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Today, I want to tell you about an add-on that I use all the time with the new StumbleUpon format. It’s called CleanSUBeta and was written by Furman87.

This is an absolutely wonderful extension, and I have fallen in love with it so much that I spent an hour searching to find it again one morning when I thought it had disappeared. It’s a Greasemonkey script, which means you have to have Greasemonkey to run it, but it’s such a useful script that it would be worth it even if Greasemonkey didn’t have other great scripts.

You can get Greasemonkey for Firefox or IE, just follow the link depending on which browser you have. Once you have loaded Greasemonkey, go here and click on the install button for easy installation of the script.

So what does this script do that it’s worth all this bother? I’ll show you.

Here is StumbleUpon without CleanSUBeta.

and here is the sidebar:

Now, when I add SUBeta, here is how my tabs look:

Notice on the top bar, it now has tabs for Sidebar, E-mail, and Visitors. The new tabs will stay there, regardless of whether you get rid of the sidebar.

What is probably my favorite change doesn’t appear until I visit someone else’s page.

This is without SUBeta. Watch what happens when I turn on SUBeta:

Notice the bottom row of tabs. I can quickly see whether we’re friends or not, and if I want, I can send a message.

Look familiar? I can’t stand the tiny message box. It’s an addition with the remodel of the SU pages, and to me at least, it’s probably the worst change they made.

On the other hand, with CleanSUBeta and using the message link from the tabs gives me this message box:

I love having the previous conversations to refer to and having more space to write is nice also.

Finally, in case you’re curious, here is how your page will look if you use CleanSUBeta.

With the sidebar on:

After clicking on the sidebar tab: