URNotAlone

Reports of my demise are greatly exaggerated

March 28th, 2006 12:58 pm MST

The number of people who wonder why I seem to have gone AWOL apparently increases daily, based on the amount of e-mails I get asking me why I'm not in URNA chat anymore. Just so you know, I'm not gone or anything, just very very busy with family stuff at the moment and have precious little time for other shenanigans, so some priorities had to be set (yes, I'm hilariously behind with answering e-mails too...). I'll be back around and more visible again in the not so far future (consider this a warning... mwuahahahaha...).

To give you something to play with in the meantime, how about we geek around a bit with browser technicalities? (And you, dear TG profile reader, you just love geek babes. Admit it.) So let's dish out a quick article hack and have a look at my Firefox, which is my "second primary" browser so to speak, the "first primary" being Opera. Firefox is generally superior to Opera in terms of page rendering, while I otherwise prefer Opera's ergonomics and useability. In Opera 8 (I have several versions of it installed), I use a bunch of UserJS scripts and -when I have the time- tinker around with a few I've written myself. In Firefox, where I never got around yet to learning how to create an extension, I'm using a few nice ones that I like (or currently evaluate) and that I feel like recommending now, plus I might have a look at Greasemonkey features sooner or later. I'm never using any sort of theme or skin or wallpaper anywhere, so don't look at me for those...
Oh, and I'm never using Internet Explorer either - and no one should really, it's so inherently unsafe that calling it dangerous to any user's privacy is in order. Don't use it. Just... don't. (And don't come whining to me if you do and you managed to get it hijacked, have been phished, or got your PC infected with any sort of worm or trojan or other malware through it. It's your own friggin' fault. You have been warned.)

Installed Firefox extensions:

• DOM Inspector
  
  Duh. Integral part of Firefox.

 

• Adblock
  
  This is vital, if not marvelous and brilliant. There's just too much advertising, banners, popups, tracking, profiling and other bloated, annoying or dangerous crap out there that you encounter while websurfing. Adblock enables you to get rid of it all just fine. I'm using my own list of filters that keeps evolving, not any of the downloadable ones out there, to keep the overhead of filter entries I never need low. I also have a monster of a HOSTS file that blocks a bazillion of servers already at system level, but having Adblock sit on top of that at browser level makes the whole blocking thing more slick. Swish, baby.
  

 

• CustomizeGoogle
  
  Very neat. It expands your Google experience by a variety of nice functions, blocks their ads and clicktracking, and protects your privacy by randomizing the GUID stored in the cookie with every search request (and thus saves you from being profiled). The only thing I'm missing here is a way of directly managing the Google Preferences (they're all stored in the cookie too, so this extension would be perfect for it). No idea why they don't implement that.

 

• Tweak Network
  
  This gives you easy access to a few config settings that speed up browsing (number of server connections, pipelining, etc.), which is a bit more convenient than plugging through them all via "about:config". As such it's a better and simpler alternative to the widely and wildly overrated "Fasterfox" extension, which mostly relies on voodoo and placebo effects as far as the perceived speedup is concerned.

 

• ShowIP
  
  Puts the target server's IP adress into the status bar, with options to query for it in a variety of lookup services. Kinda nice to have if you're geeky enough to care.

 

• Extended Statusbar
  
  Adds a couple of output options to the otherwise rather bland status bar, like load time, number of images and amount of loaded data, making it generally more Opera-esque (I always strive to make my Firefox more like Opera in terms of functionality). It doesn't work as well as the Opera status bar, but it's better than nothing.

 

• Wayback
  
  Adds a link to the Wayback Machine to the context menu, to directly look up old versions of a target webpage. Pretty neat in theory, but I'm using this so rarely I might just as well kick it out again...

 

• Open link in...
  
  Greatly expands the ability to control where to open a link if not in the current window/tab, which is another thing I'm used to from Opera that I badly missed in Firefox, which originally can only open a link either in a background tab or a foreground window - who on earth ever conceived this stupid limited choice? Firefox Team, I'm looking sternly in your general direction.

 

• Paste and Go
  
  Yet another "Opera-izing" extension. In Opera, if you have an URL copied to the clipboard that you want to paste into the adress bar in order to go there, you can right-click and not just "Paste", but "Paste and Go" immediately without having to hit Enter or click Go. In Firefox, you can't - unless you install this extension. A small but quite convenient detail. In general, I wish the Firefox designers would take a lot more ideas from the long-standing and well refined Opera ergonomics and UI/customization design ideas. In many ways, Firefox is a newbie in the browser scene and still does a lot of things wrong, and this is one of them.

 

• User Agent Switcher
  
  Gives you easy and full control over the user-agent that you pass on to the target server with every request. Some websites give you a different output based on the browser and OS they detect you're using, or use that data to control access or even completely prevent you from accessing it. This is a way of getting around that. Very simple example case in point, go to the Google Preferences page pretending to be some Mozilla, then switch to some Opera and try again (or reload). See anything different?

 

• Tamper Data
  
  Hooks into the HTTP/HTTPS GET/POST command communication with a remote server and lets you watch, log, analyze and modify any request, if you're so inclined. (It can mess with the user-agent too.) If you're geeky enough to understand what I just said there, you're geeky enough to use it and maybe actually have a use for it...

 

• Web Developer
  
  This is seriously awesome. The number of ways this extension offers you to look at the intestines of a webpage and how it's built and control how it works is impossible to sum up in a short description like this. Anyone with the slightest bit of web geekiness should try it, chances are you'll never uninstall it. The only gripe I had with it is a minor config setting detail (defaults to CTRL-SHIFT-A for one of its functions, which is already used by Adblock - easy to reconfigure though).

 

• Download Statusbar
  
  Let's face it, the Downloads window in Firefox blows chunks. I mean, royally. I hate it. This is a much nicer and nicely configurable alternative that lets you control your downloads in a small status bar insert. Still not quite up to par with Opera and its nifty downloading ways, but it's an improvement.

 

• AJAX Yahoo! Mail [Viamatic Webmail++]
  
  I'm using a bunch of unimportant Yahoo! Mail accounts for a variety of minor purposes, and this extension expands them with a few interesting and nicely implemented AJAX functions. Also available for Opera as a UserJS version (I'm not using it in Opera myself though) and as a Greasemonkey script from their website, which apparently they didn't submit (yet?) to the userjs.org repository, for reasons unknown. (It is on userscripts.org though...)

 

• Update Notifier
  
  Automatically checks for updates to your installed extensions and themes, and offers enhanced control over the notification and installation process. Not like the regular Extensions window in Firefox wouldn't work well, but it's a kinda nice extension to have. Doesn't seem to hurt at least.

 

• Server Spy
  
  Adds a readout to the status bar showing the server brand and possible server extensions that the remote site reports it's running on. Which sometimes is kinda interesting to know. If you're that geeky. Which I am apparently.

 

• Reliby
  
  Reloads all your live bookmarks/feeds with a single click, which I found was an intriguing idea when I installed this extension (out of the box Firefox can only do it individually for a single live bookmark entry), but I'm almost never actually using it, so it might get kicked out again sooner or later. I'd much rather be able to control or cut down on the way that Firefox automatically schedules the whole live bookmark loading/reloading as such, considering it's my one and only RSS feed client.

 

• Options Menu
  
  Sums up access to possible options pages of all the extensions you have installed and puts them under a single options sub-menu entry for easier access. Again, it's not like the regular Extensions window wouldn't work well, but...

 

• Download Embedded
  
  Puts an icon into the status bar that indicates embedded objects on a webpage, and enables you to download them directly if you want. I have yet to use this to actually download something, I'm mostly using it to see more clearly what exactly any embed on a given page is (and possibly block it through Adblock).

 

• Domain Details
  
  Adds a context menu that points to domain detail lookup pages, so that you can easily access a target website's statistics and owner information. For The Interested Geek Babe Who Has Everything Already™.

 

• View Dependencies
  
  Expands the View Page Source/View Page Info context menu with an overview about which parts of the current page are called from where exactly, which to me seems to be something that belongs into that same window by design already. Also very useful for the ambitious Adblock user who likes to get a grip on what is what.

 

• X-Ray
  
  Puts the HTML markup tags right into the webpage rendering view, to make you see in context what a page element is made up of. It's not exactly transparent and thus of limited usefulness, I'm still playing with it and contemplating keeping or kicking this extension.
  

So there you have it... By gosh, you've read this up to here? Wow, you must be seriously bored. Thanks for reading nonetheless though.


hugs, Mandy