If you have broadband, you have no use for the Chimera cache, and the way its inflating like a balloon. So instead of clicking Preferences, clicking Navigation, clicking the tab 'History', and clicking 'clear disk cache' to clear the disk cache one time, put the following in the ~/Library -> Application Support -> Chimera -> Profiles -> Default -> 12345.slt -> prefs.js file:

user_pref("browser.cache.disk.enable", false);

Voila! The trick of the week! I got it from Rahmcoff (Peter of the Norse) over at the Chimera board. Note that the "12345.slt" folder will actually be named something else on your machine; you want the folder that ends in .slt ... and you may have a folder with your username instead of "Default."

[Editor's note: I haven't tried this one myself yet, and I would assume the option to disable disk cache will eventually make its way into the normal Chimera Preferences panel.]

Want fast access to your Chimera bookmarks from it's dock icon? With a simple download and replace, you can have them!

Quit Chimera and download the required files. Go to bug 163646 at bugzilla, and scroll down to Comment #5. Download the attachment and expand it. You'll have a folder labled MainMenu.nib in your downloads folder.

Next control-click on the Chimera/Navigator application and select Show Package Contents from the pop-up menu. Navigate the folders to Contents -> Resources -> English.lproj. In there, you'll see MainMenu.nib. Rename this to MainMenu.nib.old (or anything else you'd prefer).

Now copy the MainMenu.nib object from your downloads folder into the English.lproj folder. Re-launch Chimera and you should have bookmarks in Chimera's dock menu!

[Editor's note: Chimera just keeps getting cooler and cooler! This is a very useful hack, and it hasn't caused any problems with my Chimera installation. The submitted hint suggests deleting the old nib file; I prefer to rename it, in case you ever want or need to rever the behavior.]

This problem has haunted me since 1.0.1 Mozilla browser came out. If you close all the windows in the browser, then open a new window and click maximize (+), the window is a pixel thick! Quitting and restarting the app doesn't help, either. Here's how to fix the problem.

Edit the file /Users -> your_username -> Library -> Mozilla -> Profiles -> default -> random_number.slt -> localstore.rdf. Change (around line 55) the height and width from 0 to something like 100. This is a known bug by the mozilla.org folks. This is the best workaround because it saves all your profile data, bookmarks, etc.

[Editor's note: Mozilla 1.2b doesn't exhibit this behavior, at least on my machine.]

Instead of viewing the source code in a seperate tab or window under chimera, you can simply type the words "view-source:" before the 'http://' portion of the site's address.

This is also good if you need to toggle back and forth, using the back and forward arrows.

A few months ago, I imported a hosts file to block a few of the more annoying ad servers. It remaps their IPs to 127.0.0.1, as hinted here before. Netscape 7 doesn't like this, though, and will throw up an error message whenever it can't find one of those servers (sometimes 3 or 4 times per page!). Anyway, the easy way to stop that from happening is to turn on personal web sharing. Then Apache on your machine returns something that Netscape can deal with without an error message.

RealBasic Garage has set up a Sherlock 3 channel, but I had a dickens trying to subscribe to it using Mozilla. Then I remembered an earlier hint, and a variation on it does the trick:

1. Open Internet Explorer.
   
2. Go to Preferences, then Network, then Protocol Helpers.
   
3. Add Helper for "sherlock" without the quotes.
   
4. Choose Sherlock as the Helper application.
   
5. (Re)start Mozilla.
   

Now you can click on the Sherlock3 link to subscribe the RealBasic Garage (and other channels as they arrive).

For those of you with both RealPlayer and Chimera, you'll probably get a crash on launch when you try to run both Chimera and RealPlayer. The mozdev.org Chimera mailing list archive site contains the solution in the October archives. It was posted by Reinhold Penner, the generous creator of ChimeraKnight. You can read his solution here; the responding messages (use the "Next message" link at the bottom of the page) are interesting and should be read. This is more than just a tweak. It is a lesson in the use and misuse of aliases.

[Editor's note: As an aside, if you haven't tested Chimera lately, the newest versions are becoming quite usable. There are still many missing features, of course, but it's showing great promise.]

While working on the site recently, I noticed a fairly useful hidden feature in Mozilla. If you've saved form data for auto-completion, you can selectively complete fields on the form. Instead of completing the entire form with Edit -> Fill in Form, just double-click in any of the form's fields. That field only will then be populated with your auto-fill data.

The latest nightly build of Chimera now uses Command-arrow navigation for back and forward! This was the biggest thing killing my buzz about Chimera but it is fixed now, so go get it! Get it here:

http://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/chimera/nightly/latest/

Note that these nightly builds are not in any way guaranteed to be stable, but the Oct 3rd build feels pretty solid.

By unchecking the "Open unrequested windows" option in Mozilla, you could disable pop-up ads on sites like weather.com. I also found that this setting in Mozilla was respected in Netscape (even though ability to change this preference setting is not in Netscape). I found out that you can have Chimera do the same thing by placing the following two lines in the "prefs.js" file for Chimera:

  user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_close", true);
  user_pref("dom.disable_open_during_load", true);

I pasted them in so they would be in alphebetical order with the existing lines in the file. Worked like a charm!!