Filed under: Browser Tips

Have you ever wanted to compare how fast one site loads against another one? Instead of futzing around with multiple browser windows or a stopwatch, just head over to Which Loads Faster, and load the URLs into the split window interface. When you hit the GO button, it will load both sites in side-by-side frames, then make a judgment.

Keep in mind, there are a lot of variables at play, and you'll want to run the same test multiple times to get a better idea of what the average load speed is. Also, it's not clear whether the site automatically clears your cache, so you're going to want to do it manually between tests.

Of course, since each test will likely be different, it can help you create smart-ass screenshots like the header image on this post. Hey, we're just havin' fun here, right Lifehacker?

The new Firefox 4 Beta has a Feedback button; for some people, that may be an eyesore.

Some people have worse problems, like the one shown in the screenshot above. That's my default FF4 installation, by the way; I just ran it and got this, and it wouldn't budge even when I tried to customize it. The four rows of buttons stay. Only when I run it in Safe Mode it looks fine. Interesting.

Anyway, hopefully most of you have it running fine, and maybe you just want to get rid of that Feedback button. Here's how you do it:

1. Click the Firefox button (top-left corner, unless you removed it using Sebastian's tutorial).
2. Go to Customize > Add-ons.
3. Locate the Test Pilot add-on.
4. Click Disable.

Voila, no more Feedback button!

On a personal note, I must say I think disabling this button is a bad idea. Mozilla is running a top-notch usability testing program, and I think they deserve user feedback (because, after all, they just want to make a better browser for all of us). Still, if you really want to disable that button, now you can.

And now on to figuring out how to make those four rows of buttons disappear ...

LeechBlock is one of the cornerstones of my online life; it is an add-on that lets me set up a list of "time-wasting" websites and forces me to stop using them after some time has elapsed. It's one of the main add-ons that's keeping me on Firefox (rather than Chrome or Opera, which I really do like).

StayFocused tries to bring a very similar feature set to Chrome. I looked at this extension a couple of months ago, and a second look this morning shows that, with many new features added, the developer has been hard at work.

In addition to specifying which sites to block, you can now configure active days and hours (meaning, when to apply the blocking), blocked sites, and allowed sites (for white-list functionality). There's also a "nuclear option" for blocking access to all but the white list (or all including the white list, which would render your browser useless), and there's a "require challenge" option that forces you to type in a random string before you can change the options.

If any of these seem familiar to you, that's because StayFocused seems to have taken a page right out of LeechBlock's book. LeechBlock has all of these features and many more. For example, LeechBlock lets you configure five different blocking sets and control the length of the string. With LeechBlock, I can configure it to let me access my time-wasting websites for "5 minutes every hour."

Don't get me wrong, StayFocused is taking steps in the right direction. If you're serious about blocking distracting websites, though, it doesn't come close to the versatility and simplicity that LeechBlock offers. Also, I wish that StayFocused would give a bit of credit where credit is due; I could find no mention of LeechBlock in the FAQ or elsewhere.

Firefox has a very nice built-in spellchecker; it's not as nice as After the Deadline, but it still gets the job done. One problem I've had with it, though, is that the squiggly line underneath misspelled words is very easy to miss; it's red, yes, but it's also super-thin and really tiny.

If you've had a similar problem and, for some reason, don't feel like trying out After the Deadline, you will be happy to know that the style of the underline can actually be changed. It takes some fiddling, but it's not very hard. Here's what you have to do, according to the Mozilla KB article on the preference:

1. Enter About:config in the Firefox address bar. If it pops up an alert, tell it that you know what you're doing and proceed.
2. Search for ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle. If you find anything, skip to step 5.
3. If your system is like mine, you found nothing. That means you have to add this configuration value. Right-click the main portion of the window and select New > Integer.
4. Now, enter ui.SpellCheckerUnderlineStyle to create a setting by this name.
5. Now you can set the value of this setting to one of several options: 0 for no highlighting, 1 for a dotted line, 2 for long dots, 3 for a single straight line, 4 for a double underline (like you see above – that's my pick), and 5 for a squiggly line, which is the default.

This setting doesn't require restarting Firefox; it is effective immediately, so you can have another tab open and test each style as you set it to see what works for you. Now, if only you could set a background color for misspelled words...

I love Instapaper, and I love keyboard shortcuts. Instapaper, if you haven't come across it, is a tool that allows you to use a special bookmarklet to mark articles online that you'd like to read later. It has a website that is optimized for reading your saved articles, as well as a very good iPhone app so you can read those articles when you're not at your computer.

The website is quite good for reading articles, but one thing that is sorely lacking is keyboard shortcuts. If you're like me and have gotten used to navigating through Gmail and Google Reader using only the keyboard shortcuts, it feels like a step backwards to be forced to point and click to move from article to article on Instapaper.

Brett Terpstra, a developer that has put together a number of my favorite tools (including the specialized editor for Blogsmith that I'm using to write this post) felt the same lack-of-keyboard-shortcut pain, and set out to do something about it. What he's come up with is a user script for use with Fluid, so that you can create a stand-alone browser for Instapaper that is perfectly suited to the task.

The Instapaper Beyond script is very robust, and has a well-documented help screen. Just press 'h', and up pops a window very similar to the window that shows up in Gmail if you press '?' to help you remember the shortcuts, though you'll find them quite intuitive.

Unfortunately, Fluid is Mac-only, making Instapaper Beyond Mac-only as well. Maybe the more adventurous of you can take a stab at making Brett's userscript Firefox-compatible so that Windows users can join in the fun.

Flash is a much-maligned technology as of late, but for good reason! In as much as it helped usher the web forward with a standard way to present streaming video, its performance issues are a huge step backwards, particularly for mobile users.

A great solution that we've previously discussed is Click To Flash, but part of the reason it's a good solution is that it lets you start the embedded flash players when you want to. Once they're running, though, you can still run into trouble.

BashFlash is a new tool for users of 64-bit Safari that will monitor any running Flash processes, and notify you if it is starting to eat up too many CPU cycles by turning its menubar icon red. You can then click on the icon and choose whether you'd like to kill the offending Flash process. Obviously if you're watching a video you may want to leave it running, but if you're on battery power and some banner on a tab you're not even looking at is misbehaving, BashFlash could be a life (and battery) saver.

Unfortunately, BashFlash will only work for users of 64-bit Safari in Snow Leopard as it is the only version of Safari that has the Flash process separated from the browser's process. Chrome has a similar trick to prevent Flash from taking down the browser, but there's no indication on BashFlash's page that Chrome support is being considered.

[via Daring Fireball]

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.