Filed under: Browser Tips

I have a love/hate with blog comments... I love to hate them. (ba-dum tssss -- I'm here all week, folks. Don't forget to tip your waitress (Seb)) No, but seriously, there are times when the comment area of an otherwise useful blog post gets filled up with bluster and vitriol instead of helpful supportive comments. While I don't mind healthy debate, sometimes things get out of control, like they did recently at Engadget.

Depending on the sites you frequent, comments can be useful, benign, or downright negative. If you don't find that you get a lot of value out of comments, why not turn them off? I don't mean turn them off for your own site, though you could do that too, I mean turn them off web-wide.

That must have been the thought process Steven Frank went through when he put together shutup.css, a style sheet that will suppress comments from most sites. It works by hiding blocks with IDs like "comments", which you should be aware could affect some sites in ways you might not expect. But if you'd like to have a comment-less experience while browsing Engadget even now that they've turned comments back on, shutup.css might just be the ticket.

The file can be applied as a custom stylesheet in Safari, and the post links to solutions for both Firefox and Chrome.

I've been using Fluid for a couple of years now to create site-specific browsers on my Mac for certain very useful web applications like Gmail, and Jay points out 10 web apps you should be running on your mac with Fluid. Though the current version of Fluid still works well, it hasn't updated in awhile and that got me curious as to what the developer behind Fuild, Todd Ditchendorf, was currently up to.

It turns out he's currently working on a project called Fluidium, which takes the site-specific browser concept of Fluid, and does two important things: it makes it available to developers so that they can create self-contained SSBs that they can distribute, and it open-sources the code behind Fluidium so that developers can not only use it, but they can make changes as they need.

This is some neat stuff, but as a non-developer my main question was, "when will Fluid be updated?" My question was answered on the Fluidium blog, and the answer is soon. First a small update will be released to address some bug fixes, but later we can expect to see a revamped version of Fluid that takes advantage of some of the rewrites Todd did for Fluidium to make it even better.

I can't wait.

Don't you just love it when you find a way to make something good even better? Remember the Milk is a fantastic online task management application, and here are a couple of browser extensions that make it even better if you're using Firefox or Chrome.

Both of these extensions have existed in some form in Firefox for a while, but they have both recently been released for Chrome, and they're worth investigating for either platform if you haven't already.

A Bit Better RTM

Remember the Milk's primary view is through its web app (though you can access it via email, mobile, Twitter, iPhone... the list goes on and on), and unfortunately the web app leaves a little to be desired. The layout is mostly fine, but the biggest problem I have with the site is the use of tabs across the top for your lists instead of a simple list down the side.

Heavy RTM users find they can easily have 20 or 30 lists, particularly when you include smart lists, and the tab metaphor does not scale well. A Bit Better RTM (Chrome / Firefox) solves this problem by changing the layout exactly as I described, adding the ability to reorder your lists, and adding some nice keyboard shortcuts for navigating your lists that match up well with the keyboard shortcuts you know from Gmail and Google Reader.

We've published a lot of posts about features in Google Chrome and Chromium which require you to add command line switches to activate them.

So how exactly do you do that? Watch the video above, and refer to the notes below -- it's a simple process!

1. Locate your Chrome or Chromium shortcut. There should be one on your desktop and one in your start menu - either one will work!
2. Click the shortcut with your right mouse button and choose properties.
3. Find the target box (it will be highlighted when the properties screen appears).
4. Left click at the end of the line (after chrome.exe).
5. Press space.
6. Add your command line switch. The result looks like this:
   C:\Users\LeeM\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --bookmark-menu
   
   
7. If you want to add more than one, separate each switch with a space. The result looks like this:
   C:\Users\LeeM\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\chrome.exe --bookmark-menu --enable-phantom-tabs

When it comes to paring a browser's UI down to the smallest possible size, the discussion always seems to focus on Firefox. Granted, Firefox is a very customizable browser, and with the right extensions cleverly applied, you can minimize its UI. But as John Holdun notes, often overlooked in this regard is the fact that Safari is very capable of being pared down to almost nothing, and you don't need any add-ons to do it.

In fact, if you're comfortable with keyboard shortcuts, all you need to do is learn a few key ones and you'll be able to minimize Safari to a Title bar and tab bar. One warning - I've only tried this using Safari 4.0 on a Mac; I don't have easy access to Safari running on Windows, but I imagine that there are equivalents for the keyboard shortcuts I'm about to discuss.

Firstly, let's get rid of the Toolbar -- that is, the bar with the back and forward buttons, address bar, and search field. To hide the toolbar, click View > Hide Toolbar from the menu, or simply press the Command-| shortcut key. Don't worry, if you need to enter a web address quickly, you can either show it again using the same shortcut key combination, or better yet press Command-l to have the cursor automatically placed in the address bar. Type something and press enter, or tab to the search field and type something and press enter, and your page will open, and the Toolbar will immediately hide again. Slick.

The other desktop real-estate offender is the status bar at the bottom. Hiding it is just as easy - the shortcut key combination is Command-/. Like John, I tend to like to use the status bar to snoop on the destination address of links by hovering over them. This takes an extra step now, but the extra room gained by not constantly showing the status bar is worth the occasional inconvenience for me.

I have a love/hate relationship with Firefox. I love the functionality it gives me, but I hate how over time it slows down and acts like a bloated pig. Two of the biggest factors that will make Firefox drag are the amount of history it maintains, and defragmentation of the Places database. We've already told you how to fix both of those issues, but it turns out that there is now an extension that takes the place of pasting a command into the error console in Firefox to vacuum the Places database and remove any fragmentation.

Vacuum Places Improved is a very simple Firefox extension that adds a small vacuum cleaner icon to your status bar in Firefox. When clicked, it vacuums your Places database, just like the command that Lee described in his post in August, but with a single click of the mouse. In my case, the results were remarkable - starting Firefox went from taking about a minute and a half to about ten seconds.

[via Lifehacker]

Moneyseize is a very straightforward single-screen platformer with charming 8-bit graphics and music. The goal in Moneyseize is to, well, seize all the money.

You're in charge of the 'gentleman', and your job is to jump around in each level and collect all the gold coins. Your gentleman is attempting to build a skyscraper, and needs to collect 1000 coins to complete it. There are critters in most levels, and they also hold coins, and you must also avoid the various obstacles and hazards, like the prototypical spikes.

An interesting twist in the game is that while there are 25 coins available in each level, in many levels it is not possible to reach them all. As you progress through later levels, you can press switches that will occasionally change the layout of previous levels, making once impossible-to-reach areas reachable. Since you control which levels you visit from the map screen, the game takes on a bit of a puzzle flavor to go along with the straight platform style, which feels very reminiscent of early Mario Brothers games.

While I can't imagine actually completing MoneySeize, my building has already grown far larger than I ever intended it to get, just in testing it for this post. That's usually the sign of a good game.

A while back, Jason mentioned giving your Firefox performance a boost by limiting the length of time items are saved in history.
At Mozilla Links, they've shared another handy tip from Mozilla developer Jeremy Orem.

His advice: take a vacuum to your SQLite databases. Here's how to do it:

1. Open the Firefox tools menu and click on error console.
2. Paste the following command into the code box as a single line (as pictured):
   Components.classes["@mozilla.org/browser/nav-history-service;1"].getService(Components.interfaces.nsPIPlacesDatabase).DBConnection.executeSimpleSQL("VACUUM");
3. Hit [enter] or click the evaluate button.

After a momentary hang, you'll be able to close the console and return to your main Firefox window to enjoy your leaner, meaner browser!

[via Lifehacker]

Do YouTube and other Flash-based videos stutter when you view them in Firefox, but work fine in other browsers like Internet Explorer, Chrome, and Safari? This appears to be a problem that affects both the Windows and Mac versions of Firefox, and the problem (surprisingly enough) turns out not to be Flash - it's Firefox's session restore feature.

Lifehacker has a post based on information that one of their readers wrote in with. Basically, Firefox takes a snapshot of all of your open tabs every ten seconds, so that if you close your browser, you can open it to where you left off. Though you wouldn't think grabbing the plain text URL of a few webpages would be such an arduous task for the browser that it causes video to stutter, for some reason it is.

So what's the solution? Well, if you want to throw the baby out with the bath water, you can turn off the session restore feature altogether. A more sane solution is to simply lengthen the period of time between snapshots. To do this, type about:config into Firefox's address bar, then in the filter box enter browser.sessionstore.interval. The default value is 10000, which is the number of milliseconds between snapshots. Setting the number to 120000 lengthens the period to two minutes, a more reasonable but still useful period. Of course, you can set it to whatever you want, as long as you keep in mind that you're dealing with milliseconds.

I can't tell you how happy I am with this little hack - it has already prevented me from cursing Firefox a few times today.

If there's a Gmail equivalent of adding a zillion toolbars to your browser, then I'm the poster boy. I've added so many lab features and gadgets that my Gmail functions rather... differently. But I'm all about simplifying, and the Firefox add-on Integrated Gmail does just that while also giving you a window into more Google services in a top-down view. The pic above shows you "minimalist" mode and is an incredibly slimmed-down version of Gmail, Reader and Calendar. Integrated Gmail also supports custom URLs and Gadgets like Remember the Milk, so you're not just stuck with Google stuff like Picasa, Notebook, etc.

Be aware that this does a lot of fancy Javascript work to make things happen, so a few Labs features will cause conflicts. I had enabled the ability to move nav columns around, which it didn't like. Also, even in settings you'll see Reader, Calendar, etc. So if you're not keen on seeing this in every single screen, you're kinda stuck with it.

That said, if you live in Gmail and you need a simplified dashboard, this is a nice little add-on to Firefox. The developer is asking for $5 donations, which is pretty reasonable for keeping your mind uncluttered.

If, like me, you've become fairly reliant on Google Gears, the browser plug-in from Google that allows sites to save data for offline access, the release of Firefox 3.5 is probably frustrating you. For some reason, Google isn't on the ball, even though the impending Firefox release was available for aeons in beta.

Luckily, for those of you that are brave (or dumb) enough to install an unofficial version of the Google Gears Firefox extension, you can get your Google Gears goodness going in Firefox 3.5 right now. Lifehacker points us to the unofficial Gears download locations for Windows & Linux, and Mac OS X (Intel only), but had only tested the Windows version at the time they posted about it. I can report that I'm dumb enough to install an unofficial Gears build, and it has so far worked flawlessly on my Mac. I use Gears regularly with Gmail, GCal, GReader, and WordPress, and all are working as expected.

Hopefully Google will hurry up and release an official Gears release for Firefox 3.5, but for now I've got a solution that works. Do you use Gears? If so, do you rely on it? What sites do you use it with?

The Mac's built-in PDF support is pretty strong, which is nice because if there's one piece of software I have always despised for its unnecessary bloat, it would be Adobe Reader. To be honest, I've always liked the fact that when I come across a PDF online, clicking to open it results in it being downloaded and opened in the built-in Preview application. Opening PDFs in the browser was always slow and clunky using Adobe Reader, and always annoyed me.

But recently a friend convinced me to try Schubert|it PDF Browser Plugin, and I'm glad I did. PDF Browser Plugin does exactly what you'd expect, allowing you to view PDF files in the comfort of your favorite browser (provided your favorite browser is either Firefox or Safari). But what I found surprising was how fast PDF Browser Plugin is. If you happen to be viewing a small PDF, it will open almost instantly, with the only delay being how long it takes to download the actual PDF file. This speed is possible because PDF Browser Plugin is leveraging the Quartz technology built into the Mac that allows it to render PDF files in the same way the Finder or Preview does.

The plugin's other claim to fame is a distinct respect for the Mac's look-and-feel. Schubert|it PDF Browser Plugin is free for personal or educational use, but requires a $69 site license for business users.

My beloved Firefox seems to have gotten kind of bloated and slow lately, particularly when starting it up. If you've experienced a similar decrease in Firefox's startup performance, check out this quick tip from Mac Tricks and Tips. One of Firefox's default settings is to remember 90 days of history. This means that Firefox is maintaining a list of every site you've visited along with the date and time of the visit for every day from the last three months. If you're anything like me, this can be a pretty huge list.

The tip is to simply go into the Privacy tab of your Firefox preferences and lower the history setting from 90 days to something much smaller, like 5 days. To realize immediate gains, ensure your Clear Private Data settings are set to clear history, then have at it. It may take a few moments, but once your history is cleared, Firefox should start to feel like its sprightly self again.

While the tip originated at a site focusing on Macs, there's no reason to think it wouldn't also help when running Firefox on Windows or Linux.

[via Lifehacker]

I'm in love. With a browser.

Nope, it's not Firefox, and not Safari, though I've had flings with both in the past. Not Camino, not even Chrome.

My new thing is with Minefield, from Mozilla. Okay, so Minefield is essentially an early build of the next version of Firefox. But the latest version has a drastically improved Javascript engine under the hood. Is it fast? Let me tell you - it's crazy fast. In fact, Ars Technica is reporting that Minefield is 10% faster than Google Chrome.

Faster than Chrome, available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and oh - it supports your Firefox add-ins, as long as you're willing to force compatibility using Nightly Tester Tools. Minefield is an alpha release, so it's likely to still be buggy. So far I've been lucky though; all of the add-ins that I've activated have worked fine right out of the gate.

Let me guess, you're in love now too, eh? Well, there's more than enough Minefield to go around. Go get some. Minefield, that is.

[via Ubuntu Unleashed]

Does it frustrate you that even though you can add HTML links in the content of your email when creating it in Gmail, you can't add an HTML link to your signature? It sure frustrates me. Many webmail services have very limited signature editors, making it difficult to create a compelling signature.

If you would like to use more than just plain text in your signature for your webmail account, give WiseStamp a try. WiseStamp is a Firefox add-on that gives you a rich text editor to create your email signature, and gives handy links to instant messaging services or social networks that you can add in to personalize your signature further. WiseStamp supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and Hotmail.