Perhaps that is what you desire to save an image or a video clip from the web through your browser because it’ll make a great wallpaper or you want to include it in a video you’re making. In most cases (especially when it comes to pictures) you can simply right-click on the file and choose “save image as,” or something similar.

But sometimes that doesn’t work, or not well enough. What if there’s no save option on the right-click menu? How can you quickly save many images from one website? What if you’re trying to save an animated video as a GIF, or you keep downloading one of those .webp files no one wants?

That’s where third-party browser extensions can come in handy, add-ons that will dig deeper into a page’s HTML code to pluck out the image or the video clip you’re after and automate the process for you.

Image Downloader Continued

Open Image Downloader Continued (Chrome/Edge) and you’ll get a neatly organized grid of all the images on the current web page: You can see the format and the dimensions of each picture, save them to a disk, and even filter and order them based on their size. The add-on couldn’t be any simpler to use, and it’s one of the best for downloading images.

Take a look at all images

Download All Images Chrome/Edge works slightly differently than Image Downloader Continued. It might be able to grab some images when Image Downloader Continued can’t, and vice versa. Click on the extension button when you’re on a site, and every image on the page will be wrapped into a zip archive so you just have to choose where to save it.

Save All Images offers you several saving options.

David Nield: All Images 

Video Downloader Ultimate

If you’re struggling to save a video from a website—whether it’s embedded in the page or included in a social media post—Video Downloader Ultimate (Chrome/Edge) can lend a hand. With a single click, you’ll see a list of all the videos included in the website that you’re currently viewing, and you can then either get their URLs or save them locally.

Twitter Video Downloader

Twitter Video Downloader Chrome/Edge is a tool that can be used to download videos from Twitter. It embeds the clips in the webpage and grabs them quickly. Simply click the “Download” icon near a tweet that contains a video to save it.

Base Image Downloader can filter images by their size.

Base Image Downloader via David Nield

Base Image Downloader

Extracting GIFs is not an easy task. GIFs can be published on different sites. Others use the mp4 file format. Some convert them back. No matter what format you use, Base Image Downloader Chrome/Edge excels in grabbing almost any GIF-related image and supports all other formats. This extension opens a gallery with thumbnails of images. You can either save all or one image at a given time.

Screen Recorder and Editor

If other tools don’t work, you can try using a screen recording tool instead. The Screen Recorder and Editor (Chrome/Edge), one of my favorite screen recording tools, offers a variety of ways to record the tabs or entire desktop. It also includes the ability to edit.

You can save page WE to choose what parts of a site you want to download.

David Nield Saves Page WE 

Get a Discount on Page WE

A second option is to grab all elements on a webpage. This can be done using Save Page WE (Chrome/Edge). It’s simple to use and supports keyboard shortcuts. Depending on the site you’re working with, you can opt to save images from a page to a disk, and in some cases this works for audio and video files as well.

Take a look at all images

While Download All Images (Firefox) has the same name as another extension above, it’s not the same utility—and this one works with Mozilla’s browser. This add-on offers a host of options, enabling you to filter downloads by image size, image type, and even image URL (so you don’t accidentally download ads or other linked content), and there’s plenty of flexibility when it comes to how the grabbed pictures are saved.

You have many options with Download All Images

Screenshot: All Images Downloadable via David Nield 

DownThemAll

DownThemAll, also known as Firefox, is able to grab everything on a site, even images and video clips. It’s by no means a blunt instrument and comes with plenty of options for choosing what to save and where to save it. It is one of the extensions that you’ll quickly discover indispensable.

SingleFile

SingleFile (Firefox), an extension which saves web pages in full, is another great tool. It’ll download all of the HTML, text, and images on a particular website, and it integrates very neatly into the Firefox interface. If you’re struggling to grab images with other extensions, this one might be the solution.

Scrolling is possible My timeline is my choice, and I can access it whenever I like. This miracle of technology is amazing. However, I find myself doing this a lot even though I would rather be doing something else. 

With this in mind, I’ve been thinking lately about how I’d like social media to be just a little bit worse—to add the slightest amount of friction so I don’t spend quite so much time doomscrolling. The web version of all social media networks can be used on your phone without the need to install the app. This was my solution. Every social network—Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, and even LinkedIn—works in the browser on your phone. This is a bit more complicated than an app, and for me it adds enough friction that reminds me of how much I can do with the time that I have.

This is just the beginning. I’ve talked about how you should always question the default settings, and the idea that you need to install an app to use a social network is a particularly strong default. In some cases, the web app works better than the original app. Here’s why. 

We do not have any sneaky access.

Many information is required for apps like social media. Some of this makes sense—if you want to upload photos, for example, Facebook is going to need access to your photo library. Some of it makes less sense—does any social media application actually need your current location? 

It’s possible to figure out which apps have permission to do what, but if you use the web version of social media apps you don’t have to. That’s because websites don’t run in the background of your device constantly—they only load when you request them. It’s a myth that Facebook is listening to your conversations, but if you don’t install the Facebook app it’s not even hypothetically possible for them to do so. 

No Notifications

Both pros and cons are there. You will never miss any updates on the social networks you choose with notifications on your smartphone. That’s great if you want to be constantly connected, but it’s also a big part of what makes these social networks so addictive. 

Put simply, if you’re trying to be more mindful about your social media usage, the notifications are a pretty big problem. The web version of social media sites can’t push notifications to your device, though. You can be more conscious of when and where you check your social media. Sure, you might still impulsively type “Instagram.com” on your browser from time to time, but it will be because you’re making a choice—not because a notification pulled you in. 

Sometimes, Terrible Features are Added Less Commonly

It seems like Instagram has been getting worse. Where once I’d scroll through a collection of photos from friends, now I get a bit of that followed by a cheap TikTok knock-off. 

I can’t fix this for you—social media networks are incentivized to keep you scrolling, not to make sure you’re happy while doing it. The problem with the old Instagram, apparently, was that you’d stop scrolling after you stopped seeing new photos. The alternative is a never-ending stream of algorithmically curated “content.” I’m not a technologist, or a futurist, but it seems probable to me that Meta (which owns Instagram and Facebook) will keep making their products worse and worse in an attempt to squeeze every last bit of potential attention—and revenue—out of you. 

I can’t solve this for you, but using the web version of a given social network seems to delay the worst features for at least a while. Instagram’s web version, for example, only recently added the aforementioned stream of garbage after you complete scrolling. You get an extra six-month supply of peace if the Instagram web app is used. It also means that the web version will likely be spared whatever fresh hell the Instagram team dreams up next—at least, for a little while. It’s not a lot, granted, but it’s something. 

How to add any website to your home screen

I, personally, like having to type the URL for social networks into my browser in order to open them—it’s a nice amount of friction. If you’d rather not do that, though, you can add icons for the web version of any social network to your home screen, so you can open them like apps. 

Safari can be used to open Safari for an iPhone or iPad. Tap the button to go there Share The button is located on the right side the address bar. Tap Add to Your Home Screen Add the icon to your home screen with the logo.

You can find more information here AndroidOpen the site in Chrome. Tap the three dots icon at the top-right corner. Then, tap Add to Your Home Screen. This may be different in certain cases. Get the App instead—Twitter did this for me. There’s a technical reason for this involving something called a Progressive Web App, but you don’t have to worry about it. You will see the icon on any device. Android home screen.

It’s really hard to use social media with intention. I don’t think using the web app is a magic trick that will solve my impulsive checking—that’s going to take work on my part. It’s a tool I have, though. 

I can make it even more effective by logging out when I’m done scrolling, which means I’ll need to enter my password the next time I want to scroll. It’s easier to get rid of my bad habits if I don’t add any friction. This is what I would like for myself. Give it a try if you too want it.

Recenty, I watched Talking about his calculation, a colleague particle physicist said that it was a calculated he had advanced to an unprecedented level of precision. What was his tool? A 1980s-era computer program called FORM.

The longest equations used by particle physicists are some of the most complex in science. They use thousands upon thousands of Feynman Diagrams to show possible collision outcomes at Large Hadron Collider. Combining formulas such as these is not possible with pen and paper. Even adding them to computers can be difficult. While the school algebra rules are efficient enough to do homework, their efficiency for particle physics is woefully inadequate.

Computer algebra systems are programs that attempt to solve these problems. For 33 years, FORM has been the best program to help you solve the most difficult equations.

Jos Vermaseren is a Dutch particle physicist who developed FORM. This key component of the infrastructure of particle physics allows for complex calculations. However, as with surprisingly many essential pieces of digital infrastructure, FORM’s maintenance rests largely on one person: Vermaseren himself. He has started to withdraw from the FORM development process at age 73. Because academia rewards publications, and not software tools, there has been no replacement. The situation may not improve, and particle physics could be subject to a dramatic slowdown.

FORM began in the 1980s as computers changed rapidly. Schoonschip by Martinus Vermaseren was the predecessor of FORM. This program, which Martinus Veltman created, is a chip designed to be plugged in to an Atari. Vermaseren wanted to create a program that was more readily available and accessible by all universities. It was written in FORTRAN (for Formula Translation) and he began programming it. FORM is a riff. Vermaseren published his software in 1989. By the early ’90s, over 200 institutions around the world had downloaded it, and the number kept climbing.

Every few days since 2000, a paper in particle physics that cites FORM was published on an average basis. “Most of the [high-precision] results that our group obtained in the past 20 years were heavily based on FORM code,” said Thomas Gehrmann, a professor at the University of Zurich.

Some of FORM’s popularity came from specialized algorithms that were built up over the years, such as a trick for quickly multiplying certain pieces of a Feynman diagram, and a procedure for rearranging equations to have as few multiplications and additions as possible. But FORM’s oldest and most powerful advantage is how it handles memory.

As humans can have short-term memory and long-term memory, so computers also have main and external memories. Main memory—your computer’s RAM—is easy to access on the fly but limited in size. While external memory devices, such as solid-state drives or hard disks hold much more information they are also slower. You need main memory to be able to solve long equations.

In the ’80s, both types of memory were limited. “FORM was built in a time when there was almost no memory, and also no disk space—basically there was nothing,” said Ben Ruijl, a former student of Vermaseren’s and FORM developer who is now a postdoctoral researcher at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Zurich. It was a problem because the equations required too much memory. For one to be calculated, the operating system would treat the hard disk like main memory. The operating system, not knowing how big to expect your equation to be, would store the data in a collection of “pages” on the hard disk, frequently switching between them as different pieces were needed—an inefficient process called swapping.

FORM does not use swapping, and instead uses its own approach. The program allocates a specific amount of hard drive space to each term when you use FORM for an equation. The software can keep better track of the parts of the equation by using this technique. This makes it possible to quickly bring the pieces to main memory, without having to access any other data.

Memory has grown since FORM’s early days, from 128 kilobytes of RAM in the Atari 130XE in 1985 to 128 gigabytes of RAM in my souped-up desktop—a millionfold improvement. Vermaseren’s tricks are important. Particle physicists are increasingly dependent on precision as they comb through the Large Hadron Collider’s petabytes to find evidence for new particles. This increases the complexity of their equations.