Firefox for power users, part 2

15 May 2005 Apple Internet Microsoft Firefox

Here are a few more useful bits and pieces to improve you browsing experience if you’re a Firefox user.

GreaseMonkey

This great extension provides a framework that allows scripts to run against web pages from your own machine. The upshot of this is…

Linkify turns anything that isn’t a hyper link but looks like it should be into one
Butler removes advertisements from Google while providing second opinion search links to other engines
Gmail: Smart-Delete button adds a useful missing button to the Gmail interface
Google Maps: Mouse wheel zooming does what it says on the tin
Google Suggest adds the still-in-beta search prompting feature to the main Google interface

There are many many more at GreaseMonkeyUserScripts.

CuteMenus

Put icons next to some menu items to bring the UI a bit more in line with Microsoft’s tools.

FlashGot

Download multiple files, images etc. from a single click.

Other browsers

Mac users may want to check out Camino which uses the Gecko rendering engine inside a native Cocoa application. It’s pretty fast and cool although it can’t use any of the Firefox plug-ins. Another alternative browser is OmniWeb which uses the Safari rendering engine but provides many more useful commands, options and facilities than Safari itself.

Microsoft fans will have to wait a little longer until the public Internet Explorer 7 betas turn up. We’ve been promised fixed PNG transparencies and improved CSS handling. In related news Bill Gates has been trying Firefox…

Postfix

Just a quick note to praise the free Windows blogging application Zoundry that allows WYSIWYG style editing. I’ve managed to use it to clean up some of the previous postings too. Now if only it had a spell checker and auto-pasted in the clipboard URL when you create a hyper link…

My Visual Studio 2005 Beta 2 DVDs arrived Saturday free of charge courtesy of Microsoft. I’ve just installed them alongside SQL Developer 2005 and will hopefully be posting some tit-bits soon. One heads up is to install IIS before VS2005. The VS2005 installer won’t warn you or error however the SQL 2005 installer will tell you it’s a prerequisite if you want Reporting Services. If you install IIS after VS2005 and before SQL 2005 you’ll receive an unidentified error for the Reporting Services installation.

[)amien