Readers offer their best tips for making Google Instant work in Opera, viewing Google Maps in full screen and visiting encrypted Facebook.
About the Tips Box: Every day we receive boatloads of great reader tips in our inbox, but for various reasons — maybe they’re a bit too niche, maybe we couldn’t find a good way to present it, or maybe we just couldn’t fit it in — the tip didn’t make the front page. Got a tip of your own to share? Email it to tips at lifehacker.com.au.
Make Google Instant Work in Opera
Rkarren tells us how to fix Google Instant in unsupported browsers:
To make Google Instant work in Opera (Google says that its not supported), right click on the home page and click Edit Site Preferences. Go to the network tab, and under Browser Identification, click “Mask as Firefox”. This trick also works with Netflix.
View Google Maps in Full Screen
We’ve mentioned a Greasemonkey script to view full-screen Maps, but Till Dettmering shares an alternative method without extra add-ons:
View Google Maps in fullscreen by adding ?output=embed to the URL:
Note that this doesn’t fill your entire screen; just the entire browser window — but you can then make your browser full screen to make Maps truly full screen.
Encrypt Facebook Access with SSL
Cool Frood lets us know that Facebook supports SSL encryption:
Looks like Facebook also provides https access like Google. I decided to try out https randomly on Facebook and it worked. Good way to keep your admins from looking at your data.
This has been around for awhile but isn’t heavily publicised, so we thought it was a nice thing to note for those that didn’t know.
Use Multitasking with Videos in iOS 4.1
Cameron Little tells us about a lesser-known addition to iOS 4.1:
iOS 4.1 update lets you switch from playing a movie to another app and return to the paused movie! So multitasking works the same way with movies as it does with music now.
I was sad you couldn’t do this in the 4.0.
Bing Maps already does full screen without a stupid URL.