The Wiert Corner – irregular stream of stuff

Jeroen W. Pluimers on .NET, C#, Delphi, databases, and personal interests

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Archive for the ‘Web Browsers’ Category

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Personal Blocklist (by Google) – Chrome Web Store

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/02/18

The new Personal Blocklist extension for Google Chrome allows you to block certain patterns from the Google search results.

Ideal for those “link aggregation” sites that Google itself does not block yet.

The input from this tool will be used to improve the Google Search results for others tool.

The personal blocklist extension will transmit to Google the patterns that you choose to block. When you choose to block or unblock a pattern, the extension will also transmit to Google the URL of the web page on which the blocked or unblocked search results are displayed. You agree that Google may freely use this information to improve our products and services.

–jeroen

via Personal Blocklist (by Google) – Chrome Web Store.

Posted in Chrome, Power User, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

Chrome will never add Find-As-You-Type to the Chromium core

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/01/24

To quote the comment below:

we have no plans to ever add FAYT to the core product.

Wow, that is a pretty strong statement.
The core chromium team somehow seems heavily opposed to FAYT, a feature you see more and more in modern products (not only browsers, also word processors, web sites, software development IDEs, etc).
Some people might know FAYT as “incremental search“, or “type ahead find“.

I’m wondering about the cause of this very strong statement.
Did some portion of the comment thread in the bug report seriously piss someone off at the Chromium team?
Are there technical objections?
Are there any usability objections?

It is a real pity that the Chromium team doesn’t go into more detail as to why the object to adding FAYT into the core.

The bug report is not the only thread about this, there is at least this help forum thread on it too.
Both are from 2008 (hey: that is ancient in internet years!) and are still active, so there clearly is demand for FAYT.

Internet Explorer does not have FAYT in its core either, but does Chrome really want to be compared with that?

Luckily, there are two FAYT extensions:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chrome, Power User, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

SEO guys taking over Google results: Search Filter and Stackoverflowizer Chrome extension

Posted by jpluimers on 2011/01/14

Over at least the last year, I keep adding more and more “site:domainname” clauses to my Google search queries because somehow content scrapers somehow rank higher in the Google results than the original content.

Some domainnames I often used because of good content:

  • stackoverflow.com
  • microsoft.com
  • wikipedia.org
  • apple.com
  • reference.com
  • …

Others too noticed the SEO guys are steadily taking over Google results: Jeff Atwood just wrote a great article on this topic (with an even greater list of comments), and there is even a Stackoverflowizer app redirecting back from the scrape sites back to the content!

The world upside down, but maybe this is some good news:
an opportunity for other search engines to fill the gap.
And it looks like they do, and Vivek Wadhwa wrote a nice article on those too.

There is an opportunity for browser extensions too, so here are some Google Chrome extensions:

Be prepared to fill your machines with some more memory as browser plugins do eat some.

–jeroen

Posted in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Power User, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/09/27

Currently this is FireFox-only.
I hope someone ports this to a Chrome extension and Internet Explorer plugin: HTTPS Everywhere | Electronic Frontier Foundation.

–jeroen

Posted in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, LifeHacker, Power User, Web Browsers | 1 Comment »

Solution: Can’t paste on a web-site with Ctrl-V

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/16

Quite a few web sites have fields where you cannot paste with Ctrl-V.
I don’t know why: pasting text input is a great way to speed up your work.

A solution for most of them: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Keyboards and Keyboard Shortcuts, Power User, Web Browsers, Windows | 1 Comment »

Bleeding Edge: Vodafone UMTS caused WordPress.com “edit link” to be broken in Google Chrome. #fail

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/07/05

Last week I wrote about Bleeding Edge: version WordPress.com “edit link” broken in latest Google Chrome stable build – or is Vodafone causing this? #fail.

Since then I have researched this further: I verified that the http://1.2.3.4/bmi-int-js/bmi.js link indeed was caused by Vodafone.

They use a mechanism of directing all HTTP traffic through a transparent proxy and rewriting both the HTML and images in compressed form in order to save bandwidth.

There are a few problems with this:

Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bookmarklet, Power User, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

Bookmarklets: empower your webbrowser

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/06/02

Next to Greasemonkey – the script engine that empowers FireFox and Chrome, there is another very powerful way to enhance your browser:
Bookmarklets.

Bookmarklets are like shortcuts, but they don’t point to a static URL: they add action, usually by some JavaScript.

If the bookmarklet returns a string, then the browser will follow that as a URL.
But the since bookmarklet  has access to the current page, it can also perform just a local action.

The cool thing is that most bookmarklets work on almost any popular browser.

These are a few bookmarklets that I use on a regular base, most are from bookmarklets.com: Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Bookmarklet, Conference Topics, Conferences, Development, Event, Power User, Software Development, Web Browsers, Web Development | Leave a Comment »

Maximum URL lengths

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/04/20

A client recently asked me what space should reserve to store URLs in their DBMS.

The plurality in the topic title is a hint: different systems have different limits on URL lengths.

But first:

Don’t use long URLs

If you use long URL’s (longer than say a coupe of 100 characters), then usually you have a problem.

First of all: short URL’s are easier to remember, index and search.

Second: long URL’s can pose problems.
It might be that your browser and server support them.
But a user might be behind an intercepting proxy (sometimes invisible to both you and your user) that imposes a URL limit.

In stead of long URLs with a HTTP GET, use shorter URLs with a HTTP POST. Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in .NET, ASP.NET, Delphi, Development, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera, Safari, Web Browsers, Web Development | 8 Comments »

gmail harmless error message when editing settings: “Your changes have not been saved. Discard changes?”

Posted by jpluimers on 2010/01/28

When you edit your gmail settings, recently you often  get this message if you move the focus away from the settings pane:

Your changes have not been saved.
Discard changes?

The odd thing is that the settings are indeed saved just before you move the focus away.

So I always wondered if the message can be really ignored, and this thread confirms the message indeed is harmless.

I do still wonder why I get this message mostly in FireFox and Internet Explorer, but almost never in Chrome :-)

–jeroen

Posted in Chrome, Chrome, Firefox, GMail, Google, Internet Explorer, Power User, Web Browsers | Leave a Comment »

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