Hacking Facebook To Remove The Social Value Facade

We see [Ben Grosser’s] point that all the metrics found on the Facebook user interface make the experience somewhat of a game to see if you can better your high score. He thinks this detracts from the mission of having social interactions that themselves have a value. So he set out to remove the ‘scores’ from all Facebook pages with a project he calls the Facebook Demetricator.

You can see two UI blocks above. The upper offering is what a normal user will see. The lower is the page seen through the lens of the Demetricator. [Ben’s] feels it doesn’t matter how many people like something or share something, but only that you are genuinely interested in it. With the numbers removed you’re unlikely to follow the herd mentality of only clicking through to things that are liked by a huge number of people. He explains this himself in the clip after the break.

The Demetricator works much like the Reddit Enhancement Suite. It’s a browser add-on for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari that selectively strips out the metrics as the page renders.

TUIO Multitouch On IPhone Via Browser Hack

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When the MSAFluids Remote multitouch App was rejected, a developer found a way to get virtually the same effect using a safari App. They’re using the TUIO protocol to get the desired remote control. This opens up the door to extending Applications through the browser as well. While this probably wouldn’t allow you to utilize the other sensor inputs from your device, like accelerometer data, it will allow for fast prototyping of applications that don’t need that.

Flash For Jailbroken IPhones

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Hackers are continuing to outpace Apple with feature additions. The team at iMobileCinema has created a flash plugin for the Mobile Safari browser. It’s a beta release and still a bit buggy. This app is only available to people who have jailbroken their iPhones. You just need to add d.imobilecinema.com to your sources in Cydia to get the package to appear. While it can crash from time to time, it’s certainly better than no support at all.

[via Gizmodo]

Faster Browsing With RAM Disks

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A coworker approached us today wondering if they could get a performance boost using Samsung’s newly announced 256GB SSD. Most of their work is done in browser, so we said “no”. They’d only see benefit if they were reading/writing large files. Their system has plenty of RAM, and we decided to take a different approach. By creating a filesystem in RAM, you can read and write files much faster than on a typical hard drive. We decided to put the browser’s file cache into RAM. Continue reading “Faster Browsing With RAM Disks”

Speed Testing The Latest Web Browsers


With the imminent release of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5 being finalized this week, Lifehacker decided it was a good time to run the browsers head to head to see which was the fastest and least resource intensive. The testing system was a 2GHz 2GB Vista machine. The timing system used wasn’t directly hooked to the browser, so tests were repeated multiple times to improve accuracy. The cold start winner was Opera, but most browsers opened in about a second if they had been run recently. Safari did well loading content in multiple tabs at the same time, probably due to its short render times for JavaScript and CSS. The final test was memory usage; we’re sure many people will be happy to know that Firefox 3 RC3 only used 66% of the RAM required by the other three browsers.