Google Chrome Promoted on the Most Valuable Online Property

Google’s new browser Google Chrome is being promoted on arguably the most valuable property on the web – Google Homepage.

The browser itself is “google cool” with Javascript applications performing much better. Flash performance seems a bit sluggish. Need a password manager and status bar perhaps, and a Linux version of course.

The open source project behind Chrome is called Chromium. The rendering engine is Webkit, and Javascript “monkey” is a new JS virtual machine V8.

Internet Explorer’s Trailing Comma Woes

Internet Explorer is notorious for breaking on trailing commas in JavaScript array declaration. e.g.

var obj = {
     a: 1,
      b: 2,
};

fails on IE, while all other browsers just ignore the innocuous trailing comma after second element.

Weeding out these commas from JavaScript code is absolute PITA. However, here is a regular expression search string I wrote to search such instances in the code.

,\s*\n+\s*[\}\)\]]

Even better,
,\s*\n+(\s*\/\/.*\n)*\s*[\}\)\]]
matches multiple new lines and comments.

Safari on Windows Crashes Too Often

I’m not much of a fan of Apple softwares on Windows. I like iTunes though, even if it’s a bit bulky. I’ve tried using Safari on Windows for its super pleasing font rendering, aesthetics and, of late, some testing on WebKit/KHTML. However, it crashes just too often to be of any serious use and, of course, doesn’t have any DOM inspector. It has a barely usable JavaScript console though.
On a side-note, I’ve read that Safari can work on Linux under Wine. I’ll give it a try sometime. Now, if only I could run iTunes under Wine 🙂 .

Compiling Greasemonkey Scripts to xpi (Firefox Extension)

This page has a tool to create a Firefox extension (.xpi) from a greasemonkey script.
http://arantius.com/misc/greasemonkey/script-compiler

Bulls**t

This fscking awesome greasemonkey script to uncensor the Internet. Ingenious.

Need Firefox extension to open xls in Google Spreadsheet

I need one Firefox extension/greasemonkey script to add an option to open xls/doc links directly in Google docs & spreadsheets. This is something Google itself should be providing like they do in Gmail. Perhaps, I’ll write one myself in case I can’t find it.

[Update]– Whooaa! Same day Google releases its Firefox toolbar (beta) with this exact same functionality I’m looking for and have blogged. Now, is it just one wish a day, or – I want to be king 😀 , please.

Quick Proxy Browsing

When: Your ISP is stupid enough to block sites it shouldn’t.

How: Create a bookmarklet of the following JavaScript code. All the line breaks below needed to be removed for this to work.

javascript:void((function(){window.location.href=
'http://www.boxofprox.com/index.php?q='+base64_encode(window.location.href);})());
function%20base64_encode(str){
var%20alnum='ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789._';
var%20out='';var%20t,x,y,z;for(var%20i=0;i<str.length;i+=3){t=Math.min(3,str.length-i);
if(t==1){x=str.charCodeAt(i);out+=alnum.charAt((x>>2));
out+=alnum.charAt(((x&0X00000003)<<4));out+='--';}
else%20if(t==2){x=str.charCodeAt(i);y=str.charCodeAt(i+1);
out+=alnum.charAt((x>>2));out+=alnum.charAt((((x&0X00000003)<<4)|(y>>4)));
out+=alnum.charAt(((y&0X0000000f)<<2));out+='-';}
else{x=str.charCodeAt(i);y=str.charCodeAt(i+1);z=str.charCodeAt(i+2);
out+=alnum.charAt((x>>2));out+=alnum.charAt((((x&0x00000003)<<4)|(y>>4)));
out+=alnum.charAt((((y&0X0000000f)<<2)|(z>>6)));out+=alnum.charAt((z&0X0000003f));}}
return%20out;}

This little code lets one browse with a base64 encoded url to bypass any phrase blocks. Use it on your own risk etc. Thanks ‘someone unknown’ for base64 encoding function.