Which browser will win the browser war? Every month we see the browser share of Chrome, Firefox and Internet Explorer go up and down to give us some sign of who will emerge the winner.
I started a discussion on our Devils’ Workshop Facebook page about which browser was the favorite and why it was a favorite?
Well the sample size is a little small to be called a poll but about 13 responses were in favor of Firefox, 6 for Chrome and only 3 for Internet Explorer. There were other opinions which even found favor with Opera and other browsers.
At first glance it looks like Firefox wins hands down but 4 opinions which were favorable to Firefox also said they really liked using Chrome.
Majority of the people who voted for Firefox seems to like the browser for its amazing add-ons.
Almost no one had anything negative to say about their experience using Chrome.
Going by the response, one can assume that Firefox is leading the pack by a big margin. But I feel differently about which one will end up winning the browser wars.
Why Chrome will end up winner?
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Everything about using the Chrome browser comes down to one word and that word is ‘Simplicity‘. Lets be honest the world is not full of techies and majority of the people who use browsers are not geeks.
Installation
Installing newer versions of Internet Explorer or Firefox seems like rocket science when compared to installing Chrome. Most people use Gmail, Orkut and other Google related services which actively prompts people to download Chrome. This actually works great because Chrome installation is awesomely easy.
Speed
Chrome browser came to the market as the fastest browser around. It even boasted about it’s speed with its strange experiments. Jokes apart people felt Chrome won’t stay fast once they supported extensions. That has not happened and even now Chrome is known for being lightning fast as a browser.
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User-Interface
Chrome has a spartan User Interface. The search bar is the same as the address bar. The tabs are nicely up right at the top, the settings and options are hidden and access through just a couple of not so interfering icons. Chrome keeps the user’s focus on the web-page rather than other features it might or might not have.
Add-on and extensions
When Firefox updates its Add-ons or when you update even its version it needs you to restart the browser. Get and extension on Chrome and start using it without any interruption. Such interruption free features make Chrome a browser to beat.
I know a lot of you might not agree with me and might argue that Firefox simply has more options. The problem with Firefox is not the options which makes it a browser of choice even for me. The problem is it has not been able to make it simple.
So do you think Chrome will win the browser war? Do drop in your comments and views.
Firebug Lite is a Java Script that enables us to use Firebug like features in other browsers. It gives the same look and feel like Firebug. If you wish to use FirebugLite for IE6 or other browsers like Chrome,Safari then here’s the way how to do that.
Just add the following code at the top of the <head> of your page:
Stable Live Link: <script type="text/javascript" src="https://getfirebug.com/firebug-lite.js"></script> Stable Local Link: <script type="text/javascript" src="/local/path/to/firebug-lite.js"> </script>
Features
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Compatible with all major browsers: IE6+, Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome.
It has the same look and feel as Firebug.
Inspect HTML and change style in real-time in different browsers.
As shown in the image above, you will see the icon on the right bottom of your screen.
I have heard a lot about Internet Explorer 9 beta as a browser which Microsoft has finally got right. On the other hand I have always been using Firefox and then later on Chrome. When it comes to surfing on websites where I do not need to use Firefox Add-ons I prefer to used Chrome. The main reason being, Chrome is super fast and I hardly have any issues with it.
I decided to test the new browser versions against the currently, stable Chrome with the Acid 3 test.
Chrome scores the 100/100! Not surprising as even its earlier versions have hit the hundred mark.
Firefox scored 97/100. This was again not surprising as earlier versions have done decently in the Acid3 tests. Considering Firefox 4 is still beta and has not released the final version, we might see a lot more improvements.
IE9 stills scored 93/100 but did much better than its predecessor. IE8 would get stuck at a lowly 60/100 when I tested that browser last year. It seems to have improved its performance by lot with IE9.
Acid3 is a test page from Web Standards Project. The Acid 3 test basically carries out many tests and gives a graphical representation of the scoring. Ideally you can try out the Acid 3 test on your browser. Click on the letter ‘A’ from Acid 3 and it will show you further details of the test results.
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Will this help Internet Explorer maintain it’s lead?
Chances are that IE9 will be a stable browser and will match up with Firefox and Chrome features wise. It is anyways looking a lot like a fancy twin of Chrome. IE9 will probably help old faithful users of Internet Explorer to stick with it has still not show us something radically different. Something not browser other than Chrome managed since the last 2 years.
Try out Acid 3 results on your browser of choice and do share the results with us through your comments.
Having a great vocabulary or a good command over the language does not mean we cannot make mistakes when it comes to writing an email or even a note. There are times, when we are not sure if about an article or general grammar rules. Then there are mistakes which creep in inadvertently. We bloggers call them typos.
After the Deadline is a great service which allows correcting grammar and even checking context of a word in a sentence.
Features of After the Deadline
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The best part of ‘After the Deadline’ is that it has a host of options to check up on from Grammar mistakes to double negatives.
Another good feature is I could exclude some websites. ‘After the Deadline’ does not check up on your writing on those sites. 🙂
You might wonder why not use the inbuilt correction from the browser. I found ‘After the Deadline’ far more advanced. It does check for context even if the spelling of the word is correct. This is helps in the case you when I write the word ‘thing’ in place of ‘think’. Most browser correction software cannot pick this up.
Some drawbacks
There are a couple of drawbacks or negatives of After the Deadline extension or Add-on.
I was not able to use it properly with Gmail. Also I had to restart my browser even with Chrome, to get the features working fine.
Some text boxes still are incompatible with ‘After the Deadline’ extension or add-on. We cannot use it there. 😐
‘After the Deadline’ is one of my favorite spell checking tools. I have used this for a couple of weeks and to be honest I have not seen anything better out there. Download it on your browser or even as a bookmarklet. If you have a WordPress blog you can download the plugin too. 🙂
Anyone who does a lot of work online has come across this problem. The problem of managing the several tabs we have open. Mozilla has made Firefox 4 beta version available. It’s first build was nothing much to speak about except it was very fast. Now with the latest updated version of Firefox 4 beta there are two new feature which simply blew my mind away.
Panorama is situated discreetly where all the tabs are located to the extreme right. Simply click on it will give you an option similar to the image shown above.
Just rearrange your tabs you have open into different groups. Smaller groups can be the unimportant ones while large ones can be important sites you like to visit.
Click on the tab and you are taken to it. This is different form bookmarks as if you close the browser the sites are saved in Panorama. If you close the tabs it is not saved.
New App Tab feature
With the new Firefox 4 update another new feature is enabled. This one allowed me to create App Tabs.
Right click on any tab and create App Tab. (Image to right)
The tab is saved as a small icon which always open when you load up the browser the next time. Something similar to Pin Tab feature of Chrome browser.
I think App Tabs will make it a lot more easy to look up some pages which we do not look up too often but do watch regularly. Like a Twitter page or a blog you are following.
Download the Latest Firefox 4 by visiting their landing page for Beta version. If you have already an earlier version of Firefox 4 available, update it from accession Help and Check for Updates on the browser itself.
Video Demo of Panorama feature
Here is a video which explains Panorama Tab feature briefly.
So do you think Firefox 4 will be the browser to beat? I certainly do think so. Do drop in your comments with your views.
Many people have obsessed on the time it takes for a site to load up on the browser. Recently, Google had declared that how fast your website gets loaded will have an impact on SEO or page ranks.
I think when it comes to blogs, speed might not have such an adverse impact but I am sure it got a lot of bloggers wondering how their website performed when compared for speed with others (competitors). 🙂
Which loads Faster is a website that tests loading speed for two different websites from one page itself and compares them.
The image above showed two websites being tested for loading speed. We used Devils’ Workshop and wpVeda.
There are added features or repeating tests and capturing data.
Another interesting feature is Race. This allows multiple websites to load up and be tested in a group. The group with fasted loading speeds wins the race. 🙂
Apart from Google looking at loading speed, a site which is slow can finally end up frustrating visitors too. So it would be a nice idea to compare your website for speed against some popular ones.
Do try out Which loads Faster and share with us what are your views on loading speed for websites? Are they any important? Do drop in your comments.
Social networks have really captured a lot of attention for many people to stay in touch with each other. Email still remains the most important way to pass confidential and personal information. I mean we cannot discuss a business proposal over Facebook or Orkut can we! 😛
Most people use their email address to register to social networks like Twitter, Facebook and Linked in. Rapportive is a awesome online tool which shows relative information corresponding to the email id. (see image below)
As you see in the image above, with my email id you can see links to my Linked In, Facebook, Twitter, hi5, Blogger and Flickr profile.
Rapportive needs to be installed on the browser as a addon with Firefox or an extension with Chrome.
Rapportive works with Gmail and when I opened a message it search for information about that email address and displays it on the right hand column where usually Gmail displays sponsored links. I have never ever clicked on these links through Gmail so for me this is a great use of space on Gmail’s layout. 😉
Another feature I liked is I could leave notes about the email addresses which is very useful. Sometimes we need to remember certain things about someone we send an email.
There are many add-ons around which can change the way Gmail layout is or can even give added information on Gmail itself. But Rapportive will probably change the way I look at email ids for sometime. Use Rapportive on a Gmail account which you use professionally and to which you get a lot of emails from a lot of different people.
India is celebrating its 63rd Independence Day today. In these 63 years, India has achieved remarkable feats in various areas, be it sports, science or technology. When it comes to technology, time and again India has proved itself to be a super power. Adam Tablet PC- the iPad killer from India, and the recent $35 tablet computer are some of the examples to substantiate this claim.
Even in World Wide Web, India has made its presence felt by coming up with decent alternatives to the already present services.
Indian E-Mail Client
This needs no introduction. Everyone must have heard about rediff, and many of you must even have an account on it. I started with rediff and still have that account active, though I no longer use it for sending e-mails. Interestingly, I subscribed to DW through my rediff id some 2 years back. 🙂
However rediff is no longer the preferred e-mail client now, because it failed to compete with new features introduced by Gmail.
It is a relatively new e-mail client, which offers you shortest possible e-mail id of the form yourname@in.com along with 10 Gb of storage space. It also has some unique features that Gmail doesn’t have presently. One such feature is “Future Mail” which lets you send a mail at some future date and time. Another cool thing about mail.in is the concept of in-browser tabs that opens e-mails in new tabs within the website.
If that wasn’t enough to lure you to in mail, it also offers some cool applications like Gmail Preview which shows you a feed of latest 20 unread mails in your Gmail account.
However the compose mail box needs some more refining if it wants to give real challenge to Gmail.
This is one area where we are yet to come up with something unique. Though there are quite a few Indian search engines present, they are either based completely on Google or they are not competent enough.
Still if I have to go for an Indian search engine, I’ll prefer Khoj.com. It has clutter free homepage and since it is powered by Google, it provides relevant search results. I tested another popular search engine Guruji with the same search query that I used for Khoj but the results relevancy was no where near to that of Khoj.
The latest addition to Indinized web is the Epic browser, which was launched on 15th July 2010- the same day when India got a new symbol for Rupee. Epic browser, which is developed by Bangalore based startup Hidden Reflex, is based on Mozilla platform and has most of its features, tailored to suit Indian mind. It supports a long list of Indian languages and comes with a sidebar that supports over 1500 applications which matter to Indians- such as Facebook, Orkut, Gmail, BookMyShow and lot more.
Let’s hope that in the time to come, Indians will come up with alternatives to other web based services too- maybe a blogging platform that has the best features of WordPress and Blogger?
Today, instead of using the regular web services, I’m using their Indian versions. This is my way of celebrating Independence Day. 🙂
Have you ever used any of these services? Do you think they stand a chance against the already established players?
If you are using web on your mobile, chances are high that you are using a third party browser like Opera Mini, Bolt or UC Browser. While all are good, UC Browser seems to fulfill most of my needs. But it may feel awkward for those who were using Opera Mini for a long time and are new to the browser. So I would like to give a brief guide to use it.
Options>Data Access>Add and Edit Data>Always Allowed.
UC Browser is available for different platforms including Java, Symbian, Windows Mobile, iPhone etc.
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In jailbroken iPhones, to add UC Browser in Cydia(The unofficial AppStore), goto
Manage>Sources>Edit>Add>http://wap.uc.cn/en
For Java Platform, a standard version, as well as a low memory version is available. The low memory version is for lower end phones that don’t doesn’t support the standard version. It doesn’tn’t have some features of the standard version.
This article is primarily intended for the Standard Java Version.
#2. Let it Initialize
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After installing, open UC Browser. It will first check your network to set up an more fluent connection with the server for browsing.
After network test, it will update the startpage and other data. If initialization fails, then try restarting the browser, or check your network settings.
#3. Choose a Theme
Choose a theme for the browser as you like to make it unique from the others that suits you . Go to Menu>Preference>Themes>Manage Themes and select a theme. You can download more themes from
Menu>Preference>Themes>Download Themes. After download, it will ask you to install the theme. Or you can later install it from
Menu>File>Download Manager and then press “1” at the theme and choose “Install”.
#4. Add Some Bookmarks
Add your bookmarks from Menu>Open>Bookmark and then Menu>Management>New Bookmark. You can also create folders to arrange
your bookmarks. While in a page, you can add it to your bookmarks from Menu>Navigation>Add Bookmark, or else just tap button “1” to get the Context menu for adding bookmarks and other function.
#5. Configure Shortcuts
UC Browser comes with predefined shortcuts and you can change them as per your convenience. To change the shortcut keys, go to Menu>Preference>Shortcuts. After changes, click “Save”. You can restore default shortcuts by clicking “Restore”.
#6. Customize Settings
You can change the default settings from Menu>Preference>General Settings,. which includes the detail settings for changes as you wish to make your browsing more smooth, fast and pleasure To have an idea about what each setting does, go to
Menu>Help>Help Contents.
#7. Understand the Startpage
The Startpage of UC Browser is very intuitive. At the top, you have the “Bookmarks” and “Home” icons to switch (press “left soft key” or “3” button on your phone) between the start page and bookmarks. Next is the Search bar which lets you search the web. Below it you’ll find the Address bar which lets you enter web addresses.
Below the Address bar, there are drop down tabs with recommended and sorted links for you to get the site through a few clicks instead of typing the long addresslinks. The lowermost drop down tab shows your History. You can expand a tab by clicking on it. The last part shows some sponsored links.
#8. Browse the Web
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After the customizations and understanding the startpagestart page, now you are ready to surf the web. To go to a website, just enter the URL in the Address bar. e.g. – http://forum.ucweb.com and press Ok. The page will load in few seconds. You can use the navigation keys or your phone’s keypad to navigate through the page.
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You can save the page for later viewing from
Menu>File>Save Page.
To refresh/reload the page, go to
Menu>Navigation>Refresh.
And it provides a auto refresh function to keep your update with the news you don’t want to miss.
#9. Search the Web
It is easy with the inbuilt search function. Click on the Search bar and enter your query. You can select from predefined search engines given. Then click “Search” to get the resultssearch the web.
#10. Use the Context Menu
The Context menu lets you access the most used functions easily. The default Shortcut is “1”.
In normal, it gives option to open new window, copy text, share etc.
You can also search from the highlighted text.
When you highlight an image, you can use the context menu to Zoom or Save the image.
While you highlight a link, you can copy the link, open it in a new tab, or save the linked file.
#11. Download Files
When you click on any download, you’ll be prompted with generally three options, “Open”, “Save” and “Cancel”. The options provide by the browser change as different file types. For Zip and PDF files, you will have an option “Preview” to directly view the contents. For apps, you’ll have a “Install” option. To download the file with your default browser, select open. Select save to download the file with UC Browser download manager. And you’ll find the speed is much faster than the built-in browser.
#12. Upload Files
When you are on a site with the upload dialog box, click “Browse”.
Then you’ll be presented with two options. You can either upload from your phone or take a photo instantly to upload.
#13. Install Apps Downloaded with UC Browser
If you use a s40 phone, the apps you download with UC Browser are marked as unsupported format. To install them, lets take an example:.
Suppose you tried to download app.jar. UC will automatically rename it to app_jar as it cannot save it as app.jar due to phone limitations.
So to install the app, just rename it to app.jar from app_jar with your default file manager.
#14. Protect Your Privacy
You can easily delete the browsing and search history, cookies, cache and traffic to protect your privacy. Go to Menu>Tools>Clear History.
#15.Go Advanced
Now, when you are ready to surf the web in a new way, feel free to explore the advanced functions in UC Browser. UC Browser gives much more flexibility and more control over your browser.
Conclusion
Though UC Browser is designed to be easy, it may feel less user friendly for new users. Hope this guide will help. You may want to check out my post 15 reasons to fall in love with UC Browser. Also don’t forget to share your experience with us by dropping a comment here.
We take browsers and their extensions very seriously but sometimes we forget in life there is room for fun. So instead of looking the them most awesome Chrome extensions for blogging or social media I thought I might as well share with you 3 great extensions which if not do anything productive might atleast put up a smile on your face. 🙂
So here is the list of 3 fun extensions for your Chrome browser.
This Chrome extension called High Five does just that and displays a large ‘High Five’ on your Chrome browser. It really does nothing except I find it fun to have my browser give me a high five after writing a nice post. 😛
I am sure if you have an email id you must have received forwards explaining how in the English language you can write any word incorrectly by replacing certain alphabets but the brains still guesses it correctly. This extension does exactly that and lets my brain get a little exercise.
Do not press the Red Button which shows a red button on the top right corner. Press it once and its starts to tell you not to press it again and again. What follows is a very funny conversation with a red button. 😛 This one gets very funny as you keep pressing the red button.
