Resize Images Directly On Web Pages In Firefox

It happens that you stumble upon a site where images are posted that are simply to small to make out all of the details. Some let you view a larger version of the image when you click on it, while others do not offer larger versions of the images at all. This can be a problem, for instance on shopping sites if you’d like to zoom in on a photo of an item that you consider purchasing.

We have covered extensions and userscripts before that can do that, like the Image Zooming extension or the userscripts Mouseover Popup Image Viewer and Zoom Image.

The Image Resizer/Scaler extension offers a different solution, that many Firefox users may find more comfortable and less obtrusive to use. Instead of zooming an image on mouse over, or on right-click, the extension adds drag zooming to the web browser.

All that it takes to zoom an image is to hold down the left mouse button while the mouse cursor hovers over it, to either zoom in or out by moving the mouse into the upper left or lower right direction. The cursor changes once you start moving the mouse to indicate that you can now zoom in or out with the mouse.

You need to keep in mind though that the image is limited to the space it was posted on, which means that you may not see all of the image if you zoom out to much. This is for instance the case on Google+ where images cannot go beyond the post width.

Two additional features have been added by the author of the extension. A right-click on the image resets it to its original size, while a double-click maximizes it automatically. You can also hold down the Ctrl key to disable the feature for the time being on the current page.

All in all a useful extension for users who want mouse image zooming capabilities in the browser.

Hide Offline Contacts From Facebook Chat

Facebook fairly recently made a change to Facebook Chat that is irritating many users of the site. The chat interface, displayed in the lower right corner of the screen is now not only listing contacts who are online, but also those who are not. To make matters worse, online and offline friends are mixed in the listing. The only way to identify online contacts is the green icon next to the contact’s name.

It is not really clear why offline contacts are displayed next to online contacts there. While it is possible to send messages to offline chat partners, it is probably not something that a lot of Facebook users would want to do, as they could use the site’s messaging options instead for that.

Messages send to offline chat partners are displayed to them the next time they come online. Some Facebook users may prefer to hide offline chat partners from Facebook Chat to increase the visibility of the feature.

The following extensions and scripts let you hide all offline contacts from Facebook’s Chat window.

Firefox add-on: Tidy Facebook Chat

This add-on for the Firefox browser hides all Facebook contacts who are currently offline from the friend’s listing in the sidebar.

Google Chrome: Facebook Chat Fix

This add-on shows only online friends on Facebook in the chat bar. It furthermore hides the mini news-feed that you see on the site as well.

Userscript (Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera): Facebook Old Chat Sidebar

This one is the most sophisticated option of them all. It returns Facebook to the old chat interface. It hides offline friends, so that only online and idle friends are shown, orders friends by first name, displays the total number of online friends and groups friends by status.

That’s not all though. It automatically adjusts the size of the chat bar and makes the chat bar stick to top.

The userscript is probably the best choice as it offers more customizations and options than the browser extensions.

Mute Firefox With A Single Click

Sometimes you may want to mute all sound coming from the Firefox web browser. Maybe you are currently on a page with a Flash animation that is making irritating sounds, or you are about to answer a phone call and need to mute the sounds in the browser because of that. Or maybe you are about to open Firefox in a public location and want to make sure that the sound is muted to avoid irritating other people around you.

Firefox users have a few options here that may depend on the operating system they use. Windows 7 users for instance could use the sound mixer to mute the Firefox web browser this way. While that works as well, it is not really that comfortable, especially if you need to mute and unmute the browser regularly.

Enter Muter for the Firefox browser. Muter is a browser extension that adds a single button to the browser’s status bar. A left-click on the button mutes all sound in the browser instantly, another click turns the sound back on.

A green status bar icon indicates that sound is currently enabled, a black one that it has been disabled in the browser.

These icons and a few other settings can be changed in the add-on’s preferences.

Here it is possible to switch to a menu-less button (the default button links to the preferences and different themes offered by the add-on), to switch the default buttons which can be handy if custom themes are used n the browser, and to change the hotkey.

You can also mute or unmute Firefox with the hotkey Ctrl-Alt-M. This may be useful if you prefer not to have the add-on icon displayed in the browser’s status bar.

The only other option available in the settings is a switch to restore the mute status when the browser restarts. Sounds are automatically enabled on restart if that option is not checked in the preferences.

Firefox users can download and install Muter from the official Firefox add-ons repository.

How To Turn Chrome or Firefox Into A Single-Site Browser

A Single-Site browser serves a very specific purpose. You use it to access one, and sometimes a handful, of websites and services on the Internet. This can be financial sites, your email accounts or other sites with personal information like a medical related sites. The basic idea is to block access to all other sites to protect the account and information from certain attack forms like cross site scripting or clickjacking.

All connections are blocked except to those sites that you have explicitly allowed. This means that third party scripts won’t be loaded if they originate on a non-whitelisted domain, and that you won’t be able to open third party sites manually in the browser.

This guide demonstrates how to turn Firefox and Google Chrome into a single-site browser. Inspiration has been taken from Vasa’s post over at the Wilders Security Forum.

Google Chrome

Google Chrome users can make use of the –host-rules parameter to block all domain connections except the ones they whitelist. The general parameter looks like this:

--host-rules="MAP * 127.0.0.1, EXCLUDE *.ghacks.net"

This redirects all connection attempts to localhost, except for connections to the ghacks.net site or one of its subdomains.

You can also add multiple inclusions in the following way:

--host-rules="MAP * 127.0.0.1, EXCLUDE *.ghacks.net","MAP * 127.0.0.1, EXCLUDE *.microsoft.com"

Windows users can add the parameter to Chrome in the following way:

• Locate a Chrome shortcut in the Start Menu, Taskbar or Desktop
• Right-click the shortcut and select Properties
• Append the parameter to the end of the Target listing, with a space in between.
• Click Ok to apply the settings.

You could alternatively create a second shortcut to use it for accessing your important sites, and keep the general shortcut for all other sites that you visit in the browser.

Firefox

Mozilla Firefox users need to install the SimpleBlock extension for their browser first. They then need to create a SimpleBlock.ini file in the user profile folder and add a regular expression to it to allow access to certain sites.

R: https?://(?!(My.bank.com|Second.site.com|Third.site.com))

This would allow access to the three domains mentioned above, and block all other connection attempts.

It is probably best to create a new user profile for this. You can use an add-on like Switchy or the new Firefox profile manager application.

Closing Words

It is best to create new profiles or shortcuts to work with Single-Site browsers. Security add-ons like NoScript can mitigate the issues if they are configured properly.

Quitomzilla For Firefox Helps You Quit Smoking

Smoking is one of those things that I could never get my head around. Why would anyone want to pay money for something that damages their health? I have a few friends who are smoking, and one of the things that I witnessed over the years were lackluster and honest attempts to quit smoking. And while some managed to quit from one day to the other, many failed in their attempts after a week, month or even years of not smoking.

The incentive to stop smoking should be obvious: You can save a lot of money which you could spend for other things. You first may spend them on things that help you mitigate the desire to smoke. The second benefit is that your overall health will improve over time.

The Firefox add-on Quitomzilla helps smokers quit smoking by keeping track of statistics associated with smoking. The add-on keeps track of the money that was saved by not smoking, the number of cigarettes that were not smoked, and the overall time since the last cigarette.

First time users need to open the add-on’s configuration with a left-click on the status bar icon. Here they can set the quit date and time, the price of a pack of smokes with 20 cigarettes, the currency and the cigarettes that they consumed per day.

The extension furthermore displays milestone information in the browser. These milestones use macros that reveal how much money has been saved since the day of quitting smoking and how many cigarettes have not been smoked.

The milestone message can be edited in the options. Firefox users who want to quit smoking should give it a try. While it probably is not enough to keep users from smoking on its own, it could very well assist them in that task.

Make The Most Out Of Pinterest With These Browser Add-ons

Web browser add-ons can improve your Pinterest experience significantly. Let me give you a quick overview of what the service is about. Pinterest lets you pin photos and videos to online pinboards. These are publicly accessible, and all Pinterest users can comment on them, share them or pin them to their pinboards as well. Links to the original site the photos or videos were found on are retained, which makes it a visual bookmarking service as well.

There are three options to pin photos or videos to your own pinboard. You can use the bookmarklet and run it on the page that contains the photo or image, paste the web address of the page on the Pinterest site into a form, or pin an item that has been posted by another Pinterest user.

When you look at browser extensions, you will notice that Google Chrome got the bulk of it, while both Firefox and Opera only one each. Lets take a look at the add-ons:

Pinterest Add-ons

Pin It Buttons – Instead of having to use the bookmarklet, these extensions add a button to the browser that you can click on to pin a photo or video on that website. Chrome: One Click Pinterest Button, Opera: Pinterextension

Right-click Pinning – These add a right-click context menu option to pin the selected item to one of your Pinterest pinboards. Chrome: Pinterest Right click, Firefox: Unofficial Pinterest Addon

Keyboard shortcuts – Adds a shortcut to pin items on a page with a keyboard shortcut. Chrome: Pin It!

Image Zooming – Lets you zoom in on images right on the Pinterest website without having to click on the item. Works similar to Hover Zoom. Chrome: Pinterest Zoom

, Pinterest Image Expander, Pinzy

Pin Screenshots – Lets you pin screenshots of web pages that you are currently on, or upload photos from your desktop to pin those. Chrome: Screen 2 Pin

Closing Words It is interesting to note that there is no userscript, and only one Firefox add-on available for a popular service such as Pinterest. Google Chrome on the other hand has been blessed with extensions in comparisons. Is it because many developers are using that browser now? What’s your opinion here? Also, let me know if you come across other add-ons for Pinterest. And if you are not currently a user, you can grab your Pinterest invites here.

Gridtube Modifies YouTube’s Search Layout

The search results layout on the video hosting website YouTube has a few usability issues. When you search on YouTube, you are presented with a long list of scrolling results. For each result a small low res thumbnail image is shown prominently, and next to that the video’s title, part of the description and a few other information including the uploader and the number of views it has received yet. Especially the need to scroll down the list and the low resolution preview images face criticism.

The Firefox add-on GridTube modifies Youtubes search layout in several ways to make it more user friendly. It comes with two new viewing modes that change the search results listing.

The small and large grid mode do away with the standard layout. They place the thumbnail images next to each other in a grid, so that it is no longer necessary to scroll down on larger screen resolutions. The only other information displayed – by default that is – is the video title and play time.

The different modes, and the information they display, are selected at the top right of the screen. Here it is possible to switch to the large grid view mode, or the standard list mode. The large grid mode displays larger video thumbnails. The list view mode on the other hand simply displays YouTube’s default layout, but with the option to turn off ads on the page.

You may notice that all three modes display higher quality video thumbnails. That’s useful if you do not like the low resolution video thumbnails that YouTube usually displays on search result pages.

Both small and large grid modes can be clicked again to display additional information for each video. When enabled, the uploader, views, quality and time since the upload are displayed as well.

You will notice that videos open in a new tab in the browser. This setting and the higher thumbnail quality can be disabled in the options of the add-on. The only other option there lets you select a default quality level for videos.

GridTube can be installed directly at the Mozilla Firefox add-ons repository.