Want to know the great thing about Firefox? It’s that you can write add-ons for it without messing about with Greasemonkey or something. So, when I wanted to offer users the ability to toggle in and out of text-only mode, I wrote a Firefox add-on. Thing is, whenever I was using another browser (I’m known to occasionally dabble with Chrome/Rockmelt and Safari), I’d get frustrated about how difficult it was to go into Textise. If you’ve had to do it, you’ll know what I mean: copy the URL of the page you want to view text-only, go to the Textise home page, paste in the URL, hit “Textise”. Just so hard!

So I got to thinking (happens after a couple of beers) and the idea of bookmarklets occurred to me. And you know what, this was very, very stupid because, back in 2009, one of you (jlemoine to be precise) had suggested this very thing on the Feedback and Suggestions page. Oh well, I caught up in the end.

The happy ending here is that I’ve written the bookmarklet and you can go get it on the new Bookmarklet page. What’s more, it contains exactly the same code as the Firefox add-on. Doesn’t look so nice (the add-on can can have a nice image in FF) and doesn’t have right-click menu functionality but it works on all the browsers I’ve tried and should be really useful if you like to flick in and out of text-only mode.

Let me know how you get on with it.