Mozilla Firefox has been a favored browser for many who are using Chrome now. One reason for me to move from Firefox to Chrome was its speed and relatively being light-weight on resources.
But lately, Chrome has often become a bit of a resource hog, while Firefox which keeps pulling out new released every few weeks has become lighter and a lot faster.
Firefox 7 is now available for download.
Features of Firefox 7
ADVERTISEMENT
Firefox 7 claims to be use 20% to 30% less memory than its predecessors. That means the browser runs a lot smoothly even if many tabs are open.
It supports faster HTML5 animations along with many improvements to the speed of the browser.
It has news tools which will help developers create faster web apps that run on Firefox.
I am not certain if it will be able to stop Chrome’s growth but it will make current users very happy. Also recently Chrome browser has had some issues with management of resources. This might give Firefox browser a good boost.
Download Firefox
Here are the links for download Firefox 7 on all platforms.
Most of the websites now include HTML snippets/buttons of Facebook, Twitter etc. even though they are used to share content, they actually track you all over the web. If you care about privacy, you must have already installed privacy addons like Ghostery, Adblock Plus, but here’s a new addition to your privacy toolkit – Priv3.
Priv3 is different from addons like Ghostery. For example, Ghostery blocks social sharing buttons (+1, Like, Tweet buttons) and other social snippets (Facebook comments, Facebook connect) completely, so you may feel disconnected.
Priv3 protects your privacy by blocking trackers, but still shows social snippets like Facebook Comments, +1, like buttons so you don’t miss any content. Once you interact with the social snippet, it reloads the cookies and tracking starts again, so unless and until you interact with the snippet, the addon keeps blocking the trackers.
One thing which is too disappointing for me is that Priv3 is only available for Firefox, so all I can do is wait for a Chrome version of it. If you’re a Firefox user, check it out and also tell us what you think of it.
Now a days, it is quite easy to view PDF files within most updated browser. But that is not all there is to viewing a PDF – I like to use mark-up or comment on it, even extract images and text from a PDF file. For this I found PDF Nitro Reader very helpful.
Most times it is quite suitable to view PDF documents on a browser; but invariably PDFs are not just web articles and we need more options like highlighting important text or paragraphs along with inserting sticky notes.
Nitro PDF Reader allows editing the PDF document, along with the ability to extract images and text.
It also supports QuickSign for adding digital signatures on PDF documents.
The software is also compatible with most browsers.
Try out PDF Nitro Reader and drop in your comments.
If I want a site to appear on new tab page, I need to load that website repeatedly, this is hectic and I don’t want to install extensions like Speed Dial. Although, there’s an alternative way to get control over ‘Top Sites’ in Chrome
Yesterday, I was playing with the user data of my Chrome profile, and suddenly I discovered something super interesting. With this hack, you can customize and control the sites that appear on new tab page.
Let’s begin..
First of all, close Google Chrome, including background processes, as we’re tweaking Chrome itself.
Go to C:UsershomeAppDataLocalGoogleChromeUser DataDefault (in Windows 7), XP and Vista paths will be a bit similar, just search for “Google” folder.
There you can see a file named ‘Top Sites’, that’s the file we need to tweak. This is actually a SQLite file, so you need a SQLite viewer in order to edit that file.
Here we’ll use a simple Firefox addon – SQLite manager for the purpose. Download and install it.
Now after installing it, launch your Firefox, hit Tools (in the menu bar) > SQLite manager.
Now the addon will be opened in a new window, then, hit Database > Connect Database, and select the ‘Top Sites’ file which I showed you in the first.
After you have connected the database, hit Thumbnails (under Tables), which is in the left side bar.
And now there you’re! You can have a glimpse of top sites in the right column, hit the URL_Rank tab for sites to be in order.
Editing and Adding new ‘Top Sites’
To edit any site, right click on it > edit. There you can edit the site URL, rank, title and even thumbnail. Let’s have a close look at each part of it.
URL: This is obvious, to change the site, you need to change the URL.
Rank: Give it anything from 0 to infinity, more rank implies less probability of appearing on new tab page.
ADVERTISEMENT
Title: Just add the meta title of the site.
ADVERTISEMENT
Thumbnail: This is a bit painstaking, you need to get the thumbnail of the site you want to add. For this we’ll use Webshots, just enter the URL of the site and you can get the thumbnail of it. That’s not all, now you need to resize the thumbnail to 212 X 132 exactly, I used MS Paint for this. In SQLite manager, you can add thumbnail by clicking on clip icon next to Thumbnail option.
After editing all these things, click Ok and the database will be updated accordingly.
I know, this may be a bit complex for some of you. If you weren’t able to follow this tutorial, we can help you, drop your doubts in the comments.
The launch of new Facebook smart lists is a good feature in terms of privacy and making Facebook updates more relevant. But if you are using Facebook friends list from a long time and after the launch of these new smart lists you are dealing with so many lists then this post is for you. We will tell you how you can merge two lists together to make one.
Let’s tell you the use of merging two lists. Suppose that I was previously using a list ‘Hidden Content’ with all my private updates hidden to friends in that list. Now it’s very inconvenient to add each one of my friend from ‘Hidden Content’ list to the new restricted lists. So you can merge your older list into newer one with just few clicks.
How to merge two lists:
Open a Facebook friend list in which you want to merge another list. You can open a list from Facebook left sidebar on your homepage.
Once you open a list click on ‘Manage List’ on the top right side of page and select ‘Merge List’ from the drop down menu.
Now select the list you want to merge with this list. You can select a list from the lists given in the pop-up. After that click Merge Lists to merge both the lists into one. That’s it; your two lists now will be shown as one with all the friends in both the lists excluding duplicates.
Don’t forget to tell us whether you like the new smart lists feature or not?
Facebook recently changed lots of stuff on user profiles. As usual people do not like these changes due to the same reason, that is these changes are confusing and users are not habitual of them. Let’s tell you everything about these changes and what’s the use and purpose of launching them.
Sticky bar at the top (header):
Facebook’s header is still the same but Facebook made the new header bar sticky. That means header will stick to the top of page and will always show you whenever you use Facebook. Even when you scroll down to the bottom of a page it will remain at the top.
ADVERTISEMENT
Purpose: The purpose of this change is to keep search bar always with you so that you can easily search for your friends without going to the top of page. Also it makes easier to access the homepage and profile page easily with just one click without scrolling.
Top and Recent Stories:
Unlike older buttons of Top post and Recent posts on Facebook, we have now selective Top stories where you can select yourself which post should be there as a top post and which shouldn’t. You can select a Top story by clicking on a Blue corner with every update. Facebook will show similar stories as top whenever you visit Facebook next time.
Purpose: Well there no such use of this feature and it makes Facebook’s homepage damn confusing as there are no separator between the top and recent posts. But according to Facebook this feature lets you to select your kind of top posts rather than showing every post with likes and comments. It might be a useful feature once we get familiar with the new interface.
ADVERTISEMENT
New Lists:
This feature isn’t new and we told you about this few days back. This is a new automated way to add people into lists and read more updates from selected friends only.
Purpose: The major reason for launching this feature is to make users to use the old lists and to get updates from selective friends only. It also gives you an option of hiding your updates from some people in your friend’s list without unfriending them.
Bigger photos in News Feed:
A feature copied from Google+, Facebook also started showing bigger pictures in its news feed. Also if you upload a group of photos it will show once bigger picture and two smaller pics side by side.
ADVERTISEMENT
Purpose: The purpose of this feature is to attract friends to the pictures you upload. Obviously a user easily gets attracted to a bigger picture rather than three smaller ones, so the chances of opening the picture increase. This is a good change in Facebook even if it’s a copied one. 😉
Ticker:
A new updates section on the sidebar which shows updates from all your friends and their recent activity. This is more like a news channel’s Breaking News. 😛
Purpose: Facebook Ticker is also launched to increase user interaction. It gets updated every second and user checks it time to time. Also watching an update is easy as you don’t need to visit a new page for every update, just roll over your mouse cursor to an update and it will show the whole post there. It’s not liked by Facebook users but I’m sure they will get habitual of it.
Birthday and Event view:
ADVERTISEMENT
Facebook birthdays and events are shown in a new way now. The placement is still the same but when you click on a birthday or an event it will show it on your homepage itself without opening it in a new page.
Purpose: This is a good feature and user friendly too because by using this you can wish all your friends who are having birthday on that day on a same place without visiting everyone’s profile and wishing them separately. Also you can see current and upcoming events with a single click.
People don’t like most of the new features at the moment as they hate changes but they will start liking it. But it’s true that people visit Facebook because their friends are here and to stay connected with everyone. The fun part in Facebook is missing now. Let’s see whether people like the new timeline feature or not which is not yet available for everyone.
Facebook had its F8 conference yesterday. Over the past few days Facebook has truly made a host of changes but yesterday it has unveiled a new feature called Timeline.
Timeline basically changes the way we see our Facebook wall. The changes are quite radical.
At the moment it is not available for all users and might be made available in a couple of weeks. Thankfully, for the curious minded there is a hack which allows Facebook to enable Timeline feature on your account.
The method is simple. Timeline features are available for Facebook developers and all you have to do is register at Facebook as a developer. Here is a step by step guide on how to go about it.
First visit Facebook’s Developer App on your account. Access it from this link. The user is prompted to allow Facebook Developer Apps to access your Facebook content.
Now Click on Create new App as seen in image below.
Now enter App Display Name and App Namespace. It can be any test name as we are not actually creating a new app.
Now the point is to fill up details about Open Graph details for the App.
As seen in the image below enter what your App will be used for and click on ‘Get Started’.
Here you might be prompted to verify your account via a mobile phone number or credit card. I used registered my phone which got a verification code via a text message.
Once done with the verification, you have convinced Facebook that you are a developer and Facebook Timeline is added on your profile as a developer preview.
You Facebook profile will now be enabled with the new Timeline feature. Do be careful as this is still a beta product and might have a few bugs. In case you want to opt-out of Timelines look up this guide.
Changes with Facebook have been dime a dozen lately, but one change which particularly criticized is the Facebook News Ticker. The new ticker basically shows a stream of real-time updates from your friends on Facebook.
For instance when a friend of mine updates his status or uploads a photo, I get to see it on a ticker on the right hand column.
Unfortunately there is not way to switch this ‘Ticker’ off on Facebook.
If you are like me who does not like the Facebook News Ticker and uses Chrome as a primary browser, then there is help. There is a Chrome extension which when installed, simply removes the Ticker from the Facebook layout. 🙂
I often watch movies on my computer. It runs on Windows 7 and my favourite movie player is VLC player (Video Lan). One very useful reason to do so, is the feature of downloading subtitles from the internet and synchronizing them with the movie I am watching.
I came across a nice Add-on for VLC Player, which allows the user to download subtitles of a movie while watching the film.
Using Subtitle Finder
First make sure your VLC player is updated. The latest version can be found from here.
Now visit Subtitles Finder, and download the (subtitles-mod.lua) file on your computer.
If only code is shown, copy-paste it into a notepad and save the file as subtitles-mod.lua. Make sure File Type is selected as ‘All Files’, otherwise the file might end up being saved as a .txt file.
This file has to be added into VLC Folder in Program Files on your computer. Below is the exact path where the file has to be added.
Windows (all users): %ProgramFiles%VideoLANVLCluaextensions
ADVERTISEMENT
Windows (current user): %APPDATA%VLCluaextensions
Now while you are watching a movie on DVD and do not find subtitles in English or any particular language then you can simply click on View >> Subtitles >> Download.
We have the option of searching but most times the subtitles are found without any trouble. Click on “Load Selected Subtitle” as you can see in the image above.
For older version of VLC player, you might have to look up the Subtitle Finder by clicking on View >> Extensions >> Subtitles.
Next time I am watching a movie, especially in a foreign language, this VLC extension will surely be most useful.
If you browse internet from two or more devices, then you know the pain of syncing browser profiles, be it Chrome, Firefox or any other browser. Chrome sync, for example, doesn’t sync cache, form data etc. Firefox sync is even worse, it doesn’t even sync themes/personas and addons. That’s why there’s a need of software which can backup ‘everything’.
FavBackup lets you backup and restore browser profiles, supporting 6 prominent browsers including IE, Firefox, Chrome, Opera and Safari.
FavBackup is a portable tool (no installation needed) to backup and restore browser profiles.
It Backups almost everything, from cache to plugin data.
Restore works perfectly, I have tested it on Chrome 15.
If you’re using Opera then using FavBackup, you can also convert Opera profile from XP to Vista/7, 32-bit to 64-bit and vice versa.
You can even use FavBackup for syncing your browser profiles,all you have to do is, place the backup folder in your Dropbox folder and make sure you have installed Dropbox on all your Windows devices (as FavBackup works only in Windows).
Compatibility: Works with the latest version of Chrome, Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE. Windows only.
