kurtmckee, posts by tag: firefox - LiveJournal

My computer is absurdly old. I hand-selected the components and assembled it back in 2002. It was a marvel of processing power at the time, but you'd never know it now. As software has become more featureful, my computer has proven unable to keep up. Nowadays some websites cause Firefox to hang for seconds at a time. As an example, two weeks ago I had reason to visit SoundCloud.com.

One of my brothers was in town, and we had stopped at Jimmy John's for lunch, but what's this? They had some absolutely bangin' music on! I asked the guy behind the counter about it, and he grinned and said "This is Unprotected Sex." While I silently congratulated myself on my word choice, he continued that it was his and his friend's music, and that I could check it out on SoundCloud. (The track in question was "Wizardsbro demo".)

SoundCloud's music player has an interesting feature: users can leave comments at specific moments in the song, and the website will put their avatar underneath the player at the point that they left the comment. For popular artists like Porter Robinson or Skrillex, this means that there are hundreds upon hundreds of overlapping images to load, and my computer can't handle that.

I finally fixed the problem using the Element Hiding Helper extension, a companion to Adblock Plus. It let me quickly zero in on the offending HTML and block it forever:

soundcloud.com##OL.timestamped-comments:last-child

I've again extended the life of my computer, so while I'm an idiot for doing so, at least...um...

Well, the point is that Element Hiding Helper is awesome, and you should use it to excise the stupid stuff websites throw at you.

For a long time I've loved having the Link Widgets extension for Firefox installed; it has very powerful navigational tools that look at the webpage content and determine what the "Next" and "Previous" pages are, relative to the current page. (As an example, if I'm viewing a comic from May 23, the May 22nd and May 24th comics are the previous and next pages, respectively.) If the webpage doesn't provide explicit semantic links to adjacent pages in the HTML, Link Widgets will look through the webpage for links with words like "next", "back", and "previous". And if it doesn't find anything like that, it will actually look at the URL and guess that a number like "23" (following my May 23rd comic example) can be decremented and incremented for the previous and next URLs!

However, while reading The Adventures of Tintin - Breaking Free I was struck by the extraordinary difficulty of fidgeting with my mouse to click "next" (either the in-page link or the Link Widgets toolbar button). Then, after reading the entire thing, I accidentally pressed Ctrl+, instead of Ctrl+L and was surprised that the previous page loaded instead of the focus jumping to the address bar.

Lo-and-behold, Link Widgets supports keyboard shortcuts for going forward or backward in a sequence of webpages: Ctrl+, and Ctrl+. (the mnemonic being the left and right angle brackets also on those keys). There's absolutely no documentation of this feature, so I wanted to share not just that this great extension exists, but that it has convenient keyboard shortcuts for people like me who prefer to lean back in a chair with a keyboard instead of hunching over the desk with a mouse.

Bonus: I no longer need the Link Widgets toolbar visible, since with these two keyboard shortcuts and the Alt+up shortcut I already knew about, I have all the functionality at my fingertips that I want from the extension!