My attempts at looking for a way around this problem yielded a way of switching on developer mode for Chrome and then using a Userscript to do the same thing.

Unfortunately, the whole process is rather clunky and did not really work. Happily, I stumbled upon something called Privoxy, and it’s an absolute godsend which I will now heartily recommend to anybody who’s on the Internet often. Even if you have adblock software installed on Firefox, you should check out Privoxy all the same because it’s a whole new concept of Internet filtering.

First let’s introduce Privoxy and what it is capable of. It is an advanced non-caching web proxy with filtering capabilities allowing you to directly modify HTTP headers and controlling access. The advanced features are quite powerful and allows you to filter out certain keywords, setting up actions and filter rules and so on. However for most of us, Privoxy is used to block ads and banners, get rid of ‘web-bugs’ or invisible cookies and generally remove most of the nasty stuff that the Internet likes to throw at you.

Although the settings sound scary, installing and configuring Privoxy can be done in two steps and gives you 80% of the benefits from the tool. Only a small percentage of very advanced people would actually use the remaining 20% of Privoxy’s power for other purposes. Simply head on over to their website and grab a copy to install in your machine.

After you’re done, its time to set your browser to use Privoxy as a proxy. In the case of Google Chrome, we simply head on to the Options > Under the Hood page and hunt down the Proxy configuration. In the new dialog menu, go to LAN Settings, then Advanced and finally under HTTP and Secure, set the Proxy address as localhost and the port as 8118. This are the port that Privoxy uses. Set the same settings for your other browsers if you want to use Privoxy to filter out the data.

Once that’s done you’re all set to go. Remember to allow Privoxy to start each time your computer does (just drag a shortcut to Privoxy and put it inside your Startup folder in the Start Menu). Otherwise, your browser will be hunting for a Proxy which hasn’t started yet.

That’s all you need to do. Now whenever you visit any website, Privoxy will be the bouncer in line to strip search the content and filter out all the junk from the Internet before passing the remaining clean data over to your browser, to use an analogy. The built in filtering algorithm and rules are pretty sturdy right out of the box, but remember to update your Privoxy installation every now and again to get newer filtering rules. It’s a very fast and efficient way to set up ad blocking on your computer, and if you follow the above method for Chrome, Internet Explorer will also be configured for Privoxy.

Having been using Mozilla Firefox version 3.0 for almost 3-4 months now, I must say I’m totally impressed with this browser and anticipating for its 3.5 ever since the initial announcement. Let’s see what has the new release in store for us:

1. Faster – With the addition of the brand new JavaScript engine called TraceMonkey, Firefox 3.5 promised a two times faster browsing performance than the previous 3.0. This is a time-saver for me since multitasking has been going on and I’m sure many of you will appreciate the necessity of getting a well performed and stable browser.

2. More Privacy Options – The latest version has upgraded its browsing privacy level. Instead of just clearing the browser history, now it provides more options in:

a) Private Browsing: By turning ON this feature via Tools> Start Private Browsing, whatever sites you’ve visited afterward won’t be recorded. Don’t panic when seeing all your other browsers closed abruptly, you’ll get them back by stopping the browsing:  Go Tools> Stop Private Browsing.

b) Forget About This Site: Erase the particular sites from history instead of clearing all with  History > Show All History > (right click) Forget this site

c) Clear recent browsing: Clear browsing history based on time ranges from last hour, 2-4 hours ago, today or everything, using Tools> Clear Recent History

3. Retrieve closed windows/tabs –In previous version, Firefox could only recover last closed tab. But now, it has enhanced this feature to retrieve recently closed windows/tabs via: History > Recently closed windows @ tabs. Let’s just say that browsing experience won’t be that frustrating anymore.

4. Play Video – It used to be impossible to play videos using browser. Now, Firefox 3.5 makes it happen while supporting player controls and file saving as well. Just right click the video, and it will all lay out for you. This is a good news for web developers as they could do more, such as including effects or links within the video.

5. Location Aware Browsing – Not meant to scare you, but by authorizing Firefox to share your location based on IP, info on nearby wireless access points etc, you can now make your location transparent to websites that involve Geo-location service, by Share or Don’t Share.

6. Support New Web Technology – Web developers couldn’t be happier since Firefox 3.5 is now supporting various new web technologies, such as creative fonts downloads, CSS improvements for stylizing your pages, web worker threads and more. Just imagining all the cool things you could do to optimize your page browsing, and even incorporate media files for projects like animation etc.

Besides all these, Mozilla Firefox 3.5 is all about personalizing your browser with add-ons, just like old times sake. Get your new release today, and tell us what you think of it?

A repository of Bookmarklets

However, getting your hands on useful bookmarklets have proven to be a less than friendly experience. Google searches brings up only a handful of relevant results and the majority of them are scattered all over the web. This is where Bookmarklet Directory comes into place. As more and more people come to understand and appreciate the simplicity of bookmarklets, there will be a growing number of user-generated bookmarklets and Bookmarklet Directory aims to collect and rate each submitted bookmarklet in a central repository, much like what Userscripts.org has done for Greasemonkey scripts.

There are a huge number of bookmarklets currently on the site, running on a diverse range of platforms including Firefox, Chrome, Safari and even the iPhone version of Safari. The site categorizes into highest rated, newest and also most popular. You can also browse by tags. However, missing is the option to browse by function, which makes it a tad bit difficult if you are looking for a specific way of achieving something via bookmarklet. The search function attempts to bridge this though.

Being so Web 2.0, Bookmarklet Directory also has a Twitter feed which you can follow @bookmarklets.

Well, a solution has finally arrived. This tool, called LoadScout, is completely free and does exactly that, giving you the ability to tell it where the archive is. It will quickly download the list of files contained within that archive and you can selectively choose which ones you need and you only need to download those parts.

I’m not sure how they do this but the technology is pretty nifty! You can also use it to preview parts of a song to see whether it is worth the download. However, it has some problems working with file sharing sites, so the usefulness is limited due to this.

An alternative is Archview, a Mozilla Firefox extension that does the same thing, except its integrated into the browser and can be easily accessible.

Both these utilities are tremendously helpful in doing these very specific tasks, although you might not run often into a situation where you have to use them extensively. However, when you do, you’ll be glad.

Tree Style Tab

Tree-style UI has been prominently used in Windows Vista and the upcoming Windows 7 that allows you to have an overview of your directory structure and navigate from one place to another easily. Its hierarchical structure makes it easier to see how your folders are structured at a glance.

The Tree Style Tab extension will place all your tabs on the left (ala Windows Explorer in Vista) and from here on, every time you open a new tab from an existing page, the tab created will be placed under the parent website, and so on. This allows you to see quickly where you came from, and also collects tabs from the same website into one group. This way, you can go on opening tabs and switching around different sites without getting confused in a sea of tabs later on.

Breadcrumbs

Another extension you might want to try out is Breadcrumbs. Breadcrumb navigation is also introduced in Windows Vista (although Linux has it for a long time now) that allows you to go back to a parent directory and also gives you a visual indication of what route you took to arrive at the current folder. For me, this wasn’t really an issue as I always use “Backspace” to go back to the parent folder one step at a time, but for browsers, you can now have Breadcrumb style navigation using this extension.

To use it, let us assume the following URL:

http://pretend.com/this/is/something.htm

If we double click on “is”, we will automatically go to

http://pretend.com/this/is

And so on.

However, many websites won’t work with breadcrumbs either because they did not configure a default page for a particular subdirectory, or simply because they have disabled the ability to view subdirectories from their server. Regardless of this limitation, quite a lot of sites will function well with it.

To use it, let us assume a URL:

This extension allows you to replace text fragments (strings) in a page by other text fragments. The system is based on substitutions, where each substitution has an input text which has to be replaced (the “Replace” field) and an output text by which the first has to be replaced (the “With” field). When a substitution is applied it’s over the whole content of a page (you can’t do partial substitutions at the moment). Substitutions can be case-sensitive or insensitive. The use of regular expressions is also supported.

Download this free FireFox add-on at the Mozilla.org website.

The setup is pretty easy. Just enter your WordPress blog’s URL, username, and password and you are ready to go.

When you see something fancy and you want to put in your blog, simply click on the Screen Grab to WordPress icon in your Firefox status bar and choose what to capture and where to send it to. You can save the capture locally, copy to the clipboard, or post directly to your WordPress blog.

Get this Firefox add-on now and make your screen capture (and blog insertion) effortless!

1) ColorZilla

Let’s say you really love a color scheme of your favorite website. You love it so much, that you want to implement the same color scheme for your own site. Unfortunately for you, you have no clue how to figure out what’s the RGB color or HTML color code. That will soon change with the Firefox add-on, ColorZilla. ColorZilla allows you to obtain a HTML or RGB value of an object on any website.

Great, but, it doesn’t end there! You can Zoom the web page you are viewing and measure distances between any two points on the web page. The DOM spying features allow getting various information about DOM elements quickly and easily.

This has to be one of the greatest Firefox add-on designed especially for web designers!

2) Measure It

Measure It is another great Firefox add-on for web developers especially those new to developing websites. Let’s say, you would like to create a banner for your site, but you have no idea what’s the standard dimensions of a web banner (like me 10 years ago perhaps). So what should you do? Panic and freak out? No! I’ll tell you what you need to do! You’re simply need to measure the standard dimensions of another website’s banner.

The Measure It addon for Firefox allows website developers to measure anything on a web page. Maybe you want to measure another website’s banner, or a website’s ad space. Maybe weird enough, you just want to measure their search bar! Whatever you want to measure, the Measure It add-on will be there for you!

3) Scribefire

Let’s say that you found something interesting on the Internet (news, videos, articles and etc.) and you want to share it with your blog readers. Instead of opening up a new browser window, browsing to your blog’s login page, click on the Write a post link and etc before you can start writing, why not take the fast route? What’s the fast route? Blog from within ScribeFire!

ScribeFire is another awesome Firefox web developer (or more precisely “blogger”) add-on which allows users to easily drag and drop text from the web page into their blog, post entries, take notes, and even optimize their ad inventory, directly through the Firefox browser. Like I said, the fast way of blogging! Setting up your blog to use the add-on is extremely easy, and won’t take that much effort too. When I installed it for my blog, it took me only two minutes for the whole thing to be setup. Right now, blogging platforms that support ScribeFire include WordPress, Blogger, Livejournal, Myspace, and plenty more. But, you know what’s the best part? They are releasing a brand new Quick Ads program that could give you some extra cash!

Michael Arrington of TechCrunch.com has this to say “…a lot of bloggers swear by it.”

4) FireFTP

Let’s face it, using the FTP program in Windows sucks! No matter how many times you set the right username and password, they keep asking for the “correct” information! Not to mention the command line FTP program where you need to type and every command manually… ah, that’s painful.

Of course, there are plenty of FTP programs which you can use to replace those in Windows. FireFTP is one of them! FireFTP is a free, secure, cross-platform FTP client for Firefox that provides easy access to your FTP server! I’ve been using FireFTP for some time and I must say it’s really easy to access your website using this add-on.

Let’s take a look at some of FireFTP’s features:

• Synchronization: Keep directories in sync while navigating
• Automatic reconnect and resuming of transfers
• Directory Comparison: Compare directory content (compares subdirectories too!)
• International: Available in over 20 languages
• Search/Filtering
• Character Set Support: UTF8 and just about any other character encoding supported
• Export/Import accounts
• Integrity Checks of transfers (XMD5, XSHA1)
• File Hashing: Generate hashes of files (MD5, various SHA’s)
• Remote Editing
• Drag & Drop

…and a whole lot more… it does some commercial FTP clients cannot do!

5) TwitterFox

Today’s web developer finally realize the potential of Twitter, another social site which doubles as a micro-blogging service. Twitter’s users can send and read other users’ updates (otherwise known as tweets), which are text-based posts of up to 140 characters in length. This free service is one of the most happening invention this century… as of July 2008, it has over 2,200,000 accounts registered!

Let’s look at Twitter’s FireFox add-on, which is appropriately called TwitterFox. TwitterFox is a Firefox extension that notifies you of your friends’ statuses on Twitter. Other than that it can automatically post Twitter messages to your Twitter page, send public messages to other Twitter users and of course including private Twitter messages. With this great extension/add-on, most likely you will never find the need to visit your Twitter page ever again!

Thanks for the freeware community. All the above are free to use… they may not be much, but they can certainly help us to help make our life a little easier, especially on the Internet.

Today, let me show you how to easily prevent this from happening. Oh this depends on which browser you are using.

Internet Explorer

Click on the drop down arrow next to the Printer icon on the toolbar. Select the Page Setup menu item.

In the Page Setup window, you should see the “Headers and Footers” setting which specifies what are to be printed in the headers and footers. The codes “&u&b&d” will eventually print the URL of the page, as well as the printing date. You can simply delete off the codes such as “&u&b&d” which is in the footer section to have a blank footer.

You can of course modify the codes to print out different stuff in the headers and footers. Here is a list of the codes:

• &w – Window Title
• &u – Page URL
• &d – Date in short format (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &D – Date in long format (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &t – Time in regular format as shown on the clock (as specified by Regional and Language Options in Control Panel)
• &T – Time in 24-hour format
• &p – Current page number
• &P – Total number of pages
• &b – right align the next text. (following &b)
• &b&b: Centered text (between &b&b)
• && – A single ampersand (&)

There you are, pretty straight forward and easy for Internet Explorer. Now, how about Mozilla Firefox?

Mozilla Firefox

On the File menu, click on Page Setup. Then in the popup window select the Margins & Header/Footer tab.

Here you should see that it’s very easy to change the margins, and of course the header and footer options. All the options are in the 6 drop down selection lists, no messy codes to play with as in the IE browser. If you want to get rid of the URL, just select blank in the drop down list.

There you are, some quick tips for Internet Explorer as well as Firefox. Don’t ask me how to do this in other browsers such as Opera, because I haven’t played with them that much yet.

It says “Congratulations on Shipping! Love, the IE Team”. IE Team loves and congratulates the Mozilla team for the release of Firefox 3?

Haha… the cake may look cute and hilarious. But it wasn’t true, it’s just a hoax.