I do not know if this has been listed before but I thought it was handy. In Netscape Communicator 4.X, you could instantly go to your home page by pressing the Command and home keys. While it is not listed in the menu (as it was with 4.X), this same shortcut works in Mozilla. I do not know if it is in all versions but it is in the latest alpha (1.2a) and most recent stable (1.1) releases.

If you use Chimera (Navigator) in an extended desktop (multi-monitor) arrangement with the left monitor the main, you can extend the sidebar into the second monitor. Simply option-click the window zoom button (green). The window fills your main screen and the sidebar starts exactly at the left hand edge of the second monitor. It helps if the resolutions are the same on both monitors.

OK, that's pretty obscure but very handy.

Since upgrading to Jaguar, OmniWeb has been running exceptionally slowly for me, especially when using things like Google. The exact symptom is that many pages take a while to load. For exmpale, Google search results took 13 seconds to load instead of 2.

After a lot of troubleshooting, and many e-mails back and forth with Omni Group, I found the problem: If you have Age of Empires II, you probably have a font called "Age of Empires II Fonts" in your ~/Library/Fonts folder. If you remove this font, OmniWeb gets much speedier (on my computer at least), and AoE II still seems to work fine.

I have already notified Omni Group, so we'll see if they manage to find a work around. Until then, you can use mine. :)

[Editor's note: Untested here as I don't have AoE to test with.]

One thing that has always made Chimera unusable for me as a browser has been the lack of an option to specify a minium font sizes, meaning many fonts displayed far too small for my limited eyesight.

On a hunch, I added the following line to the prefs.js file:

  user_pref("font.minimum-size.x-western", 14);

You can change 14 to any font size, and Chimera will never display fonts smaller than that size, regardless of what the page specifies.

I picked up this tip from Reinhold Penner in the Chimera mailing list. Basically you can get Chimera (and other browsers as well) to show a sheet with a text field to search in google. Very handy, and it's done by basically just adding a bit of JavaScript in the Apple InternetConfig setting file of OS X.

Just open ~/Library -> Preferences -> com.apple.internetconfig.plist in TextEdit (or Property List Editor if you have the developer tools) and look for the WebSearchPagePrefs entry. In TextEdit, this is what my entry looks like:

  <key>WebSearchPagePrefs</key>
  <dict>
    <key>ic-data</key>
    <string>javascript:q=document.getSelection();
    for(i=0;i<frames.length;i++){q=frames[i].document.getSelection();
    if(q)break;}if(!q)void(q=prompt('Enter Google Search Keywords:',''));
    if(q)location.href='http://www.google.com/search?client=googlet&q='+
    escape(q)</string>
  </dict>

In Property List Editor, just add the "javascript" bit, which should be one long line, not five as shown here for narrower display (no spaces, no carriage returns, just one long line). Save the changes and quit the editor. Now start Chimera and Select Search Page from the Go menu. Cool, eh?

There was an excellent hint to solve the Java-crashes in Mozilla 1.1 on one of the discussion-boards in Germany:

1. Download MRJPluginCarbon-1.0.1 (make sure you get the OS X version)
   
2. Open the folder and copy the MRJPlugInCarbon to /Library -> Internet Plug-Ins and/or ~/Library -> Internet Plug-Ins
   
3. Now for the new part: Control click on Mozilla 1.1, select Show Package-contents, drill down to Contents -> MacOS -> Plug-Ins, and replace the MRJPlugin with the new version. Mozilla must not be running when you do this step.

Thats it! No crashes since then!

One of the most interesting parts of the new iCal app is the ability to subscribe to event calendars. Unfortunately, when I tried clicking on the subscription links on the Apple site while using the Mozilla browser (my current favorite), nothing happened. I had to drag and drop the url into the subscribe screen. This operation worked perfectly when I switched back to Internet Explorer.

While doing some digging around in the weblog world, I happened upon a solution to the problem at the Disobey Nonsense Network, one of the weblog sites I found. Here's how to do it:

1. Open Internet Explorer
   
2. Open Preferences
   
3. Go to Network -> Protocol Helpers and click "Add"
   
4. Call the new helper "webcal" (use lowercase text only!!)
   
5. Click on the Helper App button and select your iCal application
   
6. Check the box to "use current application if possible.

Now shut down and restart Mozilla. Go to the Apple iCal site and click on one of the subscription links. It should work fine. Evidently, changing the preference in IE also affected the operation of Mozilla. Go Figure!

[Editor's note: This data gets written into com.apple.internetconfig.plist in your ~/Library/Preferences folder, but it appears to be encoded in some manner which would prevent manually editing the file. So if you've trashed IE from your drive, I'm not sure how you'd go about setting this helper. But it definitely works as described if you do have IE.]

I just found out by accident. If you use OmniWeb 4.1 (not tested with earlier versions) and want to open a new window containing the current website you are viewing, it's very easy to do. Simply double click on the blue link icon (next to the name of the page) in the window title bar (the one where the close, minimize etc. buttons are). Not that cool, but hey, maybe someone finds it useful :-)

A lot of websites include Favicons in their code (examples include google, altavista, cnet, cnn, ebay, macosxhints). If you've got Mozilla, then you can see them already (as far as I'm aware). Chimera also supports them, but for some reason, the folks over there have disabled them for the time being. Well, have no fear!! A few steps and you can have them back:

1. Control-click on Chimera and choose 'show package contents'.
   
2. Open Contents -> MacOS -> Defaults -> pref; you should see a file called either chimera.js or all.js; open it using TextEdit.
   
3. Hit Control-F to find and search for "browser.chrome.favicons".
   
4. Hopefully, you should now see the required pref, and can change the value from false to true.

Another great tip i just came across (thanks Altric22) is to delete the text associated with a bookmark that has a Favicon. If you do this, your bookmark toolbar could look like this.

I've been quite disappointed with the standardization of command-] for forward and command-[ as back for web browsers and the Jaguar help menu, as I enjoyed the quick keyboard access to the command-arrow keys (I have an older, smaller Apple keyboard from the original iMac days). Today I noticed holding down the option key while scrolling in Chimera will similarly move the current browser window forward or back through the history of visited pages.