Unfortunately, I had to call on Firefox at least once every other day. And while I still run across the occasional Web site that requires me to use Internet Explorer — mainly, Web sites that use some Microsoft technology, such as LiveMeeting or an ActiveX control of some sort — that’s maybe once or twice a month.

(And no, I have not given IE a chance to be my primary browser. When it truly embraces Web standards, then I will consider it. Internet Explorer is barely in the neighborhood of standards compliance right now, never mind on the same street. Safari? C’mon, man. Opera? Seriously, stop now, you’re embarrassing yourself.)

So I’ve made up my mind: Chrome gets sent back to the minors to work on its skills, and Firefox — older, fatter, slower, but far more dependable and experienced — is back as my ace starting pitcher.

The problems I had with Chrome were threefold:

I was having problems with some sites redirecting oddly, especially when I was trying to shop online. Basically, I couldn’t complete any mutliple-form-submission efforts without the site sending me back to a previous step in the process. This happened on the Sam’s Club, Cabela’s and the History Book Club Web sites, so I know it was the browser.

I suspect it was due to a misbehaving plug-in, but I didn’t want to put in the effort to track it down — not when Firefox behaves perfectly fine, with dozens of similar plugins, on those sites.

There isn’t a properly functioning download accelerator plugin for Chrome.

I searched high and low for one. The closest I came was Free Download Manager, which very closely resembles FlashGet, which I use with Firefox (via the FlashGot plugin). But I could never quite get Free Download Manager to work, especially for sites that required either forms or basic authentication. A number of users claimed in FDM’s support forum to have gotten the plugin to work, but I could not.

Again, if FlashGot / FlashGet work just fine, why am I struggling with this problem in Chrome?

In the end, Chrome’s intangibles didn’t quite measure up. Compared to Firefox, everything was just a little more shoddy and a little harder to do.

Clearing history? Chrome struggled hard, whereas Firefox snapped right along. And I don’t understand the purpose of “incognito” mode in Chrome, unless the purpose is to browse without plugins, rather than not storing history, cookies and cache files, as the documentation states.

Plugins? Some worked great — I am going to miss the Google Voice and Google Reader extensions — but for the most part, the Chrome version of a given plugin was shoddy in comparison to its Firefox version.

For example, there are no contextual menus for the Chrome version of LastPass, which can make filling out forms a lot harder. Tampermonkey — Chrome’s version of Greasemonkey — kept crashing on me. Settings for Adblock Plus are a lot more complicated in Chrome than in Firefox.

I liked how snappy Chrome was when I first used it. But as soon as I added plugins to it, the trouble started, and now the only practical difference between the two is the aforementioned lack of polish in the Google offering.

That may not last. It is possible Chrome will improve as time goes by. I’m not averse to giving Chrome a second, third or, for that matter, as many additional shots as it deserves.

But I surf with Firefox. I know Firefox. Firefox is a good friend of mine. Chrome, you’re no Firefox.

All links in this post on delicious: http://www.delicious.com/dougvdotcom/chrome-just-isnt-up-to-firefoxs-snuff

Tynt's annoying Read More clipboard jacking: You can kill it with AdBlock Plus for Firefox.

I love Firefox. It’s pretty much the only Web browser I use.

I hate Tynt. If you’ve ever copied text from a Web page, then pasted it, only to find a mysterious “Read More:” link inserted at the end of the text you copied, you just ran headfirst into Tynt.

Each time a user pastes content from your website into an email, blog or website, we automatically add a URL link back to your site’s original content. When someone clicks that URL, they are directed back to your site and see the original content. This drives incremental traffic to your site when your content is shared without your knowledge while maintaining a consistent user experience.

It may well be a “consistent user experience” for me to have to hit the backspace key to delete the “Read more” link Tynt adds every time I copy a small block of text, but it’s a consistently annoying experience.

I appreciate the importance of reciprocal links. I understand the challenge to content publishers of having content lifted from their Web sites without attribution.

So before I get into details about this fix, let me be clear: If you copy Web content, attribute it. It’s the right thing to do.

That said, there’s a wrong way of getting people to do the right thing, and Tynt is definitely the wrong way.

I find having my simple act of extracting a quote from a Web page turned into a link-spamming takeover of my local machine to be far more disturbing than a tracking cookie or layer ad.

Don’t be messing with my clipboard. It’s mine, not yours. I will put into it what I want there, not what you want.

Fortunately, I was able to put an immediate end to Tynt’s “Read More” clipboard copy highjacking in Firefox with Adblock Plus, a highly popular add-in that does what its name suggests: Blocks advertisements, and other content, from displaying on a page.

How To Block Tynt In Firefox Via Adblock Plus

I don’t mind Web ads. In fact, on many sites, ads are quite useful. But I absolutely despise Tynt, so I went ahead and installed Adblock Plus specifically to deal with it:

1. I installed AdBlock Plus from the link above.
2. After restarting Firefox, I was asked to choose a “filter subscription,” which is basically a series of user-contributed rules that block various ads, scripts, images, etc.
   1. Because I don’t mind Web ads, I chose “Cancel.” Adblock Plus warned me that without a subscription, I would need to add any filters manually; I clicked OK.
   2. You can go ahead and add a filter subscription. The “EasyList” subscription is supposed to block Tynt’s functionality; however, I found that was not always the case. For example, the EasyList (English) subscription available at this writing did not block Tynt on MySpace.
3. I selected Tools –> Add-ons, then clicked the Options button under Adblock Plus.
4. I clicked “Add Filter” at the bottom of the window that came up.
5. A “New filter” line opened.
   1. In the text box beneath, I entered *tynt* and hit the Enter key.
   2. A red exclamation point resulted, which indicated that the filter was a regular expression / too short to be optimized. I accepted that; the reason why appears below.
6. I clicked OK on the filter editing window and Close on the add-ons dialog box.

The dialog boxes for Adblock Plus that accommodate my Tynt killing filter.

And just like that, I have not been bothered since by Tynt’s annoying “Read More” hijacking.

The Alternatives Didn’t Work

There are a number of suggestions out there to put an end to Tynt’s activities. I tried most but found them wanting compared to my solution.

Block tcr.tynt.com via your computer’s HOSTS file: This was a popular suggestion. Many claimed it worked fine for them. But some Web sites — again, MySpace serves as an excellent example — aren’t stopped by blocking that one domain.

Tynt actually uses a number of subdomains to deliver its services; in some cases, the Tynt scripts run off the Web server you’re visiting. Since you can’t use wildcards in a HOSTS file, that means adding dozens of entries to the HOSTS file; and again, even that won’t stop Tynt if it is running off the local Web server.

Use the NoScript add-on for Firefox: Another option is to employ NoScript. But that is a nuclear solution; NoScript is pessimistic.

In other words, it blocks all Web sites from running JavaScript, and allows you to whitelist sites. That might have been an acceptable approach to annoying scripts five years ago, but in this age, your Web experience is going to be seriously curtailed if you start by blocking scripts.

Use the YesScript add-on for Firefox: YesScript is a Firefox add-on that takes an optimistic approach to JavaScript. That is, you can blacklist sites, rather than having to whitelist them, as in NoScript.

Unfortunately, I did not see a way to use wildcards with YesScript, which pretty much made it the same as the HOSTS file option; and therefore, it did not work, for pretty much the same reasons.

And for the record, I looked for Greasemonkey scripts (couldn’t find one), add-ons specific to Tynt (couldn’t find one), and even tried using Tynt’s purported global opt-out button (surprise: it didn’t work).

About That Exclamation Point In Adblock Plus

Which brings us to the warning Adblock Plus shows about the filter rule.

As previously noted, our filter uses *tynt* as its expression. This is basically an instruction to Adblock Plus to block all objects that contain the letter sequence tynt: scripts, images, cookies, HTML, whatever.

Adblock Plus is smart enough to know that this is a very broad stroke; it’s four characters long, and generally speaking, that’s a wide net to cast — a net that could well catch a lot of fish we don’t want to fry.

For example, suppose we used the expression *ding*, instead. That would catch over 900 different dictionary words alone, most likely removing content from the page that we actually want to see.

On the other hand, *tynt* catches zero dictionary words. Because that combination of letters is so rare — it almost exclusively applies to content we intend to block — the chances it blocks something we want to see is infinitesimal.

But Adblock Plus doesn’t know that, so it warns us.

Finally, I used *tynt* as the filter expression because I want to block not only scripts and content emanating from tynt.com, but to also catch local implementations of Tynt’s scripts and objects.

In other words, the entire Tynt clipboard hijacking solution could be installed on the Web host I am visiting. But the objects those scripts use are going to have to invoke the term tynt in calling objects or sending requests to Tynt’s servers in order to work; I am catching every time that happens with this expression, and putting an end to it before it begins.

All links in this post on delicious: http://delicious.com/dougvdotcom/killing-tynts-read-more-clipboard-copy-hijacker-with-the-adblock-plus-plug-in-for-firefox