Tag Archive for 'extension'

FireFox StumbleUpon Stumble Button

This isn’t the typical stumble button that shows/hides the StumbleUpon toolbar. This is the actual stumble button which loads random pages.

StumbleUpon is an excellent way to browse the web by randomly ’stumbling’ upon websites you probably have never heard of, based on your taste. Most modern browsers have plugins or extensions to facilitate the task of ’stumbling’, usually in the form of a clunky toolbar, such as StumbleUpon’s Official FireFox Extension. This toolbar works fine but might seem like overkill for many, adding what many think is an unnecessary toolbar full of many features one might not even use. It’s possible to disable/hide many of these features, but the toolbar remains, taking up vertical screen real-estate. After much dabbling around, I managed to hack up an easy way to make it so that it only shows the stumble button. Then you can move this button around to wherever you like. Here is the end result:

Stumble Button

Stumble Button

To achieve this, you will need to of course have the StumbleUpon Official FireFox Extension installed, make a simple edit to about:config, and then add a userchrome style using the Stylish Extension.

First, install the StumbleUpon extension and go to its settings, which can be found by going to your add ons window and clicking on StumbleUpon, then Options. Now, make sure that it looks exactly like this:

StumbleUpon Settings

StumbleUpon Settings

Once you have it like that, you should only have the stumble button and the thumbs up/down icons on the toolbar. Next, you will want to install Stylish. Once installed, go to the Stumble Button UserStyle Page and click the Load Into Stylish button, and confirm the action.

Finally, you will have to head over to about:config by copying and pasting that into the address bar, then hitting enter. Once there, type stumble.right-justify-width into the filter box, and you should get one result. Double click on it and set it to 0, then restart FireFox.

Upon restarting, you should now be able to move the button around to wherever you like, by right clicking anywhere on the menu bar (Like on the file menu) and hitting customize. Now you can click the stumble button to land on a random page based on your StumbleUpon settings (If you chose you like technology stuff, it’ll give you technology pages, or a combination of all your favorite categories, etc.).

If you would still like to be able to rate sites without having the thumbs up and down buttons, you can go to the StumbleUpon Extension settings and go to the Shortcuts tab. Enable the stumbling shortcuts and configure to your taste.

Google Browser Sync

Yesterday I barely found out about a Firefox Extension made by Google: Google Browser Sync. This is pretty crazy, it’s what I’ve been looking for for a while and I didn’t even know Google, my favorite company, had already made it haha. Basically it stores all your information from your browser like Bookmarks, Cookies, Tabs/Windows Open, etc. and syncs it to their servers on your account. So you can install this on another computer say at work/school, and it’ll automatically synchronize both computers. So if you bookmark something at home, and you go to your school computer which is also running this extension, you’ll have the bookmark over there too.

Right now I’m not using it for that purpose but rather for backup, just in case anything happens. It’d be better if Google somehow let you view or manage these things it stores, but as far as I know that’s not possible. Either way, this is a great extension so far.

If you ever get into a situation where you have all these tabs open and you have to leave and can’t leave the browser on, some people like me force kill the process (Using CTRL+ALD+DEL) so that the next time I start up Firefox it allows me to open up those same tabs (Lame I know haha), instead with this extension you can close the browser regularly (Just don’t close the tabs themselves), and the next time you start it up the discrete little Google Browser Sync extension will ask you which of those you would like to go back to. Really neat.