[Chicago] [OT] Is it just me ...

[Martin Maney]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 09:28:22AM -0400, Peter Harkins wrote:
> You may find the Firefox NoSquint extension useful. You hit ctrl +/-
> as usual to change the font size in a page and it will remember what you
> set each site at accross pageviews and sessions.
> 
> https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2592

I'll have to give that a look.  I still miss the long-gone Galeon bit
where it would remember stuff like that (maybe it was just CSS
disable?) on a site basis, which was more often than not just the
right granularity.  Of course, I'm also still waiting for someone to do
browser history in the style that the OS/2 Warp browser attempted (it
tended to get confued if you'd navigated to the same page two or more
different ways) - basically a tree, or perhaps better described as a
forest where each typed-in URL was the root of a tree.  So you could
easily go back to a branch you'd gone down earlier (the curently
standard sidebar history display is pretty lame for that if you've been
wandering around a site - it squishes everything flat, discarding all
the information about how you navigated (quasi-spatial context, that)).

> As for idiotically narrow columns... I find a 'print' link if I can, or
> (more likely) move on to another page. I suppose a GreaseMonkey script
> could be used to fix broken designs, but I've never been interested
> enough in a site to write one.

Yeah, a good "print version", when there is one, is almost always
better for actually reading anything longer than a few sentences.  I
had greasemonkey installed for a long time but never got motivated
enough to mess with it much - the cost of getting it to tweak things always
seemed to be greater than the benefits.  I suppose I might feel
differently if there were some site I *had* to use that needed more
than CSS disabling to make it readable (or if it was more interactive,
in which case disabling CSS might not be a viable option for fixing
readability).  But so far I haven't had that need.

-- 
The phenomenon of financial excess associated with
promising novel technologies is a recurring feature
of the last two centuries.  -- Andrew Odlyzko