Dear Chrome, Slow Your Roll

Google, please stop doing that. I’d actually love it if you took features out of Chrome and brought it back to the original, clean builds that were fast as fuck. That’s all I care about in a web browser.

Instead, we’re at the point now where I cannot shut down my computer without force-quitting Chrome. And the browser is just about the only thing that can get my brand-new MacBook Pro to beachball.

I know it’s a crazy concept in the age of fast iteration on the web, but what if you just stop development on Chrome from a feature perspective? Continue to speed up and refine the JavaScript engine and underlying tech, but keep the browser itself as minimal as possible.

MG Siegler

Browser plug-in and website warn about data harvesting by Facebook apps

The App Advisor Security Network website has profiles on more than 500,000 third-party Facebook applications that describe the user data they collect, what actions they can take and whether they are considered unsafe. The application profiles also display user ratings.

Meanwhile, the App Advisor browser extension, which works with Safari, Firefox and Chrome, gets activated when users visit either application sites or call up an application’s page in the Facebook App Center.

Macworld

Footnotes

Footnotes are a great way of inserting additional information into a text that, either it is not relevant enough or simply would break the text flow with some link or bibliographical reference. I use them on this blog as you might have noticed, by virtue of this wordpress plugin.

Now until now the way to see a footnote was either by hovering above it, and you would get this:

No Footnote

or by clicking on it, and it would take you to the bottom of the article to read the footnote. If you clicked on the orange return it would return the browser view to the where you were reading.

No footnote at bottom

As you see neither option is perfect. The hovering option will display gibberish if anything else than standard letters are used, including an “apostrophe” or quotation marks. The clicking option will disrupt your reading and probably take some time as the browser redraws the webpage.

However there is a third option. Available for all of the major three browsers (( As you should guess this means Safari, Chrome and Firefox. Opera likes to play alone in its corner and IE, well, IE is on its own small limited world and enjoys beeing there. If you use it, stop it right now. Try something else and you will find out an entire new world out there, where you can get rounded corners on pictures and other great aesthetics. Oh, and speed. And more speed… )) as a plugin called Footnotify. Whith it, when you click a footnote mark you will get this:

With footnote

Feeling convinced? Footnotes are now aesthetically attractive and you keep your page location and can go on with your reading flow. It should work on every site with a standard footnote html tag. Try it.