Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on November 09, 2007 by CyberNet.

We just wrote about how Gmail 2 breaks a lot of the Greasemonkey scripts that are available, and Gina from Lifehacker turned right around and released Better Gmail 2. As expected this version only has a fraction of scripts that the original extension had, and it still lacks some of my favorites: Google Calendar integration, Google Reader integration, and Folders4Gmail. None of those scripts have been made compatible with Gmail 2 yet.

One script that I have to have is one for automatically inserting HTML signatures into my emails. The script I used previously wasn’t all that complicated, and I decided to go ahead and fix it myself. I took it one step further, however, and made it work with both the new version and the old version of Gmail.

Note: This script is designed to insert your signature at the beginning of replies/forwards, instead of at the end.

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Download and install Greasemonkey if you don’t already have it.
2. Install the script
3. You’ll need to have the HTML code for the signature that you want to insert. Once you have that just go to the Greasemonkey script manager and edit the script’s HTML signature. The code looks something like this (insert the signature where you see the green text):
   

   var htmlSignature = ‘<br>–<br>Ryan Wagner, Founder/Editor<br><a href=”http://cybernetnews.com/”>CyberNet Technology News</a><br><a href=”http://cybernetnews.com/”><img src=”http://feeds.feedburner.com/CyberNet.gif” style=”border:0″ alt=”CyberNet Technology News”/></a>‘;

   top.window.setTimeout(”top.window.frames[‘main’].frames[‘” + parent.name + “‘].document.getElementById(’hc_compose’).contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName(’body’)[0].innerHTML = ‘” + htmlSignature + “‘ + top.window.frames[‘main’].frames[‘” + parent.name + “‘].document.getElementById(’hc_compose’).contentWindow.document.getElementsByTagName(’body’)[0].innerHTML;”,500);

   var allBody = document.evaluate(”//body[@class=’editable tr-field’]“, document, null, XPathResult.UNORDERED_NODE_SNAPSHOT_TYPE, null);
   allBody.snapshotItem(0).innerHTML = htmlSignature + allBody.snapshotItem(0).innerHTML;

This script does work with Opera, but only with the older version of Gmail. I used a special Firefox-only searching property to insert the signature for the new version of Gmail, and the reason being that Gmail 2 has some issues in Opera. In fact Opera users won’t even see a link to the newer version of Gmail unless they are masking the browser as Firefox or IE.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Gmail HTML Signature BookmarkletHow to Insert HTML Signatures in GmailFeedBurner Headline Animator Stats Prove Its WorthNew: Gmail Color Coded LabelsCyberNotes: How To Create A Great Email Signature

This article was written on October 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

Mozilla made an announcement today regarding their future plans to deliver a Mobile Firefox. This isn’t the first time that we’ve heard of something like this from Mozilla, but this time they sound extremely serious.

There are already mobile Mozilla browsers available today, one of which is pictured above and is only available to Nokia N800 and N770 users. It offers full AJAX support, RSS feed previews, add-ons, and more.

There is also the Minimo browser for Pocket PC’s, and the recently released Joey service. Mozilla plans on continuing to develop Joey further, but Minimo is unfortunately getting kicked to the curb. I actually use Minimo as my main browser on my Pocket PC because it is one of the few free tabbed alternatives for Windows Mobile. Mozilla has said that Minimo was a valuable experiment that has given them information on how Gecko (Mozilla’s rendering engine) operates in mobile environments, but it will no longer be developed.

The best news they posted is the idea of Mobile Firefox having support for extensions. This could make it easy to integrate the browser into services like Flickr, Twitter, email accounts, and more without needing to install additional applications. This can be pretty amazing depending on how well Mozilla is able to implement it, and what kind of control they are able to give to developers.

Mozilla is expanding the team of contributors for the mobile project, but when is the Mobile Firefox release date? That’s a good question, and Mozilla has said that it will certainly not be before 2008. The mobile project will use new technology that won’t be available until after Firefox 3 ships, but they can probably pump out some barebones test versions by the middle of next year.

The inevitable question that comes to my mind now is how will this affect Opera Mini usage? Opera has almost been alone in this market for quite some time, but will Mozilla be able to capture the large market that Opera Mini already has? For last month Opera Mini had a 0.39% market share, which isn’t bad when that’s putting it up against desktop browsers like Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Source: Mozilla Blog & Download Squad
Thanks for the tip “s”!

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Mobile Firefox Mockups
• Firefox Mobile Progress Update
• Firefox 2.0 Beta 1 Slips To July 11
• Firefox 2.0 Alpha Set For February
• Firefox & Opera Users are the Most Apt to Update

This article was written on February 21, 2007 by CyberNet.

We’ve said enough about Snap Previews already, but it’s going to be mentioned once more.  This time around, there’s another option to getting previews that’s similar to Snap, but yet very different. It’s called iReader, and instead of the pop-up screenshot previews of linked sites, it gives you a preview in words.

iReader is made by Syntactica who previously had a run with a search engine which, according to Read/Write Web, got shut-down by Google. The linguistics behind that search engine have been put to use again with iReader. You can read in detail how it works here, but in a nutshell, it weighs parts of speech differently, and analyzes the concept in the context of the sentence structure. From that it determines what’s important, and turns it into a bulleted summary.

As far as previews go, I’d say it’s better than Snap for a few reasons.  First, the Snap Previews are so small that you really can’t see what you’d actually be getting into by clicking.  But more importantly, iReader is an extension for your browser which means you, the reader is in control.  It’s your choice if you’d like to use the tool or not, which is not the case with Snap where control lies in the hands of the publisher.

I installed it in my Firefox browser, but it’s also available for Internet Explorer and can be used on both a PC or a Mac. Now, would I actually use it? Probably not. When I hovered over a link, it took about three seconds for the preview to appear.  In that time, I probably could have actually clicked on the link which would be more useful than reading a summary.

Another issue that I ran into was that it started pulling information from sidebars.  For example, I tried it on CyberNet, and after hovering over a link, the first two bullets told me about CyberMarks which came from the left side column and had nothing to do with what I would have been clicking through to.

This browser extension is still in Beta which means it should only get better over time. If I had to pick between Snap Previews and iReader, it would definitely be the latter, but yet I still am not overly impressed. You can find the download for iReader here.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Snap Previews Much More Tolerable Now!
• Good-Riddance Snap Previews!
• CyberNotes: Interclue Puts the Information at your Fingertips
• CyberNotes: The Top 10 URL-Related Extensions for Firefox
• DiggReSS Does What Digg’s RSS Feed Should Do

This article was written on September 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Could you imagine having a browser without a bookmarking system? To me that would be like using a computer that doesn’t let you copy and paste…it’s almost impossible to fathom what that would be like! So I think it is safe to say that bookmarks are important for productivity, but the real question is, what can we do to make it better?

I crawled my way through all of the 218 bookmark-related Firefox extensions on the Mozilla add-ons site, and I quickly realized how poorly some of the extensions were categorized since many of them didn’t have much to do with bookmarking at all. I was able to find a pretty good amount of extensions though that I thought were pretty interesting.

–Synchronizing Bookmarks–

One of the most common things people want to do with their bookmarks is synchronize them with some online service. That way they can be accessed whether they are at work, home, or on the go.

There are several different services that can be used to store your bookmarks, and here’s a listing of what I believe are the best synchronizing extensions:

• GMarks (for Google Bookmarks) – This is my favorite Firefox extension for synchronizing bookmarks. It makes use of the Google Bookmarks system so that everything you bookmark is kept private, and it is packed with features. You can have your bookmarks in a toolbar or in the sidebar, and it’s capable of importing your existing Firefox bookmarks.
• Smarky (for Simpy) – This is based off of the GMarks extension mentioned above, except this one works with the Simpy bookmarking system.
• Del.icio.us (for Del.icio.us, duh) – This is a simple Firefox extension that’s used for managing your bookmarks on Del.icio.us. You can add a description, notes, and tags to each bookmark you save.
• Foxmarks (for Foxmarks or custom) – I really like this extension because it integrates right into your existing Firefox bookmarks. You can hardly notice that the extension is synchronizing your bookmarks, but it is. Lifehacker also has a great tutorial on how to setup Foxmarks to work with your own FTP.
• Clipmarks (for Clipmarks) – Clip certain sections of websites so that only the content you want is saved.

–Making Bookmarks More Productive–

Now on to more of the gems. Some of these extensions I had heard of, or even written about prior to this, but there are still several that I hadn’t seen. You may not need to use some of them now, but there are certain times when each would serve a useful purpose.

• Flat Bookmark Editor – This adds several fields to the bottom of the Bookmarks Manager so that you can edit the contents of a bookmark without having to pull up the properties. This is extremely useful if you’re trying to edit a bunch of bookmarks simultaneously.
  
• Speed Dial – The idea for this type of feature was originally from the Opera browser, but as expected, a version with slightly less features has also been turned into a Firefox extension. Using it, you can set some of your favorite sites to be displayed on a Speed Dial page.
  
• Visual Bookmarks – Have a hard time finding a site or image in your bookmarks? This could be just the solution since you can view all of the sites as thumbnails. Unfortunately this doesn’t integrate into the Firefox bookmark system so you’ll have to bookmark sites separately with this extension, but you can highlight certain portions of the screen that you want captured for the thumbnail.
  
• Bookmarks Duplicate Detector – When you reach a few hundred bookmarks, sometimes it is difficult to remember whether you’ve already bookmarked a site or not. Have no fear…Book Duplicate Detector will scour through your bookmarks looking for ones that point to the same address.
   
• Smart Bookmarks Bar – Sometimes you may want to put a lot of bookmarks on your toolbar, but the problem is that there just isn’t enough room. This extension will collapse all of your bookmarks down to just their icon, and when you hover over them with your mouse it will reveal their names.
  
• Bookmarks LInkChecker – You can check your bookmarks to see if the links have been broken. This should become part of your regularly scheduled maintenance.
  
• Enhanced Bookmark Search – This is a much more powerful search mechanism for finding bookmarks. You can even save searches into dynamically updating folders…it kind of reminds me of how the dynamic playlists in iTunes work.
  
• Dog Ears – This lets you bookmark your place on a page so that you can quickly jump to the important portions using the Shift+Spacebar hotkey.
  
• AddThis – Using this extension you can quickly bookmark a site on any number of different services.
  
• Bookmark Permissions – This lets you enable or disable certain options, such JavaScript, on a per bookmark basis. That way you can disable JavaScript system-wide, but enable it for the sites that you trust. Of course you’ll have to open the site using the bookmark in order for the settings to be applied.
   

–Overview–

I think I’ve covered almost all of the interesting bookmark-related extensions, but I would love to hear of any others you can come up with. Don’t forget to checkout our URL-related extensions as well, but even more importantly, make sure that your Firefox extensions don’t have memory leaks.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• What do you want your Firefox to do?
• Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary
• CyberNotes: What Are Your Favorite Firefox Extensions
• Firefox Extension Finally Made For Google Bookmarks
• It Is Time To Get Your Flock On!

This article was written on July 23, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

The new Firefox 3 address bar is one of those things that you either love or hate, and it’s quite amazing how much buzz such a simple aspect of the browser can cause. The new address bar is often referred to as the AwesomeBar because of how useful it can be, but more officially it is considered the Smart Location Bar.

Why does the Smart Location Bar get so much attention? In most browsers the address bar only looks at the sites you’ve previously typed directly into the bar, but in Firefox 3 it also includes results from both your history and bookmarks. This kind of behavior definitely takes some getting used to, and it wasn’t until I had been using it for a few weeks that I really began to love it.

We’ve got a bunch of different things in store for you to today. To get the ball rolling we’re going to briefly explain how Firefox 3 calculates what results should be at the top of the address bar when you’re typing, and what should be at the bottom. Then we’ve got a bunch of tips on how you can tweak and alter various aspects of the location bar until it’s exactly what you want it to be.

–The Algorithm: Frecency–

Firefox 3 assigns a rank to every site that you visit, and it uses multiple criteria to do so. The two main things that factor into how a URL’s value is calculated are how often you visit that site in conjunction with when the site was visited. This value is often called the Frecency: frequency combined with recency.

That sounds simple enough, but as Mozilla’s documentation demonstrates there is a lot more to it. Bonuses are given to sites that you manually type into the address bar, bookmarks that you visit, and more. Plus more weight is given depending on whether you visited the URL in the last 4 days, 14 days, 31 days, or 90 days. All of this plays into what appears in the address bar when you start typing.

The good news is that you can essentially customize each aspect of the algorithm using about:config in the browser. If you pull up about:config and type frecency into the filter list you’ll find all of the different values associated with the algorithm. It’s helpful to know the formula used in the calculation because it will help explain what each of the different entries represent:

Visit Value = Bucket Weight * (Visit Bonus / 100)

The bucket weight values appear in in the about:config as firstBucketWeight, secondBucketWeight, and so on. These “buckets” correspond to the recency of your visit (4 days, 14 days, etc…) which can be adjusted with the firstBucketCutoff, secondBucketCutoff, etc… settings.

Visit bonuses are given to various URL’s depending on a variety of factors, including whether a site is bookmarked, whether it was visited by clicking a link, or whether it was visited by entering the address into the location bar. All of these values can be adjusted as well, and of them have the word “Bonus” on the end of them in the about:config frecency section.

–Deleting Entries & Resetting Stats–

Although the system seems overly complicated it’s pretty easy to mange what items appear. For example, I’ve read stories by several people saying that they don’t want results from their history showing up in the address bar because of questionable sites that they visit. Well, the results that are available are only those that are in your history, which means clearing out your history will wipe out those “questionable sites.”

You can do this in a variety of ways. If you want to wipe out your entire history (and therefore reset the stats) you can go to Tools -> Clear Private Data, and from there you can erase your browsing history among other things. Alternatively you can go to History -> Show All History where you can manage individual items, and you can also search through your entire history. Just select the items you want to remove and press the Delete key.

If you want a really fast way to remove items from your history you can use the… address bar! That’s right. Select an item from the address bar using the keyboard arrows, and then press the Delete key (Shift+Delete on a Mac) to see it get removed immediately.

–Removing History & Bookmarks–

If you don’t want the address bar searching both your history and bookmarks there is actually a quick fix. Open up the about:config, navigate to browser.urlbar.matchOnlyTyped, and change the value to true. Now the address bar will behave just like it did in Firefox 2 where it only searches those addresses you’ve typed into it.

–Removing Bookmarks–

Believe it or not you can prevent your bookmarks from showing up in the results without giving up the history results. Just open up the about:config and set places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus and places.frecency.bookmarkVisitBonus both to 0 (that’s the number zero). The next thing you’ll want to do is restart Firefox and clear your history. This is because Firefox has the frecency values stored, and without clearing the history your bookmarks will likely still show up.

Tip: If you want bookmarks appearing that you have visited only set the “unvisited” option to zero. That way your visited bookmarks will continue to show up as normal.

–Hide Unvisited Extension–

The Hide Unvisited add-on is similar to the method I described above for removing your bookmarks from the results, but it eliminates some of the hassle. What it does is set the following values in the about:config to zero:

• places.frecency.unvisitedTypedBonus
• places.frecency.unvisitedBookmarkBonus

After those have been set to zero it will erase the frecency values for the bookmarks that you haven’t visited before. This prevents you from having to wipe out your browser’s history in order to see the new values take effect.

This doesn’t, however, prevent your bookmarks from being displayed all together. This only affects those bookmarks that you haven’t visited since the last time you cleared your browser’s cache.

–Alter the Appearance–

The OldBar add-on for Firefox 3 won’t touch the address bar’s algorithm, but it will change the appearance to make the results look like they did in Firefox 2.

–Displaying Google Results–

We’ve supercharged the Firefox 3 address bar with our own homegrown CyberSearch extension. In a nutshell it lets you search Google and see the results right there in the address bar. It’s highly customizable and can make you a lot more productive.

–Distinguishing the Types of Results–

If you want it to be easier to recognize the different types of results in the address bar you may have to look no further than this style designed for the Stylish extension.If you don’t mind diving into the CSS code you can (of course) customize the color scheme, too. With it results from tags will be highlighted in light yellow, bookmarks in light blue, and history items in light green. Similarly our CyberSearch extension has a built-in customization option so that you can pick what background color its results use, and so this works well with it.

Thanks for the tip Mark! [via Ghacks]

–Overview–

Hopefully this article has helped you understand exactly how the Firefox 3 address bar functions, and how you can make it work for you. Be sure to checkout our other Firefox 3 tips, and let us know in the comments how you’ve gone about customizing the address bar.

Copyright © 2009 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

• Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary
• Tweaking Firefox To Load Pages Faster
• Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary
• Update For Tweaking The Session Restore In Firefox 2
• Your Week in Review with Sunday’s Summary