Another reason to love Firefox.

[katallison]

OK, you know how it goes -- you see a rec for a story that sounds cool, you hit the link, the page loads -- and you stagger back from the monitor, blinded by some hellish combo of acid-green-on-black type, or lurid pink on purple. Or you struggle through a paragraph or so of dim grey print on darker grey, before giving up the whole thing, rubbing your eyes and muttering anathema. Perhaps you are so annoyed you post a nasty rant to your LJ about the godawaful design taste of some people.

Well, cringe no more, nor mutter and rant. All you need to do is:

1. Use Firefox. (Don't have it? Just go here and get it. Go on, I'll wait, it's a quick download, and you'll thank me later.)

2. Then go here and download the Web Developer extension. Once it's downloaded, all you have to do to make it active is to quit the browser and relaunch.

3. Now, when you hit one of those blindingly illegible pages, just right-click anywhere in the page, and from the context menu thus summoned, choose Web Developer --> Disable -- Disable Page Colors. And -- voila, like magic, the page will reload as plain black-on-white text. (To return to the original state, just go through the steps again and deselect Disable Page Colors.) (Only make sure you don't change from one to the other while you're in the middle of composing an LJ entry or your text will be lost [Voice of Experience].)

There are a jillion other very cool things you can do with Web Developer (view and edit CSS, use your own stylesheet for pages, get rid of images, etc. etc.)--but this one function alone has already saved me a world of aggravation. And it's only one aspect of one of a jillion other cool extensions (Image Zoom, Nuke Anything, Mouse Gestures [without which I can no longer function]). I snuggle Firefox to my bosom, and cover it with smooches.

Comments

[pearl-o.livejournal.com]

*sighs happily* Firefox is one of those things which, after two days or so, you wonder how you ever got along without it for so long.

[bethbethbeth.livejournal.com]

I love you! I use Firefox, but haven't had time to test out all the extensions.

Of course, I loved you even before you posted this info, but...

[reginagiraffe]

Um, you can do the same thing in IE.

[imkalena.livejournal.com]

Well, you can unless the miserable scum that put up the page locked the fucker down.

Maybe Firefox can overcome these things?

You know, what I really hate is people that post long stories to lj, and have their format locked down with a text size of -1. And it's white on black, which is bad enough by itself. Curses upon them.

[tankou.livejournal.com]

Firefox is so wonderful.

[spike21.livejournal.com]

Actually Opera has that feature too, on the regular toolbar you can toggle between author mode (the hideous black-on-black page) and user mode (your preference).

[askye.livejournal.com]

Thank you for this information! There's nothing worse than hearing people rave about a story, only to click the link and discover I can't re

[lovekeller.livejournal.com]

Thanks so much - this is something I've wanted for the longest time. I should have known it was available from Firefox/Mozilla.

[aerye.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is nice. Very, very nice.

[buddleia.livejournal.com]

*Does the dance of I love Firefox*

[meri-oddities.livejournal.com]

Brilliant! That is so cool. I never thought about doing something about those awful pages before, except of course leaving. Thanks!

[chickwriter.livejournal.com]

OMG, yes, Firefox rules! I've been using it for months and totally love it.

[silverakira.livejournal.com]

I've always been an IE gal -- but, okay, you've sufficiently pimped me. [grin] Going to check it out now.

[tovalentin.livejournal.com]

What with having a high-res laptop and low-res eyes, I worship Firefox for the ability to increase font size with a key-click. I was damn tired of having to cut and paste 6-point lj stories into Word so I could read them.

All hail Firefox! Plus I'm still in the honeymoon stage with the denying of the cookies. Heh. "No, I won't accept that spyware cookie! Take that, you bastard!" ::click::

YAY! Firefox!

[namastenancy.livejournal.com]

I love it. It's clean, fast loading, has none of the huge security holes that IE and other Microslut products have and you can tweek it to your heart's content. I should have know that an utterly cool lady like you would be using the coolest browser around. If you want to have more fun, go to the forums which you can access via Mozilla - lots of great info there as well.

namaste SF nancy