The Mac's built-in PDF support is pretty strong, which is nice because if there's one piece of software I have always despised for its unnecessary bloat, it would be Adobe Reader. To be honest, I've always liked the fact that when I come across a PDF online, clicking to open it results in it being downloaded and opened in the built-in Preview application. Opening PDFs in the browser was always slow and clunky using Adobe Reader, and always annoyed me.

But recently a friend convinced me to try Schubert|it PDF Browser Plugin, and I'm glad I did. PDF Browser Plugin does exactly what you'd expect, allowing you to view PDF files in the comfort of your favorite browser (provided your favorite browser is either Firefox or Safari). But what I found surprising was how fast PDF Browser Plugin is. If you happen to be viewing a small PDF, it will open almost instantly, with the only delay being how long it takes to download the actual PDF file. This speed is possible because PDF Browser Plugin is leveraging the Quartz technology built into the Mac that allows it to render PDF files in the same way the Finder or Preview does.

The plugin's other claim to fame is a distinct respect for the Mac's look-and-feel. Schubert|it PDF Browser Plugin is free for personal or educational use, but requires a $69 site license for business users.

My beloved Firefox seems to have gotten kind of bloated and slow lately, particularly when starting it up. If you've experienced a similar decrease in Firefox's startup performance, check out this quick tip from Mac Tricks and Tips. One of Firefox's default settings is to remember 90 days of history. This means that Firefox is maintaining a list of every site you've visited along with the date and time of the visit for every day from the last three months. If you're anything like me, this can be a pretty huge list.

The tip is to simply go into the Privacy tab of your Firefox preferences and lower the history setting from 90 days to something much smaller, like 5 days. To realize immediate gains, ensure your Clear Private Data settings are set to clear history, then have at it. It may take a few moments, but once your history is cleared, Firefox should start to feel like its sprightly self again.

While the tip originated at a site focusing on Macs, there's no reason to think it wouldn't also help when running Firefox on Windows or Linux.

[via Lifehacker]

I'm in love. With a browser.

Nope, it's not Firefox, and not Safari, though I've had flings with both in the past. Not Camino, not even Chrome.

My new thing is with Minefield, from Mozilla. Okay, so Minefield is essentially an early build of the next version of Firefox. But the latest version has a drastically improved Javascript engine under the hood. Is it fast? Let me tell you - it's crazy fast. In fact, Ars Technica is reporting that Minefield is 10% faster than Google Chrome.

Faster than Chrome, available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and oh - it supports your Firefox add-ins, as long as you're willing to force compatibility using Nightly Tester Tools. Minefield is an alpha release, so it's likely to still be buggy. So far I've been lucky though; all of the add-ins that I've activated have worked fine right out of the gate.

Let me guess, you're in love now too, eh? Well, there's more than enough Minefield to go around. Go get some. Minefield, that is.

[via Ubuntu Unleashed]

Does it frustrate you that even though you can add HTML links in the content of your email when creating it in Gmail, you can't add an HTML link to your signature? It sure frustrates me. Many webmail services have very limited signature editors, making it difficult to create a compelling signature.

If you would like to use more than just plain text in your signature for your webmail account, give WiseStamp a try. WiseStamp is a Firefox add-on that gives you a rich text editor to create your email signature, and gives handy links to instant messaging services or social networks that you can add in to personalize your signature further. WiseStamp supports Gmail, Yahoo! Mail, AOL Mail, and Hotmail.

Have you ever wished you could apply the power of Google's search algorithm to the bookmarks you have stored in Firefox? If you're okay with uploading your bookmarks to a relatively unknown site, you can do just that.

Searchmybookmarks.com has a Firefox extension you can install that will upload all of your bookmarks to their server. Then, when you visit the site, you have the option of searching just your bookmarks, searching your bookmarks and the rest of the web (but giving preference to results from your bookmarks), or just searching the web.

In my brief testing, the site is clearly still in beta, as some obvious search queries that should have returned many results from my bookmarks returned no results at all when searching only my bookmarks. Yet, if I chose to search both my bookmarks and the rest of the web, those same results I was expecting the first time around came out right on top of the result set.

If you were ever sure that you had something bookmarked, but couldn't remember where, searchmybookmarks.com might just be able to help you find it.

Love him or hate him, productivity blogger Merlin Mann has come up with a great way to help keep yourself on track. The idea is to avoid the seductions of the web by stopping a moment to make sure that you're spending your time on what you really want to be spending it on.

In his blog post on the subject, Merlin describes opening folders full of bookmarks all in one go, which have the potential to suck up huge amounts of time. He therefore created a page on his site that asks him "Is this what you want to be doing right now?", and included it as the first bookmark in each of his folders of bookmarks.

While this is a great idea, if you don't operate the same way, opening complete folders of bookmarks all at once, this probably won't help you much. But what if you could set your browser to open this page by default every time you opened a blank new tab or new browser window?

With the NewTabURL extension for Firefox, you can do exactly that. Slick, and helpful.

Firefox is like a box of chocolates--

No, let me try that again. Firefox is one of those applications that's so hard to write about, because there may be little tricks and shortcuts I've been using for some time, and someone will discover one and say, "Hey, that rocks! Why didn't anyone tell me?" Then light dawns over my marblehead that it is a useful trick, and I should have pointed it out.

So Sean Privitera kindly reminded me that searching Google on Firefox is easier than it appears. Ever been reading something on the web and you have no freakin' idea what the word or phrase means? Select the word in question (if you really want to try it out, select this word: geoduck. It's not a Pokemon), right click, and wonder of wonders, there is an option there to search Google for the selected word.

See a nifty bit of formatting on a website, and you're wondering how it was done? Select that formatting, images and all, and right click. Then click "View Selected Source" and a window will pop up in Firefox showing you (brace yourselves!) the HTML formatting of the parts in question.

I've learned to love my right mouse button. Seriously, developers hide all the interesting stuff there. Of course, the right mouse button in Firefox will allow you to open a link in a new tab or window. But it can also calm some fears about what you might be opening (and how it behaves). Right clicking while hovering over a link can tell you if it opens in a new tab, what the URL is, and allow you to send or copy link location.

It is the little tricks like these that make a browser really useful, and more than just a vehicle for surfing the web. But like geoducks, sometimes you need to do a little digging to find them.

First Asus released the EEE (you know, that tiny little Linux laptop), now netbooks are flooding the marketplace as other makers trip over themselves to compete. I love my new MSI Wind, but let's face it: 1024x600 doesn't give you a surplus of screen real estate. Here's what I've done to maximize my viewable area in Firefox without sacrificing much needed functionality.

Step one is to reduce what you can using the options Firefox provides out-of-the-box.

First to go: the status bar. While I know there are reasons to leave it visible, it's not really necessary for the bulk of the web browsing most of us do, and those are valuable pixels we can save. Next, head over to the toolbar menu click on customize. Switching from the default large to small icons will provide another small gain.

Now let's get rid of the bookmarks toolbar.

If you're not using an online bookmarking service yet, owning a netbook is a good reason to start. By using Google bookmarks and installing the GMarks addon, you're able to sneak all your favorites into the top main navigation toolbar. After you've installed GMarks, go back to toolbar customization and drag the GMarks Toolbar star onto the bar wherever you prefer it.

There is a battle for the hearts and wallets souls of our young surfing children on the interwebs. Parents are obviously concerned about the appropriateness of the world wide web being a kid's playground, so are looking for suitable controls to help them feel their children are protected online.

We looked at 2 kids browsers, Glubble and Kidzui, and gave them a test spin as well as subjected them to an unscientific kid focus group. Check out our results after the jump.

Install the add-on and you're given FireShot creates a tiny menu on your navigation toolbar that gives quick access to full-page and visible area capture functions. It does a great job at rendering pages, even those with Flash animations. Support for saving as PNG, JPEG, GIF, and BMP is built-in, as well as exporting to just about any editor.

What really sets FireShot apart, though, is the integrated upload feature. Select it, and you can resize your image on-the-fly and post it to FireShot's free image hosting repository with minimal effort. If there's one feature that helps sell a piece of software to us, it's how much time and effort we can save by using. FireShot makes putting browser screencap online so easy we almost feel lazy doing it. Almost.

Read it Later, a bookmarking plugin for Firefox that we first covered last year is now Firefox 3 compatible. The new version also adds a handful of new features that make it even more useful.

What makes Read it Later different from other bookmarking tools like the del.icio.us plugin for Firefox is the fact that Read it Later makes it easy to bookmark pages, but makes it just as easy to delete those bookmarks. While other services let you save pages forever, Read it Later is designed to let you come back to pages you just don't have time to read fully right now.

The latest version features:

• Offline viewing
• An RSS feed so you can subscribe to your bookmarked pages and keep track of them in a reader
• Synchronize your saved pages with other computers

You can also activate a new "click to save" mode by hitting Alt+M. In this mode, any link you click on a web page will automatically be saved to your reading list. Hit Alt+M again to deactivate this feature if you actually want to open up pages by clicking on links.

So you may have heard that Mozilla is hoping to set a world record for the most software downloads in a single day today. The company has been hyping today as "Download Day" for about a week. But a more apt name might be "Down Day." That's because GetFirefox.com is down. As in dead, kaput, service unavailable.

This probably shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone, but if you encourage millions of users to download your software on the same day, your servers are going to take a hammering. But it appears that even Mozilla had no idea how many people would be trying to download Firefox 3 today.

There's a good chance that you may get through if you keep hitting refresh. And there's a good chance that the company will manage to break the world record if it ever gets the servers back up. But you know what? If you don't really care about setting a world record, Firefox 3 RC 3 is pretty much identical to Firefox 3 final. So if you're already running RC2 or RC3, there's no need to kill yourself trying to update your browser today. Tomorrow, next week, or even next month will probably be soon enough.

In the meantime, if you've got your heart set on downloading a next-generation browser, you can always take Opera 9.5 for a spin. That company's servers are holding up just fine.

Update: Some users are reporting success with these download links. Windows, Mac, Linux

Update 2: It looks like the site is back up, but incredibly slow. Like dialup slow.

The folks behind the PicLens browser plugin for Firefox and Internet Explorer are on a roll. Earlier this year the company rolled out an improved version that lets you view image slideshows from Google, Yahoo!, Flickr, Photobucket, SmugBug, Photobucket, and DeviantArt as a never-ending wall of pictures. Last month, PicLens added support for YouTube videos. And now PicLens 1.7 adds a whole new "Discover" section that lets you browse images and movies in categories such as:

• US News
• International News
  
• Sports
• Entertainment
• Movies/TV
• Fashion/Lifestyle
• Science/Technology
• Business

The content comes from several sources including MSNBC, ESPN, and movie trailer sites. And the content is constantly changing. You can access the Discover tab just by hitting the PicLens icon in your browser and selecting the Discover button on the left hand side of the screen.

PicLens has also added the ability to search Amazon.com from the main search box. And probably one of the most useful new features is a "Return to PicLens" button that pops up in your browser window any time you follow an image from PicLens back to its original source. This lets you go back to your PicLens session without starting over from scratch.

The makers of the Opera web browser don't officially make a portable version of the browser that can be run from a USB stick. But if you want to run the recently released Opera 9.5 browser without installing it or making any changes to your registry, one third party developer has got you covered with Opera 9.5 USB.

All you need to do to run Opera 9.5 USB is unzip the program folder to your hard drive or to a USB stick. You can run the program without affecting your current Opera versions or other web browser settings. And you won't leave any data on the host computer, so if you want to borrow a friend's computer without leaving access to your browser history behind, Opera 9.5 USB cold come in handy.

If you're more of a Firefox person, you can also grab a portable version of Firefox 2 or Firefox 3 RC2. Like Firefox Portable, Opera 9.5 USB is Windows only.

[via CyberNet]