User styles have been around since the early days of the web. They are a way for users to specify their browsing preferences using CSS cascade. I remember way back when this option was fairly prominent in Internet Explorer settings. Now, I don’t even know how to find it in most browsers. But I did […]

Like it’s not bad enough that JavaScript has implied globals (forget var and you create a global), but the browsers have decided it’s a good idea to add more pollution to the global namespace. This has been a source of frustration before with IE, it’s really hard to understand the logic behind it, but it’s […]

HTTPFox is an interesting Firefox extension for monitoring the HTTP traffic, obviously inspired by the IE-only commercial HttpWatch. HTTPFox shows some stuff that are missing from Firebug’s Net Panel, such as requests for favicons and such. There’s also a little search box that lets you filter the list of components. Pretty cool too is the […]

Today is the Download Day for Firefox, which means the new release FF3 is out now. Go ahead, download and help set a Guiness record for the most software downloads in a day. Also, last night we released a new YSlow version that works with FF3 and the latest Firebug 1.2 beta (and also FF2, […]

Always wanted to create a Firefox extension? Or a Firebug extension? Here’s an easy way to take off the ground, no more excuses. Firefox Extensions The way most people get started with creating a Firefox extension is copying an existing extension and tweaking. This is not the best way as you can guess, the best […]

Steve Souders, performance architect at Yahoo, announced today the public release of YSlow. What’s YSlow? It’s an extension to Firebug (yes, correct, Firebug, not Firefox) that helps with performance optimization efforts. It scores your page on the scale A to F, based on compliance with Yahoo’s performance rules. It’s a tool that has been used […]

So you know how to add external scripts and styles, using the DOM, after the page is loaded. And what if you don’t have external files, but have some style definitions and some JS code as text and you want it inserted and executed into a page. The DOM way “Ha! An easy one”, you’d […]

Let’s say you want to quickly try out some small stylesheet changes, but you don’t want to (or prefer not to, or for some reason temporarily you just can’t) modify your application’s CSS file(s). In FF it’s easy – you have Firebug and you can play with styles until blue in the face. And in […]

Update: A better version of what I was trying to do is here. It works around the cross-domain permission problems in IE by not loading a page in the frame, but putting there the actual content. Firebug – no words to describe how cool it is, really. After the recent new release (1.0. beta) the […]

Have you looked at the HTML markup of the new Yahoo homepage? Then you should. The markup (although it won’t validate) is a piece of semantic art. Lists are lists, tabs are lists, only one table to be seen (obviously plugged-in coming from a different site) The total number of markup elements on the page […]

The question is – what will a browser do, given a page with several stylesheets, each of them probably overwriting definitions from the previous ones? Will the browser render the page using the first received css file, while downloading the other ones and after that partially re-rendering where required? The answer is: no, the browser […]

If you want to try executing custom local scripts on any page you visit, try Greasemonkey. Here’s a 10 seconds tut. The task is to create a custom script and to make sure it’s executed every time you leave a page on phpied.com (prerequisite) Get Firefox! Install Gresemonkey from here Create a file phpied.user.js (all […]