Archive for the ‘Browsers’ Category

Chrome is not ready for main street

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Like all geeky people out there, once Google’s Chrome browser came out. I downloaded and installed it. I read the cartoon that explained a little of how it worked under hood. Its pretty information and it was a good read. Unfortunately, well its a good browser but its not ready for prime time. Maybe in a few years it will be ready. It has a lot of catching up to do with Firefox.

The reasoning and logic, which you can read about in the cartoon, for creating a new browser makes sense but since they pretty much started from scratch they still have lots of features to add.  But I am sure that once they get lots of the kinks worked out, and add all those features that make Firefox so good, the Google browser will slowly gain a wide audience.  Specially since people do love google products like good docs, gmail, picasa, etc.

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Nostalgic for Opera’s Rewind Button!

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

The Opera browser is yet another alternative to Inernet Explorer and its really good. For older computer with less processing power and ram, Opera is great. The only reason I don’t use it all the time is because I have many extensions in Firefox that I need to use.

Either way Opera does have this great feature that I wish Firefox had and that is a a rewind button.

opera-rewind-button

The Left arrow is the regular back button, but the double left arrow is the rewind button and its great. Here is how it works.  The following is an exerp from the Opera website.

Specifically, what happens when you rewind is that you go back to one of these points in your history, whichever is latest:

*    The last page you visited on a server, if you have left the server
*    The first page you visited on a server

Suppose that you have a browsing history like the following:

1. www.opera.com
2. www.opera.com/about
3. www.opera.com/download
4. www.opera.com/mini
5. widgets.opera.com
6. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock42
7. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock43
8. widgets.opera.com/yetanthetclock44
9. mini.opera.com

Rewinding will then take you back through the URLs that are emphasized in the above list.

So why is this good? Because it saves you tons of clicks.   Say you go to google and  search for ‘computing tips’. You will get tons of sites. You click on first result and go to that website, call it example.com . The site is good and you visit 12 pages of its site. But you want to go back to google’s results to check out other sites.   With the  traditional back button you have to click back 12 times to get back to google, or with Firefox you can click drop down box and try and find google’s result page.   Those methods are fine , they are just too messy or waste time. With Opera’s rewind button you are back where you want to be with 2 clicks. The first click will take you back to the first page you visited on example.com then the next click your back to where you want to be. Google’s results page.  Then you can visit the next result.

I used Opera for bit at a time, but every time I use other browsers I find myself missing this feature. All browsers should definitely implement it. :)

What do you guys think? Should browsers implement it? If you have not tried it, download opera and use it for a week and see what happens. :)

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Why have Firefox and Explorer installed?

Saturday, January 17th, 2009

Like everything in life, if you have two of something the easier your life will be.  Say you have two cars.  You wake up and one does not start, well no biggie you have another car and take the other to work( The chances of the other one not starting are very slim). You will worry about the other one later.  :). There is no difference in the computing world.

Say Firefox goes bad temporarily and you don’t want to re-boot and re-starting Firefox process is not working. Well no worries, just start up a copy of Opera, or Safari. I actually have all major browsers installed.  Firefox is my main one, and occasionally it does go bad, thus I use the other ones.  Of course, none of other have my bookmarks, or saved passwords so if you need to do other things more then just browsing you will be stuck.

But its a safe bet to have two of each thing installed. I pretty much have two of everything. I have open office installed and office 2007. And  yes office 2007 has stopped working on a couple of times and when in a hurry and need to get something typed up fast open office write does the job excellently.  I don’t stop my progress if a program acts up, I just another one.;)

Having two things installed is also a good way of diagnosing if something is not working. Say you are browsing and a page doesn’t work. You can’t tell if the web page server is down or if its your browser not working. Well just open up another browser and if you get the same error, well most then likely its the web page server that is not working… Of course this is assuming your internet connection is working( you can see other sites, besides this particular one).

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