now exists. See Extension For Getting Firefox To Save Pages Using Page Titles.

So importing my bookmarks from Internet Explorer into Firefox was easy — but then my history of saved password information for some of the key places I go to wasn’t part
of this. Ugh. But no fear, I quickly found an article explaining that File|Import lets me bring these
over — along with cookies, past history and other things. In contrast, using the Import feature from the Manage Bookmarks window only brings in bookmarks, not other
information.

Downside? All my favorites are a subfolder of my regular one, and the sorting that Internet Explorer does of showing me the most used ones is lost. So some downtime, but
something easily overcome. And the first page I visited needing password info, my username was recorded OK but my password wasn’t. Had to dig it out.