An earlier DrupalEasy Quicktip presented a technique for enabling a large number of checkboxes on a Drupal administrative page — such as the permissions admin page — using the Check All extension for the Mozilla Firefox browser. Unfortunately, with the release of Firefox version 3.6, that extension is no longer supported, and there is no indication that an updated version of it will be released. Thus, that exact technique is no longer workable.
However, the Firefox add-on ecosystem shares many similarities with that of Drupal — one of which is that when a valuable add-on is unusable, for whatever reason, a different developer will often create an alternate solution, or continue to maintain an add-on with similar or identical functionality, keeping it up-to-date with the latest releases of the host system. In this case, the replacement extension is CheckFox, which works just as well for enabling and disabling a lengthy column of checkboxes on any Drupal page.
To utilize CheckFox, follow the same procedure as for Check All: Add CheckFox to your Firefox installation, and restart your browser. On any Web page, click and drag your mouse to highlight the labels of the target checkboxes (or use "Select All" on Firefox's Edit menu), and right-click on the page. On the context menu that pops up, choose "Check" or "Uncheck" (these menu labels differ from Check All's). If your highlighted checkboxes include at least one that is enabled and at least one that is disabled, then both menu options will be present.
This alternate extension should be equally helpful when you have more checkboxes than time or patience!
This DrupalEasy Quicktip is from Michael J. Ross, a freelance website developer and writer.