We have had our web experience controlled by the sites we visit for so long that for a lot of us, the web browser defaults no longer even come in to play when controlling what the text on a web page looks like, except in the case where we want to override whatever choice the site we are visiting has made.

This isn’t a rant. I actually think, by and large, that this is a good thing. CSS (or Cascading Style Sheets) allows precise control over the overall look of web sites, and when you are trying to walk that line between clean and detailed, CSS can be the razor that keeps your site from looking too busy or too cluttered. There are many precise tweaks that can enhance the presentability of a site, like the vertical spacing between lines of text.

But, as you have no doubt noticed, this site doesn’t employ CSS to force a particular font type, size, style, or color. Those are all left up to the choices you have made in your browser settings, and if you are anything like me, you probably haven’t even looked at your browser font defaults for years.

Then end result? 10-point Times New Roman, with blue unvisited links and purple visited links.

If you absolutely hate serif fonts (fonts that have little twiddly bits on the letters like Times New Roman), take a moment to go in to your settings and select a different font that is more pleasing. You can choose any font that you have installed, from Helvetica (or Arial for you Windows folks) to something more exotic like Calibri on Windows (the new MS Office default font) to Monaco on the Mac.

All the browsers except Chrome have a font setting in their options. Google Chrome, created with minimalism in mind, forces you to edit a configuration file to change your font defaults. I found where this configuration resides from a Chrome Help Discussion Board:

Using text editor to open:
   ...\Documents and Settings\User_Name\Local Settings
   \Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Preferences

You will find the "webkit": {  "webprefs": { in the file.
Those settings are for WebKit.

In my setting example:
   "webkit": {
      "webprefs": {
         "default_fixed_font_size": 11,
         "default_font_size": 12,
         "fixed_font_family": "Bitstream Vera Sans Mono",
         "minimum_font_size": 12,
         "minimum_logical_font_siz": 12,
         "sansserif_font_family": "Times New Roman",
         "serif_font_family": "Arial",
         "standard_font_is_serif": false,
         "text_areas_are_resizable": true
      }
   }

The minimum_font_size and minimum_logical_font_size prevent Chrome to use
very small font size for display.

Remember to close Chrome first before you edit the file, or the file you saved
will be overwritten by Chome after exiting.

If Google Chrome has the most annoying default font configuration, Safari 4 possibly has the best.  Not only is it easy to find, but if you are viewing a page that uses the default browser font (like this one) selecting a font will immediately update the page with that font, allowing you to see immediately if it’s a good choice or not.

Of course, as more and more sites adopt CSS-heavy themes in an attempt to give you a unique and identifiable look, these settings become less relevant. Maybe that’s the lesson we can take away about Chrome – they’ve already decided that default fonts should be set once (by the developer) and forgotten.

I had a lot of trouble coming up with a short, catchy title for this article, and I’m still not sure if I got it just right.  But the idea, which dawned on me a few days ago and is starting to nag at me, is not hard to grasp:

I do my best writing when I’m not in the middle of information overload.

Now, don’t get me wrong.  I love information overload.  I have mild ADD so diving in to a vast cyclone of links, comments, entries and pictures is like taking a hot bath.  It is amazing and wonderful.

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Have you ever gotten excited about a product from a new startup, used it a bit, and then wandered off when it didn’t quite do what you wanted it to, or perhaps you you were using something already that is just slightly better?

That happens to me all the time.

But the great thing about most startups are their agility and drive to succeed.  If you take your eye off of them for a moment, when you re-visit them it seems like a whole lot of great new things happened during your absence.  Contrast this to some big, established web application companies where you are lucky to get a great new feature once a quarter or so.

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Even though Twitter itself is a web site, don’t you occasionally want to have access to Twitter while you surf away in a different window, or at least be notified when someone sends a tweet your way?  In that case, what you may be looking for is a Firefox add-on for Twitter. Unfortunately, there are a dozen or more already out there. Recently, I installed two and I’d like to share with you my thoughts about them.

Tweetbar

First let’s look at Tweetbar. This a brand-new plugin from Mike Demers that makes use of that sadly-underutilized sidebar to give you an almost-fully-featured twitter client, in the style of TwitBin. What this plugin does right is capture the essentials of the Twitter site in a sidebar-friendly format.

The essentials are all there — tabs to follow everyone, people you follow, people who follow you, and the vaguely-entitled tab friend which shows you who you are following, and their last tweet. You can also change your refresh timeout and clear out any of the tabs.

The bad part is that’s where the good bits stop. There is no “reply” or “favorite” or “direct message” buttons anywhere, not around the user icons, nowhere. So you have to do your tweet maintenance the old-fashioned way, typing it all in the input window. Also, if someone posts a link in their tweet, Tweetbar helpfully makes it a link, but when you click the link it uses the current tab. There doesn’t seem to be a way of changing that behavior. Worse, it does not honor ctrl-clicks to open a link in a new tab! For me, that’s makes it worse than the original Twitter interface, in all honesty.

TwitterFox

TwitterFox, from Naan Studio, takes a different approach to integrating Twitter on Firefox. It places a small, unobtrusive Twitter icon in the bottom status bar. From there you can left-click on the icon to log in and get tabbed window that defaults on recent friends’ tweets. You can switch to replies you have sent and a direct message window. There doesn’t seem to be any support for viewing all tweets, and you probably wouldn’t want to — the window is only 345 pixels high, good for about 4-5 tweets at a time. Also, it is not re-sizeable, which is definitely a drawback.

Each tweet has an “arrow” button in the upper-right-hand corner, making it easy to quickly shoot off a reply to incoming tweets. Also, TwitterFox keeps a tally of how many new general and directed tweets you receive. Another nice touch is a subtle fading of tweets you have already read, which acts as a sort of “bookmark” to make sure you don’t miss anything.

Finally, if you right-click on the TwitterFox icon, you can turn off TwitterFox popups, force an update, change Twitter accounts or set your preferences. The Preferences Pane lets you add/change a password for a selected account, change your refresh time and popup timeout, and assign hot-keys to TwitterFox actions. You can also enable/disable a notification sound.

Some people will find the tiny un-resizeable window a definite showstopper. However for me, and the number of tweets that I get, it seems to work and it’s fast. I definitely like this addon more than Tweetbar.

Firefox Compatibility

A final note about compatibility. I found that TwitterFox installed on pretty much any version of Firefox I had installed, but Tweetbar definitely was limited to versions older than Firefox 3 Beta. This might not be a big deal for you, but if you live on the edge it might make a difference.