Show Only Image From Image Hosting Websites such as ImageShack
There are many image hosting websites that allows users to upload images, photos and pictures which allows anyone to view it publicly by sharing the link. However there are a few types of links provided by the image hosting site such as the link, direct link, widget code, forum code, alt forum code, HTML code, forum thumnail, alt forum thumbnail and HTML thumbnail. For a user that don’t know much about computer, most probably they will be sharing the link instead of direct link.
The different between the two links are the link sends the user to the image hosting website with a lot of garbage on the page such as advertisements and etc. As for the direct link, it is a link only to show the image and nothing more.
Firefox will require GreaseMonkey extension together with the userscript and Chrome with just the extension called Show Just Image to remove all the junk from the normal image hosting link and showing only the image. This saves you from having to click another time on the thumbnail to zoom and view the image in full. Show Just Image currently supports 90 image hosting sites including some of the popular ones such ImageShack, Photobucket, flickr, tinypic… There is nothing you need to do, just install and the extension will detect and redirect automatically to the direct image link.
Download Show Just Image Firefox Userscript | Chrome Extension
SearchPreview Adds Thumbnail Website Preview for Google Search Engine
All of major search engine such as Google, Yahoo and Bing allows user to search for webpages based on keywords. The search results only contains the title of the webpage, URL and a short description. There won’t be any thumbnail preview included because of two simple reasons why is to make the search faster and also to save the searcher’s bandwidth. However some people may prefer to have a real time generated thumbnail to know the status of the website because the search engine are not fast enough to crawl the website for the latest information. For example, some sites appear on the search result but clicking on it shows under maintenance…
An easy way to have a thumbnail preview is by installing SearchPreview for Google extension for Chrome browser. After installation the plugin, you will see an extra thumbnail preview of the website generated in real time on the right side of the search results.
Do note that using this extension is very different than the Shows Options > Images from the page option in the Google Search page. The Images from the page option takes the images from Google Images but the extension creates a live thumbnail preview for the search result. If you haven’t noticed, selecting the Images from the page option gives out search results very differently compared to the normal keyword search.
Download SearchPreview for Google
Download Standalone Google Chrome for Offline Installation
Google Chrome is one of the fastest and lightest web browser developed by Google and is free for everyone to use. The official website to download Google Chrome is http://www.google.com/chrome/ and clicking the Download Google Chrome button redirects you to download a small 550KB ChromeSetup.exe file. Unfortunately that 550KB file is merely a web installation of Chrome which attempts to download the latest version from Google’s server. There are pros and cons about this, the good thing is it always lets users to download the latest version and the bad thing is it cannot be used as offline installation for networks.
The Chrome web installer will download an approximate 12MB of file to install Chrome and if you have hundreds of computers in a network, you will need to consider the offline version of Chrome installer. The official webpage to download Chrome browser says nothing about where to download the full version of Google Chrome that don’t require an active internet connection to install.
Searching in the Google Help area reveals that Google doesn’t call it an offline or standalone installer but instead a Chrome Alternate Installer. The Chrome Alternate Installer is in fact the full version of standalone installer that can install directly without internet connection. You can download the full version of Chrome from the link below.
http://www.google.com/chrome/eula.html?standalone=1
Set Gmail as Default mailto for Opera Browser
The new Opera 10.51 was recently released with speed improvements. Opera is a quite well known free web browser but it takes the 4th place after Firefox, Internet Explorer and Chrome. Opera web browser supports built-in mailto protocol to use which email client. For example when you click on the mailto hyperlink, an E-mail Client Selection window will open with 3 selections asking you if you want to use system default, create opera mail account or use a web mail service. Selecting the web mail service lets you select Yandex, Fastmail, Opera Web Mail or Mail.ru.
You can’t find Gmail in the list but here is how you can easily add Gmail to the e-mail client selection list in Opera. First make sure that Opera is closed and then go to the folder where Opera is installed. Normally it is installed in C:\Program Files\Opera\. There is a folder by the name of default in the Opera directory. Enter the default folder and double click the webmailproviders.ini file to open with your text editor. You should see Yandex, Fastmail, Opera Web Mail and Mail.ru ID, URL and ICON. To add Gmail to the list, copy and paste the information below and paste it to the end of the file and save it.
[Gmail]
ID=10
URL=https://mail.google.com/mail/?extsrc=mailto&url=%s
ICON=https://mail.google.com/favicon.ico
Now run Opera, press Ctrl+F12 to open the Preferences window. Go to the Advanced tab and then click Programs on the left pane. At the right pane, you will see a mailto Protocol. Double click on it, select Use a Web mail service and select Gmail from the list. From now onwards, whenever you click on a mailto link, it will open Gmail from your Opera.
Browzar is a Lightweight Portable and Private Web Browser
With the private browsing and incognito mode for current web browsers, it offers absolute privacy for web surfers because all cache and history won’t be saved and automatically cleaned when the session is terminated. There are also third party extension that auto cleans up browser temporary files when exit but there are times when you have too many extension installed and will cause some incompatibility problems. One method is to use the portable version of Firefox browser and run the private browsing mode or manually clear the recent history.
Another way is to use Browzar, a very small and lightweight browser that is only 209KB in size which allows you to search and surf the web without leaving traces on your computer. Browsing history, stored files, cookies and search auto-complete won’t be saved on the computer. The only reason why Browzar is so small in sizer is because it is based on Internet Explorer’s engine. Most websites have better compatibility with IE so you won’t be facing problems in opening complicated websites.
Browzar doesn’t support third party extensions like Chrome or Firefox. It is meant to be a portable and private browser which you can run directly from a USB stick. When you close Browzar, you will notice that it automatically perform cleanup by deleting history, cookies, temporary internet files, temporary java files and flash local shared objects.
Browzar might be a little old as it was last updated on December 2008 but it is still a good alternative for a portable and private web browser.
FlashPlus Manages Flash Contents on Webpages
Normally when a flash component is embedded to a webpage, there is nothing much you can do about it other than zooming in and out, setting the flash quality and printing it. For some custom players such as YouTube, it offers a bit more features such as stop download, watch on youtube and copy embed html. You can now manage flash contents on webpages by installing FlashPlus extension for Chrome browser.
FlashPlus is an extension that helps you manage flash content on web pages. By installing this extension, you can drag or resize flash movie files on any webpage, maximize flash content to the whole browser window, darken the areas around the flash content, pop out the flash to a new window, and block the flash to speed up page loading and also removing annoying music in the background.
After installing this extension, a FlashPlus icon will be added to the end of the address bar whenever you are on a page that contains flash contents. Clicking on that icon put the flash in full screen, locate the flash element, download and block. To have more features such as resizing, moving and darken, click on the thumbnail and the flash component will be highlighted. You can move the flash area and resize it. There are also buttons on top of the flash that lets you darken the area around the flash, make it full screen, block the flash and pop out into a new window.
List of Hidden About Pages for Google Chrome
Google Chrome is somehow a little similar with Firefox. For example, it supports extensions and then it uses About: pages. For example, in Firefox you can access a bunch of hidden settings by typing about:config on the address bar. As for Google Chrome, it has 8 About and 4 Chrome pages. Normal users don’t normally needs to access the about Pages because it contains advanced information such as network, memory, DNS, cache, histograms information.
Here are the current list of hidden Chrome and About pages for Google Chrome.
chrome://extensions – Shows extensions installed in Chrome
chrome://history – Shows web history
chrome://downloads – Shows Chrome download manager
chrome://bookmarks – Open Chrome bookmark manager
about:net-internals – Shows Chrome network information
about:memory – Shows memory usage of every tab and website loaded
about:dns – Shows DNS information
about:plugins – Shows Plugin information such as Flash and RealPlayer plugin
about:cache – Shows internet cache
about:histograms – Shows A list of histograms for Google Chrome’s internal metrics
about:version – Shows Chrome’s version number, webkit and user agent
about:credits – Shows credits and links
about:blank – Shows blank page
about:crash – Shows a crash tab
Some of the older about pages such as about:stats, about:network and about:internets which is Chrome’s humorous easter egg are removed. It still lacks of about:config which gives us access to hidden settings though… If you access the about pages very often, you might want to consider installing ChromeAccess extension which gives you quick access to all relevant about and chrome:// pages.
