Most users who have that I know do the following when they want to open a link or a website that is displayed in one browser in another: They click in the address bar field of the browser and mark all of the address. Advanced users may use the shortcut Ctrl-a after clicking for the same effect. They then right-click and select Copy (or press Ctrl-c) to copy the website address to the clipboard. Then they open a new tab in the second web browser and paste the url into the address field there. In the final step they click the load button or press enter.

That’s a lot of work for a very simple operation. If you have enough screen estate you may be able to run both Internet browsers on the screen at the same time. If you do, you can use simple drag and drop operations to open a link or open website in one web browser in another.

This works with all browsers that I have tested. You can drag and drop from and to Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer.

To drag you move the mouse over the favicon of the website or the link in question, click and hold the left-mouse button and drag the address into the other web browser. You can drop it anywhere there and the website will be loaded in the active or the selected tab.

It is such a simple thing that can make such a big difference in day to day work. Did you know about this method? Or do you know of other (browser) related tips that optimized your workflow significantly?

One of the main culprits are images and other media contents. Images are not just screenshots on websites but also logos, buttons and advertisements. These items are usually larger than the pure code of the site, and one way to speed up things is to disable images in the browser.

In Firefox, you can either disable or enable images. There is no option to display images on some websites and block them on others. Sorry I have to correct myself: You can disable images and configure a whitelist in the browser’s options. This is however a tedious process and it is not possible to load only some of the images on a site.

That’s in stark contrast to the Opera web browser where it is possible to configure those settings individually.

ImgLikeOpera is a Firefox extension that adds Opera’s image loading capabilities to the Firefox web browser. The extension comes with four pre-configured general profiles and options to assign profiles to individual websites. That way you could still load images on a site while images would not be loaded on others.

Only cached images are loaded by default after the extension has been installed. It places an icon in the status bar of the Firefox browser that works as a switch between the various image loading settings and as a link to the extension’s options.

A click on the icon iterates through the available image loading modes (left-click next in line, right-click previous). The selected mode is then set for that particular domain name.

You can switch from loading cached images only to one of the other available image loading presets, for instance to load no images at all or to load all images. Images can be loaded selectively by hovering the mouse cursor over an image, holding down Ctrl and a left-click.

Filters can be configured to handle specific images automatically without user interaction. Filters support both simple and regular expression.

A simple filter would be to block all .gif images from being loaded, or to allow all images from a specific domain or from a specific directory of a domain.

Additional options include blocking Flash contents, delaying the loading of images by a certain amount of time and integrating the functionality with Tab Mix Plus’s session management.

Hotkeys are provided to switch between image loading states. This is done with Alt-M and Alt-M).

ImgLikeOpera is a handy extension for Firefox users who work on a slow or unreliable Internet connection The extension is only available for Firefox 4 or later.

In this article I am going to introduce you to some of those alternative web browsers and show you what they have to offer. I will skip over the installation of these browsers as you will most likely find them in your distributions’ repositories. These browsers will be in no certain order.

Arora

Arora

Arora is a light-weight, cross-platform web browser (so long as the platform will run Qt) that offers many of the features you have come to love on your browser (and then some). Arora uses the QTWebKit port of the WebKit layout engin. The feature list looks like:

• Fast startup
• Desktop integration
• Smart location bar
• Session management
• Privacy
• Search engine management
• Flash plugin support
• Download manager
• Tools for web developers
• Translations for thirty languages.

Elinks

Elinks

I can’t help but add a text-based web browser to this list. Elinks hearkens back to my old Lynx days where browsing the web was not interrupted by images, ads, and flash. Why would you want to use such a browser? Simple: Elinks is fast. Not Chrome fast…even faster. Elinks is so fast you will miss your pages load if you blink – that kind of fast. But remember, you only get text here. You use Elinks from within a terminal window. Open one up and enter the command elinks. Hit the <Esc> key and then enter a url. Simple. Fast. What more do you want from the web? ;-)

Epiphany

Epiphany

Epiphany is supposed to be the web browser for the GNOME desktop. It isn’t really, but it does try. Epiphany lives somewhere between Elinks and Arora. It’s not text-only, but it will handle your fancy-shmancy plugins. Epiphany lets you concentrate on the content, not the application displaying the content.

Epiphany does offer a few nice features:

• Security
• Customizable interface
• Smart bookmarks
• Extensions and plugins

I was pleasantly surprised that Epiphany handled, out of the box, Flash plugins (and handled them well.)

Final thoughts

There you go: Three browsers you most likely have never heard of nor ever tried. I have run the gamut of browsers and I can say that each of the above browsers certainly has their place in the landscape of the internet. Will any of them threaten the monsters of the ball? Absolutely not. Does that mean you shouldn’t give them a try? No, you definitely should…especially if you’ve never experienced the web in its purest, text-only form.

I would highly recommend you give one of these browsers a go. You might find your new favorite app!