For me however, the most useful feature of the plugin highlights links that have had rel=”nofollow” applied to them. This can be useful when doing link building campaigns. For instance, take a look at del.icio.us and StumbleUpon – both universally apply nofollow to all links except internal ones. There’s no PageRank value in those types of links, although there may be a short term traffic boost from submitting your site to them.

If you use SEO For FireFox, you’ll be stunned at the number of sites that apply nofollow on outgoing links. Naturally, blog comments are mostly nofollowed, but sites like YouTube also apply nofollow.

Changing the highlighter color – can be done by going to Tools, Options in Firefox and clicking the Options button on the SEO For Firefox entry. The default red is quite shocking when you see it splashed across a page, but it makes text unreadable.

I prefer to switch it to a lighter color for better legibility. When you update the options, the new highlighted color is applied upon the next page refresh.

Let’s say you come across an URL that hasn’t been linked. Select it (careful with spaces at the start and end) and drag it up to the address bar. Release the mouse and FireFox will automagically jump to that page.

In fact, you can even drag regular links to the address bar for the same effect.

Other FireFox Navigation Tricks & Techniques

This got me thinking about other navigation tricks I wanted to share. Let’s try:

• ALT+HOME: This shortcut will take you back to the browsers default homepage.
• Changing Your Default Homepage: Drag a link from the address bar over the Home button. Release the mouse and you’ll be asked if you want to reset your homepage.
• ALT+D or CTRL+L: This jumps you straight into the address bar and allows you to either type in a new address or modify the address that’s already there. CTRL+L works in Internet Explorer, FireFox and Opera.
• ALT+Back Arrow/ALT+Forward Arrow: The essential Back/Forward browsing commands. Don’t leave home without them.
• CTRL+T: Open up a new tab in your browser window. It’ll start up with the cursor in the address bar waiting on your command. Literally.
• CTRL+TAB: Cycles through the various tabs you have open in FireFox. Bonus points for using CTRL+SHIFT+TAB to cycle backwards! Got too many tabs open? Then you might need…
• CTRL+W: Closes the current tab you’re looking at. Be careful, closing the last tab shuts down FireFox!
• Preloading Pages: I like to read stuff right through to the end before reading material that’s been linked to in the post. To have all the material ready and waiting, I middle click each of the links as I browse and they load up in new tabs while I’m reading.
• Bookmarking: If you’re old school and insist on bookmarking, CTRL+D will bookmark the page you’re on. Actually, I’m using the Del.icio.us Bookmarks extension for FireFox and CTRL+D brings up a new bookmark in that too! Hooray!

Conclusion

Well, the conclusion is that I am a FireFox ninja! Most of these tricks should work in Internet Explorer, only a few work in Opera (unfortunately). If you’re a Flock fan, everything should work as I foretold it.

Nonetheless, learning them has improved my web browsing experience no end.

Over to you. Care to share any Power User tips for FireFox?

I’ve just discovered the Operator extension for FireFox, which is a plugin to detect and debug microformats on any web page. I’ve tested this on a couple of pages I’m working on, and it’s extremely useful.

You can use Operator to debug your microformats. Holding down the Ctrl key when you select a microformat action will show you the HTML that corresponds to that microformat. In addition, holding down the Shift key when you select a microformat action will display our internal representation of the microformat data.

The difficulty with microformats thus far is that they’re generally invisible to users. To see widespread adoption of the microformat standard, we need to be able to detect instances on a webpage and then be able to do something useful with them. For example, Operator gives us the ability to export vCard information to Outlook (at least that’s how it worked for me).

The one drawback of Operator is that it adds yet another toolbar to Firefox, which has the effect of cluttering the screen and further reducing the viewable area. Perhaps dropping this to the status bar would be a better solution?

Regardless, Operator is hopefully a tentative step forward for the Microformats movement! I haven’t mentioned Tails Export, by the way, because it’s still not compatible with Firefox 2.