Windows/Mac: RoboForm, a fairly popular all-in-one password manager, has updated to a version 7 that includes support for Chrome and Opera (10) browsers, adds bookmark syncing, improves and clarifies its interface, and offers multiple login management. More »
Your browser of choice may have changed a lot in the past year, but luckily the best extensions for making your browser better have kept up with all the most popular browsers. Here are our cross-platform, must-have favorites. More »
Firefox/Chrome/Opera/Safari/IE: Gmail’s already got several great themes, but if you’ve never been satisfied with Gmail’s clutter, the Helvetimail user script transforms Gmail into a Helvetica-based, stripped-down interface.
(Click the image above for a closer look.)
Helvetimail is a logical—if obvious—step in the latest craze of applying minimal designs using the Helvetica font to popular web applications (see previously mentioned Helvetical, Helvetireader, and Helvetwitter). To use the script, you’ll need to enable the Minimalist theme in Gmail’s themes settings. Then, depending on what browser you’re using, you’ll have to install the user script. (Firefox users, if you’ve installed Greasemonkey, just click the user script link on the Helvetimail page to install. For the rest of you, the script’s author has instructions for various browsers.)
Helvetimail is probably the least attractive of the Helveti-bunch of user scripts we’ve seen (I love the look of Helvetical), but if you’re a big fan of the user-contributed, minimal Helvetica designs, it’s worth a look.
Firefox/Chrome/Opera/IE: I've never found Google Calendar to be particularly unattractive—until I compared it to the sleek, clean look of Google Calendar with the Helvetical user script, that is.
Helvetical has a very similar design aesthetic to previously mentioned Helvetireader, a Helvetica-themed Google Reader customization. It’s easy on the eyes and drops out a lot of the clutter of Google Calendar while keeping all of its functionality in tact.
Helvetical works with any browser that supports custom user scripts, which—in theory, at least—includes Firefox with Greasemonkey, Chrome with user scripts enabled, Opera, and IE with previously mentioned IE7Pro. (We’ve only tested it in Firefox.) If you give it a go, let’s hear how you like it in the comments.
Windows/Mac/Linux: A test version of Opera’s formidable alternative browser introduces Unite, a plug-in that lets users share music, pictures, files, notes, and chat rooms straight from their desktop. Check out its services and features in a quick screenshot tour.
Before jumping into the big pictures, note that Opera 10 with Unite is a “Labs” release, meaning some features may not work as intended and might run a bit buggy. I created Unite services in an Opera window and accessed them with a Firefox browser, and all but the straight-up web serving, oddly enough, worked just fine.
Once you’ve signed in, or signed up, with an Opera account, you can hand out your sharing URL (in the form of computername.username.operaunite.com and, when you start up your Opera Unite services, your friends will see the same landing page as you. Streaming music and full-res pictures from your system can obviously be a bandwidth and system resource drag, but if you’re using Opera Unite mostly while you’re away from your system, that’s probably not an issue.
Opera Unite is a free download for Windows, Mac, and Linux systems; using and serving up files and media requires a free Opera account sign-up. Click the screenshots below for a gallery-style tour of Unite’s features, and be sure to hit the “800×600″ links for full-size shots.
The controls for Opera Unite mostly run out of a pop-in sidebar, allowing you to start, stop, and configure services you want running. Oddly enough, to set a password for each service, you have to visit it from the browser instead of set it in your configuration panel. New services can be installed with a few clicks from Opera’s site, but it appears this Unite test version comes loaded with everything that’s out there, for the moment.
The Fridge is a pretty neat, simple, and ingenious little service. Anyone who knows your sharing name can stop by and write a little note to tack to your fridge, though you can tweak the accessibility from the configuration options.
The straight-up web server. Doesn’t support PHP, mySQL, or any of the other modern web services (though those may arrive in the future), but could be helpful for selective web access to your-eyes-only documents, or hosting docs from crashed/overwhelmed servers.
Photo sharing is straight-up and simple. The server points to whatever folder they want shared, and the user sees thumbnails and bigger pictures when clicked, and can download the full-res version from there.
Music streaming is also fairly straightforward, but offers preview streams along with full downloads. If you’ve got a whole lot of music you want to offload to friends, you’d be better off running the more direct File Sharing service (not pictured, but pretty much how you’d imagine it).
The chat service works well and is really snappy in relay time, at least in our own browser-to-browser tests. Then again, there are a whole bunch of web-based services that let you create instant chat rooms (TinyChat and Chat.io come to mind) without having to make your browser the center of repetitive pings.
Maximum PC takes an in-depth look at the stable and beta releases of the big names in the browser wars, rounding up in all 9 incarnations of browser’s competing to be your gateway to the web (Firefox 3 and 3.1 beta, Internet Explorer 7 and 8 beta, Opera 9.6 and 10 beta, Safari 3 and 4 beta, and Google Chrome). We recently walked you through our browser speed tests, putting the latest and greatest browsers through the paces, but if you’re looking for a more in-depth examination, the MaxPC article is seven pages full of charts and graphs thoroughly evaluating each offering. [Browser Battle: Nine Browsers of Today and Tomorrow Compared]
Dear Lifehacker,
How can I sync favorites in Opera, IE7, Chrome, Safari, and Firefox? Is there any way to do it, beside manually export everyone and then painfully editing the HTML?
Best Regards from a Daily Reader
Dear Daily Reader,
For Firefox and Internet Explorer, at least, we’ll whole-heartedly recommend the newly IE-friendly and Safari-friendly Foxmarks. It doesn’t have the password support of its Firefox iterations, but it does do an admirably swift job of keeping your bookmarks and toolbar favorites synced up in the background.
As for Chrome and Opera, well, that’s a trickier task. If you’re using all four browsers equally, you might want to consider using the long-standing, well-tested Delicious as your primary bookmarking tool, since its accessible from anywhere, keeps everything in sync with or without your action, and has handy bookmark bar tools for reading and saving bookmarks from any browser. When you import your bookmarks from any browser, they’ll be set to private by default, saving you a whole bunch of work. The minor pain is that new bookmarks can’t be set to private by default (correct me if I’m wrong, readers!), but it’s truly the only way to keep your bookmarks in sync without a lot of import/export/save shuffling.
Unless, of course, one of our readers have a smart solution for shuttling or syncing each browser's HTML bookmark files around—maybe an AutoHotKey script? A clever use of syncing tool Dropbox, similar to how we utilize it as the ultimate password syncer?
Peace and soul,
Lifehacker
AdSweep is a user script that blocks a good number of ads on some major websites, and works from a simple file you plug into your Opera or Google Chrome files.
The instructions for installing the single AdSweep.user.js file in your Opera or Chrome browser are laid out step-by-step on AdSweep’s main page. Opera users have a mostly graphical process, while Chrome users will have to check their version and then make a few tweaks to enable user scripts. The site notes that AdSweep will work for Firefox as well, along with Safari and Internet Explorer with some third-party add-ons, but each of those platforms has their own ad-blocking solutions, like Firefox’s uber-popular Adblock Plus. Chrome users can also use a proxy solution like the previously detailed Privoxy to get annoying ads out of their way.
We have to say it—the site you're reading right now is, of course, supported by advertising, and we'd ask that you keep them displayed if you dig what we do here. But AdSweep is pretty easily tweaked with, since it's just one file, and can be used for blocking of extremely annoying ads. It's a free download, works where Opera and Chrome can install. Thanks, Saša!
