If you are like me you use Firefox for all your web surfing, which is a high percent of your daily computer use. I rarely use other programs without
first being in Firefox and generally get the idea to use another program while surfing. Thus, was born the idea to use Firefox as my launching program. I don’t use my computer as much as most power users who require a dedicated launching program and I use very few other programs that I would need to launch. Because I don’t need the feature rich launchers that require a bit of extra memory to run, Firefox 3 seems like a good alternative. My setup is very simple, yet effective. I just registered a protocol for each program I wanted to be able to launch:
http://kb.mozillazine.org/Register_protocol Then made a bookmark with the name of the program and the address of the protocol. You could also include a tag which would be your quick code for that program.
Note - This is a Windows-only solution.
—Example— My palm.reg file looks like this (run once to register protocol):
REGEDIT4
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\palm]
@=”URL:palm Protocol”
“URL Protocol”=”"
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\palm\shell]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\palm\shell\open]
[HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\palm\shell\open\command]@=”\”C:\\Program Files\\Palm\\Palm.exe\” \”%1\”"
And my Firefox 3 Bookmark looks like this:
Description - “Palm Desktop”
Address: “palm:”
tags: “plmd”
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So basically, while surfing in Firefox, I can now open Palm Desktop by clicking the location bar and typing “plmd” (without the quotes). Not sure if anyone else has done/wrote about this before, but it might be a helpful hack for you heavy internet users!
Picture adapted from: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jaqian/366921543/