7
Apr
2009
Discovered a handy Firefox feature
If you’re at all like me, you’ve constantly got three or four windows open in Firefox, each window containing 10-15 tabs. As you bounce around from tab to tab, window to window, did you ever come upon a tab with a page that’s just mind-blowing, and you want to tweet or post about it, but you can’t give proper credit because you can’t remember how you got there? This happens to me all of the time. I just recently wished out loud on Twitter for a feature or plugin to help me with this problem. And then I discovered that the feature is already there.
If you go to the Tools menu in Firefox, and then select Page Info, this will bring up a surprisingly informative pallet. Not only can you see what the referring page is, but you can see (and save!) images contained in the page, see any RSS feeds available on that page, determine permissions for that domain, check out cookies associated with that page, and more.
Perhaps I’m the only one who has never noticed this remarkably versatile tool, but I have a feeling I’m not. Oh, and that Twitter URL in there is for real.
this is a very handy feature indeed, thank you! I was wondering about that myself—opening a dozen of tabs, following links on Twitter and forgetting who twitted about that page.
However, somehow I can’t see Twitter URLs under Referring URL, I do see other sites there, if I following a link from a site, but not from Twitter (I’m using TweetDeck). How did you get the twitter’s username showing up under Referring URL?
Yes – that’s a big downside to this feature. It only tracks referring links from within Firefox. I noticed the same thing with TweetDeck after I posted this. So, there’s still room for improvement! That screen shot shows the referring URL because I clicked directly from twitter.com in Firefox.