For those of you using slackware and want to check it out, you can download the latest 9.20b release from my Opera Slackware packages page.

opera-9.20b_20070323.5-i386-1_hno.tgz
opera-9.01_20060629.6-i486-1hno.tgz

Current stable release

opera-9.10_20061214.5-i386-1_hno.tgz
opera-9.0-i486-1hno.tgz

About the above packages

The opera desktop team have been releasing weekly builds of the upcoming recently released version 9.0.

I have been creating opera slackware packages for each one of these releases for my own personal use, and considering the fact that 9.0-final has been released, I thought that might as well share the love and upload my packages for my fellow slackers to use.

The current stable release is available for download, but I will also provide a package of the latest beta/nightly/weekly release. My own personal experience is that the beta builds are more often than not stable enough to use in a production environment, although if in doubt, download the latest stable version.

Note: These packages use shared qt libraries, meaning that you will at the very least require a basic KDE installation. As Slackware comes default with KDE installed, this should not be a problem, and I believe that if you are clever enough to engineer a slackware installation without kdelibs installed, I think you should be smart enough to create your own opera package anyway. If there is enough interest, however, I might provide static-qt opera slackware packages if requested.

If you already use the highly-recommended Bookmarks Synchronizer Plugin, then you know the convenience of remote location of your bookmarks, and how handy it is to cart your settings with you across multiple computers and operating systems. Well, while playing with my userContent.css this afternoon, a small, somewhat dim lightbulb went off in my head. I wonder if I could make this as portable as my bookmarks?

Turns out you can. With one oh-so-simple line of code, you too can drag your custom XUL hacks with you across multiple computers.

If you have never experimented with hacking your userContent.css file, well now is the time. For this example we will apply some simple but usable hacks that will change your browsers’ cursors for javascript and external links, as well as improve the look of the Firefox standard error pages. (1)

Download the sample userContent.css file.

The first (and highly recommended) step is to ensure that your custom behaviours actually work the way you want them to. So, locate your profile folder and save the file in that directory as userContent.css. To test whether the styles are working as they are supposed to, restart your browser and then mouse over this link and look for a change in your default cursor. If you see a move-styled cursor, then the sample styles are being applied correctly and you are ready to continue to step two.

The next step is to upload that CSS file to your, or a friend’s, or even your ISP’s web server. I chose to save that file as userContentRemote.css.

Once that is done, open up your local version of userContent.css and replace all of the styles in there with one, very simple, and ever-so-damn-obvious line of code:

@import "http://someserver.com/userContentRemote.css";

It is just so simple I would wager more than a few dollars that I am most certainly not the first person to think of it. But regardless of that, with one simple line of W3C-valid CSS I am able to make my Firefox browser settings portable across as many computers as I can be bothered to use.

I have been using Firefox since its pre-Firebird, pre-Phoenix days of 2002. Nearly three years on, and with the browser “all grown up now”, I have to say I am very much dependant on it. I have to admit I have strayed from time to time, experimenting with others such as the almost-had-me Opera and the looks-great-in-KDE-but-shit-in-anything-else Konqueror, but Firefox is undoubtedly the browser I have come to know and love.

One of the features that has become a necessity in my daily goings on are the plethora or Firefox extensions. So without further adieu, here are my Top 5 Firefox Extensions I Can’t Live Without.

5. User Agent Switcher

This extension allows Firefox users to specify what user agent to broadcast to the world when browsing the internet. It is amazingly simple, yet the uses of this extension are numerous. I personally use it for three specific purposes:

• To ’spoof’ the user agent of my browser to test my own code. On some of my clients’ sites I use some nifty PHP to sniff the users browser and deliver the appropriate stylesheet compatible with that browser. (Can you all say IE sucks?)
• To access clients’ sites that are so old and/or badly coded that they actually refuse to load for any other browser than IE/Win.
• To ’spoof’ user agents such as the Googlebot – once again to test my own code. (Specifically, logging of search engine spidering activities.)

Of course, there are essentially limitless uses for this plugin, these are just a few of my personal requirements.

4. Foxytunes

Foxytunes is an amazing extension if for nothing more than its huge list of supported players and operating systems. It only made number 4 in my top 5, not because there is something specifically wrong with it, but rather that it is merely an amusement extension. The fact that this extension made my top 5 despite this fact is a testament to its functionality and features.

What this extension does is integrate a small control panel within your web browser that allows you to control your chosen media player without having to toggle between windows. If that is not reason enough to give this extenstion a go, then have a quick glance at its feature set. All of that for the the princely sum of $0 and less than 175KB of your bandwidth.

3. Bookmarks Synchronizer

This extension is one that I simply cannot do without. Bookmarks Synchronizer gives you the ability to sync your bookmarks to a FTP/WebDAV server of your choice, allowing complete portability of your internet favourites.

If you are anything like me and have the annoying combination of a huge bookmarks repository as well as using numerous different computers on a daily basis, you will easily see the value of this extension. I can bookmark my heart out, and when I close firefox those new bookmarks are automatically sync’d to my chosen FTP server. The next day at work, as soon as I open my browser Firefox instinctively checks the same server for an updated file and loads the new bookmarks accordingly. Brilliantly simple and simply brilliant.

2. Adblock

The Adblock Firefox Extension: the perennial favourite amongst Firefox veterans. If you haven’t heard of or used this extension you must be living in a cave. For arguments’ sake, let’s call that cave Internet Explorer.

The Adblock extension, strangley enough, blocks ads. Sick of Doubleclick? Block it. News.com.com.com scattered with ads? Block them too. It also has a nifty filters function using wildcards and regular expressions. *doubleclick* will work wonders. Its simplicity is also its greatest strength, as all you have to do is right click, Adblock. That’s it. Really.

Go and try it on a site like CNN, you will not be disappointed.

1. Web Developer

“And to the victor come the spoils.” Although in this case, the victor is Chris Pederick, and the spoils are nothing more than a fuzzy feeling hopefully delivered by being crowned number 1 in my Top 5 Firefox Extensions I Can’t Live Without

Chris has been afforded the amazing privilege of having not one, but two of his creations feature in my top 5. Considering he has only released a total of two extensions, User Agent Switcher and Web Devloper, 2-from-2 is not half bad, Mr Pederick.

The Web Developer extension is something I use and abuse most of my day, and I cannot begin to fathom the number of man-hours this extension has saved me in debugging and testing my work. If you have anything to do with web design or development and are not yet using this, I suggest you throw your copy of Frontpage 3.0 out the window and install it!

The feature list is rather extensive, but a few worthy of mention and that I use most frequently are:

• Outlining of various elements including block-level elements, deprecated elements, links without title attributes and custom elements (such as divs etc).
• Scores of configurable tools including validating the HTML, CSS and accessibility, as well as speed reports and link checking.
• The display of id and class details.
• The display of anchors and link paths.
• Convert form POSTs to GETs, and vice-versa.
• Find broken images and/or images without alt tags.
• Disable CSS, javascript, images, cookies, cache, java, colours and many more.
• Display cookie information.
• Display response headers and page information.
• Shows whether the browser has rendered a page in quirks mode or standards compliance mode.
• Many, many, (did I mention many?) more features.

For the full list make sure you check out the features, or even easier, download and install the extension and try it out.

Honourable Mentions

• ColorZilla – Advanced eye-dropper, color-picker and page-zoomer. (Think Photoshop’s eye-dropper functionality for your web browser.)
• Gmail Notifier – Allows checking for new Gmail messages directly from the browser’s UI.