Support for NoScript JavaScript Disabled Browsers
I can’t help but wonder, considering the number of websites and web developers who insist on ensuring that their websites are still fully compliant with Internet Explorer 6, which was rendered obsolete long ago, should other non-standard browser configurations be considered as well?
Has anyone ever tried to count how many users run Firefox with the NoScript add-on?
How many users have JavaScript disabled in Google Chrome?
Do a lot of IE users have JavaScript turned off or restricted somehow?
Most importantly, if you added up all of the users with JavaScript unsupported or JavaScript disabled in their web browser, how big of a user group would they be as a percentage of all web users? Would that number be larger than the number of people still using IE 6? If so, wouldn’t it be prudent for website owners and webmasters to ensure that their websites function correctly without JavaScript, especially when so many of the elements using JavaScript are superficial like animated menus?
I for one test every WordPress theme or website template in Firefox with NoScript running to see what it looks like when it “breaks” because JavaScript is not enabled in a browser. If it still doesn’t render and function at a basic level, then I won’t use it.
Does anyone else do something similar?
Can the noscript tag be used effectively enough to compensate for non-JavaScript enabled browsers?
Best Firefox Addon For More Productivity
The basic speed dial window all browsers have.
I usually don’t like to post stubs or preliminary articles like this, but I went all reviewer on Mozilla.org this morning and, of course, ended up writing a review of my favorite Firefox add-on of all time, Speed Dial. As that review got longer I felt myself wanting to show people how to really maximize productivity with this Firefox plug-in by configuring Speed Dial the way I have ended up tweaking it and setting it up. Don’t get me wrong, my why isn’t the only way, but when you see the power and customization of the Firefox Speed Dial plug-in in use in my setup, you can see why I think that Speed Dial is the most important Firefox add-on anyone can have. In fact, it’s the one real drawback to Google Chrome for me right now.
There is a Speed Dial extension for Google Chrome on the Google extensions website, but it is a pale imitation of this powerful Firefox add-on. It doesn’t have dial groups which is the main powerful feature of the Speed Dial plugin.
Anyway, it would be irresponsible of me to get into posting my Speed Dial Firefox extension review right now when I have deadlines barreling down on my like runaway trucks with no brakes on the side of a steep mountain. However, I don’t want anyone following the link I threw onto my review at mozilla.org to arrive and wonder where in the heck the review I promised is. Therefore, I’m going to post a couple of screen shots that I think will help any user with even a little bit of power browsing experience to understand the kind of productivity gains that are possible with this plugin.
If that is you, either install the plugin and start messing around with it. Just got to Tools -> Add-ons -> Options and start customizing away. (I recommend setting up either a Speed Dial icon on your toolbars, or doing like I did and setting the right click on a page to include the context menu option to Add to Speed Dial. You can make that work by right-clicking on the tab if you prefer, but I’m used to right-clicking on the page itself when I want to do something. One of the best things about this add-on is how much it can be customized to work exactly the way you need it to in order to help out with your own time management by making browsing faster and easier.)
The quick, quick, version of how to use Speed Dial to speed up your Internet browsing and boost your online power goes like this:
- Use Dial Groups – Every web browser offers some sort of dial based start up screen. Opera was first, but Google Chrome has one now too. IE has a similar concept although it is done via text links instead of actual configurable dials. What makes Speed Dial great is the ability to have MORE THAN ONE page of dials.
- Set Speed Dial to show up in new tabs instead of waiting to click something. Every time you press CTL-T you’ll get a list of your speed dials to use. Just make your current homepage the first dial on the first dial group to keep instant access to it.
- Customize the dial group tabs – You can change the colors to make tabs easier to find. Just don’t go crazy or you’ll hate it.
- Customize the dial groups – Need more than 9 websites for one dial group? No problem. One of the configurations is how many sites to show on a speed dial group. You can change both the default, and even better change on a per group basis. You can have 12 dials under Work and 6 dials under Facebook Games or vice versa, depending on your lifestyle
– If you have a widescreen monitor take advantage of that width by setting your default dial group configuration to 3 rows and 4 columns.
Lastly, if you are a power user looking for maximum time savings, you’ll end up with a lot of dials that link to a lot of webpages. By default, the speed dial thumbnails refresh frequently which means you could end up with a slow running Firefox when running Speed Dial and switching through several dials because thumbnails are being generated for each site no matter how fast you click. (See the link for details.)
There is lots more power. Read the docs or poke around the settings to see what else you can do to improve online productivity with Speed Dial. Or, come back here in the next day or two when I get time to go on full tilt. Even easier, grab the Best Hubris RSS Feed to make sure you get the updated Firefox plugin reviews as soon as they come online.
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- Configure Right Click Context Menu for Speed Dial
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- Configure Speed Dial Groups
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- Configure and Organize Dial Group Tabs
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- Configure Speed Dial Options
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- Productive Powerful Speed Dial Configuration
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- Speed Dial Power User Setup Productivity Boost
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- The basic speed dial window all browsers have.
Then you can check out my post about Firefox personas if you need to read more about the Mozilla web browser.
Firefox Beats Chrome But…
Recently, I wrote about why Firefox is better than Chrome in a head-to-head browser comparison between Firefox 3.5 vs. Google Chrome 2. In the end, it basically came down to certain specific features that I just cannot live without because I use them on a daily basis to increase my productivity.
However, I do switch back and forth between Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox a lot. In doing so, I have developed a list of things that I wish Firefox did that Chrome already does. For the most part, these are little things that make surfing the web faster or easier, rather than make or break requirements. That doesn’t mean that I wouldn’t really like to see these Google Chrome features show up in the next version of Firefox.
Chrome Better Than Firefox Features
The biggest one here has to be speed. You have to give it to Google and their open-source browser project Chromium. What they have put together is hands down the fastest web browser. Each browser developer out there from Microsoft, to Opera, to Apple’s Safari, all have specific tests that they construct to showcase their browser’s speed. But, when it comes to real-world browsing speed, Chrome is undeniably the fastest.
Where Internet browsing surfing speed really counts is in a user’s ability to get to the Internet and then do what they need to do without having to wait for the browser program to load or refresh, or whatever. Start the timer when you click to run the program and stop the timer when your favorite website or homepage has finished loading and nothing comes close to Chrome’s speed regardless of which carefully chosen website the developer wants to use.
The reason is that Google’s Chrome browser has the fastest start-up speed. True, it cheats a little bit by displaying the interface and giving control to the user before it is actually ready to do anything productive (it keeps loading in the background), but even if you account for that extra boot up time, Chrome is still the fastest to start.
Firefox, on the other hand, is a NIGHTMARE to start-up, especially if you purposely left a bunch of tabs open to automatically reload the next time you started Firefox. Here is the rest of the list. (I do know that some of these things can be done by plug-ins or add-ons for Firefox, and that is one of the great things about Firefox, but, frankly, I already have a TON of plug-ins loaded. I’d like to start cutting down on the number of Firefox add-ons I have, not increase them.)
Things I Wish Firefox Did More Like Chrome
- Load Faster
- Search from the Address Bar – It’s awesome, but it doesn’t do this.
- Paste and Go in the Address Bar – Nothing has saved me more keystrokes.
- Incognito style privacy – I get why Firefox does privacy mode the way it does, but I really like being able to have a private session going concurrently with a normal browsing session. Getting to choose between the two types would be ideal.
- One Tab = One Process – For research purposes, sometimes I right-click a dozen or more search results before I go look at what opened up in those tabs. Sometimes one of those websites is junk and ends up hanging the whole smash. In Chrome, I open the task manager find the garbage site and shut it down without even looking at in. In Firefox I have to wait until I get back control and then hunt down the offending site myself.
How about you? What features from Chrome would you like to see in Firefox?
Firefox 3.5 vs. Chrome 2 Why Firefox Wins For This User
I do a lot of reading online. Some of it is for my freelance writing business, other times, it is research for my own projects like my saving and investing advice website, and other times, it just shows up in my RSS Feeds which I never used to read, but now read all the time because I like reading them on my phone (via Google Reader on Windows Mobile). Plus, I’m a reformed IT professional, and you can take the techie out of the computer world, buy you can’t take the computer world out of the techie.
Anyway, a lot of sites and feeds I read are starting to trickle out articles about why people are switching from Firefox to Google Chrome as their primary browser.
When I read the reasons why these people think that Chrome is better than Firefox, I realize that they don’t use their browsers like I do. They may think they are power-users, but until you’ve done 24 Google searches (still open in their tabs in case you still haven’t found what you need), opened 100+ sites, twenty or so online PDF files, clicked every one of the reference links at the bottom of eight or nine Wikipedia articles (Wikipedia is a good way to find sources, Wikipedia is not a good source for professional writers.) read through page 188 of a 533 page SEC public comments posting in order to find out just where the regulatory agency stands on what type of disclaimer is required in an investment related corporate email, all while still messing around on Facebook, Twitter, and Hulu, you don’t know what a power browser is.
Ironically, you don’t even have to push the browsers to advanced capabilities to see that Firefox is better than Google Chrome (at least for now.)
Why Firefox Is Better Than Chrome For Main Browser
When you are done running tests and calculating that Chrome loads a Javascript page in 1.834 seconds while Firefox takes 2.122 seconds, the choice comes down not to speed, but usability and functionality. There are several critical features that are missing in Google Chrome, either intentionally, or someone just hasn’t gotten around to it yet.
I’m not talking about playful little plug-ins and things like moon-phase calendars or digital clocks or skins. I’m talking about things that interrupt my workflow so dramatically, that it causes me to sit stunned for a few seconds while I try and figure out what the best way to proceed is. Do I work around it in Chrome, or do I wait forever for Firefox to load and copy and past the link over there?
Here are the Top Reasons Firefox is Better Than Chrome As a Default Browser
- File Handling – I don’t care if Chrome’s built-in download manager is better or not. Sometimes I don’t want to download the file (or technically, I want to download it in the background instead). PDF files come to mind. There are hundreds of PDF files that are linked to out there. In Firefox, it opens Foxit Reader and loads the file. I can scan it and decide whether to read it, save it, or get rid of it and move on. In Chrome, it downloads it, puts a button at the bottom of the screen and waits for me to decide what to do with it. That’s after it asked me where to save it. I had to create a temporary directory just so I have a place to put all of those little files that I have to fully download and store in Chrome, just so I can access it. I also get no choice to Open, Run, or anything else. You can’t get through 40 PDF files on a website by doing it this way.
- Google Updater – Yeah, I know, they finally pulled their head out and started doing it in a way that makes sense, but I spent so many months killing, deleting, closing, and stopping Google Update from starting automatically with Windows, that I don’t even know how to go back to letting it run. By the way, even if it doesn’t run all the time it still runs every single hour and doesn’t bother checking with you to see if now is a good time to update. If you are pushing a tight deadline and trying to download, proof, and re-upload some big files, too bad. Google Update will be wasting your bandwidth (and number of connections) downloading the upgrade from version 2.1.03.2 to 2.1.03.3, because we all know that is more important.
- No Print Preview – Seriously, how hard is this to code? There is nothing quite like printing out what you think will be 2 pages only to get 14 pages thanks to all the extra stuff that prints funny. I also hate that one extra line that prints on a new page. I never print without preview first, and Chrome doesn’t have one.
- Plug-ins – No Zotero, no default browser. The same people that used to say plug-ins were one of the main reasons Firefox was so much better than Internet Explorer, now say they don’t need them. Not me. Some of my plug-ins are optional, but plenty of my add-ons are not optional.
- Bookmark Tags – No tag support for bookmarks? I long ago passed the point where folders were sufficient to find my bookmarks efficiently, this is a deal killer.
Notice that I didn’t say anything about Ad-block Plus or NoScript or other Firefox add-ons that make browsing less annoying. If those are your main reasons for using Firefox, then by all means, switch over to Chrome. But, until I have usable bookmarks, usable printing, usable file handling, and my can’t-live-without-them add-ons, Chrome will be my secondary browser.
Chrome Is Faster
Don’t get me wrong. Chrome is faster, way, way, faster. The quicker start-up time alone is worth the extra resources I use up having another browser. When I need to check something out quickly, Chrome is my go to browser. But, when I’m settling in to get some real work done, it’s worth the wait to start up Firefox.
