# Monday, September 26, 2005

Mouse Gestures

I've made the switch to IE7 from slim browser. I really liked slim browser, but I felt the need to get back to IE, and once tabs were added I thought I'd see if I could do it. One nice thing about IE is I can have multiple windows, slim browser likes everything to be in one. One thing I really missed about switching, though, is mouse gestures:

This article discusses how I've added mouse gesture support to Internet Explorer. The code presented isn't intended to detail every step in the implementation (hopefully the source code will do this); rather it's intended to provide a quick sketch of the steps involved.

[ The Code Project - Mouse Gestures for Internet Explorer - ATL ]

Now I only really use two mouse gestures, and they aren't much to implement, but this little plug in does both and pretty much the rest of the bunch. My most used are "click right left" and "click left right" for going forward one page or back one page respectively.

Now that I have mouse gestures, I wonder what other features of slim browser I can get my IE to do?

Multiple site browser based on tab-page interface - though the IE tabs aren't as flexible
Seamless integration with AI RoboForm FormFiller/Password Manager - which I never used
Built-in Popup Killer based on intelligent identification and pre-defined filtering - though IE's isn't as bright
Site windows killed by mistake are FULLY RECOVERABLE - this always was nice, though at times irritating. Slim browser doesn't block the popup, it fully hides the blockup and if you don't recover it in a short amount of time, kills the hidden window. This is great unless the page makes sound, which the popup blocker doesn't block at all.
Ability to turn on/off Flash Animation - I never used this, it was too difficult to turn on and off all of the time.
Built-in web form spell checker - ieSpell does that for me.
Universal URL Filter: Block ad banners, flash animations, iframes or any components within any web pages by URL patterns - I never really tweaked this, so I didn't get much use out of it.
Built-in RSS News Rendering Engine. Now you can read RSS news directly inside SlimBrowser without additional RSS Reader software - IE7 has this and it's just as stupid as in all of the other browsers. Seriously people, just get bloglines.
ActiveX Filter: block obtrusive dialogs prompting you to install unsafe ActiveX controls - not sure how this is any different than IE has always had.
Convenient access to major search engines by Quick-Search Bar - sure no quick-search, but my google bar works fine.
Seamless integration of most Internet Explorer toolbars - Oddly IE does fine with this.
ScriptPad: Built-in VBScript/Jscript/HTML/Text editor - I never liked this, vi is the editor for me.
Hidden Sites : hide and show a site at users' request
Skinned window frame - WindowBlinds works for me.
Free-zooming of any web page - I don't think I have this, but I bet there is a windows accessability option to do something similar.
AutoLogin: automatically connect and log into specified website with just one click - I'm not even sure I ever saw this.
Seamless integration with online translation engine and dictionaries - with google bar
Ability to suppress script error message dialog - even IE4 could do this, I think.
Site Group: Open and save a collection of sites as a group - not very useful to me
Flexible control of startup actions - don't really need this either
URL Alias: Type short alias instead long URL - like tinurl?

A lot of good functionality in slim browser, but I think IE7 will work fine for me. One thing to note, IE7 works fine inside of slim browser so you'll still get the IE7 browsing engine inside of slim browser, if you have both installed.

#    Comments [1] |
Monday, September 26, 2005 10:41:42 PM (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)
Nicely done. I never really used mouse gestures before, but I can ceratinly see the advantage in them after only a few minutes of testing. The only problem I've experienced is that my Window Blinds is making the UI for the Mouse Gesture plugin difficult to see/interpret. Thanks again, Cafe Chimp!
Nate
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