“Mozilla FireFox Can Load Sidebars, Now It's My Default”

Mozilla FireFox Can Load Sidebars, Now It's My Default

I've been itching to switch to Mozilla Firebird FireFox as my default browser, but one thing has been holding me back: it's lack of support for Mozilla's sidebar tabs. I use a number of quick-reference tabs for looking up information on XSLT, JavaScript, CSS, HTML, and lots of other things, almost every day.

Today I figured out how to make Firebird FireFox load the sidebars just as well as Mozilla, so now it's my default browser. (The new Mac OS X "pinstripe" theme that ships as the default didn't hurt, either.)

There are seven sidebars which I find indispensable:

• CSS 2.1 Quick Reference
• DOM2 Quick Reference
• HTML 4.01 Quick Reference
• JavaScript 1.5 Reference
• Netscape DevEdge Multibar
• Gecko Dom Reference
• XSLT Reference

Here's what I did to reproduce the sidebar from the Application Suite:

1. Choose 'Manage Bookmarks' from the Bookmarks menu in Firebird FireFox
2. In the Bookmarks Manager window, add a new folder to the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder, named "Sidebars"
3. Move the Sidebars folder, so that it's the first item in the Bookmarks Toolbar Folder
4. Add a new bookmark to the Sidebars folder. Give it a name and URL for whichever sidebar is being added (see the list above)
5. Click on the "Load this Bookmark in the Sidebar" checkbox, and close the bookmark's Properties window
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 for each sidebar

That's it! Once I knew about the "Load Bookmark in Sidebar" checkbox, the hardest part was figuring out the right URL's for each of the sidebars.