It's Time for URL-Specific Browser Settings

Here’s what I’d like to see for upcoming browsers: customized browser settings on a URL-by-URL basis. I think it’s time to admit that different sites sometimes require vastly different browser settings to work optimally.

For instance, I visit some sites that scroll horizontally. To see them completely, I need to remove the Firefox sidebar. I display some reports on my intranet that I alway end up going into Full Screen mode to view. I normally don’t pass HTTP referrers (see this), but some sites suppress images without a referrer to prevent hot-linking, so I need to pass a referrer to them. Then there’s the browser-based printing thing I complained about the other day.

It’d be very handy if Firefox could do all this for me. I could see having default settings, but overriding individual settings per site. So for a URL with a wildcard of “http://intranet/wide_reports*”, supress the sidebar and go into Full Screen mode.

This is probably hard from a technical perspective, as Firefox would essentially have to scan all the settings every time a page loaded. But what a difference this would make. Provide some centralized control and it would be fantastic for intranets, since you could control not only the page, but have some form of control over the environment the page loads into.

Deane | January 30, 2005

What This Links To

The following posts are linked to from this post.

How Browser-Based Printing Should Work
My post about MeadCo ScriptX and browser-based printing got me thinking that browsers should allow print configuration on a per…
– January 4, 2005
Preventing Image Leeching
Smarter Image Hotlinking Prevention: Here's a great antidote for hotlinkers — people who embed images from YOUR Web site in…
– July 21, 2004
Outlook Web Access Privacy Hole
Here's something a little scary for anyone who uses Outlook Web Access. Watch out for the links you click…
– December 23, 2003

Comments

Anyone who designs a site that scrolls horizontally should be repeatedly beaten with a cast-iron skillet. (With the single, clever exception of the old-fashioned radio design at CSS Zen Garden).

dz | January 30, 2005 11:46 AM

OmniWeb 5.1 lacks FireFox’s pure and awesome gadget quotient. However, its got a smattering of features that makes surfing really, really pleasant. Take, for example, per-site settings for fonts, cookies, etc. http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniweb/gallery/content.html#8

Adam Keys | January 30, 2005 11:59 AM

As for horizontal scrolling, I find a lot of sites designed for 1024 x 768 resolution, but which fail to take into account the actual viewing area of the browser. While my screen is 1024-pixels wide, my viewing area right now as I write this is only 846-pixels wide when you subtract the Firefox sidebar on the left and the standard browser scrollbar on the right.

Deane | January 30, 2005 12:28 PM

The Greasemonkey extension for Firefox might get you at least part of the way, if not all of the way, to where you’d like to go. It lets you create custom javascripts and associate them with specific sites. So when you arrive at that site, your javascript executes. So you could automatically adjust the window size at certain sites, etc.

http://greasemonkey.mozdev.org/

Josh Clark | January 30, 2005 2:42 PM

Also, we could then have user-stylesheets be applied to only specific sites.

Philipp Lenssen | January 30, 2005 3:46 PM

I must be totally pyschic. According to this document…

http://wiki.mozilla.org/index.php/Firefox:2.0_PRD

…the exact thing I described here is on tap for Firefox 2.0.

Deane | February 2, 2005 11:04 PM

i have a question regarding browser settings and url can i ask that question here?

| June 27, 2005 11:06 AM

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