Welcome to Ghostzilla 1.0 Plus
www.ghostzilla.com

IMPORTANT: Read this page sometime! It is short and gives you some helpful hints for getting the maximum out of Ghostzilla. It may tell you about just the feature you're looking for.

This is a short introduction to Ghostzilla. To see it again at any time, select the Help->Welcome menu option, but, in short, this is the most important thing you need to know: Ghostzilla disappears if you move the mouse away from its window. It comes back if you move the mouse to touch the LEFT edge of the screen with the mouse, then the RIGHT edge, then the LEFT edge again -- just make sure the mouse arrow goes all the way to the edges.

Invoking Ghostzilla

You load Ghostzilla in memory by pressing the keys ALT and F12 together, or by running it from the Start menu (typically Start->Programs->Ghostzilla). Ghostzilla will place itself inside the window of your working application, whatever that happens to be (Word, Mail, Acrobat, another browser, Visual Studio... or literally anything else; by the way, those names are trademarks of their respective owners, etc.). It will look as if the browser has become a part of your work application, but it has not really -- it's only shown that way to make it hard to detect. The Ghostzilla window has only a thin menu bar on its top and a thin status bar at the bottom.

Hiding Ghostzilla

To hide Ghostzilla quickly, just move the mouse far enough from Ghostzilla window's edges -- for example, move it up all the way. Ghostzilla will disappear and your screen will look as it did before you brought the browser. It will disappear from the task bar as well, but it will stay in your computer's memory -- ready to be brought back quickly when you're ready.

Reinvoking Ghostzilla

To make the browser reappear, do the following with your mouse: move the mouse to the LEFT edge of the screen, then to the RIGHT edge, then to the LEFT edge again. (Be sure to go all the way, i.e. to touch the edges with the mouse cursor.) Do it reasonably quickly, and Ghostzilla will show up again. Think of it as rubbing a magic lamp to let the ghost out -- you have to do it the right way.

You don't have to worry if you rearranged your screen while Ghostzilla was hidden; the browser will always find the most suitable place on the screen to install itself in, to look least conspicuous. Try experimenting with changing the position and size of your working application's window and hiding and reinvoking Ghostzilla. You will see that the browser always adapts to the current screen.

Terminating Ghostzilla

To completely unload Ghostzilla from memory (i.e. quit the application), choose the Exit menu option from the menu bar, or press Ctrl+Q, or run the little Start->Programs->Ghostzilla->Stop Ghostzilla application, which will close Ghostzilla even if it is hiding. It's not a bad idea to close Ghostzilla when you call it a day.

Shrinking and enlarging Ghostzilla window and text

The easiest way to control the size of the Ghostzilla window is to resize the windows of your work application to your liking before activating Ghostzilla. Another way is to press the CTRL key and the UP or DOWN arrow within Ghostzilla -- CTRL+UP will shrink Ghostzilla window, CTRL+DOWN will enlarge it.

At any time, you can press the keys CTRL and "[" (left angle bracket) together to shrink the letters of the Web page you are looking at. Keys CTRL and "]" (right angle bracket) will enlarge the text, and CTRL and "=" together will set the letters back to the original size.

You can shrink the window and the text so much that even someone sitting next to you will likely be unable to see that you're surfing the Web.

Showing pictures

Ghostzilla by default hides big pictures, to make itself less conspicuous. Big pictures are replaced with empty dashed frames -- but not disabled. To see a picture, just move your mouse over the dashed frame and the picture will appear.

Preferences

You can control how "ghostly" Web pages will be -- by selecting Setup->Hiding Level menu option, you can either set it at Level 3 (default) -- where text and pictures are gray and pale, or at Level 2 -- where text and pictures are black and white or gray but not pale, and Level 1 -- where the picture looks like in any browser, with full colors and even the big pictures are always shown, but it still disappears when you move the mouse away. Level 1 may be good if your computer screen faces the wall of your office.

If your network connection does not appear to be working, check out the Proxy settings in Setup->Network Proxies menu option. In the unlikely case you want to change other browser settings, you can do so in Edit->Preferences menu.

Quick navigation

To open a Web page, click on the leftmost menu option, Open, and enter the Web address. Next to it is Back, for going back one page, and Google, for searching the Web. The rest is a standard browser menu; menus View and Go are related to navigation. Keep in mind that you can activate a menu option from the keyboard if you press the ALT key and the underlined letter (ALT+O for Open, ALT+C for Back, ALT+L for Google, ALT+B for Bookmarks, and so on).

Some other handy keyboard shortcuts are: CTRL+R to reload a page, CTRL+F to search for text within a page (CTRL+G to repeat), CTRL+I to get current page information, CTRL+D to bookmark a page. You can find all these shortcuts when you look at the menus.

To completely exit Ghostzilla (unload from memory), press CTRL+Q.

Advanced: viewing multiple pages at once

Ghostzilla has only one window (so that you can quickly hide it if you need to), but it supports viewing multiple pages through its tabs -- you can open a new tab as if you would open a new window in a traditional browser; you do so either by choosing File->New Navigator Tab menu option or by pressing CTRL+T. You can open independent pages in each tab. If you right-click on a link, you can open it in a new tab, or even in a background tab. Close a tab by pressing the little "X" button in its corner.

License agreement and open source information

Ghostzilla is based on an open-source browser-development platform, Mozilla. The terms of Netscape Public License and Mozilla Public License require that distributions of the original Mozilla, modifications of Mozilla, and "Larger Works" i.e. combinations of original Mozilla code and proprietery code, make the modified code available as well. For Ghostzilla license agreement and availability of portions of Ghostzilla that originate from the Mozilla source code, please click here.