While watching movies on the iPhone version of YouTube I always noticed videos looked better. I just thought it might be the smaller screen. With this new Add-on for FireFox, I think it confirms that there are different quality versions of videos at YouTube. In fact, according to Josh, this Add-on streams from video.l.google.com instead of youtube.com. This makes sense to me because Google videos always supported much better video quality. Perhaps the YouTube player on the iPhone does the same thing?

The Add-on for FireFox is called “Better YouTube Firefox extension” that really does improve the video quality of YouTube, depending on the video that was originally uploaded. I always upload videos in a better quality than is shown at YouTube, and I can confirm that it does work with a side-by-side comparison of two of my videos using Safari (left) Vs. FireFox (right) with the Add-on:

(Click for full size and to see the detail in the “Jason G.” logo bug)
(Click here to use this video for testing)

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If you have FireFox, oh boy do I have an add-on for you. Thanks to Tek for this tip… it’s such a great find I had to break my blogging drought and say something about it. It’s called PicLens and what it does it turns your desktop into a full 3D browser for the images on the page or in the gallery you are viewing, such as Flickr, Google images, Smugmug, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, and many others.

It’s hard to explain exactly what it does–you just have to believe me that it is the most incredible photo viewing interface ever. If you don’t have FireFox, you need to go get it just to try this thing out. Just install the add-on, then go to Google Images and search for photos, or go to a Flickr gallery. Once you see the thumbnail images, mouseover one and you’ll see a play button appear. Click it and you will be immediately immersed in an incredible photo viewing environment.

Go get it: PicLens

Since I switched over from Windows XP to Mac OS X Leopard this past November one of the more puzzling things has been how to add desktop shortcuts.  This was real easy in Windows’ Internet Explorer.  Just Right-click your desktop and select “Create Shortcut”.  On a Mac (FireFox or Safari) this is not an option.

I finally found the answer, and like most things on the Mac, it’s easier than the PC.

You may have noticed while surfing around that when clicking text on a page it sometimes turns into a box, one that you can drag.  I know I did, and I always wondered what I could do with it.  Now I know.

You can drag any text link from a page onto your desktop to create a shortcut.  Also, if you want to make a desktop shortcut of the current web page, just drag the icon that appears to the left of the URL in the address bar.  This is by default a globe icon, but a site can customize it so it may look like some other 16×16 image.  Either way, just drag it to your desktop and it will create a .webloc file.  Just click it to open it up in your default browser!

Works great in both FireFox and Safari.

Just click and drag the icon to your desktop when it turns to a hand icon.

This is one of the reasons I’ve switched from Windows to Mac:

As a web developer, it’s essential to be able to test a fresh page in as many browsers and environments as possible.

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