Skip to main content

MileWideBack Extension for Firefox

The last week I installed MildWideBack, a really superb FireFox extension. With this extension, navigation back and forth in a tab becomes very easy. All you've got to do is to 'throw' your mouse to the left edge of the screen and navigate back or forward by left-clicking or right-clicking on your mouse.

This extension works on the simple theory of Fitts' Law. For all of you who are aware of this law, you would know that the time to acquire a target is a function of the distance to and size of the target, the target here being the two *small* back and forward buttons on top left of your browser. This implies that acquiring these targets, ie, pointing to these buttons is not very easy. All the more difficult if you are using the smaller buttons so as to get more space for web page content.



http://dragtotab.mozdev.org/milewideback/


But withthis extension our 'target' effectively has considerable height and an infinite width! And thus one need just move the cursor with high velocity to the left and navigation is much easier.

Usability Glossary: Fitts' Law
Get MildWideback

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Gmail Chat Disabled

The fact that it happened does not surprise me but that it took so long for our network administrators to figure it out does. And if you are wondering how do you disable Gmail's chat features on your network, you only need locking DNS lookups to chatenabled.mail.google.com , by returning 127.0.0.1 .

Advertising Billboards as Rain Covers

Advertising billboards are put to use as Pakistani refugees, left homeless after the October 8 earthquake, set up their tents in Muzaffarabad, Pakistan. [via SFGate ] Technorati Tags: Pakistan Earthquake

Community effort to create a single persistence model for the Java community

A community effort led by Sun Microsystems is aiming to create a single 'Plain Old Java Object' persistence model to provide a single object/relational mapping facility for Java app developers in J2SE and J2EE. Paul Krill writes In a letter to the “Java Technology Community” on Friday, specification leads on Java Specification Request (JSR) 220, which is the proposal for Enterprise JavaBeans 3.0, and JSR-243, for Java Data Objects, state that the two technologies feature divergent persistence models. “This divergence has caused confusion and debates among Java developers, and is not in the best of interest of the Java community,” said JSR-220 leader Linda DeMichiel who also is a Sun employee, and Craig Russell, a staff engineer at Sun who leads JSR-243. “In response to these requests [for an end to the unwanted divide], Sun Microsystems is leading a community effort to create a single POJO (Plain Old Java Object) persistence model for the Java community,” the letter said.