Toydi Learns To Web

I love reading. Especially after having ADSL signals tunneling through my phone wire, I spend more time reading online. Like most of the other users, I read using browsers. Rather to have only one browser installed, I have several browsers in my WinOS box, including Opera, Mozilla Suite, Firefox and and of course, the default IE (oh.. believe or not, and Lynx too! But I only tried it once).

As an online reader, I wish my browser to have these features:

• Saved Session (as in Opera) – able to recall which page and until where I read in the last browsing session.
• Easy-To-Trackback History (as in Opera) – a list of previous browsed web pages sorted by last accessed date, so I can track back what I’d read (Nightmare.. if trying to track back the last accessed web page in IE’s history).
• Custom Styling View (as in Opera) – able to view web page in customized styling. As I always prefer a darker background when I read novels in long hours.
• Tabbed Browsing (as in Opera, Mozilla) – I love to follow hyperlinks and open them in new pages. I do read multiple pages MUXly at once, sometimes.
• Feeds Reader – (as in Opera, Firefox) blogrolls are growing in my bookmark, I wish to have a feeds reader intergrated into my browser.

As a programmer wannabe, somehow I wish my browser to have extra features:

• Custom User Scripts (as Greasemonkey) – well, I love the idea where users should able to take control of what will be executed in their own box.
• Web Development & Debugging Tools (as in Mozilla Suite) – they really helped me so much to during the degree’s thesis project.
• A Playground to Hack – hack into the codes.. adding features of my own..

So, this evening, I decided to try to setup an *ideal* browser with features described as above. Here’s what I did:

1. Download & install Firefox 1.0.7
2. Install a new theme/skin: ifox 1.6
3. Install extension: Sage 1.3.6 – the feed aggregator
4. Install extension: Greasemonkey 0.5.3 – the user script manager
5. Install extension: SessionSaver .2d * nightly 30 – restore last browsing session

And here’s what I have now!

A browser with Saved Session, EasyToTrack History, Tabbed Browsing, Feeds Reader and a *cute* monkey. Suprisingly, I can use Sage to watch out my gmail too!

Well, I will install some Web Development Tools once I need them, I think. Now, there is still one thing, my new browser cannot view page using custom styling mode (as “User Mode” in Opera). I just couldn’t find the appropriate extension yet, please tell me if you have the extension that just do the job.