Bookmarklets that I use regularly

What is a bookmarklet?: Bookmarklet is a small javascript code which helps you achieve something directly from your browser without leaving the page. To use a bookmarklet, just drag the link in the subheadings below to your browser bookmarks bar and just click it for the desired functionality.

Readability bookmarklet: Open any Indian news site like rediff or times of India or Economic Times. If you want to read any article, it is very distracting. One very good bookmarklet which can make your life very easy is 'Readabiliy'. You can customize how you want to see the page and it will be rendered like that. No ads no distracting flash. Try one and you will not look back.

bit.ly sidebar : You are reading a good article and you want to tweet it to your friends. You can press the retweet button on the site or go to twitter copy the url and send. But in the first case, there is no easy way to enter your comments and in the second case, the url is very big so you cannot write your comments. This bit.ly sidebar opens on the side after you click with the url shortened. You can enter your comments and tweet it.

Share on Tumblr: You are reading something interesting. You wanted to save  few lines of it for yourself. You can do that with tumblr. You can have a tumblog and using this bookmarklet save text, pics and videos to tumblr directly. See my tumblog here. Visit it for amazing quotes.

Add Zemanta: This is a helper in your blogging. Suppose you are blogging and how good it would be if somebody directly help you link important text, related blogs, contextual images and good tags. That is Zemanta for you. If you are a blog, this will surely help you.

Delicious: The best bookmark manager of the web has a bookmarklet too. You can save your bookmarks by just clicking a button and after saving you will be redirected to to the original page. And whats more, you can even tweet directly from there.

Read Later: If you have opened too many windows for reading and suddenly you feel that you don't have sufficient time to read all of them now you can save them later for reading and read them later. There is another site or ReadItLater also which is also quite useful. But I like the Instapaper's presentation better.

Try them out and  suggest any good bookmarklets that you use.

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Things which I miss in Chrome

I being behind a corporate firewall, am not allowed to use only IE6, the buggy browser from Microsoft. I had made a passionate plea to my company's IT team to allow us the luxury of using any other browser like Firefox or Chrome. But they never relented. Even with many companies pleading against using IE6 through IE6NoMore as it takes lot of time of porting their applications on IE6, it still remains the most used browser on the internet. I being a junkie for all things google, tried the google's browser chrome the day it was released and fell in love with it instantly. It matured quite fast from the bugs which stopped many websites from being loaded on Chrome to adding themes first and extensions next.

But I still Mozilla firefox, the browser which really let us know that there is an alternative to the boring and bug ridden IE6 for two things

One being the very well written firebug plugin. Chrome has something called developer tools which provides some of the functionalities provided by Firebug that it is not complete. There is a firebug plugin available for chrome here but the user comments under it suggest that it is extremely buggy. So whenever I have to work on a css issue, i will fire up my firefox and work on it.

Another thing which I miss in chrome is the CHM reader. I have many ebooks in chm format but they are not opening these days in IE due to some security update by Microsoft but that file can be easily opened in firefox in the CHM Reader addon. I hope these plugins are soon available in Chrome and I stop using other browsers completely.

Do you use chrome. If so what else do you think it misses?

Ofcourse, still some bank sites dont open well in chrome and still have to be viewed in IE6. Shame on them.!!!!

I think IE6NoMore website is directly targeted towards them