Social Fixer (formerly Better Facebook)

on Friday, January 31, 2014

Social Fixer (socialfixer.com), formerly called Better Facebook, is exactly that: a way to streamline Facebook to take out the annoying features, and tweak the ones you want to keep, to create a better Facebook experience.

It's free, and will automatically discover what browser you are using and provides the appropriate add-in.  Once added, it will take you through a Wizard to show you to use the most commonly used features of Social Fixer.  A small icon will then appear in the upper right corner to give you access to all the tools available in Social Fixer.

You should definitely click the icon to see all the options allowed (the screenshot below is just one of fourteen tabs of options).  The Wizard will take you through the most basic options, but clicking the icon and seeing all the options available is really where Social Fixer begins to shine.  You can change the width of the display (or go full width of your browser window), add and remove features in the side columns, force the most recent stories to display first (as opposed to Facebook deciding what you want to see), get rid of sponsored posts, change color themes, even write your own CSS for your Facebook page.



Because of the sheer number of available options, it takes some tweaking to get things just right, turning off some features after you've tried them, turning some features back on.  But after getting a sense of how Social Fixer works, you can customize Facebook to make it a much more useful and enjoyable experience.

Firefox Add-ons Causing Browser Crashes

on Thursday, September 8, 2011

When I recently updated my Firefox browser, it began to crash whenever I opened more than one tab. I tried all the usual suspects: reinstalled Firefox, ran a malware scan. It turned out the problem was not with Firefox itself but the compatability with certain add-ons.

If you are having problems with Firefox, go to the Tools menu, and choose Add-ons. The Add-ons Manager will appear (a screenshot is below). Disable everything (the Disable buttons are circled in the screenshot below). If Firefox starts working properly again, you can Enable them one at a time, until you find the one that was making Firefox crash. Problem solved!