The Blog of Brad
Posts tagged firefox
Greasemonkey Scripts
Dec 11th
Greasemonkey is a useful extension for Firefox, however this week, I saw that Mitchell McKenna (@MitchellMckenna) mentioned that Chrome now installs Greasemonkey scripts. If you aren’t fully aware of the power of Greasemonkey take a look here (link here).
First off, the best place I’ve found to get GM scripts is userscripts.org, a (mostly) free and open-source community.
- YouTube Auto Buffer & Auto HD & Remove Ads (link here) – this delivers what it’s name promises.
- Gmail Unread Message Count in Favicon (link here) – I’ve used this for YEARS with Gina Trapani (@ginatrapani) ’s Better GMail FireFox extension too, however it works great in Chrome without Better GMail.
- PDF/PPT/TIF view in Google Docs (link here) – This is THE plugin I can’t live without for Windows; I use my laptop as a sidekick to my desktop and don’t want to mess it up with Adobe Reader and files on the hard disk. This script opens PDF links that you click on in Google Docs viewer.
Ninite Application Installer
Oct 25th
This week has been an interesting week: it’s been Windows 7 week! I chose not to write about Windows 7 this week because for most people it’s not big news –I’ve had it for months from MSDN, a lot of those who care have tried the betas, and most “regular” people don’t upgrade their operating systems until they get a new computer. However it’s worth mentioning that there is a great service out there that will be useful for those reinstalling their OSes (recommended as opposed to an in-place upgrade for Windows 7), reinstalling your Vista or XP install, or just got a new computer and need to get all of your applications on your computer. Ninite has a solution for you.
Ninite, a new service that allows you to check-off what software you’d like to batch-install, creates an executable that takes care of downloading and installing the applications you chose from the list that they provide. However there are free and open source programs on this service, you can also get paid software such as Microsoft Office 2007 Standard, which just downloads a trial of it, allowing you to activate it using your purchased product key.
As I said before, this site creates a batch installer mini-program that takes care of downloading and installing your applications. I should clarify that the application you download from this site is small, less than a megabyte (165KB in my case). When this program is executed it does the downloading, meaning that this will not install applications offline such as downloading this on a computer with an internet connection and trying to install applications on a PC without an internet connection won’t work and trying to use this to install applications on a PC with a slow internet connection won’t be beneficial.
Here is how the interface works:
And this is what the installer app looks like in Windows 7:
I give this service top marks for it’s usefulness, uniqueness, ease-of-use, and wide selection of applications. However I’m interested to see if they will offer a way to do offline installs of applications (a lot more useful if performing a lot of installs on a lot of machines).
Haiku Alpha 1 Released
Sep 21st
I’ve written many times about the media operating system from the ’90s, BeOS, and it’s open-source project that continues code base development, Haiku. On September 14 Haiku Inc released the first alpha of the Haiku OS in a very open-source-y press release (to paraphrase the press release) “take a look at what we’ve done, it’s not done yet, but the more people use it, the more it will be developed and debugged”. I’ve been playing with this for a few days and am actually writing this post using the BeZilla/BonEcho browser on Haiku. It’s interesting. [release note] More >
Firefox Extension: Tree Style Tabs
Apr 16th
I heard this recommendation on Leo Laporte and Steve Gibson’s Security Now podcast (episode ##) for a Firefox addon called Tree Style Tabs which is just about the most UI concept I’ve ever seen. (Given that it does almost have a terminal-esque geeky feel to it, so this is not universally grandma-friendly). Basically, this just moves the tabs from the tab-bar to a tree-list on the side of your browser (btw, because of the tree-list metaphore created back in the ’90′s, that means you have parent and children items..). See the screen shots below and get your copy free for Firefox 2.0 and 3.0 here… More >
Firefox Extension: Googlepedia
Apr 16th
I have to draw notice to this AMAZING Firefox addon, Googlepedia, this gives the user ~80% more Wikipedia-age per search (as we know, the top results to Googles searches are frequently Wikipedia links) by transforming the normally useless right half of the Google search result page into a Wikipedia viewer. This is part of my computer essentials which I HAVE to install before I even consider using. Get it for free
