Now, I’ve used Chrome in Linux before, and a few things about Firefox kept me hooked.  Today, though, I was on a mission to change all that.  I wanted basically all the functionality I got from Firefox in my Chrome experience as well.  This article should help others do the same.

Tip: Flash is enabled in newer versions by default, but in old Chrome for Linux versions, you had to start it with –enable-plugins.  I’m using native x86_64 flash for Ubuntu 9.04, and it works brilliantly.  Get it here.

Result

The first thing I did was import all my Firefox settings, which Chrome asks when it starts the first time.  This worked extremely well, even pulling over my bookmarks toolbar.  This is the result of my work:

Tip: To get the bookmark toolbar to show, hit Ctrl-b.

Another Tip: You can remove all the title text from bookmarks to get the bare icons I did above.  It’s actually pretty clean when you have favicons to depend on.

Goal 1: Stumbleupon

Yes, I waste tons of time stumbling.  According to my stats, I’ve given 4,854 pages a Thumbs Up, 447 pages a Thumbs Down, and I’ve hit the Stumble!  button 18,610 times.  This behavior may be unhealthy, but I’m addicted.  The solution to this is the cool toolbar they have.  You can see an example here.  This replaces the Firefox addon toolbar for everything by the initiation of Stumbling, which I made a little bookmark for in my toolbar.

Stumble!

Goal 2:  Instapaper

Instapaper is great for putting those articles in a reading queue that you just don’t feel like reading, and getting them on some mobile device when you’re bored, like on a flight.  It’s easily solved in Chrome with a bookmarklet.  See your account details in Instapaper, since it’s personalized.

Goal 3: Delicious

I love delicious.  It’s seriously helpful, and the delicious addon for Firefox has been on of my reasons for sticking with it for so long.  Yet, I recently found out that a bookmarklet can do all of the functions I use the addon for.  Here it is:

Delicious

Just drag that to your toolbar.

Goal 4: Get rid of that stupid blue theme

Ugh.  That light blue crap reminds me of Windows XP.  Get it away!  Thankfully, Chrome now has themes.  I changed it to the Brushed look, and I like it a lot.

Goal 5: Amazon Universal Wishlist

The Universal Wishlist bookmarklet still works like it did in Firefox.  Awesome.  Get one.

I hope this helps all of you out there with Firefox blues.  Google really has come through on this one.

Goal 6: URL Shortening

I always liked being able to click a button and shorten a URL.  I can get this functionality using PunyURL (the sapo.pt one) using this bookmarklet: Puny

hank@tardis:~$ wget -S http://www.ralree.com
--2009-06-30 09:52:13--  http://www.ralree.com/
Resolving www.ralree.com... 74.54.115.108
Connecting to www.ralree.com|74.54.115.108|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response...
 HTTP/1.1 200 OK
 Date: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:49:54 GMT
 Server: Apache/2.2.11 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.11 OpenSSL/0.9.7a Phusion_Passenger/2.1.3
   mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635
 X-Powered-By: PHP/5.2.8
 X-Pingback: http://www.ralree.com/newblog/xmlrpc.php
 Last-Modified: Tue, 30 Jun 2009 13:49:21 GMT
 X-Content-Security-Policy: allow self; img-src *; object-src *.ralree.com
  *.ralree.info; script-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info pagead2.googlesyndication.com
  friendfeed.com; style-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info
 Content-Length: 57457
 Keep-Alive: timeout=5, max=100
 Connection: Keep-Alive
 Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8

As you can see, my content security policy is sent as an HTTP header on all HTTP responses from my site.  I basically stole an example from this page.  I’ve attached it in the .htaccess file in my site’s root, before everything else in there, like so:

<IfModule mod_headers.c>
Header set X-Content-Security-Policy "allow self; img-src *; object-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info; script-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info pagead2.googlesyndication.com friendfeed.com; style-src *.ralree.com *.ralree.info"
</IfModule>

I highly recommend everyone with commenting activated on their blog enable this, since XSS is a serious pain.  This seems to work very well on Site5, where mod_headers was simply enabled out of the box.

All you have to do is copy the room name into the Join Chat window, and put in groupchat.google.com as the server.  I hope you find it useful.  If anyone knows how to make this a link that GNOME will throw at Pidgin, let me know.  That would be awesome.

Get the Script

SunSpider Benchmark Results

Get it now!

Update

After trying it with YouTube and TheSixtyOne, and seeing some lame bugs, I decided to go back to Flash 9 and face the music on overlays.

Update

Well, it turns out it crashes on my TheSixtyOne player on the right! Time to try Gnash…

Update 2

Experiment over. The OSS Flash solutions completely fail at playing the flash audio on the right. Once they get just a little more compatible, I’ll try again.

Greasemonkey 0.7.20070607.0 for Firefox 3

Test this in IE and Firefox

I left little invisible links in each one (search for ‘Supplies’ on the page). I also removed all the default javascript from the Firefox version and replaced the Try Again action with a simple reload one-liner.

Then, I just wrote some awesome PHP to take care of which one to load, and called it index.php:

<?php
if (preg_match('/MSIE/i', $_SERVER['HTTP_USER_AGENT'])) {
  readfile("errortest-ie.html");
} else {
  readfile("errortest-ff.html");
}
?>

And we’re done. Not bad, eh?

// ==UserScript==
// @name           Citibank Continue
// @namespace      http://www.ralree.info
// @description    Makes the Citibank browser warning page go away
// @include        https://web.da-us.citibank.com/cgi-bin/citifi/portal/l/l.do
// ==/UserScript==
document.getElementsByTagName('input')[0].click;

Get it here. As you can see above, it does nothing dangerous. Just clicks the damn button for you so you never have to see the unsupported browser screen again.

It was pretty cool – we got some swag and stuffs.