Archive for the ‘Browsers’ Category

Opera has a much-promoted feature called speed dial, which basically showed a wall of your favorite/most visited websites. The same option is built right into Safari as well, but Firefox can also give you this functionality with a number of addons.

I tried a few, among them was the visually appealing  FoxTab which gives you 3D tab browsing and a nice looking speed dial, but it was buggy for me, and wasn’t customizable enough. In the end I arrived at the very simple looking, but extremely well customizable Fast Dial. The simpler looks were actually welcome, since the functionality of this should be for me to launch a site really quickly, not looking at it for ages.

Once installed the addon gave me exactly the options I wanted, and more. You can add sites by entering their URL directly, but you can also right click on any page to add it quickly. In the options you can choose how many sites you want to show, you can change the dimensions of the boxes to fit more, and of course you can completely customize the look. Apart from the 3D aspect, you can do anything with it, so you could make it much flashier than it is, but for me the simple elegance of the default look is fine.

More importantly, you can change the text of the windows (or leave them out altogether). This is a must for me, since I sometimes work with very similar sites, which are nevertheless totally different, like cPanels for different accounts, phpMyAdmin’s for different sites and so on. Here the text and the favicon would be almost the same. The addon gives you great options for customizing the favicon, which you can actually change to a different one from the web, or use your own, and you can also change the website preview to an image of your own.

This is one of the best speed dial addons since it seems no-frills, fulfilling the needs of those who just need launching power, but in reality it has the power to extensive customization easily.

If you visit many sites often, chances are you either don’t use the bookmark toolbar because it would get crowded, or you have a bulging toolbar. To save a load of space, and make the toolbar look better, you can force it to show only the website favicons with a simple tweak to Firefox, read on!

A lot of what you see in Firefox can be changed (this is why themes are possible), and molding your browser to your own needs is not that hard. The first thing to do is find the location of your userChrome.css file. If you’re in Windows you can open any folder and type “%appdata%\Mozilla\” in the url bar (without quotes) and you should be transported to the folder where your application data is held. In most cases this is located in “C:\Users\Your-Windows-Username\AppData\Roaming\”. If you’re on Linux you can find this folder in “~/.mozilla/” and if you’re on a Mac, you’ll see it in “~/Library/Mozilla/”.

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My first time installing a Google Chrome extension was an extremely positive experience, no restarts, quick install, and an awesome plugin called Feedly. Feedly is essentially a feed reader, but it does its job in such an elegant way, that it rises out of all the other readers I’ve seen.

It’s available for Firefox and Chrome as an extension, and will pull your feeds from your Google account. Once installed you can go to the Feedly page to view your feeds, in a very user-friendly, magazine style view. You can view your feeds in a number of ways, my favorite is the cover view, which shows large thumbnails for most recent items on the left, and smaller thumbnails and excerpts for a list on the right. All the views offer great visuals, and good ways to browse, but where Feedly also excels is the reading/sharing/organization options.

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Using more than one browser at once is not just the practice of web designers, everyone can reap the benefit of having multiple browser open, instead of multiple tabs or windows of the same browser. You can separate different types of pages more easily, you can keep your workflow in a different space than your personal like, and you can better use the different advantages of different browser.

If you work on the web and/or live an active social life here, you surely have a lot of “accounting” type pages open, or pages you want to monitor regularly. I call my email accounts and adsense account “accoutning” pages, since these are in no way part of my workflow, separating them is a big productivity booster. Firstly, if I take all of these pages and open them in Chrome instead of Firefox, I will be left with a clean environment to work with in Firefox, and quite possibly, less memory usage. Once you have these separated, the less clutter will help you focus, and you can also put one browser on a side monitor, and your main one right in front of you, if you have a dual monitor setup.

You can also reap the benefits of different features if you use more than one browser. I wouldn’t really use Flock for working, but its a great browser for living your social life, so using Twitter, Facebook and such is much easier and faster. If you are more productive in your personal space, it will leave you more time to work, or simply more time to relax.

Over at Lifehacker, they do some  browser speed tests now and again, and I thought the results worthy to share with you guys. The subjects of this round were Firefox 3.6, Chrome 4 and Opera 10.5. In some areas you’ll find surprising results, especially in javascript use (Opera wins by a mile), and memory usage with extensions, which is won by Firefox.

Since I’ve been using Firefox for 10 minutes with about 6 tabs, and its eating away at half a Gb of memory, I find that hard to accept. I might have a really badly written extensions somewhere I guess, but compared to a lot of people, I hardly use any extensions at all.

To be completely honest, until now, I didn’t really care about browser speed tests because Firefox was just so ahead of the game, that the features it offered far surpassed any speed problems. Even if you had to reboot, or restart Firefox every hour, it was still worth it for your productivity. However, nowadays that Chrome is right behind Firefox (Opera is fine as well, I just never really made a connection to it) I just might change browsers for speed reasons.

For the complete list of comparisons, along with nice bar charts, take a look at the full post on Lifehacker.