Chrome Extensions
Google Chrome updated today with support for extensions. That's the last big Firefox feature to be implemented, and the bushy-tailed browser isn't looking so bright-eyed these days. I hardly touch it any more: Chrome has been my primary browser for months, and I've only had to drop into Firefox for Cooliris browsing, the odd rendering problem (I use the developer code, so this is no indication of anything) or header/footer-less printing. Chrome is just so damn fast that anything else feels all IE6, and I currently have five of its application shortcuts on my Windows 7 taskbar. It rocks.
Extensions that have caught my eye so far include:
- Cooliris - the oddly re-named (PicLens was much better) image browser that makes finding photos for bloggy advent calendars, say, a breeze.
- Google Wave Notifier - because Google Wave is proving handy at times, but not often enough for me to have a window permanently open.
- Send from Gmail - makes Gmail the default email client. Adds a slightly unnecessary button to the toolbar, though.
- RSS Subscription Extension - adds an RSS button to the address bar.
- IE Tab - I haven't properly tried this out yet, but it claims to add IE8 in a Chrome tab, which is useful for websites that hate third parties (bank websites, usually, because they can't afford to support all these different browsers). It can run silently from a URL list, too.
- Clip to Evernote - after Google Notebook died, Evernote became my primary knowledgebank for interesting doodads. Except I never use it, because opening the website/app and copy/pasting is too much like being a doctor or lumberjack or something. Enter this extension, and I can drop things in with one click. Ra.
I'd like:
- Blacklistthingy. Timerblockerwhatsit. I've forgotten the name, but it blocked websites on a timer. I need to block BBC News, Google Reader and Facebook (possibly Twitter, too) from 09:00-13:00 and 14:00-18:00. Because I am pathetic.
- Something to remove the URL etc. headers/footers when printing websites. I use an online invoicing system and send invoices to a PDF printer, and currently have to load FF.
- To use the ChromeMilk extension, which adds pretty integration with Remember The Milk. Unfortunately I am incapable of using Remember The Milk due to the aforementioned patheticness, manifesting in an inability to keep the lists up to date. I would like to use it, however, because Remember The Milk is pretty great, and one day I will FIX MY BRAIN.
- Something to prevent background-tabs - opened from application-only windows - stealing the focus. Bit obscure, but if I'm clicking through Twitter of a morning (in its own application window), it's nice to middle-click-open a bunch of background tabs without each one jumping into view.
- A Twitter checker. Heh. This was a joke. There are a billion Twitter integrations already. I am not installing any of them. Because I like getting things done. See also Facebook.
The best thing about extensions in Chrome? They auto-update, like the browser itself. Sure, some will get uppity about new code being installed without their permission, but, you know, suck it. One of Firefox's major problems is its astonishingly irritating update notifications for itself and its extensions - Chrome, meanwhile, updates in the background and doesn't nag nag nag. I can see the anti-arguments, and maybe it should have an option to disable auto-updates, but in practice it's just so much nicer.
Firefox 3 extensions I like
Firefox 3 came out a week ago. Its memory usage is apparently far improved (even if it still takes an age to load) and javascript performance is lovely - Gmail and Google Docs are snappy as anything.
Feature-wise, there's nothing stand-out jaw-dropping, but a lot of small, great stuff. I particularly like the 'AwesomeBar' - the address bar that searches your history for possible page matches. This means I can type page titles rather than domain names, and, for example, go straight to an amazon product page I saw yesterday by typing 'monkey brain jelly mould' or whatever. FF3 also has browsing stats, new themes, and colour-profile support (already causing a lot of confusion over at Lifehacker, which isn't surprising given how complex colour profiling can get). There's a full field guide here.
After a week I've finally got it configured properly. Here're the extensions I ended up with:
All-in-One Sidebar: Adds a small sidebar with quick access to bookmarks, history, downloads, extensions, source code and page info. It collapses nicely into an unobtrusive set of icons, and is just more handy than the menu bar.
Better GReader: Improvements for Google Reader, as compiled by those useful people at Lifehacker. I only use it for Bypass iGoogle Choice, which skips Google's annoying 'which reader do you want to use' page, and Preview Button, which adds an option to load the actual post page inline.
Compact Menu 2: Frees up screen space by replacing the Menu bar with a drop-down button. Once installed a new button appears in the Customise... options, and once this is dropped onto a toolbar the Menu bar disappears. You can't actually hide the Menu bar manually, so the trick is then to drag everything from the Navigation Bar onto the Menu bar, then hide the former. It's most useful when used in conjunction with the All-in-One sidebar, as you'll rarely need the menu bar.
Delicious Bookmarks: I think del.icio.us is far more useful than any built-in bookmarks manager, and their extension makes it as convient. It adds a toolbar with a local cache of all your tags, plus a quick bookmark button. If you're new to del.icio.us, it can also copy over all your existing firefox bookmarks.
DownThemAll!: This is designed to do clever things like download batches of files, but I use it as a regular download manager. I used to have FlashGot to link into my (paid for) copy of GetRight, but the latter is increasingly unable to understand download pages, while DownThemAll just works. Its one-click downloading is handy, and the I've-finished noise is endearingly pretty.
dragdropupload: Lets you drop files into upload boxes, rather than Browsing explorer. Quicker for email attachments.
FaviconizeTab: Adds an option to shrinks tabs to just their FavIcon. Means I can shove gmail, google docs and twitter into a corner without them taking up too much space. Compatible with Tab Mix Plus, happily.
Gmail Manager: Lets me log into multiple gmail accounts simultaneously, and adds an Unread Mail count to the status bar. I leave the latter checking for 'You've sold a book' emails on my Google Apps account, while my personal email is open all the time. It's been a touch flaky since Firefox 3, though, and I'm expecting a bug release soon.
Google Notebook: Ridiculously useful link to Google's scrapbook system. Highlight text in Firefox, right-click 'Note this' and it and the corresponding URL are saved to an online 'notebook'. You can create as many as you like, too. I use it to research essays and collect bad jokes1. I've had a bit of trouble with picture ratios, and they seem to have b0rked my fix, but text works fine.
Google Gears: Google's synchronizing tool, letting you work offline in Docs and Reader. I actually turned off the Docs' offline support, though, as it kept breaking one of my spreadsheets. Haven't tried it with FF3 yet.
Google Toolbar: I like it because it's the only search bar that adds clickable 'find' buttons for each word (or quotation) in your search, so you can quickly search the page for that specific term. It also sets gmail as the default email client, although FF3 can apparently do that itself. This extension has been known to randomly kill Firefox 2, but seems ok so far on FF3.
Leechblock: Stops me accessing certain websites in certain timeslots. I use it to block BBC News, Twitter, Google Reader and Facebook between 1100-1300 and 1400-1730, as I have no self-control. It'll actually kill the pages if they're open when the time ticks over, which is Annoying As Hell but quite proper. It can also block sites after you've spent a certain amount of time on them. And you can set it to block its own options in these timeslots, although I haven't found this necessary. Yet.
PicLens: A pleasant system for viewing online photo albums. Easier to see than explain, but essentially it takes over the screen, showing blocks of images against a black background and downloading upcoming shots in advance. It understands all the usual photo sites, including Flickr and Facebook, and you can click through onto an image's individual page if you want to comment. The most recent version adds a 'return to PicLens' button so you can go back to where you left off, which was its one major annoyance.
Remember the Milk for Gmail: I'm not good with to-do lists, as I usually forget them after a few days. But RTM's extension adds a toolbar to Gmail, where you can view / add / tick-off tasks as they occur. I spend half my day in Gmail, so this is pretty convenient and probably the reason I've kept up with RTM for 6 months. I'll write a review at some point...
Tab Mix Plus: Honestly, I can't believe this isn't built into the main browser yet. It gives you total control over your tabs, from their maximum/minimum widths to their positioning and scrolling behaviour, to their colour schemes. Firefox 3 support is only in Beta, but seems fine here. I'm on v.0.3.6.1.080416, available here (it's the current dev build).
I guess I'm running more than the average browser, but I think it's about normal for my level of geekery. I've been very happy with its performance, albeit with the aforementioned load delay.
- Did you hear about the giant who threw up? It's all over town! [↩]
PicLens
PicLens should be gimmicky, but somehow isn't. It's a browser add-on for viewing images (plugin for IE, extension for Firefox), that understands the major photo sites. This means it can display all relevant pictures, rather than just those currently visible. It's easier to explain with an example:
I was making mockups for a uni project this evening, and needed a picture of a juggler, with specific criteria: it had to be a full-length, side-on view. I searched for 'juggler' in Flickr, and the search results showed me 20 pictures per page. This was a bit slow, and by page 10 was getting frustrating - it turns out most people don't shoot jugglers this way. Eventually it occured to me that PicLens might help. It places a small 'play' icon over images from supported sites, and once clicked brings up a full-screen, 3D wall of images:
PicLens understands that I'm on a Flickr search page, so performs the search progressively as I scan along the wall. The scroll wheel zooms in, and dragging left/right pans along at variable speeds. This is approximately a billion times faster than going through individual pages. I glanced at hundreds of pictures before spotting something appropriate, at which point I double-clicked it. This downloaded the high-res version and displayed it full screen - I could then jump to the photo's Flickr page via a button at the top of the screen (although I only discovered this later after watching the tutorial video - it could do with being a little more obvious).
I've been merrily browsing my contacts' photostreams and sets all evening - the wall is visually gorgeous, and it's just good fun. Plus, photos generally look better on darker backgrounds. It's technically polished, too: the wall appears extremely quickly and I've experienced no processing delay when browsing, which is impressive for a full-screen app1. It's possible to scan faster than new images can be downloaded, but they appear fast enough that this is rare. I should mention that it's stalled on me a couple of times, but re-clicking the play button solved it.
PicLens supports Google Images, Yahoo Images, YouTube, Facebook and deviantART, amongst others. There's also a Wordpress plugin to add support to individual blogs. I predict somebody will buy this company pretty sharpish. Definitely worth installing if you spend any time browsing images, imho.
- having said that, my Firefox install is less than a week old and everything's quick at the moment [↩]
Two useful plugins for the Wordpress visual editor
I think they're handy, anyway:
- Enable Firefox spell checking in the Visual editor
- Add a toggle switch for advanced features in the Visual editor (try shift-v in IE or alt-shift-v in Firefox to do it manually). The extra toolbar has 'paste plain text' and 'remove formatting' buttons, which will help with a couple of the VE's annoyances.
Enough procrastinating, Andrew. Back to work.
Firefox 2.0
I was hesitant to upgrade Firefox because I knew it would break some extensions, but the supposed speed and security improvements were tempting so I went for it anyway. It installed quickly, and on first run checked all the extensions, automatically disabling / downloading new versions as necessary. This Just Worked, happily.
Is good. It seems faster than 1.5. I tend to have 15-20 tabs open at any particular time, which sometimes slowed down FF1.5 considerably. FF2 seems to handle them without a problem, which is great. Page loads seem subjectively faster, but I'm aware there are plenty of other factors which could be fooling me there. FF2 looks much nicer than 1.5, too. I always thought the default theme was ugly and never found anything much better in custom themes (with the possible exception of the Opera theme, but that caused problems with Options dialogs). The new silver / grey theme looks much classier, imho.
Most of the broken extensions had alternatives:
Tab Mix Plus - adds many useful options to FF's tabbed browsing feature, such as a maximum and minimum tab size, multiple lines of tabs instead of a scrolling bar and close-tab buttons in reasonable locations. The official version isn't yet compatible, but the Release Candidate seems to work ok, despite a couple of bugs with re-ordering tabs.
Resizable textarea - allows any text field to be resized, and comes in useful surprisingly often (particularly on blogger.com comment boxes). A compatible version can be found in the comments here.
Compact Menu - removes the pointless 'File, Edit' etc. menu bar and replaces it with a drop-down list which can be placed next to the address bar. Not updated for FF2, but there's a compatible version available here.
Paste and Go - just a little thing, but one-click pasting and loading of URLs is surprisingly pleasing. The old version has been replaced with Paste and Go 2.
Other favourites, such as Auto Copy, CoLT, dragdropupload, Googlepedia and FlashGot, were updated automatically.
I can't think of the last time a site was broken in Firefox. I think this is probably to do with the great rendering engine, although it's possible that most of the sites I visit these days are the kind that design for FF anyway. I have the occasional problem with Windows Media Player files refusing to load, but that's all. It's easily a full IE replacement. I don't have any actual problems with IE7, but extensions make FF2 the more productive of the two.
Deuglifying Firefox
Flickr's new interface didn't work with Opera, and this was the prod I needed to take another look at Firefox. In the past I'd always found it to be slow, clunky and ugly. Its saving grace was the excellent rendering engine, plus possibly extensions. Apparently new versions have brought improvements, but I'd never played with them much.
I fired up 1.5.0.3, and it immediately seemed faster. Double-clicking to create a new tab worked without flashing the screen and pausing for half a second, for example. I don't find it so snappy as Opera, but it's fast enough not to be annoying. So that was a good start. However, it was still ugly as hell. Toolbars took up way too much of the screen; the tabs were far wider than was necessary; the browny background peeked through at every opportunity...It needed fixing.
A day later, and I'm pretty much happy with it:
Many of my alterations were to add features found in Opera, purely because I'm used to them and too lazy to re-learn anything. I thought I'd go through the steps I took in case anybody else is thinking of switching over.
Fixing the toolbars: The topmost 'File', 'Edit' etc. menu bar can't be turned off, but there's a way around it. I dragged the contents of the navigation toolbar into said menu bar, then disabled the navigation toolbar. I ditched a few of the icons - how often do I actually click 'forward' and 'back' anyway? - and set the 'small icons' option, which saved a fair bit of space. The clever Compact Menu extension then replaced 'File', 'Edit' etc. with a single drop down button, which I placed next to the address bar. It was a little crowded by this point, so I removed the search box and installed Google's Firefox toolbar, which is useful enough to be worth the extra space.
Tabs: For a tabbed browser, I thought the built-in tab support was lacking. The tabs themselves are huge, and the first time I closed the browser and re-opened it to find all my tabs gone was something of a surprise! Also, it seemed to open new windows at the drop of a hat. Happily, the Tab Mix Plus extension fixed most of that. The 'single window mode' does its best to keep everything in tabs. There's a built-in Session Saver, so you can re-open Firefox and be in exactly the same state as before. Also, it has the option to shrink the sizes of tabs to the width of the website title, but with a maximum width - this saves vast amounts of space, and you can see many more tabs on one screen than was possible before. The default 'unread tab' font was red italic, but happily that was changeable too. It's endlessly configurable, and I'm still tweaking the options.
Theme: I tried a couple of the most popular themes, but they didn't do much for me. Eventually I found an Opera theme which worked very well. I prefer the curved tabs, and the light blue background beats muddy brown any day 
I do have a slight problem with this theme, which I'll detailbelow.
Features:
- Quicksearches - In Opera you can configure address bar shortcuts, so that typing 'g monkeys' will search google for monkeys, 'az pullman' will search amazon etc. This doesn't sound like a big deal, but I've got used to hitting CTRL-T for a new tab, then quickly entering whatever search I was after. It's faster than navigating to the google search bar, and offers a wider range of searches. I had some trouble finding out whether this was possible as I didn't know what to search for, but it turns out that Firefox also has this built-in. Right-click on any search box and select 'add a keyword for this search', enter the equivalent of 'g', and you're done.
- Mouse gestures - The All-in-One Gestures extension handled this perfectly. Showing the mouse 'trails' on screen is very helpful.
- Paste and go - A surprisingly useful little feature of Opera is being able to press ctrl-shift-v to open whatever URL is in the clipboard. It only saves one keypress, but I missed it within a couple of minutes. The paste and go extension solved that.
- Bookmarklets - I used to have FeedLounge and del.icio.us bookmarklets sitting in a toolbar, but Firefox doesn't seem to allow URL shortcuts on anything other than the annoying bookmarks toolbar. I couldn't solve this problem, but there are other methods. The del.icio.us firefox extension added a 'tag this' button to the address bar, and it's superior to the bookmarklet in a few ways. The LiveLines extension alters the behaviour of the address bar's RSS logo so you can specifiy an RSS reader instead of Firefox's built-in system. Now, clicking the logo adds the feed to my FeedLounge account. I like that.
- Sidebar - I never used Opera's sidebar all that much, but it did come in handy occasionally. FF's built in sidebar was kinda lackluster, but the All-in-One Sidebar is far better, letting you manage bookmarks, themes, extensions, history and downloads from the same place.
Issues:
I have various extensions that place icons on the status bar. The Opera theme doesn't seem to separate them and they're all bunched together. Most other themes use a separator of some kind. Presumably I can edit the theme to do this, but I had a quick look and became terribly confused. Does anybody have any experience of this?
Opera has pre-defined text fields, so that when you started typing your address, for example, it would display a dropdown box letting you enter it automatically. I found InFormEnter, but that adds a large icon next to every field. Is there any equivalent for FF?
I used to have a sidebar with favicon links to my favourite sites. FF's sidebar is too large for this, and you can't set it to display the icons only. It's not a big deal, but did some in handy occasionally.
Firefox suffers from the same problem as Opera in that if you submit a form and there's a problem with the next page, when you hit back the forms are empty, or in the same state as when the page was loaded. I had a database connection problem and lost a post because of this.
Conclusion:
Although it took a fair amount of work, there doesn't seem to be that I use in Opera that Firefox can't emulate. Being able to use Google Calendar, Flickr etc. outweighs any disadvantages, so I'll stick with it for the time being.
Switching to Firefox
Microsoft has recently been forced to update Internet Explorer, to the detriment of its users. A patent ruling has resulted in users having to click a button before any 'plug-in' content can be loaded on a website. This is annoying as hell. Visit onegoodmove in an up-to-date IE6 and you'll see what I mean. It's the first time I can see a reason for average users to switch to Firefox1.
By 'average user', I mean somebody with little knowledge of software or hardware. They want to use the internet just like they want to use Word or Excel - they have no time or interest in learning their way around computers. I think this represents a huge number of people, and they shall go collectively by the name 'Joe Sushi' in this post. I've arbitrarily decided that he's a he. No slight should be inferred, it's just neater than writing s/he all the time.
Why should people switch to Firefox? The first argument is security. This has never really convinced me, because I've found that Joe Sushi is wary of anything that says 'you must update your software'. His first thought is 'it's working fine at the moment, thanks, and how do I know you're not just going to download a virus?'. Although you could argue that Internet Explorer has had more security issues2, both Firefox and IE need updating on a regular basis. When security issues are found, Firefox and MS release patches in the same amount of time. Old versions of Firefox and IE are both vulnerable to security problems, and once Joe Sushi becomes aware enough of the value of keeping his browser up-to-date, the security argument becomes far less convincing. Sure, IE problems are likely to be more prominent - a virus could circulate a URL that exploits an IE vulnerability and infects your computer - but is this likely? The chances of this happening to any given individual are very slim, and I think they're outweighed by the advantages in IE's favour.
IE, for all its flaws and rendering issues, is the browser standard to which all websites must comply. Almost every website in the world will work fine with IE, and this is the killer feature. Yes, Firefox's rendering engine is excellent, but it has problems with plenty of websites that look fine in IE. Sure, this is normally the result of bad page design, but Joe Sushi doesn't care. Many online banks demand IE because it's far easier to comply with one browser than the myriad available, and they have to pay technical support staff to answer phones. Joe Sushi just wants a website that works. Somebody with a little knowledge of browsers will switch to IE for that particular site, but is Joe Sushi going to want to do that? Of course not. Do you want to tell him why he should juggle two different programs when one seems to work fine?
The basic Firefox package is essentially an IE6 clone, with tabs. Joe Sushi doesn't care about extensions (or tabs, for that matter), he just wants to browse the net as he always has. Firefox provides an Internet Explorer not made by Microsoft, but, to to Joe Sushi's eyes, it's inferior. IE is also integrated into Windows (for better or worse) and many programs are hard-coded to run IE when launching a URL. This is indeed rather silly, but there's no way around it.
However, IE has never annoyed Joe Sushi before. Clicking a pop-up button, with associated beep, gets old very quickly. A large number of sites will be affected, too. IE7 should fix the majority of IE6's problems, but this issue may remain if MS can't overturn the court ruling3. It'd be nicer if software patents were scrapped outright, given that they inhibit practically all innovation, but I can't see that happening. I should think IE's annoyance factor will win Firefox a few converts.
Interestingly, an MS spokesman says:
This is not an issue just for IE...This is a potential issue for Netscape Navigator, for Opera and for other browser vendors. This is an industry issue.
Netscape Navigator? As long as they're keeping up with the times. However, I'd bet that nobody's going to sue the Mozilla foundation, or Opera. MS is where the money is, after all.
- I've deliberately used Firefox as an example because I think it's designed as a direct IE replacement, especially in the default download. Much of the above applies to Opera etc. too [↩]
- and this may have more to do with the number of people looking for exploits, rather than inherent security problems, although this is a contentious topic [↩]
- there may be ways for website designers to bypass the issue, but older sites will still suffer [↩]
Opera goes Ad-Free
The Opera web browser is now available for free, without any advertising banners. Despite having paid for my copy, I think this is an excellent move on their part, and I hope it encourages uptake of what I consider to be the best browser around. It also means firefox has some proper competition, which can only be good for us customers
Opera to go Ad-free?
There are rumours that Opera is to go ad-free in the near future. Despite having bought a license, I really hope this is the case. I far prefer Opera to Firefox, which I find clunky and inelegant, and was very happy when version 7 came out with much needed improvements to the rendering engine. Version 8 is even better imho, and I've been using it happily for months. I'd say that anybody using an alternative browser is looking for the most productive software, and aren't wedded to one application. Opera's major disadvantage are the adverts in the free version, and despite their being fairly unobtrusive it's understandable how people could be put off. I honestly think people would prefer Opera to Firefox (with the below caveats) and anything that would attract people can only be a good thing. Removing the ads is undoubtedly the move that would catapult Opera into becoming a major competitior, although the following would help too:
- Get Gmail working fully. It doesn't currently support the HTML editor or new windows for composing emails (which breaks mailto links).
- Maybe allow third-party toolbars. People can currently customise everything about the browser except for this.
- Promote the User Javascript (equivalent to Greasemonkey) feature more - perhaps make up some great extensions to demonstrate what can be done.
Hello!
Hey, thanks for coming! I'm Andrew, and this is where my headthinks come to breed. They often dance around humanism, photography and general wonderments, but there's dabblage aplenty.
Do feel free to email me - I get lonely:
Your hair looks swish, by the way - have you done something new?
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