Today's Friday Favorite is a new one to me, but it's been around for a while. I just picked up the latest version of HistoryHound from St. Clair Software -- more famous, probably, for Default Folder X -- and have been using it constantly for days. Its hotkey already has its own spot in my muscle memory. Here's what it does:

HistoryHound indexes bookmarks, history and cache from all of your browsers, with presets for Camino, Firefox 2 & 3, Flock, iCab, OmniWeb, Opera, Safari, Shiira and URL Manager Pro. It means being able to bookmark willy-nilly in any browser and know that you'll be able to quickly locate noteworthy sites again, in any application.

Not just the bookmarks, though; in the background -- with a very low footprint -- HistoryHound starts indexing the full text of each page. Then you can search for exact or fuzzy matches, or with Spotlight-style boolean keywords for any text on the landing page. Search comes in two flavors: a tiny popup panel which can be assigned to a hotkey and provides a list of matches as you type, and a full, Webkit-enabled search window with page previews and a multi-column result list.

"Ever wanted to rid the web of the scourge that is Adobe Flash, but still retain the ability to view Flash whenever you want?" When it comes to sales pitches, that one is pretty difficult to beat.

Ever since Flash was unleashed on the web, it has been used for obnoxious and annoying ads. About the only web technology which has been more frequently abused is the animated GIF. For as long as I can remember I have disabled Flash, or plugins entirely, to avoid the annoyance. Firefox users have had extensions which manage flash, but Safari/Webkit users have been left out in the cold.

Several months ago someone created a now-defunct project on Google code simply called "clicktoflash". The premise was simple: replace all instances of Flash with a subtle grey box, and if you want to load it, click it (hence the name). The project was abandoned and deleted nearly as quickly as it appeared, but fortunately it had already been "forked" by Jonathan 'Wolf' Rentzsch who now maintains clicktoflash at github (which reminds me, TUAW is now on Github too).

Newer versions include the ability to "white list" a domain (meaning that Flash will always load for pages from certain sites) or load every Flash object on a page, rather than having to click all of them separately. It will also alert you of new versions and lead you through the installation process in a matter of clicks.

If you visit YouTube you will also find that if you control-click on movies, you are given a chance to load either the Flash OR H.264 versions of movies, or open the movie in QuickTime Player, or download the H.264 version. That alone makes it a great addition to any Mac. Be sure to checkout the settings under the Safari > ClickToFlash menu for additional controls.

I first learned about ClickToFlash from John Gruber who noted ClickToFlash is "a legitimate browser plugin that goes in ~/Library/Internet Plug-Ins/, not a dirty input manager hack. I can't remember the last time a piece of software made me this happy." I have to agree. ClickToFlash is a perfect example of "addition by subtraction" proving that you can make something better by taking something else away.

ClickToFlash is a free download and supports Tiger, Leopard, and Snow Leopard. It requires Safari 3 or higher.

I realize I may not be your average browser user. As a web developer, a browser to me is two parts daily use, two parts testing, and one part challenge. Since 2005, I've been using Firefox in some form or fashion as both my primary browser and as a testing vehicle.

I had recently started a JavaScript-intensive project, and I appreciated Safari 4's lightning-fast JavaScript execution speeds. In Firefox, I rely mostly on add-ons like Web Developer and Firebug to help me analyze and test for mistakes in websites I build in Firefox. They work great, but enabling them slows the browser down.

That's why I was excited for the updated Web Inspector that comes as part of Safari 4. (Yes, Safari 3 first came with Web Inspector, it couldn't hold a candle to Firebug's Swiss Army knife of an add-on for Firefox.) Testing was easy, and Safari 4's Web Inspector's many improvements made me think I could migrate to Safari full-time.

Read on to see how it went.

Digg's Kevin Rose, perennial purveyor of information that just "fell off the back of the truck" shared a link early this morning to Google's new, supercharged, Webkit-based browser -- for Mac.

The new browser, Chrome, is clearly marked as a developer preview, and not meant for general browsing. In fact, as a good Mac citizen, it will refuse to set itself as your default browser.

It scores a 100 on the Acid3 test straight out of the box, but doesn't pass: it fails something called the linktest, which involves interacting A tags and IFRAMEs. A little research suggests that it could be a bug with Webkit. If that's true, then it's a bug that Safari 4 beta has fixed.

Chrome appears to have Flash (and other plugin) support disabled as well. JavaScript support, however, is fully functional. While Chrome performed much better than Firefox on this cursory test, it still didn't beat Safari 4 by a long shot. While only a beta, its performance is respectable and sure to improve.

Again, Google Chrome isn't for everyone, but if you're a web developer who needs to keep up with the bleeding edge of browser development, then this preview should be stable and reliable enough for you to test what you need to.

Read through for the full JavaScript test details.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

While this might not be news for everyone, reader Brad and I seemed to be having the same problem: Using Firefox 3, we would see the "unsupported browser" message pictured while trying to use me.com.

Obviously, Firefox 3 is a supported browser for MobileMe. A TUAW colleague gave it a try and found everything to work fine. Brad and I compared notes about what plugins we have in common, and found that Ubiquity was causing the problem.

It turned out to be related to the user-agent string: MobileMe uses the user-agent string to determine what browser you're using, and Ubiquity tacks on an extra bit at the end. For example, without Ubiquity installed, it shows Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120121 Firefox/3.0.5. With Ubiquity installed, it said Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10.5; en-US; rv:1.9.0.5) Gecko/2008120121 Firefox/3.0.5 Ubiquity/0.1.5. (Emphasis mine.)

Since MobileMe doesn't know what to do with the extra Ubiquity text at the end, it thinks you have an unsupported browser, and shows you that error.

The good news is that you can fix this, thanks to a simple technique from Tim Jarrett, and still use both Ubiquity and MobileMe. Read on to find out how.

Thanks, Brad!

Apple 2.0's Philip Elmer-DeWitt notes some new Net Applications statistics that suggest 8.87 percent of all Internet users use a Mac: a new record.

Add to that the iPhone platform's 0.37 percent, and over one in eleven use an Apple product to browse the web. The iPhone gained 12 percent more users compared to the month before.

Also notable is that Windows users accounted for less than 90 percent of Internet users for the first time in recent memory. Also, market share for Internet Explorer dropped below 70 percent for the first time since its popularity surged in the late 90s.

Linux also gained ground, increasing almost 17 percent to 0.83 percent of all Internet users.

Net Applications tracks statistics from over 160 million visits to websites it monitors. The full report is here.

Opera Software CEO Jon Stephenson von Tetzchner said in a New York Times interview yesterday that its engineers have developed a version of the Opera web browser that works on the iPhone, but Apple has rejected it for the App Store because it competes with Safari.

This isn't unprecedented: Apple rejected an app called Podcaster possibly because it duplicates functionality in an upcoming version of the iPhone software. Podcaster was (for a time) available via ad-hoc distribution before that, too, was shut down.

Daring Fireball's John Gruber suggests that Apple rejected Opera because the browser included its own JavaScript interpreter, something forbidden by the iPhone SDK developer agreement.

Opera makes two flavors of its mobile web browser: Opera Mini for most mobile phones, BlackBerry, Palm, or Windows Mobile; and Opera Mobile, a more featured version for Symbian and Windows Mobile. A beta version of Opera Mini for Android is also in development.

Update: Gruber used his massive Rolodex over the weekend to determine through an unnamed source that the app may not have even been submitted to the App Store. Huh.