Welcome to Firefly
Firefly is a filemanager for the Mozilla platform.
Contacts: Mail me or write in the contacts area here
[version 0.1]
This was the initial release.
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Splitting the window horizontally and vertically
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Closing a split - if you have splitted the window multiple times you can close the currently selected split (indicated by black border) with this button
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Moving to bigger pane - if you have opened many splits it will become more difficult to view your files. So you can make one split occupy the whole window - with this button:
and go back to the multiple split window with this button:
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Back and Forward buttons with history
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Refresh button
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Up directory button
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Standart file operations - Cut [1], Copy, Paste, Delete
(the buttons were added in version 0.2)
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Views menu - allows viewing files as Details, List, Tiles and as previews
Details - shows folder contents as a list - each folder entry occupies one row and shows the name, extension, size, creation date, permissions and path of the file
List - shows just the name and a small icon for the file. There are as many files on the row as can fit
Tiles - same as List but with bigger icons
Thumbnails - shows the files in a thin strip on the top with the ability to scroll the list left/right if it doesn't fit. Below this list is the area where the preview of the file is shown. For the preview you need some extra programs:
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Image - doesn't need extra programs but you are limited to the image formats that are supported by Mozilla
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Music/Video - you need VLC (Video Lan Client) installed and it's plugin too in order to have preview for theese files [2][3]. To install the plugin on Windows check the Mozilla plugin during installation.
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Documents - you need OpenOffice plugin. To install it - install OpenOffice and go to Tools -> Options:

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PDF files - install Adobe Acrobat Reader
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Folder tree in the sidebar - the tree is purely for navigaton purposes. When you click a folder in the tree it will open in the currently active pane. If there isn't open Firefly window it will open one.
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You can open and close the sidebar with this button:
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Context menus:
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Filters - using filter on the current folder - you can use either wildcards ot Regular Expressions
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If you have installed IETab extension you will be able to view the html rendered by IE engine
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Up to version 0.3 these were in the views menu, since then they have been moved to new menu.
As you can see you have a choice to view the html with Mozilla or IE engine.
And you can do both - by splitting the window in two and using in one Mozilla and in the other IE engine.
In any of these modes the content in the address bar is considered a web site address and the extension tries to load it.
An interesting side effect has the IE engine - if you use it on a local folder and not on a Web site - the folder will be viewed as if opened by Windows Explorer!
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Options - File types

Here you can configure what extensions can be previewed in the Thumbnail view.
Movie/Music are opened if you have VLC plugin,
Image - these are the image formats supported by Mozilla,
Document - files that are previewed by OpenOffice plugin
and Pdf - files opened by Acrobat Reader plugin
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Options - Tree

Here you can configure which folders are loaded in the sidebar. After configuring you will have to close and reopen the sidebar to view the newly added items.
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Options - Send To

Here you can configure the "Send To" context menu - you can copy the files to that location in just two clicks.
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Options - Open With

Here you can configure the "Open With" context menu - you can choose a program witch to open the selected file.
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Options - General

- Show hidden files - whether to show hidden files/folders or not. You will have to close and reopen the sidebar for that option to take effect in it.
- Automatically playmusic and video - when you have VLC plugin installed the music/video files configured in the File types options are played in the tooltip.[4]
- Don't allow wildcards - switches the filter between Wildcard and Regular Expression mode
- Calculate dir size - when checked the extension will try to calculate the directory size in the tooltip and in the properties dialog
- Automatically open sidebar - when checked will open the sidebar automatically when you click somewhere in the Firefly window
- Directory scan interval - used when calculating the directory size - the bigger the slower is the calculation but less likely is to lock the browser
- Script run time warning interval - when that number is small it is more likely that you will see a dialog asking you to stop
the current operation (dir size calculation mostly). If you see that dialog then the operation has already taken too much time (
probably trying to calculate the size of a folder with many subfolders).
You can stop it if you want or wait untill it finishes - but be warned your browser will be locked during that time
[version 0.2]
Second release - bugs fixed and added new features.
- Localization added - made Firefly localizable and submitted it to Babelzilla for translation
- Added Cut, Copy, Paste, Delete buttons
- Added Select All context menu option and keyboard shortcut
- Added keybord shortcuts for most of the actions
- Added keybord navigation in the splitted pane and between the splitted panes
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Added external editor setting - when you set up an external editor in the options dialog:
(here the editor is set to C:\Windows\notepad.exe)
you can press "Edit" in the context menu (or press the shortcut key - F3) and the currently selected file will open in that editor
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Added the ability to search in the current directory(including the subdirectories):

Choose the search option, type your search string in the filter dialog and press enter to perform the search.
To go back to the normal file view choose one of - "Details", "List", "Tiles", "Thumbnails" (for version 0.2) or "file" (for version 0.3)
- Errors are logged in the file firefly.err in your firefox profile directory. If you have problems with the extension you can mail me and you should attach that file.
[version 0.3]
The third release - bugs fixed and added new features. This is the current release
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The buttons were rearranged and menus were added to some of them

There is that new button with menu for example.
It defines what type of view we will have - "File", "Search", "Mozilla" or "IE"
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When writing manually a folder path in the address field you get a list of all folders that
you have in that folder and you can choose one throught tab or arrows.
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Breadcrumb path in the address box:

To activate it press the file icon:

When in breadcrumb mode you can right click on any of the breadcrumbs to get a menu showing all the folders on that level and change to one of them:

If you right click on the first breadcrumb you will get a context menu of the folders you chose in the tree options dialog:

When clicking on the breadcrumbs you can change the current folder.
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Linked browsing - when you have two or more splits showing different folders but with
the same folder structure (c:\work and d:\work for example and all their folders and subfolders are the same)
you might want to browse them simultaneously. Now you can focus one of the splits and go to the
special menu to add it to the list:

If you go to that dialog again you will see the starting folder listed. You can't browse simultaneously above that folder:

And you can remove it by selecting the split, go to the menu and click Remove.
You can also use the keyboard shortcuts for these two operations.
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When you go to a folder containg files you will get predefined filters in the filter menu:

These are all file extension encountered while listing the folder plus ".*" - which means all files.
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Permissions are showing as they should and not as numbers any more:

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Up directory button now has menu which allows going up to five levels.

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The main button was changed to allow faster access to the preferences and the help:

- This help was added
[1] Cut is the same as copy - currently it doesn't delete the files after making copy. The extension is still in pretty early stage and hasn't been tested enough so that's safer.
[2] I recommend using VLC plugin from VLC 0.8.4 or 0.8.5 as i haven't been able to make 0.8.6 work (for me it crashes Firefox every time - if you have been able to make it work please contact me).
[3][4] See Known problems for more information
First thing you need to do is customize your toolbar and add the new button:

(right click somewhere on the toolbar to see the menu)
Then drag and drop the new button on the toolbar:

Here is how it should look in the end:
The next step is to add folders to your sidebar:
Go to Tools -> Add-ons -> Extensions -> Firefly -> Options
Go to Tools -> Extensions -> Firefly -> Options (for Firefox 1.5)

Choose the tree section and browse for folder:

You can write alias for that folder if you want. After that press the button 'Add' and new entry should appear in the list below
When you are done adding folders press OK. If your sidebar was open you must close and reopen it in order to see the changes you made.
All the directories that you have chosen have appeared in the sidebar:

This is how the sidebar should look in the end. The sqare brackets hold the alias for the folder you have written.
Congratulations you are now ready to use Firefly - just click on some of the folders in the sidebar.
- Using more than one thumbnail for Audio/Video preview will most likely crash your browser (as far as i know that's VLC plugin problem). The same applies to a thumbnail view playing Audio/Video file and a tooltip trying to play another Audio/Video file.
- Size calculation for large directory structures can lock the interface and a Script runtime warning may appear. You can configure from preferences "Directory scan interval" and "Script run time warning interval" to prevent these. The same applies to the search feature.
- Linux users should configure the icons they want to see for a particular file type and turn on "Show internal icons" option. The reason is that it seems 'moz-icon' is not supported on Linux and i use it to show the icons for every file or folder.
- On Linux file.launch() is not working (on windows it launches the application or the file in the associated application). Because of that i have to use another method for launching files, but it's not 100% working - some files will not be launched in their coresponding application (they will not launch at all). Currently i don't know the reason for that.
- Some users reported that nothing appears in the sidebar after the tree is set up for the first time and a restart is required to work - i haven't been able to reproduse this bug, but i did fix a few other bugs in the sidebar - and hopefully this was caused by one of them. If you are still experiencing this please contact me to work this out.
If you know something about the problems above please contact me.