OK, so this is pretty old news but I hadn’t really noticed until recently as they don’t show a link for all documents. But why is this so awesome? PDF is a rich format that offers many features not really relevant to web search. Most often searchers are just looking for some information, like MSY’s latest price on that Hot New Intel CPU.

But this only affects search results. But you can install a Greasemonkey script which opens all links to PDF, PPT and DOC files using the Google Docs Viewer. We’ve had online apps for a while, but I consider Google’s  step of opening up the GDocs Viewer to be THE official singularity, or “beginning of the end” for the humble desktop application. After this, there is no turning back. And I for one, want to see how deep the rabbit hole goes.

Or as a friend of mine once said “Firefox + Internet = Operating System”.

That said, one feature that needs improvement is searching within documents. This is only enabled for some documents, presumably the one Google has had time to index the metadata or OCR. And search hits are only highlighted with no feature of iterating through them.

http://userstyles.org/styles/20377

I realised something very interesting about Chrome recently that hadn’t occured to me until I was installing Adblock Plus in Firefox. It’s not a dealbreaker but still: Chrome will never support decent ad blocking software. Think about it, where does Google get a large chunk of their revenue?

That aside, here’s an exhaustive list of why I want to switch to Chrome:

• Speed.

However, its still missing some features preventing my permanent switch to the web browser on all platforms. In decreasing order of importance:

• Lack of bookmark synchronisation, e.g. Xmarks.
• Lack of (non-alpha) Linux support.
• Lack of Mac support.
• Missing “/” find in page shortcut.
• Inadequate replication of the Firefox search bar.
• Cannot set minimum font size in options.
• Cannot customise toolbar layout (I could save 32px of vertical real estate by having my bookmarks and address bar on same line).

I have to ask: will Chrome just be this decade’s Firefox? Firefox (Phoenix) was touted as a slim, lightning fast, no-nonsense browser. But lately, Firefox has been slow to the point of frustration. This is either due to an intrinsic inefficiency, or caused by the Extensions “feature” which, uncontrolled facilitates user-crafted mega-bloat.

Stylish is a Firefox Extension that can apply custom CSS styles to certain webpages, in most cases fixing a user-identified problem with the design. DJBullwinkle has written a custom style called Google Reader Absolutely Compact which does exactly what it says on the box.

Basically, it makes several improvements on the much bloated default interface, allowing you to maximize the efficiency of your screen real estate.

• Article text spans full width of screen
• Compact no-frills borders around items
• Almost all heading stuff removed, save for the search box
• Narrower left-hand column

Visit the link for a preview of the changes, or just try it out! This has been added to my list of essential Firefox tweaks; it’s a godsend.

I should mention, this also removes some navigation buttons, so you’re gonna want to get up to speed on the keyboard shortcuts by pressing “?” in Google Reader.

My only real criticism would be to increase the size of article headings so they stand out a bit more, which you can do by changing the font-size from 100% to 140% as below:

/* shrink titles, but add underlining for visual identification */
.entry .entry-title {
    font-size:140% !important; }

I will conclude by remarking on a trend I’ve noticed in online interfaces since using websites which tailor their design to the iPhone and iPod Touch. These interfaces are some of the most efficient and user-friendly I’ve used to date: Google Reader, Google Talk Gadget, Gmail, FaceBook, Last.fm, ANZ Internet Banking, there are more.  Web designers should be reminded that only when forced to trim a design back to the bare essentials, do you realise what those essentials actually are. You discard all those tacked on superfluous features (Google is notorious for this, just look at Gmail), until only the functional ones remain.

Happy reading!