Indistinguishable from Jesse

Entering a single-line comment on the last line no longer causes a syntax error. Updated shell, updated bookmarklet.

New features and bug fixes in JavaScript Shell 1.2:

• Multiline input. You can now insert line breaks using Shift+Enter and paste multiline scripts. Edward Lee ("Mardak" on irc.mozilla.org) added this feature.
• Fixed the bookmarklet version to work in Firefox 1.0.3 (it was broken due to the fix for bug 289074). Edward Lee was the first to point out this problem and helped me fix it.
• Fixed print() to not bring up the File > Print dialog.
• Fixed blink() to work in IE (using border instead of outline) and Opera.
• Made the feature that lets you click anywhere to focus the input box work in Opera. It still doesn't work in IE.
• Fixed multiline output in Opera. It still appears all on one line in IE.
• Fixed the bookmarklet version to have a vertical scrollbar when needed on Firefox trunk. (I might be working around a bug in Firefox trunk.)

I'm aware of several new problems introduced by the multiline input feature:

• In Opera, Enter inserts a line break and *then* submits.
• In IE, multiline output isn't broken over lines.
• In Firefox 1.0.x, but not on trunk, a scrollbar appears if you have a few dozen lines of input.

JavaScript Shell 1.1 is still available.

The blogidate XML well-formedness bookmarklet now works for XML that is longer than several kilobytes. Previously, if it found an error in long XML, it wouldn't highlight the error or tell you what line it was on, and gave an error message instead. The fix was to add a Node.normalize() call before trying to extract the text of the error page generated by Firefox.

I primarily use this bookmarklet to help keep my blogs valid, but it also saves me time by catching errors that cause bad rendering in real browsers, such as forgetting to close a <strong>.

Original post about the bookmarklet

Internet Explorer no longer lets me drag bookmarklets. When did that change? I can drag http: links, but not javascript: links.

(Internet Explorer's support for bookmarklets has declined steadily since IE 5.5. IE 5.5 supported 2083-character bookmarklets. IE 6.0 only supported 508-character bookmarklets. IE 6.0 in XP SP2 only supported 508-character bookmarklets and counted spaces as several characters.)

My bookmarklets have appeared in print media several times:

• PC Magazine, Fall 2004 Digital Home issue: Security Watch: Revealing Passwords mentions my view passwords bookmarklet.

  KMGI focuses on Microsoft products, but we also found a bookmarklet (a piece of JavaScript you save as a browser bookmark) that's more brand-agnostic -- and free. It's called "view passwords" and is available at www.squarefree.com . "View passwords" exposes saved password text in IE, Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape. The script also reveals hidden text in Opera, but the way that browser executes saved passwords -- by filling in the user name and password, then activating the Submit button -- prevents the bookmarklet from working, except on a very slow page load.

• O'Reilly's Google: The Missing Manual (May 2004) devotes almost two pages to my search and seo bookmarklets.
• PC Magazine (February 2004): Bookmarklets Boost Web Surfing.
• Heise c't (November 2003) has a screenshot of the result of using the "number rows" bookmarklet, if I'm remembering correctly.
• New York Times (August 21, 2003): Fishing for Information? Try Better Bait had a paragraph about the @alltheweb bookmarklet.

I have print copies of all of these except the Feb 2004 PC Magazine article. O'Reilly shipped me a free copy of Google: The Missing Manual, Matti sent me a copy of the issue of Heise magazine from Germany, and I bought the others at bookstores.

Using the Flash seek bar bookmarklet, I found two hidden segments at the end of Strong Bad e-mail 87: Mile. They can't be reached by the usual method of clicking on things at the end of the cartoon. Burning Horizon has instructions for getting to the first hidden segment but not the second.

The bookmarklet allowed me to read all of the signs in the desert in This Land.

A co-worker pointed out that you can use the bookmarklet to reach minigames in Frank's Adventure 3. You have to pause before using the slider for it to work correctly.

I wrote a bookmarklet that adds a seek bar to flash movies. It works in Mozilla and IE. Read the script or grab the bookmarklet.

Google has been testing a new look with a small percent of visitors. I wrote a bookmarklet that lets you make Google show you the new look:

toggle google look

(Drag it to your bookmarks bar, visit google.com, and click on the bookmark.)

It works by changing the ID in your Google cookie to 102c51875a8839e9, the ID of one of the visitors Google randomly selected to test the new look. If your ID is already 102c51875a8839e9, it sets it 0000000000000000 (anonymous), letting you switch between the old and new looks quickly. Since the bookmarklet only changes the ID part of the cookie, it preserves your settings, such as the number of results per page.

Thanks to jcurious for pointing out the Neowin thread in which "poind" posted the ID from his Google cookie.

Update March 28, 2004: Google is now showing the new look by default. The bookmarklet no longer has any visible effect.

Update January 27, 2005: iMilly has created a modified version of this bookmarklet to anonymize your Google cookie.