Browser plugin Cooliris (formerly known as PicLens) has been mentioned several times on MakeUseOf but never covered in detail. So for those who are hearing this name for the first time, Cooliris is a plugin which is compatible with Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer. It prides itself by enhancing your browsing experience when it comes to viewing photos on certain Cooliris-enabled sites (elaborated below) and when watching video clips on YouTube.
Advertisements have become an inevitable part of our life, invading almost every realm. Sometimes they are harmless and easily ignored, but they can appear outright annoying and then again some ads may be too tempting to pass on. But honestly, how often did you find random ads useful?
On the internet it’s not always possible to avoid banners, ads or pop-ups. Firefox offers several different ways to control what is shown to you and what will remain hidden, blocked or covered.
Per default, Firefox can block pop-ups, not load images, and not run Java or JavaScript.
A Firefox Quick Search is one of the coolest Firefox features and at the same time the least known one. Using Quick Search feature you can search a website of your choice directly from the Firefox address bar.
So instead of say going to www.youtube.com and then searching for standup comedy, you can set up a Firefox Quick Search for Youtube and then type in the address bar y standup comedy. Hit enter and you will be taken straight to the search results on Youtube.com.
I personally hate printing content directly from the web - even if the page “has been formatted for printing.” This is because it seems web designers and corporations alike do not care about the environment or your wallet (ink is expensive!).
They wind up printing advertisements at the bottom of your printouts or some times even (gasp!) in the middle of your content.
I found a site via the Make Use Of Directory this morning that has greatly improved my quality of printing. With this nifty little site you can either use their website or save a bookmarklet that lets you launch PrintWhatYouLike on the site you are viewing by clicking it.
The standard search box in Safari is pretty simple. Type in your search query and hit Enter. Boom! View the results from Google. Well, that’s only if you’re quite certain about what you’re searching for. What if you’re in that zone when you’re looking for something but you aren’t really sure what it’s called or which keywords to type in? Search suggestions are what you need. Maybe a more powerful search box?
Here are two search enhancement plugins for Safari which will improve its search function by leaps and bounds. Find out which is better!
It has been several weeks since the launch of Google Chrome, we did several articles covering it already. So probably most of you will have heard of it, downloaded it and used it by now. If you love the Chroming experience and want to get more out of it, here are seven less obvious, but useful features that you can hack into your Google Chrome and improve your Chroming experience.
Ten years ago, nobody ever considered having a website with videos. The enormous size of the multimedia files would make the site almost impossible to access, considering how slow the internet connection was at that time.
There were many tweaks invented in order to survive the snail-like internet connection speed in the past. Some were just bogus tricks to make the user feel it was going faster, others went further by optimizing the data traffic to make the most of the limited ability.
To me the Firefox search bar is an indispensable tool and one of the few features that I cannot part with. Now of course I’m talking about my modified version of it. The default version is pretty good already, but there are still a few things that can be improved. Here are five steps anyone can take to improve their search experience.
It’s tedious to take your mouse and move it up into the toolbar to hit the search bar when all you want to do is look something up real quick. Instead click [CTRL] + [K] to instantly find your cursor in the search bar and use [Ctrl] + [DOWN] or [CTRL] + [UP] to navigate through your search engines.
No, don’t get excited, Google hasn’t released the Mac and Linux versions of its new browser just yet, but here’s the next best thing. The good folks over at Code Weavers have come out with a way to run the Windows version of Google’s Chrome on non-Windows computers. They’ve used Wine to make it run on the other OS’s and they’ve called their creation Cross Over Chromium.
I’m running a Mac, so I’ll be talking only about the Mac version here, but I would guess the Linux version can’t be too different.
The one and ONLY thing I like about the Opera browser is its ’speed dial’ feature, where you can click on thumbnails of websites and be taken to those sites immediately. I loved having my favourite websites on the screen as pictures that I could just click with my mouse. So a few weeks back, I decided to see if there was a similar function available for Firefox. I finally settled upon Fast Dial, speed dial for Firefox. I now love it so much I can’t live without it.
Google’s new browser Chrome is causing quite a stir, especially among people worried about privacy and security.
As I have mentioned in my previous article about Chrome, every installation of Chrome receives a unique ID number, which is submitted to Google, for example when the browser is updated or when the program crashes. In order to present personalized suggestions while the user is typing into the Omnibox, Google relies on an outside database. To feed the database and make these personalized suggestions possible, all entries are logged in combination with the user’s IP address.
If you have used Quicksilver on Mac, Launchy on Windows or GnomeDo on Linux and you love the user experience, then I’m sure you will love Ubiquity too. Ubiquity is an experimental Firefox extension that uses a command pane to help you get information quickly or to get a job done easily.
Once you have installed the extension, you will be brought to the Welcome page where you can configure the shortcut key to activate the command pane. I changed the hotkey to Ctrl+Alt+Space since the default shortcut key Alt + Space conflicted with one of my Ubuntu shortcut key. If you are Windows user, most likely your default hotkey is Ctrl + Space. Mac user should be able to access it via Cmd + Space
Those of you who have been reading MakeUseOf know that Google isn’t the only search search engine on earth. We have talked about some cool search engines to remember and also how you can create your own search engine with ROLLYO. Hittery is a new app which joins this league of websites. It isn’t a new kind of search engine but in fact a custom search dashboard with some unique features which could prove to be super helpful.
Who doesn’t love watching videos online ? Whether it’s a video of a recent live concert, your favorite song or a tutorial on something, you name it and you’ll find the video on the popular video sites. This is the reason why YouTube is one of the top 3 websites on the internet. It just seems to have all your favorite videos and hence you love spending time on it.
You’ll never see me driving around in a pimped out car, but tweaking the looks of my computer and everything on it is a whole different case altogether.
When you surf around the web long enough, it will happen. It’s just a matter of time. Sooner or later you’ll arrive on this God awful website that’ll make you scream out in terror and hide beneath your desk. For some reason or another, some people just can’t grasp the concept of design.
User, meet Stylish. Stylish is a Firefox add-on. It’ll enhance your browser experience. Stylish uses simple, user-submitted CSS scripts (similar to Greasemonkey) to tweak the looks of certain websites.
There are dozens of ways to boost your productivity, and we tell you plenty. But have you ever just looked at that and said “Gee, I just don’t have time to do that” or you just don’t want to use some new alpha beta whatchamacallit. Lucky for you, there are some simple everyday things you can do to make doing whatever easier and faster.
1. Sort Bookmarks - This might take a little time if you already have a lot of bookmarks, but it will help you find the site you want faster.
Firefox is close to our hearts. In the past, we’ve reviewed a number of Firefox add-ons here on Make Use Of. Any guesses what this article is about? Yes, you’ve guessed it - it’s the ever popular Firefox add-ons list compilation.
However this time, its a list with a difference. The add-ons in this list are the Winners of the Extend Firefox contest organised by Mozilla Labs.
The add-ons are classified into three categories.
Pencil is a GUI prototyping and diagramming add-on. This means that you can use Pencil to create mockups of windows, buttons, panes etc. Some of the features of Pencil are:
A Firefox extension called iMacros will save you some time by recording a group of routine tasks in Firefox and letting you repeat them whenever you want, with absolutely no programming required!
Once you get the hang of it, you can do more than just repeat a set of steps, and start scripting some very complex tasks in Firefox. You can call your mini-program from a library which goes in the sidebar on the left side of the screen. Or you can bookmark your macro: it behaves just like any other bookmark in your list (it can be organized and tagged, put in the bookmarks toolbar, etc.) but calls your macro instead of a web page.
Web 2.0 has enabled us to connect with people around the world easier than ever. Social networks such as MySpace and Facebook, sites like Digg, Stumbleupon and Twitter have unraveled a new world and helped foster huge communities of internet users who work together when they are online.
Browzmi is a web app which takes things a step further and intends to make the basic process of casual surfing on the internet an interactive and engaging one, where you can have your friends see what you are surfing and vice versa. It’s simply exploring the web with your friends and getting involved in a healthy discussion about your likes and dislikes about a particular website.
KallOut is a very simple, yet very functional, Windows program. For highlighted text in many programs (including Firefox, Adobe Acrobat, Internet Explorer, Microsoft Office and Notepad) it puts a small icon next to the highlighted words, which looks like this 
. When you hover your mouse over that icon, it gives you a menu to look up the selected text in many popular services like Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, eBay and many more.
Also with the BestGuess™ feature, KallOut even analyzes the content you’ve selected and suggests the most relevant places to search for that phrase.
I love Firefox and I love extensions!
There I said it. I am an extension junkie!
I did a clean install today on a new laptop and I decided to document some of my favorite Firefox extensions. But before we get into the list …
I wanted to warn you that each additional extension you install uses more memory and can slow down your Firefox or computer. So try out as many as you want, keep what you need and disable/uninstall the ones you don’t to keep your fox running nice and quick.
It may sound like a threat, but the internet is not quite everywhere, yet. So what do you do when there’s no internet available to you? First, take a deep breath!
The answer is actually quite simple. You plan ahead and take the internet with you. Or at least parts of it. It may not be an efficient way to cater your online cravings, but you may finally catch up on some long due reading and best of all, it’s free.
I have two alternatives for you, and I will start with the smaller solution.
You have to give it to Opera; it’s stayed in there.
Starting as a research project in 1994, Opera has been responsible for some world changing innovations (think tabbed browsing) and yet never seemed to achieve the kind of success it deserved.
But this isn’t a history lesson, it’s an article on a few of the killer features of Opera that keep me using it each day. I use Firefox and Flock pretty frequently as well, but Opera, as of version 9.5 has become my favourite.
It’s time for another MakeUseOf Poll. This time instead of voting on the best program for the job we are asking you to tell us about your favorite shortcuts.
Like any other widely used piece of software Firefox has its own set of keyboard shortcuts. Some of them are quite popular while some are ones you may never have heard about. If you have been using Firefox for some time now I am sure you have your own must-use list. Tell us about them.
Yoono is a Firefox extension that works like a sidebar and lets you stay updated with friends and websites. You can stay connected with friends on social network websites such as Twitter, Facebook, Piczo, Flickr and Friendfeed. You can also talk to your friends using AIM, MSN and Yahoo Messenger using the widget. Yoono is a great extension if you want to save time switching between all the social network websites you use and keep less messenger programs running because of the built in instant messenger support. In a way Yoono is like Flock in the way that it keeps you connected with your social networks such as Flickr but I think Flock does a better job at it.
As you have probably guessed this poll is about browser toolbars. Do you have any browser toolbar installed ? Which one? Why do you use it? Share it with MakeUseof readers.
Note that we have listed only the popular ones here. I am pretty sure there are other great little-known toolbars we don’t know about. We are here to find them out. So if you aware of any good toolbar that might be helpful to others please post it in comments.
You can select up to 2 options!
Do you use any Browser Toolbar? If so, which one?
Total Voters: 492
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“Reclaim your Privacy!”
That is the claim of Xerobank, yet another group of software developers amongst the increasingly competitive world of web browsers. Firefox is now taking on close to 20% of the browsing market, Internet Explorer has 70% or so and Opera and Safari squabble over the rest.
XeroBank browser “is the most popular anonymous web browser in the world” according to the developers, and could be true. I’m Just not sure of too many other browsers competing in that space.
XeroBank uses two anonymity networks, Tor and XeroBank, to ensure completely anonymous browsing with secure and encrypted connections.
At heart I am a lazy computer user. When I want to do something on the computer, I either use keyboard shortcuts or I use a bookmarklet to achieve it. The last thing I want to do is go clicking around aimlessly for ages and ages……(zzzzz…..)
But as the web has evolved, some bookmarklets have become redundant as their use has become integrated into the web browser. For example, a bookmarklet to subscribe to a RSS feed is no longer necessary because in Firefox, you can now subscribe to a RSS feed by clicking the orange RSS logo in the Firefox URL address bar instead.
Does your ISP deliver the speed you pay for? It’s rather easy to test your broadband internet speed. However, there are a few things to keep in mind. For one, ISPs usually promise an “up to” speed, so you can’t expect top performance at all times, that’s part of the deal. During high traffic times your ISP will suffer from high loads and will certainly not be able to deliver the maximum speed. Thus you’d best perform different speed tests at different time points, to see whether you ever reach the top speed. Also, when running a speed test, make sure no other applications are using the internet, else the result will not be accurate.
Hooeey is a free service which lets you track and organize the websites you surf, on any computer. It goes one step ahead of Google Web History and stores all of your web history online in your Hooeey account which then lets you access it from any computer. It can be a pretty cool service especially for those who spend a lot of time online doing research and may forget to manually bookmark the sites.
Here on Make Use Of, we’ve talked about start pages several times before, and we’re doing it again now. This time, it’s about Feedly.
Nick mentioned Feedly in the comments of this Make Use Of article and the fact that it’s just a Firefox extension caught my eye. I checked it out immediately and I was pleasantly surprised. Feedly is like a browser start page – but it works from your local computer. It’s touted as a social and magazine-like start page and I must say it lives up to its name.
You probably use Firefox. Why? Probably because you’re a smart cookie and you know that it’s faster, more secure, and all that jazz. Well, I’ve grown tired of that. I want Firefox to be the most fun browser to use. I want to trick people into getting blown up with my browser!
What? I can do that? With PMOG, it’s possible!
PMOG, which stands for “Passively Multiplayer Online Game,” is a 200k browser add-on for Firefox that makes social browsing a lot more fun and interesting. Sign up and install the toolbar and you’re on your way to underhanded online fun. How does it work?
From the perspective of a downloader, there are two species of files roaming around the virtual world: the easy ones and the difficult ones. While the members of the first set of species are easy to handle - ‘Right Click’ then ‘Save As’ and they are all yours, the members of the second set of species appear to be impossible to download. Videos and other multimedia files usually fall into this second category.
We have already covered the Read it Later Firefox extension twice before, once when I wrote about some time-saving Firefox extensions and also when Mark wrote about the benefits of this extension.
But now this wonderful extension has been updated for Firefox 3 and in a big way. It brings some awesome new features which, I am sure, could make it one of the most popular extensions for Firefox 3.
So without any further delay, here are the power packed features of this updated extension.
We have previously discussed browser start pages and we have found that there are many options from which we can choose from. However ClutterMe is a start page which intends to stand out from the crowd.
I think ClutterMe is certainly one of the simplest yet very effective start pages available. Instead of just praising on it, I’ll immediately start with its features so that you can see what exactly I am talking about.
That’s right. ClutterMe allows you to just click and write anywhere on the page. Once you are finished writing, it will save it for you. Therefore you can take notes on your start page in the simplest possible manner.
There are many different scenarios behind broken links, dead websites or 404 errors. For one, the server could in fact be down or overloaded. Especially popular sites like Facebook or Twitter are often slow and timed out when hit by the masses. The same is true for pages that receive a short-lived hype via Digg, Del.icio.us and the like.
On the other hand it may be an issue on your side. Just think of a bumpy ISP or a bad wireless connection. In any case, it’s annoying when you cannot access a website, and constantly hitting the reload button doesn’t make it any better.
Here are three Firefox addons to ease your mind.
Does this bug you as much as it bugs me?
http://www.howmuchlongercanmyurlsget.com/before/Igo/totally/insane.htm
If you’re blogging or uploading files frequently, passing out lengthy links to your posts can get pretty tedious. That’s where URL truncator services come in, stepping up to provide a shorter link that’s easier to remember and share. There are a ton of options out there, and most have something unique to offer.
Probably the best known truncator around, TinyURL offers the features most people are looking for: an easy to remember domain name, fairly short (though at 6 characters it’s double what some create) identifier, and a preview page for your shortened link by using “preview.tinyurl.com/[link]“. Their page also automatically copies the new URL to your clipboard, and they offer a bookmarklet.
When it comes to your security, no web browser is perfect - and no malware app is going to catch everything. I came across BufferZone Free a few weeks ago and have been running it since, and I’m pretty impressed.
BufferZone adds another layer of protection to your browser by setting up a sandbox (an isolated “virtual directory” on your hard drive). As Trustware puts it, the program “transparently redirects modifications in your PC to a virtual, isolated environment, so that unauthorized modifications cannot be applied to your actual PC.” Malicious apps can’t write changes to your actual system files or registry - only BufferZone’s virtualized versions. Anything you download - temp files, images, executables, you name it - gets sandboxed. Why is that a big deal?
If you happen to be one of the many people who use their built-in mobile web browser to check your e-mail, chances are you get frustrated by that little scroll wheel or tiny scrollbar when trying to move around inside the page.
If you’ve used the web-based version of Gmail on your mobile browser you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. Like when you open an e-mail, read its contents, then decide you want to archive or delete it; you usually have to scroll nearly all the way down to the bottom and click on the appropriate link or whatever other link you were trying to click. This can be quite awkward if you’re reading an e-mail that your sister sent you that’s 45 pages long and you’re just trying to easily delete or archive it. In last month’s Gmail podcast, Chuck Tomasi talked about a feature he calls “Speed Dialing”.
Well, my two week descent into unusability and lack of functionality that is Safari, is finally over.
About two weeks ago I undertook to stick to Safari all the time, 24 hours a day/7 days a week, while at home. Thank goodness I had an oasis of sanity every weekday when I went in to work. As slow as my office computer is (P4 with 384M of ram) it was a relief to be able to drag my mouse backwards to return to the previous page.
Think you are safe on the internet because you use Firefox? Think again. With the market share of Firefox increasing daily - more malware and virus authors (and websites) are exploiting this browser to spread their wares.
Fortunately, the open nature of Firefox typically makes fixes come shortly after a vulnerability is discovered, and also allows for addons which can further increase your security online.
Here is a short list of top scripts to help you keep safe while browsing the web. Some of these may exchange usability for security, so see what works for you and go with it!
The mobile web is starting to really take off. More websites started to offer mobile versions, new mobile apps released on a daily basis, mobile browsers getting better, etc. To sum up, more and more people access internet from mobile phones. If you got a blackberry, iPhone or any kind of smartphone, here are a couple of tools and websites to get you started.
OperaMini - Mobile Browser
I’ve been a Firefox user for a few years now, since it came out really, and I love it. It’s a great browser and the extensions can turn it into anything you want it to be, from an FTP client to a multiplayer pong game.
I’ve been using a Mac for a little over a year now and while I’ve opened Safari a few times for fun, I’ve never used Apple’s built-in browser for any real length of time. I decided a few days ago to see — just for the heck of it — whether I could use Safari exclusively at home for two weeks. While I certainly do miss Firefox and all it’s great, useful extensions, the challenge is made a little easier because of Safari’s speed. I haven’t done any scientific experimentation, but it is my impression that Safari is faster than Firefox.
Opera is a very overlooked web browser in my opinion. It has some nice features and it’ s really fast at browsing the web too. OK, the widgets don’t integrate into Opera as well as add-ons for Firefox but they’re still pretty damn cool and Opera doesn’t need to be restarted when they’re installed unlike Firefox.
In this post I will discuss a few cool widgets that I have stumbled upon while browsing the Opera Widgets archive.
(1) PageRank Widget
Page Rank is a cool little widget that you can download within Opera that lets you calculate the Page Rank of any website within seconds.
If you’ve been following my articles on Make Use Of for any length of time, you’ll know that I am a big Firefox nut. But every now and then, I will break out the Opera browser on my PC. Even though Firefox regularly steals the limelight, Opera still has a smaller cult following and it’s only right that we begin to recognise that and give it the attention it rightly deserves.
So since 10% of you said in our recent poll that you preferred Opera as your browser, I decided for a while to lower my Firefox fanboy gushing and start to look at some other browsers. So let’s start with Opera.
I’ve previously written about how you can save and monitor bandwidth when using Firefox. In that post, I wrote about a few settings that you can alter and a few extensions that you can install for optimising bandwidth usage. Now, I’d like to introduce a relatively unknown Firefox extension called Better Cache to all of you.
For those of you who don’t know, the cache is a place on your hard disk where Firefox stores the websites you’ve visited temporarily. Firefox caches visited sites so that when you access them the next time after you’ve closed them, it need not download the page again. This saves you potential bandwidth. But the downside is that the cached version will not display the recent changes to the site (meaning you need to refresh the page).
If you browse the internet on a regular basis (and which Make Use Of reader doesn’t?), it doesn’t take long to stack up a big list of website URL’s that you will want to check up on later. The default bookmarking feature in the Firefox browser only takes you so far, so let’s take a look at some ways to better organize your growing bookmark collection, whether it’s synchronizing with another computer or just accessing the links a little bit easier.
1. Foxmarks : The Add-on Multiple Computer Users Can’t Live Without
The mobile web is really taking off. There are a ton of startups exploiting this very market, and it’s only going to get more and more competitive.
With lots of mobile users in the US, unlimited internet and wi-fi enabled phones; browsing the web can be quite the experience. If you don’t have Opera on your phone, chances are you’re using a crappy built-in browser that rarely, if ever, renders pages correctly. That’s where Mowser steps in.
In previous articles, we looked at the essential shortcuts for Gmail, Google Reader and Google Calendar. Today, we’re going to look at the king of the internet - Firefox.
Instead of just wildly throwing a list of shortcuts at you, I’m going to give you scenarios where you may use them and you can then see how you can easily remember them. I’ll also only give you what I think are the really important ones, the ones I use on a daily basis to whizz my way around the Fox.
Your Firefox hasn’t been re-started in hours. It’s running continuously, you’re surfing around websites, and of course you’ve wasted lots of time. You could have instead spent that time doing something good and productive, rather than just flying around worthless sites.
Here are four neat Firefox extensions and 1 desktop app that help you track the time you spend online. They even give you reports so you can watch out and make efficient use of your time by cutting down on wandering around sites that are of no use.
LeechBlock can be set to block websites from loading in Firefox.
Last week, I was hunting around for a few extensions that may help me gain some more viewing space in Firefox. I have a few toolbars and around ten extensions installed whose configurations and buttons seemed to have loaded up the interface with a lot of junk. Moreover, I don’t really use the default options and buttons presently in the Firefox window that much. So I wanted to hide them and make my browsing a better experience.
Here are a few tweaks and extensions to help gaining more space for viewing websites in Firefox:
With all the hype about Adobe AIR and Prism by Mozilla Labs, I thought that I would write something about Fluid. Squeezed between the middle of the two, Fluid offers Site-Specific Browsing for Mac OS X Leopard. Fluid lets you turn any Web service to a desktop application, with its own Dock icon and menu bar.
| This happens many times to me: I search on Google for a problem I’m having with my computer, click on a search result, reach the site (most of the time, it’s a forum), and boom! I have to register in order to view the solution on the page. Or worse, on some occasions, they want me to pay them to view the page. |
But instead I have tried ways to bypass such sign up forms. Here are a few tips for you:
These days, though internet connection speeds have advanced, there are people out there who are using limited connection that come with a monthly bandwidth cap. In such cases when the user goes over the limit for that time period, he is usually surprised with a hefty bill at the end of the month. If your monthly bandwidth is limited here are some tools to help you reduce and monitor your bandwidth consumption.
iTunes is not the best or even one of the faster music players out there but it is definitely one of the most popular ones. If you’re using iTunes as your primary music player then here are some addons to improve your iTunes experience. On the other hand, if your iPod is the only reason you keeping it then check out some equally good alternatives in our iPod Tools roundup.
(1) iTunes Sync - Sync iTunes with other MP3 players
Firefox may be my browser of choice but there are times when it is REALLY slow, so slow in fact that I am sorely tempted to defect to Opera or even *gasp*