Hacksar

With the recent release of Firefox v3.5, I’m sure many people have upgraded their old versions of Firefox to take advantage of some of the new features that were placed in this release. However, there also seemed to be some “downgrades” (or maybe just bugs) in the release that I’m surprised that the developers/testers didn’t catch. For example, if you click a link in an external program (like an IM client such as AIM for example), and you have Firefox set as your default browser, the link will open up in the last tab you have open (rather than opening a new tab). In older versions of Firefox, the setting under Tools -> Options -> Tabs -> “Open New Windows in a New Tab Instead” would allow you to open external links in new tabs. However, now, it does not. Thankfully, there is a simple fix for it – keep reading for the solution.

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If you have used Google’s iGoogle personalized homepage, you have probably come across the various updates that have been slowly applied to different accounts. I was just given an update where a Google Chat, or gTalk, “tab” was added to my iGoogle homepage. Gmail has had this little box for a while now, but since I do the majority of my email checking through the Gmail widget in iGoogle, I never was bothered by the gTalk box.

However, now that the gTalk chat box is on iGoogle as well, it is starting to become bothersome. It often lags behind and takes the page a very long time to load; this is especially annoying if you have iGoogle set as your home page, as I do. I looked around for ways on how to remove the gTalk box from iGoogle. True, it has an option to “hide” the chat box, but it still leaves a large “Enable Chat” link in it’s place, which can still be annoying. Here’s the solution I made after not finding any other good / working solution. (Solutions such as editing the XML file didn’t work and I wanted to avoid GreaseMonkey scripts because those can slow your browser down as well.)

Note that this solution only works with Firefox. If you do not use Firefox, change over as it’s much faster, more secure and customizable.

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