Rubénerd!

If you still use Google services regularly, it's worth noting they allow you do disable some of the tracking they perform. Browser plugins can help to block the rest.

Disable Web History

Most people I talk to don't realise Google records all the sites they visit through their searches. They bill it as a way to "tailor search results". The DuckDuckGo people call it "search bubbling". I deem it "unnecessary". Fortunately, Google lets you turn it off:

1. Log in, the go to history.google.com
2. Click the gear button on the right hand side
3. Choose "Settings"
4. Click "Pause"

To confirm, go back to history.google.com and notice the bright blue "Turn History On" button. Isn't it interesting that Google lets you turn web tracking on with one click, but it takes three clicks and loading a menu behind an untitled button to turn it off? ;)

It should be noted here that web history is merely being "paused". Whether Google can turn it back on, or can be compelled to, would be reason enough to logout when you want to use their search.

Adorable Hyouka detective image by こよる on Pixiv

Set DoubleClick tracking opt-out cookies

Google's advertising arms and subsidiaries track you across sites by default, but you can disable it with a cookie by visiting:

https://www.google.com/ads/preferences/html/opt-out.html

Google now even offer a plugin for Firefox, Chrome and Internet Explorer to store your desire not to be tracked. I haven't tested this, so I can't vouch for it.

https://www.google.com/ads/preferences/plugin/

In both cases, these opt-outs are stored in your browser, not your account. Therefore, to prevent this kind of tracking you need to have the opt-out cookie and/or plugin installed on every browser and on each computer/smartphone. Cumbersome, I know, but it's currently the only option Google allows us.

Browser extensions

To further prevent tracking, there are several different plugins you can use.

For Mozilla browsers, Gprivacy forces sites to respect the do-not-track header by sanitising links in search results. Any links that it modifies in your browser are shown with a green shield, and the original link with a red shield is included alongside it.

If you're not interested in maintaining a cookie whitelist with CS Lite Mod or Cookie Monster, the Beef Taco extension maintains opt-outs for hundreds of advertising networks, including Google. I've blogged about this before.

Done

As I've said with all cloud computing services, the key isn't to abstain from them, but to use them wisely. As Professor Frink would say, MMMMMMMM-HIVEN MAVEN!

A silly little hack I devised this afternoon if you run Gnome 3 and have the pretty (but unused) Contacts icon in your Applications menu. Open this as root:

/usr/share/applications/mozilla-seamonkey.desktop

And replace this:

Exec=gnome-contacts

With this:

Exec=seamonkey -addressbook

One of these days I'll fulfill my dream of writing an entirely XUL desktop environment. And it'll use the Walnut theme by default. Oh, you'd better believe it.

I got this irritating message on Firefox and SeaMonkey constantly, mostly because I don't have Flash. Fortunately, it's easy enough to disable.

Go to about:config and set this option to true:

plugins.hide_infobar_for_missing_plugin

Installing extensions into a new SeaMonkey install this morning, I got quite a shock!

Simple Clocks :: Add-ons for SeaMonkey
This add-on has been removed by its author.

As someone with friends in multiple timezones, Simple Clocks was the simplest way to see at a glance whether or not I'd be waking anyone up with my tweets, newsgroup messages and the like. It's a shame the developer couldn't keep it going.

I guess it's back to FoxClocks; another excellent plugin but with extra features I don't really need.

I've had a surprising number of emails and tweets from people asking about my move to SeaMonkey, so I've decided to write a few posts about how I tweaked it to work for me. This is the first, on messing around with the interface :).

Simplifying the interface

Despite its modern core based on Firefox, SeaMonkey's user interface is still derived largely from Netscape Communicator. It can be easily tweaked to resemble contemporary browsers such as Firefox and Chrome though if you prefer.

1. Right click the Navigation toolbar and choose Customise...
2. Click Use Small Icons
3. Choose Icons from the Show listbox.
4. Drag the Search button off the toolbar
5. Drag on the Search box
6. Boom!

If you're a Chrome user, you can skip step 5 and use SeaMonkey's shortcuts for search! You can either type "g [terms]" into the navigation box for a Google search, or enter any terms and choose the "Search Google for [terms]" that appears.

Modern theme

Aside from having retro appeal that you'd be a fool to not take advantage of, I think SeaMonkey Modern it still has real class, particularly in the mail application.

1. Go to the View menu
2. Choose SeaMonkey Modern under Apply Theme
3. Restart, boom!

Using userChrome.css

Many of the userChrome.css tricks I blogged about for Firefox back in 2010 work with SeaMonkey too. If you haven't made a userChrome.css file yet and really want to customise SeaMonkey to an extreme:

1. Open your SeaMonkey profile folder
2. Create a folder called chrome (ironically enough!)
3. Create a file within chrome called userChrome.css

Below is my file. I err on the side of minimalism, so you may want to adjust to your own tastes!

/* RENDER PRIMARY FONT MORE COMPACT */
* {
    font-size: 10px !important;
}

/* MONOSPACE FONT FOR LOCATION BOX */
#urlbar {
    font-family: monospace !important;
}

/* MERGE STOP AND RELOAD BUTTONS
   STOP MUST BE PLACED BEFORE RELOAD TO WORK */
#stop-button[disabled="true"],
#stop-button:not([disabled]) + #reload-button {
    display:none !important;
}

/* HIDE SUPERFLUOUS ELEMENTS */
.autocomplete-history-dropmarker,
.search-go-button,
#star-button,
.tabs-closebutton,
.tabs-newbutton,
.toolbarbutton-menubutton-dropmarker,
tooltip {
    display:none !important;
}

All done!

Part two I'll be tacking importing and extensions, stay tuned! ^_^

In the spirit of @Jeorgina consolidation, I decided to see if SeaMonkey could also be used as a Google Reader replacement!

Many of these tips should also work in Thunderbird, but I haven't tested it. Feel free to leave a comment with your own experiences if you choose to try it out!

Setting it up for feeds

SeaMonkey Mail (SMM) works around the concept of accounts. Much as you would create a new email or newsgroup account, to subscribe to web feeds you create a special "Blogs and Newsfeeds account."

1. Navigate to File → New → Account
2. Choose "Blogs and News Feeds"
3. Give it any arbitrary name. I was boring and called it "Feeds"

In your SMM sidebar, you should now see an account with the familiar square orange web feed icon alongside your mail and newsgroup accounts. Consolidation and simplification to the MAX! ^_^

Subscribing to feeds

As I found with Google Reader, creating folders to organise your feeds is easier to do before you subscribe to feeds.

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "New Folder"
3. Give it a unique name, and optionally choose a parent folder. Yes, you can have a hierarchy, such as "apple" under "tech"! Take that Google Reader!

Then its simple enough to subscribe to feeds:

1. Right click your feeds account
2. Choose "Subscribe"
3. Enter the feed URL, and choose a folder to download them to.
4. Optionally, you can also hit Import to download feeds from an OPML file, pretty slick!

Caveats

One thing that caught me out initially was that SMM downloads article from feeds into folders like email, rather than just displaying them in folders like Google Reader. As Mozilla notes:

Removing or changing the folder for a feed will not affect previously downloaded articles.

If you decide to change the folder for a feed, this just means you need to drag and drop any previously downloaded entries into the new folder as well.

Thoughts

I've been using SMM to read all my web feeds for about two weeks now, and so far it's been a more than capable replacement for Google Reader. Having my feeds in the same window as my newsgroups and email accounts has also been so gosh darn convenient!

Downloading and using SeaMonkey (or Thunderbird) just for web feeds might be overkill, but if you already use it, give it a try with your feeds. I'm thoroughly enjoying myself :)

Christmas has come early! Less than a week after reviewing my transition from Thunderbird and Firefox back to SeaMonkey, we've had a 2.6 and 2.6.1 update! :)

According to the release notes:

• Added support for the HTML5 "context menu" feature (contextmenu attribute)
• Added Print Preview support to Composer
• Added update channel indication to About SeaMonkey page (about:)

And under the "Mozilla platform changes" heading:

• Added Type Inference, significantly improving JavaScript performance
• Added support for querying Do Not Track status via JavaScript
• Added support for font-stretch
• Improved support for text-overflow
• Improved standards support for HTML5, MathML, and CSS
• Fixed several stability issues

As MCBastos, Paul Bergsagel and I noted in the newsgroups, the a significant change has been an overall improvement in performance, not just in JavaScript, and especially on my venerable 2006 MacBook Pro.

Thanks to the SeaMonkey team for the present! I know a few of the developers are German, perhaps they're keeping with the tradition of giving and unwrapping presents on Christmas Eve instead ^_^.

As for the fact I'm unabashedly using a gigantic K-On picture with the SeaMonkey icon superimposed... um... Merry Christmas!

Having moved from the Mozilla Application Suite to Phoenix 0.2 in the mean old days, I'm giving SeaMonkey a try and am really liking it.

Sea-what?

Aside from those on Twitter who asked me why would you do that lol!111!!eleventy!, many didn't seem to know what SeaMonkey was. As well as an adorable aquatic critter, SeaMonkey is a web browser, email client, html editor, address book, IRC client, newsgroup client, RSS aggregator, positron accelerator, coffee machine and working implementation of the Haber Process. Believe it.

SeaMonkey is the community driven continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite which Mozilla originally spun off Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox and Thunderbird from. The Mozilla Application Suite in turn was based off the original Netscape Communicator, the dominant WWW client software for much of the late 1990s.

SeaMonkey Mail

I've been a heavy Thunderbird user for years, predominantly because it allowed me to easily import my existing Mozilla data at the time. Unfortunately, I've haven't liked some of the changes in the 3.x series. The new tab UI feels inconsistent and confusing. I preferred the old way of searching which quickly returned results in the same view, and without expensive indexes being constantly built. And so on.

SeaMonkey Mail reminds me of the Thunderbird 2.x series, which in my opinion was the best graphical email client since that one that was bundled with Cooee (whatever that was called) and the older versions of Eudora. It detected my Thunderbird user data, and had all my accounts and gigs of messages imported in a few short minutes. Understandable given they largely share a common codebase, but still impressive.

I've added all my email accounts from Thunderbird and [[re-]al]pine, subscribed to all my newsgroups from Pan, and have even replaced the now unusable (in my opinion) Google Reader with it for web feeds and whatnot. Four applications in one! ^^

SeaMonkey Navigator

Given I'm using SeaMonkey for my mail, I figured I'd try using it as my browser in place of Firefox as well. The current 2.5 release is based off Firefox 8.0, and as such supports the same HTML5 and CSS3 goodies.

I was impressed at how many of my critical Firefox extensions like NoScript, Ghostery and Simple Clocks work flawlessly in SeaMonkey. Unfortunately, Tree Style Tab doesn't, and currently I haven't been able to find an available replacement extension that puts my tabs on the side, ala Opera. For someone who has dozens of online docs open at a time, this is really important! I have a newsgroup thread and a post on mozillaZine about it, we'll see if anyone can help out.

Functionally, I've noticed no difference using SeaMonkey Navigator over Firefox other than perhaps in memory usage. SeaMonkey uses less memory than Firefox and Thunderbird combines, which again I suppose makes sense.

What are we up to now? Five applications in one! ^^

Conclusions

Over all (is what people wear on farms) I'm surprised by how quick I've taken to this software.

The minimalist in me likes that I've replaced two icons with one in my dock. I like that with a CMD-1 I can get to a browser, and CMD-2 I can read practically all my internet communications in one window. It even comes with the "Modern" theme from the old days, which contains so much retro win I have it set as my default theme for now.

I'll be keeping Firefox for now just in case, but I haven't launched it since last Thursday.

Heartfelt thanks to Philip Chee, Karsten Düsterloh, Jens Hatlak, Robert Kaiser, Ian Neal, Neil Rashbrook, Andrew Schultz, Justin Wood, and all the others in the SeaMonkey community for your tireless efforts :).