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Posts tagged ‘Browser’

14
Apr

Adobe, Stop Killing My Internets!

I am not sure if it just me, but lately it seems that Adobe Flash Player is becoming more and more unreliable, and causing my web browser (be it Chrome, FireFox and/or I.E. — I prefer Chrome, although I wish it supported ICC profiles like FireFox) to constantly crash.

Has Adobe Flash Player Caused Your Browser To Crash?

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As Adobe Flash is widely used it, unfortunately, is not practical to completely remove it from your machine; however there are a few simple tools which let you automatically block Flash from loading unless you white-list the site or click on the flash to play it. This technique is also great for preventing those annoying Flash ads that popup in your face (Although some of them do look pretty cool)!

Continue Reading To Find Out How To Stop Adobe Killing Your Internets!

6
Oct

FireFox Add-ons To Make Your Life Easy

One thing that I love about FireFox is it’s vast library of add-ons. Not only does Mozilla provide an easy to search online repository of add-ons, but installing add-ons with FireFox is easy as three clicks. Although there are many useful add-on, there are also quite a few of not so useful add-ons — So I thought that I would share some of the add-ons that I commonly use.

  • Clipmarks — Allows you to save sections of a page, without having to book mark the entire page. Useful for saving sections of a blog or news article. *requires registration
  • CSSViewer -  A Simple CSS Property viewer. Provides a great, web 2.0 looking, floating window that displays CSS Information about the item your cursor is currently over.
  • Dog Ears — Mark important parts of a webpage to easily relocate them. Lets you dog-ear long pages, with persistent marks, so that you can skip straight to those marks the next time you return to that page.
  • FasterFox — Performance and Network tweaks for FireFox. I would recommend that you lower the performance increase back from “Turbo Charged” to at least “Optimized”, to help prevent overloading web servers.
  • FlashGot — Download helper for FireFox. Absolute must have, especially if you have a download manager.
  • GoogCal — A very simple add-on which lets you add a Google Calendar button to your toolbar.
  • GreaseMonkey — Allows you to customise the way a webpage displays, using JavaScript. Scripts can be downloaded from userscripts.org.
  • Locationbar — Changes the look of your location bar by putting emphasis on the domain.
  • PDF Download — Allows you to choose if you want to view a PDF inside the browser, as a PDF or as HTML, or in your default PDF application. Another must have.
  • Resizeable Form Fields — Lets you click and drag form fields to increase, or decrease, their size.
  • Tab Scope — Shows a thumbnail preview of your tabs, when you hover over a tab.
  • View Formatted Source — Displays formatted and color-coded source and CSS information for elements. Great for reading messy or long html source.
  • Web Developer — A useful toolbar which gives you various web developer tools. Can also be useful for non web developer as it lets you disable JavaScript and CSS.
  • Zotero — Helps you collect and manage citation information. Great if you’re doing research or you frequently require saving citation information.

One of your favourite add-ons not in the list? Post a comment with the add-ons you use.

12
Jun

Windows Safari

Apple have just recently released Safari 3 beta and with this release they have included an XP and Vista version, for the previously Mac only browser. Steve Jobs announced the release of Safari 3 during the Apple Worldwide Developers Conference (see video here) and showcased some of its features and benefits. Aside from the claims of being “the best browser ever”, Jobs also claims that Safari is 2x faster than IE7 and 1.6x faster than FireFox 2.

Personally I’m not a fan the Mac look and feel, especially that big grey toolbar, however there are a few features which are useful, if not at least intriguing. For example, while tabbed browser, you can drag a tab off the tab toolbar and a new window will be opened with that tabs contents displayed. Another useful feature is the ability to resize text areas, without the need for this to be implemented by the website (of course this is available in FireFox through the use of a Resizeable Form Fields extension by Justin Watt).

Aside the aforementioned features of Safari, it does appear to render HTML quicker than IE7 and FireFox. However, there are a few bugs or unimplemented features which should be included. One notable downfall is the lack of support for the scroll wheel click feature (I’m not sure if this is lack of support for my Microsoft Laser Mouse 6000 or if it’s not included at all), which is presumable a direct side affect of the mac mouse having a 360 scroll ball instead of a wheel. Another downfall I noted was that the tab toolbar does not always close once you close all of the tabs (excluding one), but granted it is only a beta I’m sure that bug will be fixed before the final release.

All-in-all I think Safari is just another standard browser really, and I’ll be sticking to FireFox for now. However, if you would like to try out the new Safari you can head to http://www.apple.com/safari/ and download your free beta copy. Or alternatively you can download the real “best browser” from http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/.

Update June 13th: Apparently there have already been several vulnerabilities found in Safari.