The Blork Blog

I have an old G3 iBook that Martine and I use primarily as a Web terminal. We both use our desktop machines for real work, but it’s handy to have a Web machine kicking around for use anywhere in the house.

Given its vintage, the iBook is a bit slow by today’s standards. It was tolerable, however, until we upgraded to OS X 10.4. Boy was that a disaster. Not only did we lose the brightness controls on the monitor (a widely-reported bug that Apple refuses to acknowledge), it was like pouring cold molasses into the works. Even basic Web browsing is now so painfully slow that the machine is barely usable. Freshly booted, and with only two or three tabs open, it’s functional, but in the real world that’s rarely the working scenario. Despite the various optimizations I’ve done, the thing slows to a crawl and often becomes completely unresponsive for no particular reason.

I was wondering if it was a problem specific to Firefox. After all, there have been reports of Firefox sometimes misbehaving on Macs. So this morning I decided to try using the Safari Web browser instead.

Um. Yes, Safari is “faster,” but it’s extensibility is so limited that I feel like I’m back in 2002. I used it for about half an hour, and I was surprised at how limited and under-thought a few aspects of the interface was. For example, I wanted to add a bookmark, and to create a new folder for it. Duh. Creating a folder is a separate step that you have to do first. As in, there is no option to create a new folder while creating the new bookmark. That’s just retarded.

Then I went looking for extensions, hoping to make Safari mimic my Firefox experience. Um. While there are extensions available, they seem to be geared towards the obscure and ineffable. For example, the Greasekit extension is “an InputManager extension, that intends to emulate Greasemonkey’s custom javascript functionality for Safari.” Huh? WTF does that mean? Then there’s the TabStop plugin, which “displays a warning when you attempt to quit or close a window in Safari that contains multiple tabs.” What? You need a plugin for that? That’s built into Firefox (with the option to turn off if you like).

OK, I’m being ungenerous. I found a few Safari extensions that could be somewhat useful, such as the above-mentioned Tabstop (although that’s really just filling a feature gap) as well as a number of ad blockers and such. But I couldn’t find any extensions that match the ones I use, and love, in Firefox.

For the record, those Firefox extensions include:

Signature

The Signature extension lets you create a bunch of customized, prefabricated text strings for use in Web page text fields. It sounds obscure, but I use it all the time. For example, I have a string that includes the link path to the location of my blog images; when I’m linking to an image I just click the Signature item and then type the file name. I also have one for my YULblog ping codes (there’s no way I can remember them by heart), so every time I make a blog post and want to ping www.yulblog.org, I just click in the “Trackbacks” field in Wordpress and insert the Signature item (two clicks). Bingo, ping codes inserted. Even the code for the drop cap that I use as the first character of my posts is a Signature item. Two clicks and all I have to do is type the letter. Very, very handy.

Inserting Ping Codes; Two Clicks

Nuke Anything

Have you ever been trying to read an online article but you keep getting distracted by some annoying animated ad that’s embedded right in the text column? With Nuke Anything installed, you just right-click the item and choose “Remove this object” from the context menu that appears. Bingo, annoying animation is gone. This is particularly handy when you’re at the office and the page you’re reading has “NSFW” images or ads on it. Click click click. Nothing left but the text. Unfortunately it doesn’t work on everything, and it doesn’t work all the time, but I generally find it 80-90% effective.

Stop Autoplay

I tend to load a lot of pages into background tabs, and then go about reading them and dismissing the tabs in a somewhat systematic order. For example, when Darkly Dreaming David puts up one of his awesome linkdumps, I’ll load them all in background tabs, click click click click… and then go through them. This is so much quicker and easier than clicking the link, then going back, then clicking another link, then going back. This is why tabs were invented. Anyway, I absolutely hate it when pages have sound or video files that start playing automatically. Cripes, that’s frustrating! I’ve just loaded up 15 background pages and now three of them are playing audio tracks, so I have to click click click click click through them all, scrolling up and down, to find what’s playing where, and to pause them.

With Stop Autoplay, nothing starts on its own. All embedded audio and video files are represented by a blank rectangle with a small “Play” button in the middle. Nothing plays until you want it to. Brilliant! As it should be.

Annoying Autoplay Ad Stopped Dead with Stop Autoplay

Lots More

I use a dozen other Firefox extensions, but those three are the most useful. I suppose what I really need to do is find a way to roll the iBook back to OS X 10.3 so I can go back to using Firefox. I hope there’s a way to do that without having to reformat the hard drive, but I doubt it. Not that I expect any help from Apple.