Firefox

The last thing I want is unnecessary junk popping up when mousing over links. Snap is a good idea in theory, but their previews should be a user-installed browser extension, not something forced on you from website to website. Or at the very least, they should allow you to create a preference on their server to say “no thanks.” Instead, we’ve got the new BLINK tag.

In order to block previews, you need to find a way to block a web connection to spa.snap.com which contains the code. The easiest way to do this is to use AdBlock Plus in Firefox. Just add a new filter with this value:

http://spa.snap.com/snap_preview_anywhere.js*

…and you’ll be set.

UPDATE: Download Squad has just informed us that an official method via Snap is available through their FAQ page. (Because that’s where we’d look for it when faced with pop-ups on TechCrunch. Oy.) By clicking this link Snap will place a cookie on your browser that disables the pop-ups for as long as the cookie exists. (You’ll need to clear your cache and refresh pages to see it take effect.)

Firefox 2.0 was released not long ago, but I’ve noticed something peculiar: tooltips based on an anchor’s “title” attribute no longer appear when the anchor is moused-over.

I’m curious… is this a bug, a new (undiscovered-by-me) preference, or simply a fundamental change in behavior by the Firefox developers?

Can’t wait for Flock to become more stable? Try the Performancing extension, which puts a blog editor smack in the middle of Firefox 1.5. You’ll get a split screen interface not too different from Flock’s editor, and you won’t have to give up your favorite extensions or wait for them to be “ported” to Flock to use it.

There are no ways to select formatting options yet (as far as I can see), but it will publish to your default format — something I’ve seen a few of these tools fail to do. It’ll still try to apply straight-up HTML blockquotes and other tags to ease entries for novice users, but I’m hoping to see more advanced options for advanced users, such as support for Markdown or other macros and templates.

In any case, it’s a sweet little extension — give it a spin!

[Edited 2005-12-23] Obviously, I was not the first person to make this comparison… but it seems there were so many similar jabs that one of the Flock developers decided to speak up about Performancing, etc.