We love IMDb, but man, there’s a lot of clutter on those pages. That’s why one of our very first coding projects was Less IMDb, a browser extension that rearranges IMDb pages to emphasize credits and minimize everything else.
For the past four years, Less IMDb sat in the righthand margin, quietly doing its job. Occasionally it would encounter an odd IMDb page that didn’t play nicely — often a themed page with oversized ads — but for the most part it worked as intended.
Then last month Less IMDb broke altogether. So Ryan Nelson dusted off the code and got it working again.
The Safari version of Less IMDb has been updated to 1.3.1 and is available here. He’s working on the Chrome version now.
Unfortunately the auto-updaters for both Safari and Chrome won’t work properly, so you have to download and install it yourself.
For best results, uninstall your existing version of Less IMDb first. (After all, you don’t want More Less IMDb.) You can find it in Preferences > Extensions.
Then download the new one and follow the instructions. (There is also a video walkthrough.)
What’s New:
- The sidebar is back when Less IMDb is turned on.
- Fixed formatting of release date, genre, and runtime information.
- Added retina display support to Less IMDb controller icon.
- Fixed bug that hid ratings even when Less IMDb was set to off.
- Changed extension permissions to allow Less IMDb to run on any subdomain for better international support.
- Fixed bug that prevented video from playing.
- Fixed bug that prevented ratings from working.
- Future versions will automatically update once 1.3.1 is installed.
Known issues and notes:
- Older versions of the extension will not automatically update to the latest version, and should be deleted before using the updated extension.
- Pages with heavily-branded content may look funky, particularly those using dark backgrounds.
- Photos and video thumbnails don’t always load when Less IMDb is turned on.
- Apple’s Safari Extension gallery doesn’t yet link properly.
- The Less IMDb page is old and FAQ is out of date (update coming).
Once Ryan get the Chrome version finished, we’ll be open-sourcing the whole project. We’d love for coders to springboard off what we’ve done to build a Firefox version, for example, or incorporate it into some of new WebKit goodness announced for Yosemite.
Less IMDb continues to be a useful little utility, something you don’t notice until it’s gone. If you haven’t tried it, give it a shot.