I’ve been using FireFox as my primary browser since version 0.9 and have admittedly grown quite attached to it. On the other hand, I’m quite fond of Google as well, so the prospect of making the switch to Chrome seemed almost inevitable as FF continues to grow into a resource heavy machine. The first deterrent however, was the lack of extension support in Chrome. The main reason I love FireFox (or so I though, as you’ll see in a moment) was for the extensions that make my day to day so much easier and that I cannot live without—such as Web Developer Toolbar, XMarks, AdBlocker Plus, pdfIt, and more.

Now that Chrome supports extensions, I really thought I was making the transition. I installed many extensions, and got Chrome to the point where I really felt like I could use it on a daily basis to accopmlish my tasks. It loads much, much faster and I thought I was in love! To my surprise, however, there are many nuances in Chrome itself that I feel make it lacking enough to the point that I cannot use it, in spite of extension support. In other words, I have complaints about the browser itself, not about the lack of extension support. These are things that extensions might possibly fix at some point, but I feel they belong as part of the browser’s base. Hopefully Chrome adopts many of these seemingly simple features as it graduates from Beta and beyond.

Here is my list of things I depend on in FireFox that are missing in Chrome:

• Several right click menu options
  • “View Background Image” – While Chrome does have support for viewing a forground image in a seperate tab, I need the ability to view a background image. It’s a feature I use a lot in FF.
  • “View Selection Source” – I understand the advantage of using the “Inspect Element” feature in Chrome, but the behavior is something quite different. I love that FireFox will show me only the code I’ve selected and highlights it in the popup window.
  • Minimal frame options – Chrome has a few options to aid you within frames, but Firefox’s options are so much richer and I find myself missing them quite a bit
    

    Chrome Frame Options

    

    Firefox Frame Options

• Customization support – Simply plugging “about:config” into the FF browser offers a vast amount of customization settings. Enough to let you really screw things up if you aren’t careful. As of yet, all I’ve seen in Chrome is the ability to set a few startup switches.
• A perplexing inablility to use Google Bookmarks in a meaningful way – So I can synchronize bookmarks across browsers, fine…but where do they get stored if not in Google Bookmarks? Even extension support is weak at best.
• Bookmark dividers – I’m an organization freak, what can I say?
• Search as you type
• Good visual representation when the word you are searching for cannot be found – Chrome simply says “0 of 0″ where FF changes the box to red.

I’m sure I’ll find more with time. These came about in a matter of a couple of days.

What about you? Have you found yourself having a hard time making the switch as you develop or use Chrome in your day to day? If you’ve found things in Chrome that you wish Firefox had, please share those as well.

Today I devised a nice, quick method for getting a printable report that looks identical to the report you see on your screen. The one downside, no selectable text for copy/paste later. But if that’s your concern, rather than printing, you probably aren’t worried about format as much anyway.

The solution I created involves downloading a FireFox extension called Pdf It! and Omniture’s own print feature.

Once you have Pdf It! installed and your report you wish to print is on the screen, simply click the print icon in SiteCatalyst’s toolbar at the top of your report. This will open a new window with limited browser chrome (toolbars, status bars, etc.) and will load your report without any of the extra navigation at top or left of your report. Basically a nice printable report. Only to print from this screen doesn’t always give the result you desire as browser to printer support isn’t always the greatest. You will still run into issues with missing images, cut off edges, etc.

So, the next thing to do is cancel the print job that automatically appears. Now you are left with just the print window. Right click somewhere in that print window and select Pdf It! > Save as PDF > Whole Page. Pdf It! will open a save dialogue and you can save that page to your desired directory. From here you can simply open that newly created PDF and print. Or if you prefer, attach it in an email to the people who care.

Ever get stuck in an endless loop, trying to download video converter, Super? Here’s how to break the loop.

I’ve never once been able to download it using Firefox, so if I were you I wouldn’t even bother trying.

Basically, you need to add the download site to your trusted sites in IE. But wait! I said the download site. Although it may appear that you are downloading directly from the www.erightsoft.com domain, you will actually be downloading from gpl.download.free.fr/Super.html so go ahead and point your browser there now.

Once you are on the right domain, open up your internet options and click the ‘security’ tab. Then hit the ‘trusted sites’ icon and add the current domain (be sure to un-check the option that requires it to be an https site). Now that gpl.download.free.fr has been added to your trusted sites list, change your trusted sites level to ‘Low.’

Now all you need to do is scroll to the bottom of the page and click ‘Start Downloading SUPER’ which will take you to http://gpl.download.free.fr/Superdc.html where you will see a link that says ‘download and use’ near the top of the screen. Click that and it will take you to http://gpl.download.free.fr/S6Kg1.html where you will see the download links at the bottom of the screen. Why didn’t I have you go there to begin with instead of clicking all these links? Well, the good people of erightsoft (or whoever they are) don’t want you to download Super from anywhere but on their site, so they check the referrer of how you got to the download page and if you don’t get there in the order I described above, you will be redirected to the begining and have to start all over.

Happy video converting!

Before I get too far, let me show an updated example of the Gillay method. This example will appear slightly different than the examples in my other post but reflects further discussion that took place within the comments section of that post.

<!–[if IE]>
<object classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
codebase=
"http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab
#version=7,0,19,0" width="780" height="590" id="gilluminate">
<param name="movie" value="gilluminate.swf" />
<![endif]x–>
<!–[if !IE]> <–>
<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash" data="gilluminate.swf" width="780" height="590" name="gilluminate">
<!–> <![endif]–>
<param name="movie" value="gilluminate.swf" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#2C676C" />
<p>gilluminate is mostly a showcase of things I have done, things I am doing, and things I can do. It is powered by a combination of HTML, Flash, ActionScript, XML, JavaScript, CSS and PHP and displays my recent websites and artwork.<br />You need the latest free <a href="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?
P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash">Flash Player Plugin</a> to view this site.</p>
</object>

Basically what is happening here is that I’m hiding the IE friendly object tag from every browser that’s not IE, and vice versa.

This same principal can be applied when "embedding" Windows Media or Quick Time movies, and probably every other type of object. Here’s an example of using the Gillay method with Quick Time:

<!–[if IE]><object classid=
"clsid:02BF25D5-8C17-4B23-BC80-D3488ABDDC6B" width="250" height="140" codebase="http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab
#version=6,0,2,0" standby="Loading Quick Time components…"><![endif]x–>
<!–[if !IE]> <–>
<object type="video/quicktime" data="example.mov" width="$width" height="$height" standby="Loading Quick Time components…">
<!–> <![endif]–>
<param name="controller" value="true" />
<param name="type" value="video/quicktime" />
<param name="autoplay" value="true" />
<param name="scale" value="aspect" />
<param name="BGCOLOR" value="#000000" />
<param name="target" value="myself" />
<param name="src" value="example.mov" />
<param name="pluginspage" value="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/" />
<a href="http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/">Quick Time Player</a> required or <a href="#" onclick="window.close();">close this window</a> and select a different format.
</object>

This code will play the example.mov movie in Firefox, IE, Safari, and IE for Mac and will validate on the W3C website

When Firefox came out, I went to the options dialogue to turn off the cache and only noticed the option to specify how big the cache could be. So I ignorantly set the size to zero and thought it would do the trick. wrong! This causes major problems with our friend the Firefox.

The first issue I noticed was that I could no longer install extensions and themes. For some reason, firefox has to cache them before it can install them. So, thinking I was a genius, I set the cache limit to 1, instead of zero. That fixed the problem. For the past 6 months (or however long I’ve been using Firefox now) that’s the way it’s been. Until today.

Lately I’ve noticed that my personal websites (including the blog you are reading now) have had problems loading the CSS file. It was kind of random; sometimes it loaded, sometimes it didn’t. I searched and researched the problem blaming Firefox all the way. But today, as part of my research, I upped my cache to 10000 and the problem went away. So I started researching more in that direction and came across a help file on mozilla.org telling me that if I wanted to turn off cache I could do it by plugging about:config into the address bar and changing the setting browser.cache.disk.enable to false.

DUH! Why didn’t I think of that before. Probably because it should be in the options menu to begin with, in my opinion.

Now even though I have my cache set to zero my CSS files are loading properly and extensions have no problems installing because I have actually turned cache “off”.

I also spent a while on google trying to find any type of backup/restore extensions or programs. I did find one called MozBackup, but not only are they not developing it anymore, it didn’t work.

In my research I realized that you can just copy the firefox directory, and use it for backup. So I created a directory called c:documents and settingsprofilemy documentsFFBackupfirefox and a batch script called backupFF.bat in my C:/ root directory with the following code:

xcopy /E /Y “c:documents and settingsprofileapplication datamozillafirefox” “c:documents and settingsprofilemy documentsFFBackupfirefox”

exit

Then I went to control panel > shceduled tasks and created a new schedule to run my bat file once a week. As far as I can tell, problem solved.

I’ve been looking at the Flash Satay method of maintaining valid markup using flash (the <embed> tag commonly used for non-IE browsers is no longer supported by current versions of HTML and XHTML). It always seemed a little wacky and time consuming to have to load your flash content into a container .swf and was not appealing to me at all. The Flash Javay method tries to address this problem, but I never liked the idea of using that much javaScript either. I mean, haven’t we spent the past few years trying to come up with a Flash detection that doesn’t use javaScript? The Javay method seems like a step backward, not forward.

Before I share my newly found solution to both problems, let me share this little newly found secret about Internet Explorer that might be useful to you in many other applications other than embedding Flash. Using the following code will only show up in Internet Explorer browsers:

<!--[if IE]>You are using IE!<![endif]-->

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, lets discuss what I’ve dubbed the Flash Gillay method. (Because everyone who comes up with a modified version of the Satay method has given it a new name, I’ve decided to name this one after myself in hopes for fame and fortune!) The general idea is to use the <object> tag exactly as it is commonly used, but to replace the <embed> tag with the Satay formatted <object> tag. Putting the Satay format inside the common format will work fine for browsers that would otherwise need the <embed> tag without any other code to help it out. For example, the following code will work in FireFox/Mozilla/Netscape without any problems:

<object

</object>

Notice that there’s no need for a container movie.

Now of course, IE browsers are going to CHOKE on this trying endlessly to load the second object. Here’s where the above mentioned trick comes in handy. Without using any Javascript at all, we can hide the second object from IE browsers by using the following:

<object

</object>

And as for the need for an alternate image or text to appear if Flash is not installed, you can now take it a step further and be even more standards compliant than the Satay method by making your alt text readable by screen readers:

<object

</object>

Notice the use of <–> and <!–> to trick non IE browsers into thinking that their respective lines end the comment and continue to render what’s inside the IF statement.

Now you can use the latest recommended Flash detection methods making it un-necessary to have your alt content point to a flash download page.

I have tested this method on IE 6.0, IE 5.5, Firefox 1.0, Mozilla 1.5, Netscape 7.0, Opera 7.1, Safari 1.0.2, IE 5.2 Mac, and yes, even Netscape 4.8. If you see any flaws in this method, I’d love to hear about it via email (I apologize for the lack of commenting capabilities on this blog, I’m still working on it).

This method can be seen in practice at http://www.gilluminate.com/

(12-21-2004 NOTE: Thanks to Stephen Rider for pointing out to me that about 8 months prior to this blog this method already existed as the Hixie Method. I maintain that I wasn’t aware of the Hixie Method at the original writing of this blog and apologize for the repeat.)

(01-17-2005 NOTE: If you plan to use the SetVariable command, you can still use id=”" for the IE version but you should use name=”" for the other version.)

(02-01-2005 NOTE: Comments are now turned on.)

(05-17-2005 NOTE: For information on why this method is more standards compliant than the Satay method, see the W3C Rules for rendering objects. Also, if IE followed these rules completely, they would not choke on the inner object tag, but only render the outter, and there would be no need for the extra IE only code.)

While this page seemed like the answer at the time, once I started trying to uninstall the current version (well documented on macromedia.com) and install the old version (poorly documented on macromedia.com) I was having all kinds of problems. So I googled “flash install cab” and found the app of my dreams!!

Flash Plugin Switcher is a program that lets you switch flash player plugin versions on the fly with the click of a single button! It still requires that you download the .cab files from macromedia (see the link above) but once you have them it’s a breeze. The download page for Flash Plugin Switcher is in German, but the help content is in English.