chrome

Start a separate Chrome app on OSX with flags from Terminal

tomo — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 09:42:00 +0000

March 16, 2016

Chrome can be opened from the command line. And by running it from the command line you can configure Chrome with a number of options, there are several hundred possible flags which you can start Chrome with.

First of all, just to start/open Chrome from the command line instead of the Dock (or Spotlight) all you need is the path to the Chrome app binary. This is the absolute location of Chrome on Mac OS X: /Applications/Google\ Chrome.app/Contents/MacOS/Google\ Chrome. You can copy and paste that to Terminal and it should open Chrome without any special options, or...

Manage clearing / refreshing cache in Chrome when reloading page

tomo — Wed, 16 Mar 2016 05:54:42 +0000

March 16, 2016

cache chrome

Web developers are constantly clicking the refresh button in their browser to see their latest changes. It almost becomes like a nervous tick, clicking that refresh to get that fix. And it's frustrating when changes on the backend don't result in the reward-inducing changes in the page loaded by the browser.

Web page caching explained

There's two levels of caching, and we deal with them in different places. First, there's flushing any cached resources in the browser, whether in the browser's memory or in files. And then there's requesting non-cached resources from the web...

How to save battery life on MacBooks

tomo — Fri, 11 Mar 2016 19:39:00 +0000

March 12, 2016

battery energy chrome

Here are some tips I use to optimize battery life on my MacBook Pro. Being aware of energy hogging apps (all browsers) and pausing them can extend your battery life to what Apple advertises.

Open Activity Monitor and switch to the Energy pane. This will tell you who the big offenders are. Chrome is a notorious energy hog, but Safari would be #1 too if you're using it to do a lot of browsing. If there's anything else in there which isn't obvious (like video players, bitcoin miners ;) then you may want to shut them down while you're on battery power. You can also get a summary

Learn CSS by playing with resources at hand: Chrome Developer Tools

tomo — Wed, 02 Mar 2016 16:54:00 +0000

March 2, 2016

css chrome

CSS is all around us. It's the invisible language that dictates how every web page, including the one you're reading now, looks - from color to size and shape, layouts and positions of each piece, all that we call "style". CSS stands for Cascading Style Sheets, a stylesheet simply being the text file containing the CSS definitions. You can take a look at a stylesheet now by right-clicking somewhere in a web page and selecting "Inspect" in Chrome or "Inspect element" in Safari. But you should use Chrome for this exercise.

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Selenium IDE vs Selenium Webdriver vs CasperJS

tomo — Tue, 24 Nov 2015 03:50:23 +0000

November 24, 2015

webcrawler scrape selenium casperjs phantomjs javascript chrome firefox

Or more specifically: Selenium IDE (Firefox plugin) vs Selenium Webdriver (Python and other languages) vs CasperJS (and PhantomJS or SlimerJS)

Selenium allows you, a programmer or non-programmer, to control a web browser and make it do things that you would otherwise do manually. With that ability, you can test your website over and over (and automatically from cron), similate users, or visit any number of web pages and read data (web scraping) on them and save to a file for processing.

If you go to the Selenium website you will...