I’m sure the issue with Yahoo! Messenger stealing focus is very common out there. It is annoying mostly because for example when I am engaged in a captivating chat with a friend and I am typing really fast (~60 wpm), the flash ads from the Y!M window swap and I find myself focused on the wrong window. Of course that for me this isn’t such a big deal (but still very annoying) as it is for others who look at their keyboards as they type and when they look at the chat window and see it empty… that’s not a pleasant sight.

Now let’s cut to the chase and get rid of this problem once and for all. It’s very simple and all you have to do is to open Notepad or any other text editor and open the file C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (yes, that’s right, no extension there). A full explanation about that file is given and marked as a comment in the file.

So, after the default line (127.0.0.1       localhost) just add 127.0.0.1 insider.msg.yahoo.com

Well that’s it. Very simple and effective.

Here’s how it looks without ads:

Again, this method involves Firefox browser and GreaseMonkey addon for it. After you installed GreaseMonkey addon and restarted Firefox you can then click the following link that will install the script i am talking about.

Install Google Account Multi-Login script for GreaseMonkey.

When you finally installed the script all you need to do is to log into your Analytics account and check out the new menu in the top right corner:

After you add your accounts you will have the chance to select the account you want to see info about and then select another available account from the list, when you are done with the first one. This saves you from interacting with login forms, signing in and out therefore you can win some time.

I find this script most useful, i hope you do too. If you get stucked somewhere on the way i advise you to have a look at another article that shows how to implement some other script into GreaseMonkey.

This solution i found involves the Greasemonkey addon for Firefox (which is kept updated quite often) and a script from userscripts.org that’s named the same like my post is. After installing Greasemonkey addon and restarting Firefox (make sure you see a monkey head in the right bottom corner) you need to install the script that reminds you that the RapidShare download counter stopped.

Install RapidShare download ready alert script for GreaseMonkey

After you click on the link above the following window will show up, just click on “Install”:

The actual reminder is a message box that says “Download ready!” and brings on top the RapidShare tab so you can proceed and download the file, here’s a picture of it:

This way you don’t need to worry again about forgetting about the counter, your cookies expiration as you won’t need to repeat the same process over and over again. Below there are some example pictures of GreaseMonkey’s GUI:

I hope this helps someone because i know it helped me a lot.

One of the posible solutions to get right with Gmail (and not only) is to disable Firebug for the websites you don’t want it to stick it’s nose into. Here comes the real issue: after a while you get sick and tired of disabling Firebug for every website you visit (at least if you could save the “black list” somewhere to import it whenever you need it or something like that). Firebug lacks an option that should say “Disable Firebug for all sites except…”, that way things would get a lot more easy. Ok, this is the short way but not necessary the best way of getting things right without compromising your developer activity. You can choose to apply it and analyse the outcome, or not.

If you want to take things further and take advantage of the oportunity of organizing your work, this is your chance. So another possible way of correcting the problem (if we care to take things really personal) is to create another browser profile (it’s just like having two or more Windows user accounts). In this example i will use just two basic profiles: one profile would be for normal browsing and the other one for web developing purposes. The first thing you’ll need to do is to close Firefox and open the “Run” dialog and execute the following line:

firefox -ProfileManager

just like in the following picture:

After executing the command a window like the one below will appear allowing you to create multiple profiles:

The first step you might want to do after the small window loads is to rename your default profile’s name to something like “Developer” (because this will be the profile that will have all the web dev related addons and settings). Of course you may want to keep this profile only for pure browsing purposes so then you can rename it to “Browsing” instead of “Developer” as mentioned early above. Either way you will have to install + uninstall some addons (extensions, plugins if you like) in order to customize your profiles to best suit your purposes.

After you rename your profile as mentioned above you need to create a second profile. Make sure you leave the box that’s followed by “Don’t ask at startup” checked. I suggest that you create another shortcut to Firefox. So now we should have two different Firefox shortcuts on our desktop and the differences between them shoud consist only in their “Target” field content as shown in the pictures:

The next step is to customise your browser profiles. I suggest you keep the profile you’ll be using exclusively for browsing as “addons clean” as possible to make sure your experience with Firefox is as fast as it can get. When it comes to installing addons for your web developing profile i’d say to have a brief look over the addons i’m using:

• CollorZilla (”advanced Eyedropper, ColorPicker, Page Zoomer and other colorful goodies”)
• DownloadHelper (”download videos and images from many sites”)
• Dummy Lipsum (generate “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text)
• Firebug (”web development evolved”)
• Greasemonkey (”a user script manager”)
• IE Tab (”enables you to use the embedded IE engine within Firefox”)
• OperaView (”open pages in Opera from Firefox, Mozilla, Flock and Netscape 8 context menus”)
• Screen grab! (”saves a web-page as an image”)
• Tab Mix Plus (”tab browsing with an added boost”)
• Web Developer (”adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools”)

The given descriptions will just have to do for the moment as i will write a separate article for every addon listed above. Now, related to the fact that you might want some things to be syncronized between the two browser profiles such as bookmars, passwords, cookies, history, etc., this might be a possible solution but i recommend backing up your data before you decide to go any further. To have your bookmarks syncronized you can do one of the following. For example go in one of your profile directories and delete bookmarks.html and instead put a shortcut to the other bookmarks.html file located in your other profile folder; or you can use FoxMarks addon to keep your bookmarks syncronized (but then you install an auxiliary addon for this and for that and you find yourself again from where you left: a Firefox browser that moves slower than your granny so i recommend the firest option). This was for the bookmars, now regarding your other shared stuff also delete the original file and create a shortcut for history.dat, history.dat and cookies.txt.

I’m sure that many of you think that this method is the same as you scratch your left ear with your right hand but it’s a possible solution if you like to take things further.

You might also want to know that i can’t be held reponsible if something goes wrong. I tested this workaround on Windows XP SP2 with Firefox 2.0.0.12 but this might also work with other versions.

Now, back to the fact that Google says Firebug slows Gmail down, that’s a fact but i pose myself the question why Google didn’t show some benchmarking charts or some kind of statistical information related to this matter. However i do not approve with Google’s solution because disabling Firebug’s network monitoring tool would mean a great loss for it’s benchmarking features.

The bottom line as i already said earlier, would consist in an option within Firebug that will help you disable it for all other websites except the ones you choose to have it enabled on.