Here is a pretty simple little Firefox hack that nearly any semi-geeky person could implement. If you are using Firefox you may have noticed that the search window that is built into the browser can be extended to include a variety of search engines and Web sites. The screenshot below shows the list of search plugins that I have installed in my copy of Firefox. If your school Web site has a search form, there is a good chance that you could build a plugin that students, staff, and parents could use in their own browsers.

There are hundreds of little search plugins that can be downloaded from the Mozdev site. After doing a little reading in the documentation, I discovered that it is remarkably easy to create custom search plugins. I immediately made one that allows our tech support people to do searches in Request Tracker, our tech support ticketing system. Since none of you can search our trouble ticketing system, I thought I would show you the code for a plugin to search the WordPress support forum. It looks like this:

# WordPress Support Forum Search by Tim Wilson
# Created: Jan 20, 2005
#
<search
 version="7.1"
 name="WordPress Support Forum"
 description="WordPress Support Forum - Search forum threads and posts"
 action="http://wordpress.org/support/search.php"
 searchForm="http://wordpress.org/support/"
 method="GET">
 <input name="q" user>
 <input name="sourceid" value="Mozilla-search">
</search>

This technique only works with search engines that use GET to send the queries, but that seems to cover most of the interesting ones. Once you get this code, just add a 16×16 pixel image for the menu and put the two files in your Firefox search plugin directory. (See these instructions to find the proper directory on your computer.) If you want to get really fancy, you can create a Web page that includes a little Javascript so that the search plugin will be installed automatically with a single mouse click. I did that for our tech support staff so the install would be the same whether they are running Windows or OS X.

This little hack and the dozens of other extensions make Firefox the most customizable browser available and a great choice for schools.

The news is all over the net today, but I figured I would join the chorus and point out that Firefox 1.0 has been released. The quickest way to get a copy is to grab it from the mozilla.org ftp server.

So why should you care? Standards, performance and security. The gecko rendering engine (the underlying browser technology behind Mozilla and Firefox) is arguably the most standards compliant. Proponents of the Opera browser will disagree, and they have a strong case, but Firefox is free and it costs $39 to get a version of Opera without the banner ads. Users accustomed to IE will notice a much quicker browsing experience when using Firefox. It’s not that the pages are downloaded more quickly, just that the page is rendered more quickly. It makes a difference. Finally, by separating the browser from the rest of the system the user is insulated from most of the really nasty IE security vulnerabilities. I know of many individuals and even entire businesses who are switching all of their users to Firefox for the security protection alone.

Give it a try. If you find that you like it, do yourself another favor and explore the many Firefox extensions that are available to add all sorts of additional capabilities to the system. But that’s a topic for a future post.