Making Google Better
Okay, so I might work for Microsoft but sometimes I use Google. And I've been know to use Firefox to access it. Not because they're better, but because they're different and it's good to be able to compare different approaches to the same problem sometimes (actually I used to be a bit of a Firefox fan boy but with IE7+IE7Pro I saw no advantages in Firefox for typical browsing)
For those times when I do use Google (search and Gmail) it's nice to be able to make the experience a little less, well, ugly. I know there's a bunch of greasemonkey scripts to do various things but just like I use IE7Pro because it rolls everything into one neat package the GoogleCustomizer for Firefox is my preferred solution to the problem
So what does it do? Everything but click the links for you!
- Use Google Suggest (suggest words while you're typing)
- Add links to competitors
- Rewrite links to point straight to the images in Google Images
- Removes image copying restrictions in Google Book Search
- Secure Gmail and Google Calendar, switch to https
- Block Google Analytics cookies
- Hide the Gmail spam counter
- Make URL previews on sponsored links visible
- Add favicons in the web search result
- Remove ads
- Anonymize your Google userid
- Add a result counter in search result
- Filter spammy websites from search results
- Add links to WayBack Machine (webpage history)
- Remove click tracking
- Add links from Google to your bookmark manager
- Use a fixed font for Gmail mail bodies
- Stream Google search result pages
- Sticky Google Preferences