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Firefox: If you hate having to search through your folders every time you change the type of file or directory you’re saving to—and we certainly do!—Save File To helps you make custom context menus for file saving bliss.

The problem arises with the way Firefox retains the previous folder you’ve used to save something. That’s great for when you’re saving a bunch of the same thing in a row—who would want to navigate from the default directory every time you opened up the save as dialogue?—but if you’re frequently saving a variety of files you want a faster way to move between directories.

Save File To is a Firefox add-on that enables editing of the right-click “Save As” context menu. Immediately after installation it adds in your Desktop and My Documents folders as available entries—and you can navigate down through those folders—but you can also specify custom folders and reorganize the menu. It’s easy to add in a folder for a specific project you’re working on or create custom links to save to your wallpaper collection, music collection, or any other system you want to set up. Although we used an image as our example in the screenshot above you can customize all the Save As menus in Firefox including how you save pages, links, images, and other files.

Visit the link below to install Save File To into Firefox or check out the via link to see a step by step tutorial at How-To Geek on setting up Save File To. Save File To is free and works wherever Firefox does. Have a favorite add-on for customizing the menus in Firefox or a similar tool for another browser? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

Every week, we pit two web apps or companies against each other in our web faceoff series. In the past, we’ve put Android vs. iPhone, Digg vs. Reddit, and Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard order to see which one was truly the people’s choice.

This week, we’re tweaking the competitors a bit. Over the last few weeks, you may have heard about a battle brewing between Adobe and Apple. It all started when Apple slyly revealed that the iPad would not support Flash.

This quickly broke out into a heated debate: Should we be abandoning Flash for HTML5, the new version of the web’s mark-up language that can support video, audio and more? Steve Jobs certainly thinks so.

Now with more people chiming in, we think it’s time to take the pulse of the people.

Which will eventually win out in the end: Adobe Flash or HTML5? Which is better for the future of the web? Do you think Apple has the muscle to take down Adobe’s widely used plug-in?

Make your choice in the poll below, which will close on Friday, February 27, at 12:00 p.m. PT. Then let us know your opinions on this matter in the comments.

Who would win in a fight: Adobe Flash or HTML5?(polls)

Faceoff Series: Overall Results

Week 1:
– Mozilla Firefox vs. Google Chrome
– WINNER: Firefox, 4600 votes (Chrome: 3310 votes, Tie: 911 votes)

Week 2:
– Tumblr vs. Posterous
– WINNER: Tumblr, 1809 votes (Posterous: 1496 votes, Tie: 256 votes)

Week 3:
– Pandora vs. Last.fm
– WINNER: Last.fm, 1187 votes (Pandora: 1156 votes, Tie: 122 votes)

Week 4:
– Twitter vs. Facebook
– WINNER: Facebook, 2484 votes (Twitter: 2061 votes, Tie: 588 votes)

Week 5:
– WordPress vs. Typepad
– WINNER: WordPress, 2714 votes (Typepad: 267 votes, Tie: 357 votes)

Week 6:
– Windows 7 vs. Snow Leopard
– WINNER: Windows 7, 3632 votes (Snow Leopard: 3278 votes, Tie: 121 votes)

Week 7:
– TweetDeck vs. Seesmic Desktop
– WINNER: TweetDeck, 3294 votes (Seesmic Desktop: 1055 votes, Tie: 260 votes)

Week 8:
– Microsoft Office vs. Google Docs
– WINNER: Microsoft Office, 1365 votes (Google Docs: 994 votes, Tie: 315 votes)

Week 9:
– Apple iPhone vs. Google Android
– WINNER: Google Android, 3323 votes (Apple iPhone: 1494 votes, Tie: 228 votes)

Week 10:
– AT&T vs. Verizon
– WINNER: Verizon, 1161 votes (AT&T: 538 votes, Tie: 118 votes)

Week 11:
– Google vs. Bing
– WINNER: Google, 2180 votes (Bing: 519 votes, Tie: 97 votes)

Week 12:
– iPod Touch/iPhone vs. Nintendo DS vs. Sony PSP
– WINNER: iPod Touch/iPhone, 704 votes (Sony PSP: 639 votes, Nintendo DS: 482 votes, Tie: 108 votes)

Week 13:
– Digg vs. Reddit vs. StumbleUpon
– WINNER: Digg, 14,762 votes (Reddit: 11,466 votes, StumbleUpon: 2507 votes, Tie: 1032 votes)

Week 14:
– Old versus new Twitter retweets
– WINNER: Old style retweets, 1625 votes (New style retweets: 699 votes, Tie: 227 votes)

Week 15:
– Gmail vs. Outlook
– WINNER: Gmail, 3684 votes (Outlook: 980 votes, Tie: 590 votes)

Week 16:
– Boxee vs. Hulu
– WINNER: Hulu, 626 votes (Boxee: 591 votes, Tie: 106 votes)

Week 17:
– Nexus One vs. iPhone 3GS
– WINNER: Nexus One, 6743 votes (iPhone 3GS: 2818 votes, Tie: 592 votes)

Week 18:
– Foursquare vs. Yelp vs. Gowalla
– WINNER: Foursquare, 1182 votes, (Yelp: 661 votes, Gowalla: 509 votes, Tie: 143 votes)

Week 19:
– AIM vs. GTalk vs. FbChat
– WINNER: GTalk, 2189 votes, (AIM: 1257 votes, FbChat: 511 votes, Tie: 203 votes)

Week 20:
– Music Ownership vs. Music Subscription
– WINNER: Ownership, 533 votes (Subscription: 299 votes, Tie: 237)

Week 21:
– Match.com vs. PlentyofFish
– WINNER: Plenty of Fish, 430 votes (Match.com: 334 votes, Tie: 187 votes)

Week 21:
– Google Buzz vs. Facebook Vs. Twitter
– WINNER: Facebook, 3353 votes (Twitter: 1828 votes, Google Buzz: 1298 votes, Tie: 651 votes)

[HTML5 image courtesy of justinsomnia on Flickr]

Tags: adobe, adobe flash, Flash, HTML5, web faceoff

Ever seen a picture online that you’re kicking yourself for not saving, especially now that it’s been removed? There’s a good chance it may still be saved on your computer; all you need to do is familiarize yourself with your browser’s cache.

Front page photo by Jeffrey Beall.

We’ve covered resurrecting images from your browser cache once before, highlighting how to recover images in Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari, but the browser landscape has changed a little since then. Luckily recovering images from Firefox hasn’t really changed, and popular alternatives like Chrome and Opera all have similar recovery methods. In Firefox, it works the same as last time we posted it:

1. Type about:cache in the address bar.
2. Under “Disk Cache Device,” copy the folder path to where Firefox stores your cache entries.
3. Navigate to that folder in Windows Explorer or Finder. The files there will have strange names and no extension, so it can take some time, but you just have to open each one to see if it’s the photo in question.

It’s not quite as easy to find your cache folder in Chrome, but it’s still there. On Windows, assuming you’re using the Default profile (which you are if you haven’t made any other profiles in Chrome), just press Win+R, paste %userprofile%\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache in the Run box, and hit Enter. In OS X, you can find it at /Users/adam/Library/Caches/ (replace ‘adam’ with your username). Basically the method is the same for any browser—all you have to do is find your browser-of-choice’s cache folder, then go digging. (If you’re an Internet Explore or Safari user, take a look at our original post on the topic for detailed instructions.)

As a bonus tip, reader zaghy2zy writes in detailing how to access removed Facebook photos that may still exist on Facebook’s servers. (This method is a little different, because zaghy2zy is actually using his cache to find the web URL of the missing files; he then relies on the face that Facebook’s servers can be slow to delete images after they’ve been removed. If this quicker method doesn’t work, the method’s above might.)

Did your friend recently delete a picture on Facebook? Maybe something you really liked but she didn’t? OR maybe something really embarrassing that you weren’t able to see?

Well, if your friend deleted it within the past 7 days and it was viewed by you or another friend, chances are you should be able to see it, still. And It’s still on Facebook’s servers.

What you can do is open your browser’s cache and look for it there. If you have Google Chrome, you can go to about:cache and search for it there. Of course there are a zillion files in there, you can narrow it down by using find. Facebook’s pictures usually end in _n.jpg so search for those and go through them manually. Once you find it, you can copy the link and open it in your browser. TADA! You can now see that “deleted” picture.

Of course, those pictures aren’t there forever. But you still have time to pass it around or use it as blackmail (not that you actually will, right?)

So yeah, you can probably do that at other sites, so go try it yourself. I only have specific instructions for Google Chrome because it’s the only browser I’e tried the method. Methods for other browsers would probably be very different but it shouldn’t be that hard to do.

Keyword bookmarks are my absolute favorite time-saving Firefox feature. I use them literally hundreds of times a day—a good system of keyword bookmarks saves all kinds of time in the browser. Unfortunately Chrome isn’t so friendly to keyword bookmarkers.

After searching high and low for a way to tweak the bookmark dialog in Google Chrome to display an option to add a keyword to my bookmarks, turns out all I needed to do was turn to the help of a few clever readers who’d emailed in how to achieve keyword bookmark bliss in Chrome. The imperfect-but-workable solution:

I just realized that keyword bookmarking is as easy as managing your search engines. Right-click the omnibox (address bar), click “Edit search engines,” and add a search engine. Use a Name you will recognize, enter the keyword you want to use, and just enter the URL for your bookmark in the URL box. Voila!

Chrome’s keyword search tool, like Firefox’s, replaces %s in the URL with your search terms. However, you can add a keyword search in Chrome without adding the %s bit at all, so when you execute that keyword, it’ll just take you to the keyword’s URL.

To clarify, check the screenshot above to how I set up a keyword bookmark for Lifehacker would look like. After setting it up, any time I want to visit Lifehacker in the future, all I have to do is type ‘l’ and hit Enter. Chrome’s autocomplete is certainly smart, and for some people is enough to replace the need for keyword bookmarks, but if you’re a keyword bookmark junkie like I am, this is an important feature to ease any browser transition.

Unfortunately it’s more of a hack than a bookmark feature, and the search engine manager isn’t nearly as robust as the regular bookmark manager, but until the Google developers decide to add this feature (my birthday’s coming up, GOOG), it’s better than nothing.

Thanks Cadence, Erik, and Rupert!

Chrome: We love Gina’s Better Gmail Firefox extension, a bundle of user scripts that improves the Gmail experience. Now that Google’s beefed up support for Chrome extensions, reader Dimitar Gruev has taken a shot at bringing an unofficial Better Gmail to Chrome.

Almost a year ago our own How-To Geek put together a version of Better Gmail for Chrome, but that was way back when Chrome didn’t even have extensions (his were all bundled into a single user script). This new Chrome extension is an unofficial Better Gmail for Chrome that was inspired by Gina’s Firefox extension and our earlier Better Gmail for Chrome bag o’scripts.

Once installed, access Better Gmail’s options by clicking the wrench -> Extensions -> Better Gmail Options. Tick the boxes of the features you want activated and you’re good to go. You can choose to hide little used fields like “Invite Friends,” remove ads, show the number of unread emails in the favicon, and more.

Gruev says future versions of Better Gmail will hide spam count, move to next message on delete or archive, and include support for POP3 email. A big round of applause goes to Gruev for putting this together. What kinds of features do you hope for in future versions of Better Gmail? Share your ideas in the comments.

SmartScreen is a killer would-be iPhone add-on (it’s not would-be if you’re jailbroken), Microsoft cries foul, claiming Google Chrome Frame makes IE less secure, and Gmail’s mobile site for iPhone and Android gets a couple of small updates.

• Note to Apple: Please Put This in the iPhone, Now
  An iPhone jailbreak app called SmartScreen brings iPhone widgets to the locked screen, allowing you to get a heads up on various widgetized data without unlocking your phone or launching an app. [Gizmodo]
• Microsoft: Google Chrome Frame makes IE less secure
  The folks at Redmond hit back at Google for releasing Google Chrome Frame, claiming it makes Internet Explorer less secure. [Ars Technica]
• The Iterative Web App: ‘Move’ and ‘Enhanced Refresh’
  The Gmail Mobile interface for iPhone and Android phones adds a Move feature and an Enhanced refresh feature that “auto-refreshes when you switch back to Gmail from another tab or application.” [Google Mobile Blog]
• three more WebGL demos
  They’ll only work with the nightly builds of Firefox, but if you got excited when you saw what WebGL-powered graphics can bring to Firefox, Mozilla is showing off three more demos. [Hacks.Mozilla]
• Google Sidewiki: Danger
  Google fanboy Jeff Jarvis doesn’t like the idea behind Google Sidewiki one bit. [BuzzMachine]

Originally posted 2009-09-24 22:50:18. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Your start page is the first thing you see when you open your browser or load a new tab—your gateway to the rest of the web. Get the most from your start page with one of these five favorites.

Whether the start page you’re using is your browser’s default or you’ve carefully selected it, checking out these five contenders for best start page will give you a chance to decide if your current start page serves your needs or if it could use an upgrade.

First, a note on our methodology. Several popular entries in this week’s Hive Five are essentially clones of each other (just for different browsers), so we opted to combine the most popular just-like-the-other options into single entries in order to give you a more diverse Hive Five. You’ll notice, for example, the entry on Speed Dial-like start pages includes the Chrome start page, Opera Speed Dial, and Speed Dial for Firefox all in one entry instead of spreading them out so we could squeeze more options into the final result.

Photo by Kairos Photo.

about:blank (Free, Browser-Independent)

In modern web browsers, typing about:XXX provides various information depending on what the XXX part is. (For more on the various about: variables, gloss over this Wikipedia article.) about:blank is the universal code for “display a blank HTML document”, and many Lifehacker readers prefer this as their start page—or anti-start page in a way!—because it fires up each session and new tab with a clean slate that doesn’t use any unnecessary resources or bandwidth. It’s fast and distraction-free.

Fav4.org (Free, Web-Based)

Fav4 is probably the most elegant of the start pages featured here—not counting the extreme-minimalist approach of about:blank. The arrangement is simple: You visit Fav4 and click on the customize gear in the lower right hand corner. From the customization menu, you can select your four favorite sites from the roster of provided site or suggest a new site if they don’t have one of your favorites. Drag and drop the four sites of your choice onto the customization side bar, and the sites will be displayed—as seen in the screenshot above—as four large icons in your browser window. You don’t need to sign up to use the service—it saves your settings on a per-browser basis using cookies instead of requiring a login. Given how much of the average user’s web traffic is directed at a small selection of sites, having only four sites in the bar isn’t as restrictive as it would first seem.

iGoogle/Google (Free, Web-Based)

Google made two appearances in this week’s Hive Five on two distinct ends of the start page spectrum. For many, Google.com is their go-to search engine of choice, so it was natural to make the basic Google search portal their start page. Others love Google as a search tool but want more out of their start page, so they use iGoogle (see the screenshot above). iGoogle is Google’s widget-based start page. Not only can you embed widgets for nearly every Google service—including Gtalk, Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Reader—you can add in additional widgets from the extensive iGoogle widget directory.

Chrome New Tab/Opera Speed Dial/Speed Dial for Firefox (Free, Browser-Dependent)

Thumbnail-based “speed dial” start pages have grown in popularity since Opera introduced Speed Dial two years ago. You can enable or install Speed Dial-style start pages in most popular browsers in a variety of ways. Opera set the stage for thumbnail-based start pages with the original Speed Dial, which allows you to specify up to 25 thumbnailed sites on your Speed Dial page for quick access. Google Chrome has its New Tab Page, which displays your most frequently accessed web pages as well as recently closed tabs (seen in the screenshot above). Finally, Speed Dial for Firefox is a Firefox extension which brings Opera-style Speed Dial to Firefox. It’s not as polished in appearance as the actual offering from Opera or self-updating as the New Tab Page in Chrome, but it get’s the job done. (You can actually find all kinds of Speed-Dial style extensions for Firefox, but this version is the one that garnered the most votes.)

Custom (Free, Browser-Independent)

While some people are content with the emptiness of about:blank and others are content with the structure imposed upon them by using pre-designed start pages, a smaller but vocal minority of readers opted to build their own start pages from the ground up. Why be restricted to the form and function of a start page designed by someone else when you can build your own start page to fit your needs and tinker with it to make it as simple or complex as you need it? The start pages readers create vary as much as their HTML chops allow, but for a surprising amount of readers, the best start page is the one you design yourself and load as a local HTML document or save on your web server for personal use from anywhere you do your browsing. Photo by jphilipg.

Now that you’ve had a chance to look over the contenders for the Start Page crown, it’s time to cast your vote:

Which Start Page Is Best?(surveys)

Honorable mention goes out to Netvibes, a feature-rich and widget-based start page, and the various session restore browser features, which load the previous windows and tabs you had open in lieu of a start page. Want to offer more reasons your favorite is so great—or want to talk up a start page that didn’t make the cut? To the comments!

Google Wave’s mascot, Dr. Wave, offers his introduction to Wave, Apple is rumored to be working towards dropping Google Maps from the iPhone, Mozilla’s browser synchronization tool Weave sees a small update, and more.

• Google Wave Even Has a Mascot: Dr. Wave! [Video]
  The first time you log into a newly minted Google Wave account, you’ll get a wave welcome message that includes this video. (It makes more sense when you’re actually using Wave and can see what Dr. Wave is pointing at.) [Mashable]
• Apple purchased Placebase in July to replace Google Maps?
  An interesting purchase on Apple’s part leads to speculation that Google Maps could be on the way out as the default maps app on the iPhone. That could potentially be a good thing if it means Google gets more control over releasing updates to Maps (like adding Latitude); it’d be a very bad thing if that means Apple won’t let Google Maps on the phone at all. [Computerworld]
• Weave 0.7 Released
  Mozilla’s in-house browser synchronization tool saw a minor update today with performance and reliability improvements. [Mozilla Labs]
• Windows XP Mode for Windows 7 hits RTM
  This one’ll be released to the web on the 22nd of the month—i.e., Windows 7 Launch day. [Ars Technica]
• UK’s High Court orders writ to be served via Twitter
  News you can use! [Reuters]
• Twitter’s Geolocation API Appears To Be Live. But Most Of You Are Lost.
  Twitter turned on its opt-in geolocation features, but a small bug was placing everyone off the coast of Africa (at a lat/long of 0/0. [TechCrunch]
• Surfacing forum posts in search results
  Google adds several links within a forum site to search results that appear to apply to the same topic. [Official Google Blog]
• Now in Google Toolbar for Firefox: advanced in-page translation
  Good news if you read a lot of foreign-language sites and you don’t mind installing a toolbar. [Official Google Blog]
• Skype 2.8 for Mac gets update for Snow Leopard
  No major changes, just some compatibility updates for Snow Leopard. [TUAW]

Originally posted 2009-10-01 18:00:00. Republished by Old Post Promoter

Mac OS X: If you want to be able to select your “default” browser on a link-by-link basis, directing some links to Firefox, others to Chrome, and so on, Choose Wisely allows you to do so.

After installing Choose Wisely you set the Choose Wisely application as your default web browser in your system preferences, instead of one of your already installed browsers. In Choose Wisely you can specify up to five browsers—here we’ve specified Safari, Chromium, Chrome, Firefox, and Opera—and you’ll be presented with that menu each time you open a link that would normally launch a new instance of your default browser. You won’t be presented with the menu while browsing from within a browser however, the selection process occurs only for the initial link.

Choose Wisely is freeware and requires Mac OS X 10.6. Have a handy OS X application to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

In December, Microsoft and the European Commission finally arrived at a resolution regarding charges of anti-competitive behavior with Internet Explorer. Microsoft agreed to implement a “browser choice” screen that would pop up for Windows (XP, Vista, and 7) users in Europe, and would make them aware of alternative browser options like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Today we finally have a glimpse at the choice screen from Microsoft, as well as an explanation of how it will be distributed.

Starting the week of March 1, Microsoft will begin rolling out the screen to Windows users across Europe who are using Internet Explorer as their primary web browser. The screen will present a randomized list of alternative browsers, along with links to install and learn more about them. Windows users in the UK, Belgium, and France will be able to manually download the choice screen from Windows Update starting next week if they wish to test it (I don’t suspect many will).

The European Commision’s decision followed antitrust charges by Opera against Microsoft from late 2007. Opera originally wanted Internet Explorer to be stripped from Windows entirely, but Microsoft later proposed the browser choice screen as a compromise.

While I’m not one to defend Internet Explorer, or Microsoft’s tactics, I never could stand behind the logic decrying Internet Explorer’s monopoly. IE’s dominance is a symptom of Windows’ dominance as a computing platform. You could definitely find examples of anti-competitive behavior from Microsoft, but that hasn’t really stopped Firefox from stealing marketshare from IE over the past few years.

Even if the browser choice screen doesn’t push Windows users to alternative browsers in significant amounts, it will at least give Microsoft’s European critics one less thing to complain about.