eurekster toolbar help

Disclaimer: This help is part of the eurekster toolbar for mozilla. Therefore it does not claim to be complete nor free of errors.

Network connections and privacy

The eurekster toolbar will try to access internet resources in a few cases where required. In all cases this behaviour can be disabled as documented further down.

Furthermore, no user data is, or will be, collected. However, naturally this excludes all data that may be collected by eurekster.com.

Toolbar elements

The toolbar contains a number of different elements. In Firefox these elements can be customized. This is important to remember if new items are added as part of a new version. If new items do not show up in the toolbar, they need to be added manually using the Firefox customize dialog.

Search related things and most of the social network aspects are not covered by this document but should be explained at eurekster.com.

The eurekster logo
The eurekster logo provides two things; clicking it will bring you straight to the eurekster homepage.
Secondly, clicking the small arrow will show the eurekster menu which includes a few more links, a convenient way to clear the search history and access to the options dialog:
The search input field
This is the input field to enter your search criteria. If the search history is active, old search terms can be selected from the dropdown.
The SearchParty™ drop down
Optional parameter for the search. See eurekster.com for more information about search parties.
The Web Search and Private Search button
A new search can be started by one of the following actions:
  • Pressing <Enter> while the focus is on the search input field or Search Parties dropdown
  • Select a search term from the search history (configurable)
  • Clickting either Web Search or Private Search button
The Invite button
A shortcut to invite others to join your network.
The Highlight button
Provides highlight functionallity separat for each open tab/window.
The Login / Logout button
Quick access to login logout. Since 0.6.2 this can be done using Password Manager to store the account details. The button text (and also the Login / Logout item in the menu dropdown) will show the user name.
The text for the logged in state can be customized using the property extensions.eurekster.buttons.loggedin. The macros {0} and {1} can be used and will be replaced with first name and last name, respectively.

Preferences

The preferences dialog contains to tabs which will explained individually:

General preferences
Browsing
General options include the ability to control how URLs will be opened by the toolbar. This is similar to the options availabe for tabbed browsing in the Mozilla/Firefox options.
Security
Here you can configure whether to use the standard eurekster form based login, or Password Manager. Note that when the Use Password Manager to remember this login checkbox is not ticked you will have to enter your account details for every login.
If using Password Manager it is strongly recommended to set a master password to protect your saved password(s).
Currently, only one profile is supported.
Highlight
The color used for highlighting text in web pages can be configured. This setting will be applied globally to all tabs/windows.
Updates
If checked, the toolbar will try to open a connection to this website to check for updates. This will be done at most once a day. Clicking the Check now button has the same effect, but will not change the startup behaviour.
Search preferences
Search
Options that will directly affect the way searches are done. If the Mark as private checkbox is ticked, all searches will be private, regardless of how they are initiated.
The second optyion controls the behaviour of the search term history. If ticked, selecting a search term from the history will automatically launch a new search.
History
The search history has a few options that will control if and how the history is stored.
The history can be completely diabled, limited to a given number of entries (0 = no limit), cleared and optionally updated from searches done in the web browser.
That means the history can include search terms that have not been entered in the toolbar search field.
SearchParties™
If SearchParties™ are enabled, the toolbar will try to update the Search parties drop down with the user specific parties. This is done by connecting eurekster.com. Unchecking this option will diable all external connections related to search parties.
Alternatively, it is possible to update the drop down once by clicking the Update now button.
Search partie data is not persistent. That means it has to be retrieved again when the browser is restarted.