News, info, and opinion by Mac users, for Mac users.

November 29, 2006

software

Check before you click

Posted Nov. 29, ’06, 9:22 AM PT by Dan Moren
Category | Software

Cooliris PreviewYou probably use Google a fair amount. It’s okay, we all do. But don’t you hate having to click on a bunch of links before finding the one you want? Or open several sites in browser tabs? Wouldn’t it be great if you could check out the site without having to open it? Don’t you love rhetorical questions?

Cooliris’s Cooliris Preview extension for Safari lets you do just that. When you mouseover a link on Google, a pop-up window appears, showing you the contents of that page. Better yet, the pop-up page is movable, resizable, and completely browseable. It works for more than just Google, too: CNN, BBC, Yahoo, Ask.com, Flickr, Craigslist, eBay, RSS feeds, and more. For Flickr and Google Images, hovering over a picture will pop up a window with the full-size version of that image, letting you drag and drop it into other applications with ease. Moving the mouse off the preview window will cause it to disappear after a few seconds.

There are versions for Firefox, IE, and Flock, but only the Safari one is Mac-compatible. And if you don’t want to see previews for any reason, you can easily disable the plug-in in Safari’s View menu. I have to say, after using it for just a little while, it seems exceptionally handy. The only feature I’d like to see is the ability to edit the list of sites for which previews appear (functionality which does exist in the Firefox version). Maybe in the next release.

Update: The Firefox version is in fact Mac-compatible. Thanks for the correction.

[via Lifehacker]


4 Comments

shadownight said:

A Mac Firefox plug-in does exist.

November 29, 2006 9:35 AM
AEC said:

Correction: The Firefox extension is also Mac-compatible

November 29, 2006 9:46 AM
Kelly Dumont said:

When I installed CoolIris for Safari, I begin experience extreme slow downs, even when I disabled the plug in. I had to remove it completely to restore stability to Safari.

November 29, 2006 12:28 PM
Jeff Author Profile Page said:

I used to use this but kept getting frustrated when I would accidentally hover over a link and the box would pop up. I eventually just deleted it.

November 29, 2006 1:43 PM

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