Author Archives: Christopher Finke

Netscape, Netscape Navigator, Slashdot, Social Media, Software

Coverage of the Navigator 9 Beta

Articles about the release of the Navigator 9 Beta have been all over the Web today. Here are the major ones that I’ve spotted:

Slashdot: First Peek at Netscape Navigator 9

Fark: Netscape releases a new browser. In other news, Netscape still makes a browser

456 Berea Street: Software Update Day

Pronet Advertising: Netscape Navigator 9 Released – The Social Browser Has Landed

Linux.com: Netscape releases Netscape Navigator 9 beta 1

Download Squad: Netscape Navigator 9 Beta 1 released

Webware: Hands-on with Netscape’s new social browser

Mac Daily News: Netscape Navigator 9.0 beta 1 released

Beta News: Netscape Browser Becomes ‘Navigator’ Again

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Digg, Digg Statistical Data, Social Media

Top 1,000 Diggers: 2007/06/06

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/06/06

If you’d like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

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Netscape Blog

Navigator 9 Beta has been released

This post originally appeared on the Netscape Blog.

Netscape is pleased to announce the immediate availability of Netscape Navigator 9.0 Beta 1. The release is now available for download from browser.netscape.com for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Some of Navigator 9’s new features are listed below; for a complete list, see What’s New in Netscape Navigator 9? at browser.netscape.com; you may want to also check out the Netscape Navigator FAQ for information on running Navigator 9 alongside previous Netscape browsers.

What’s New In Navigator 9?

URL Correction

Navigator 9 will automatically correct common typos in URLs. For example, if you accidentally type googlecom, Navigator will fix it be to google.com. The browser will watch for nearly 30 different types of common mistakes and correct them for you (asking you to confirm, if you choose to enable confirmation).

News Menu and Sidebar

The latest news is built right into the browser, under the News menu. Provided by Netscape.com, you can customize this menu to contain only the news sections that you want to monitor.

In-browser voting

Share your opinions with the world! The icons in Navigator’s address bar let you share interesting stories you find as well as vote on stories shared by others.

Sidebar mini browser

You’ve always been able to have bookmarks open in the sidebar, but we’ve improved this functionality and extended it to all links, not just bookmarks. Additionally, we’ve added a navigation toolbar to the sidebar for even easier split-screened browsing. Just right-click on a link and select “Open Link in Sidebar” to get started!

Extension Compatibility

Navigator 9 shares its architecture with the latest Mozilla technologies; as such Navigator 9 will allow you to install extensions that are compatible with Firefox 2.

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Browser Add-ons, GoogleTabs, Links Like This

Links Like This gets some polish

I’ve updated the Links Like This Firefox extension with the following features:

Links Like This is an extension for the Firefox Web browser that allows you to open many links in a page simply by right-clicking on one link and selecting the “Open Links Like This…” option. It will use the link you clicked on as an example of the type of link you want to open.

  • It now pays attention to whether the link you clicked on is already in your history and chooses similar links accordingly.
  • It will no longer open duplicate links.
  • It now removes the red dotted border from the suggested links if you choose not to open them.
  • The confirmation dialog now contains the number of links that are going to be opened. “Open these links?” and “Open these 472 links?” are fundamentally different questions. :-)

You can install the latest version from the Links Like This homepage.

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AOL, CK Sample, Jason Calacanis, Netscape, Netscape Navigator

C.K.’s start-up life

C.K. Sample III describes the last two years of working in various start-up environments inside and outside of AOL. I found this part especially interesting:

Aside: I must take a moment here to implore everyone at AOL: release the new Netscape Browser. I’ve played with early versions of it and it’s great. The best browser out there. You will reap great rewards and good faith from the Internet community if you would simply release the bugger. The people who used to be my team worked hard on that thing and they deserve to see it released. It’s Firefox, but better.

Amen.

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Digg, Digg Statistical Data, Social Media

Top 1,000 Diggers: 2007/05/30

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/05/30

If you’d like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

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Browser Add-ons, TubeStop, YouTube

TubeStop extended to non-YouTube sites

TubeStop was discontinued on December 25, 2012, and Firefox’s newly-introduced controls for managing auto-playing videos have since made it obsolete.

TubeStop was mentioned today on the the Global Geek Podcast, and the main drawback discussed was that it doesn’t disable the autoplay on YouTube videos embedded on other sites. I’ve added this feature and subsequently released TubeStop 1.1.

You can install TubeStop 1.1 from the TubeStop homepage.

TubeStop is a browser extension that stops YouTube videos from automatically beginning playback when the page is loaded.

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Browser Add-ons, GoogleTabs, Links Like This, Mozilla Firefox, Programming

Building a better multi-link opener

After giving up on GoogleTabs, I was thinking about how there is no acceptable (by my standards, anyway) Firefox extension for opening multiple links. Linky is too general, just opening large swaths of links, and Snap Links requires you to physically indicate every link that you want opened. An ideal extension should know the links that you want to open based on just one link out of the set.

I believe that I’ve written this suitable extension, and it’s called Links Like This. The extension works like so: any time you right-click on a link, an option entitled “Open Links Like This…” is added to the context menu:

Opening links with Links Like This

If you select that option, the extension will find all of the links in the page that are similar to the link you right-clicked on, highlight them, and then ask you to confirm that they are indeed the links that you want to open.

Links Like This marks the links it will open

Unlike GoogleTabs, this extension is generalized to all websites. Due to its dynamic matching algorithm, it actually appears to work better than GoogleTabs on Google search pages, and in my experience so far, it works equally well with the other search engines and link-heavy sites like Digg/Netscape/Reddit or CraigsList.

You can install Links Like This from the Links Like This homepage. Feel free to describe any positive or negative experiences with it in the comment section below.

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Life

Hi Leah!

We had planned on camping at Yellowstone last night, but temperatures in the low 30’s and the hours of snow persuaded us otherwise, so instead we drove through Grand Teton National Park and then spent the night in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. No Dick Cheney sighting yet, but I’m keeping an eye out for him.

Today we’ll try and see Old Faithful and some other Yellowstone sights as we make our way north in preparation for driving to North Dakota for my sister Holly’s high school graduation on Saturday.

Here we are expressing our concern at the possibility of coming upon a rattlesnake:

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Digg, Digg Statistical Data, Nintendo Wii, ScribeFire, Social Media, TubeStop, Twits Like Me

Top 1,000 Diggers: 2007/05/23

TubeStop was discontinued on December 25, 2012, and Firefox’s newly-introduced controls for managing auto-playing videos have since made it obsolete.

This CSV files contains the username, number of frontpage stories, number of submitted stories, number of stories dugg, and number of profile views for the top 1,000 users on Digg.

Top 1000 Diggers as of 2007/05/23

In other Digg news, the last 13 stories from this blog that have been submitted to Digg have all been buried. This includes posts about TubeStop, Twits Like Me, the Digg Top Users list, ScribeFire, and Wii-specific Web design. (Contrast this search page with this search page.) This means one of three things:

  1. Everything I write is lame.
  2. There is a group of Digg users specifically burying content from my site.
  3. eFinke.com is on some sort of Digg blacklist and is being automatically buried by the system.

I’m leaning towards #2, but I don’t know how they would track submissions from my site since the only way to do that has been broken for months.

If you’d like to be notified whenever I release a new dataset, you can subscribe to the Digg Statisical Data RSS feed, which will include only the dataset posts, or my main RSS feed, which is updated with all of my blog posts.

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Social Media, Software, TubeStop, Video, YouTube

TubeStop

TubeStop was discontinued on December 25, 2012, and Firefox’s newly-introduced controls for managing auto-playing videos have since made it obsolete.

My latest browser extension, TubeStop, is an extension for Mozilla-based Web browsers that disables the autoplay on YouTube.com videos. This means that you can open YouTube videos in multiple tabs without them all starting to play at once.

Currently, this extension only works on videos at YouTube.com, not on YouTube videos embedded on non-YouTube.com websites with autoplay enabled.

TubeStop is compatible with Firefox 1.5 – 2.0.0.*, the latest Flock builds, and Netscape Navigator 9.0. If you’re having trouble using the extension, you can either e-mail me at chris@efinke.com or leave a comment below.

You can install TubeStop 1.0 from the TubeStop homepage.

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Christina, Life, Netscape, Netscape.com, Programming, Social Media

One more day in paradise

So tomorrow is my last day in Orlando. I don’t know if it was something I ate (Cheeburger Cheeburger, I’m looking at you) or just the stress of traveling, but I’ve felt sick to my stomach since yesterday afternoon, which is terrible timing. If I was going to get sick during this trip, I would have preferred it to happen anytime during the week, since I can still program just fine if I’m nauseous, but it’s awfully hard to enjoy the extra downtime of the weekend without being further than 20 feet from a bathroom (just in case).

The work portion of this week’s ScapeCon was productive. We planned out some new features that are going to rock your world once they’re released. I’m not kidding – the next time you feel the ground shake, or even if you stumble a little bit, that’s just us at Netscape, releasing new features and rocking your world.

I should probably get to sleep; I have to be up before 6 tomorrow to make it to the airport in time to catch my flight. (Hopefully the plane won’t be as packed as my two flights were on the way here.) Once home, Christina and I are road-tripping it to Yellowstone, so I’ll be offline for the majority of the next week.

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Browser Add-ons, Google, GoogleTabs, Programming

Decommissioning GoogleTabs

I’ve decided to retire GoogleTabs, one of the very first extensions I ever wrote. GoogleTabs adds a context-menu option to open all of the Google search results on the current page in tabs.

I made this decision for several reasons:

  • I don’t have time to keep up with Google. Every time they change the HTML for any of their search result pages, I have to update the extension and release a new version.
  • I don’t use the extension. All of my other extensions came about to fill one of my browsing needs, and in a few cases, other people found the extension useful as well. Since I never really used GoogleTabs, I don’t feel the same need to keep it current.
  • There are better solutions. There are other extensions like Snap Links and Linky that do the same thing, but on a wider scale. It doesn’t make sense to have a Google-specific version when you can have one extension that mass-opens links on all webpages.

According to Mozilla Addons, GoogleTabs was downloaded a total of 95,322 times (plus the downloads directly from my site), so it had a pretty good run. Rest in peace, GoogleTabs.

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