Posted 02/17/10 at 12:00:00 PM by David Murphy

Ok, Safari fans. If you're still holding out for a few of your favorite features to appear in Mozilla's Firefox before you're convinced to make the switch, the cosmetic add-on Fission might be enough to get you to jump ship. This little add-on doesn't clone or skin your Safari browsing experience, nor does it actually build anything extremely useful into the browser that's otherwise lacking between the two competing platforms. But that's OK--not every add-on should move mountains just as long as it provides some kind of neat feature that you wouldn't be able to find normally, right?

Well, that's the definition of Fission. All this little add-on does is move the typical loading status bar from your tabs to Firefox's address bar. That's it. Though, I admit, I kind of like having this larger area serve as the status for my page loading efforts. There's a lot more space to work with (in case you're suffering from a page that's taking forever to load.) More than that, it's a lot easier to see the "snap" of the bar filling up, giving you an easy visual reference--beyond the loaded page itself--whenever your browser is done rendering content.

Will Fission win any awards for its unique fix? Likely not. But it does make Firefox just a touch bit prettier (provided it doesn't break any of your themes), and we can all be grateful for that.

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Posted 02/04/10 at 10:00:00 PM by David Murphy

One of Mozilla Firefox's bigger advantages over Google Chrome has just been wiped away and, dare we say, Google Chrome has actually one-upped its rival in terms of overall usability and ease-of-installation. We're referring, of course, to Greasemonkey. You might have heard this name echoed across tech and tweak sites far and wide. As well you should have--the functionality you can achieve by this upgrade to your surfing experience is simply unsurpassed in its depth or scope by any conventional add-on or extension.

It's quite simple, really. You install Greasemonkey to gain access to a gallery of add-ons that benefit your browsing experience just as much as your favorite official "add-ons," if not more. By add-ons, we mean "scripts." In its conventional format, Greasemonkey is a browser add-on that grants you the ability to automatically integrate new Javascript-based modifications to a site whenever you load up the page. You don't have to design these modifications yourself--a huge gallery of scripts (more than 40,000!) have already been written for a wide swath of functions and locations. Consider Greasemonkey scripts to be analogous to extensions for Greasemonkey--itself an extension for your main browser.

Sound good? Because now, Google Chrome users have the ability to tap into Greasemonkey scripts as much as any other browser user. You don't even have to install a separate add-on, since scripts work natively in the browser! 

But here's the catch: not all Greasemonkey scripts work perfectly in Google Chrome. The running estimation is that roughly 20 percent of what's out there is currently broken for Google's browser. That's not great news for a person who's easily frustrated by failure. However, here's where Maximum PC comes into the picture. We've run through a large swath of awesome Google Greasemonkey scripts to achieve two key goals: to see what works and to see which scripts, of the 40,000+ available, are awesome tweaks for your browser. Click the jump for a look at some of the top Greasemonkey scripts you could (or should) be slapping into your Google Chrome browser right now.

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Posted 01/27/10 at 12:00:05 PM by David Murphy

One of Google Chrome's more useful features is its ability to display recently opened Web pages and your most-visited Web pages via a little visual table whenever you open up a new, "blank" tab. For the Web surfer with a limited range of interests or for those interested in a quick way to hit their favorite sites in one go, this functionality is miles ahead of Firefox's, well, blank tab. But here's the problem: You can't actually customize anything on Chrome's launching page. Or, rather, you can only pin and subtract.

What I mean by that is Chome lacks the ability to let you pick, from the start, exactly what you want to appear on your "new tab" page. If a site happens to make its way across your "most viewed" list and you want to stick it there, you can pin said side to your page by hovering your mouse over the image until its blue configuration frame appears. You use the same process to prevent certain sites from ever appearing on this page--I'm not going to ask what those might be. Other than that, you're stuck--unless you start refreshing a particular page to the point of annoyance just to get it to appear, you have no way to actually predefine or shuffle around these sites.

The Chrome Extension Speed Dial is your solution for complete and total customization of your new tab page in Google's browser. It's not perfect, but it's a welcome addition to any Chrome-tweaker's arsenal. Find out about all its features after the jump!

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Posted 01/14/10 at 12:15:40 PM by David Murphy

A few habits separate the average Web surfer from the hyper-obsessive or "geek" Web surfer. Average Web surfers browse from site to site in a spidery fashion, allowing the contents of one to link them to the landing page of another. These pages, in turn, become new gateways for successive clicks in a giant, unfolding map of activity. Average Web surfers might have a few sites they like to hit up from time to time, but their general browsing habits are more random voyage than predestined path.

Geeks are not that. A geeky Web surfer has a set list of sites that are nothing short of awesome. These sites are scoured as much as your average preteen checks Facebook on a daily basis, if not more. Every last drop of useful information is extracted from each browsing session, and every one of these sites contains a melting pot of useful hyperlinks for adding extra innings to the surfing experience. Geeks will settle for nothing less than a constant influx of news and information.

The Firefox add-on Update Scanner bridges these two extremes by delivering a useful tool for browsing sessions of all shapes and sizes. Click the jump to see what it does!

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Posted 12/23/09 at 01:30:08 AM by David Murphy

It can be a real pain in the butt to go from browsing a Web page on your desktop or laptop to pulling up said page on your mobile phone. The process usually involves texting or emailing the URL to yourself or, if you're a real masochist, manually typing in the URL using your phone's built-in keyboard (or worse yet, T9-based keypad). Even converting the URL to a bit.ly or a goo.gl link still requires you to actually spend time fidgeting with your phone to get to the page. No matter what, this process just isn't very fun.

Not very fun, that is, until I stumbled across the Mobile Barcoder add-on for Firefox. With but the quick hit of a button, you can convert any Web page you're looking at into one of those neat cube QR codes. Depending on your phone, you can then use a built-in or downloaded application to scan said QR code directly from your monitor. Without a single press of a letter or number button, you'll have the page you were just looking at right in your phone's mobile browser.

Neat, eh? Click the jump to find out where to get this awesome add-on!

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