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Google Chrome Super Fast

Bashar — Sat, 08 May 2010 10:01:11 +0000

Google Chrome is taking up the challenge against fired potato, sound waves, and lighting in speed, showing amazingly high rendering speeds in splits of a second.

And for the geeks, this is the behind the scenes video.

Now imagine if I do this same test here in Kuwait. Bake a toast Vs Google Chrome. That might end up in a tie!

Google Chrome (MUST) RSS Subscription Extension

Bashar — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:11:42 +0000

Know this little icon that appears on the right of the address bar?

This is what tells you that there is an RSS feed to this page that you can subscribe to. And this is what you don’t get in Google Chrome browser for some reason. To get it, I have to search for RSS link on the page, copy it, open Google Reader and subscribe to it. How lame is that?

But here is the simple solution.

Why would something like the RSS auto-detection be just an optional extension, while the page translation is a built-in can’t disable feature?

Quake 2 on HTML5

Bashar — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 14:43:33 +0000

Unbelievable huh? If you know me very well you’ll know how much I hate April Fool, and this video was released the same day. But so was Gmail! I hope Gmail isn’t a long time joke as well cause I’ve been swearing my life on it for years. So anyways, this is the official Google Code page for the project. There are people saying it’s April Fool, and even TechCrunch was confused about it. But if you look at the Wiki and people’s comments, you will see people really trying and building it. No single comment from someone who tried it telling it’s a fool. So it seems pretty real, an for the sake of the future of the web, I really hope it remains real. This could be a serious threat message to Flash.

Google Chrome’s Built In Translation

Bashar — Fri, 26 Mar 2010 09:30:03 +0000

Have you seen this in your Google Chrome? It’s a new feature recently added to Chrome that keeps asking you whether you want to translate non-English pages. It will allow you to easily and quickly translate any non-English text on your page. And yes, I say keeps as I think it’s annoying to have such a thing pushed on my browser without any notice. Most people would visit pages of their own language, while others might find this feature useful. Now for those others, you may want to promote it on Google Chrome default page, or one time notice. But to have it by default open in every non-English page, or English page with littl non-English text in it until I tell it not to do so is not the best way to promote it.

Apparently this Google Buzz incident is going to be a trend now. Do you know why? This is an excerpt from Google Chrome Webpage Translation page.

At this time, it’s not possible to totally disable the translation bar. To control the display of the translation bar for specific sites and languages, click Options at the end of the bar.

Google couldn’t figure a way to completely disable it? Didn’t have time? Or didn’t wanna?

8 More Bugs To Go for Mac Chrome

Bashar — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 08:10:51 +0000

Few days ago, Mike Pinkerton, from the Chrome Project for Mac, tweeted Chrome for Mac release is really close now, with 8 more bugs to go, then signaling just mostly Flash issues remaining.

I’ve personally lost patience as Firefox fails to meet my expectations, and jumped to the developer version of Chrome for Mac weeks ago. Been using it since then magnificently. It crashed few times, but it can restore, and it’s times faster and more memory efficient.

O3D Real Time Browser 3D Rendering

Bashar — Sat, 25 Apr 2009 19:56:10 +0000

It’s not sci-fi, it’s not just talk. Google did release the O3D API to bring the power of 3D Accelerated graphics to the web through Javascript to all major browsers, namely Firefox, Internet Explorer, Chrome, Safari, and it works on Windows, Mac, and Linux.

You can see below a sample real time demonstration of what this API can do. Quite promising.

If you wanna get into it, go to the O3D API Page.

7 useful Google Chrome Extensions

Bashar — Sun, 19 Apr 2009 05:05:29 +0000

ChromeTricks have listed 7 Google Chrome extensions that could make your Google Chrome experience better. They’re still not as complicated as Firefox, but it’s the way. Extensions range from web-to-pdf convertion, resource freeup, password recovery, and others.

How to hide most visited sites from Chrome New Tab

Bashar — Sat, 11 Apr 2009 16:58:36 +0000

For those of you enjoying all the Chrome super speeds (and all Windows problems), if you need to disable the display of most visited sites in a new tab, although I personally love it, here is how to do it.

Google Chrome Backup Application

Bashar — Fri, 03 Apr 2009 09:24:56 +0000

For Chrome users, you may really like this tool to backup your Chrome profile, settings, bookmarks, and history, easily restorable then. Also useful if you use Chrome over multiple PCs.

PS: If you have Google Chrome, play with this neat Gravity Experiment.

Add Keyword Shortcuts to Google Translate in Firefox

Bashar — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 15:53:13 +0000

The number of times a day I find my self going to Google Translate or Googling for define: is really amazing, and opening the page over and over is tedious as well. Leaving the tab open is a good way, but hey it will get lost soon in the middle of all the other tabs. One good practice is to memorize and maintain it’s order in each Firefox window, say you place it in second tab. Then you could simply go Ctrl+2 and Firefox will take you to that tab, and you can do your translation. I like the faster way however, using the Keyword for search feature in Firefox bookmarks. Before going into the steps, I think it’s worthy to take a look at the main parameters of the url:

http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=en&sl=en&tl=ar#en|ar|test

Now to break it all into peaces, this is my URL which lands a default English to Arabic translation in an English interface, and the parts of the URL taken apart are:

- hl=en: The default interface language. You can change this to hl=ar for instance to get an Arabic version of it.

- sl=en: Default selected source or starting language to translate from in the drop down list. In my case I usually want to translate from English.

- tl=ar: Default selected terminating language in the drop down list to which the source language will get translated, Arabic in this case.

- en|ar|test: The text after the Hash (#) sign is basically the query being sent, and it corresponds accordingly to the source language (en), destination or terminating language (ar), and the text to translate (test), with the vertical bar (“|”) character separating them.

Note: sl & tl are not really so important when you create a keyword shortcut since they only represent the default selected language in the drop down list. They’re just presented here for explanation.

Now to the quick few steps:

1. Go to Organize Bookmarks in Firefox.

2. Right-Click Bookmarks Menu and select New Bookmark.

3. Fill in the parameters as needed, using the below as example (or exactly if what you need is English to Arabic translation):

Name: Google En/Ar Translate

Location: http://translate.google.com/translate_t?hl=en#en|ar|%s

Make sure you change the en & ar to your desired from and to languages.

Keyword: Make it short and meaningful, like “ea” without the double quotes for English-to-Arabic.

Description: This is optional and just for your reference.

That’s it. By now you should be able to translate from English to Arabic (or your choice) from your Firefox Address bar like this:

For vicevers, add another Keyword bookmark. At all rates, once you have it and wanna translate a word, just do Ctrl+L to move to the address bar, write your letters, e.g. “ea Arsenal”, and Alt+Click to open the result in new tab and preserve current one.

NOTE: For Chrome users, there is a way to do just that, but last time I tried the bookmarks manager was still so amature. If you can’t find an easy way to fill in such keywords, do this stupid trick. Add it in Firefox, import it and export it to Chrome ;). Worked for my other bookmarks.

3-D Acceleration Web Standard on the way

Bashar — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 10:27:28 +0000

With the blessing and support of leading tech companies like Adobe, AMD, Apple, Google, IBM and Intel, the Khronos Group will take the lead developing an open, royalty-free standard for the presentation of accelerated online 3-D Graphics. The Khronos Group is hoping to find ways to expose the OpenGL and OpenGL ES 2.0 using the ECMAScript, which Javascript dialects from.

This is really a big news now with the increasing demand on web browsers to deliver strong web application support, and one could only wonder where is Microsoft from all of this. Full details are on InformationWeek.

Better Gmail for Chrome

Bashar — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 08:11:12 +0000

(via CNET)

It’s starting now. Some real, even if hacked, extensions. The famous Better Gmail extension for Firefox that adds rich features to Gmail such as message highlighting and attachment icons has been ported to Chrome and can be downloaded from here. The installation requires you to have Google Chrome Channel Changer first, and then go the current process of extension installation on Chrome. Not as easy as Firefox, but the steps are detailed in simple here at CNET.

PS: I still don’t have my Windows PC fixed and alive after many weeks and thus I still can’t test Chrome. I guess if I was John Lasseter, my next Pixar movie would be about old computers and how the Moore’s law marks them as twice slower than recent ones after 18 months in their lifetime, shortening their happy life cycle, only to be used later for experimental and side jobs purposes.

Did you know Javascript could do that?

Bashar — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 14:25:05 +0000

Chrome Experiments is a library of cool and complex javascript experiments that were made by people from all around the world, combined to show and test the browser capabilities, mainly Chrome in this case, but you can compare it to the other browsers. Here is one example that worked on my Firefox on Mac, but started flickering and working slowly as the Monster evolved.

Ofcourse, these experiments can only be truly fair if they’re hosted by a 3rd non-related party, or if it was made like a public community driven site. But it’s not, and while you can always submit complicated Chrome embarrassing Javascript experiments, you can never be sure Google will gladly post these Chrome failing experiments on their site. Still though, it’s a fun way to test different browsers.

Google Chrome – Last Browser Standing

Bashar — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 09:40:27 +0000

One day into the Pwn2Own hacking competition, and all 3 major browsers (IE, Firefox and Safari) have fallen down, leaving Google Chrome, with predicted 2% market share), standing on its own. Interesting notes are that Opera was not part of the competition, and the first one falling was, you bet, Safari! Later, the winning hacker “Nils” managed to gain control of the Safari, and hacked the other two browsers as well.

So is Google Chrome more secured, or less known to hackers? Well either way, it means it’s more secured for the time being at least.

Fennec Firefox Mobile Browser Video Brief

Bashar — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 03:12:49 +0000

So Fennec 1.0 Beta 1 is finally released for the Maemo OS running on Nokia N810 Internet Tablet. The Firefox browser for mobiles brings I’m happy to same the same general features (and another hot logo) and concepts of a regular Firefox browser, with search engine plugins, awesome bar, and tabs and controls bar that shows by left and right tapping the screen.

Fennec Beta 1 walkthrough from Madhava Enros on Vimeo.

This is only for the Internet Tablet of N810 however, and I sure do hope they keep it as good for regular mobile and smart phones. Also, I think what’s more important and useful than a search plugin, is the add Keyword for search bookmark which is extremely helpful to minimize clicks if your search plugins grow large.

[via pavlov]

NOTE: As of now, your Google Image searches for fennec returns the Fennec animal. Give it a little while and see how we geeks mess up with everybody’s lives. Soon scientists are gonna have to include -browser in their search queries by default to get what they want :).

Google Chrome Hello World Extension

Bashar — Thu, 19 Mar 2009 02:35:53 +0000

Finally, with the recent developer release of Google Chrome, or the Google Chrome 2.0 Beta (That was fast graduation don’t you think?), you can hack your way through with some wrapper extensions just to get the flavor. You can read a quick brief about it on Google Operating System blog, or you can go straight to the Google Tutorial here.

10 ways to customize Google Chrome

Bashar — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 06:35:47 +0000

One of the main downsides of Chrome compared to Firefox is the lack of extensions feature and ability to do customization. TechRadar is giving however 10 ways you can customize and improve Google Chrome to your likings, including a link to how you can customize or make your own Google Chrome theme. I didn’t know that exist, although I still prefer the current one.

On a side note, if you love Flock for all the social features it has, you gotta start loving Chrome, as Flock is abandoning Firefox.

Not enough browsers? How about a GreenBrowser?

Bashar — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 21:44:23 +0000

Last time I read about a new browser I was like “Ohh God, not another browser!”. It was called Chrome and one day after it’s release it became my default one. Not that I’m at all enthusiastic about this now, but history has taught lessons. GreenBrowser is not something that takes the path of simplicity, but rather complexity in features, with rich tab management capabilities, allowing password-locking to the level of a tab, and closing of tab groups with shared base URL.

I don’t have a Windows machine nearby to try it, but it does have a Japanese thumbnail so some people might have faith in it. For full review, read the PC World article.

Microsoft Gazelle – A More Secured Browser?

Bashar — Mon, 23 Feb 2009 17:04:15 +0000

After the continuos slip in IE market share to Firefox and the quickly emerging Google Chrome, Microsoft researchers seem to be working on a new web browser that tries to turn things around in the way they treat web pages. While Google Chrome treats each tab as a process by it self, Gazelle, which relies on a what’s called a “browser kernel”, will take each part of the web page as a separate element, arguing that a trusted parent page may contain an iframe to an untrusted website content. While true, this seems to be a fix for what Microsoft Windows faces the most, which is security, and on the other hand sacrifices on the performance side which is much more needed nowadays with the WEB 2.0, and some calling for the WEB 3.0 bubbles, turning the browser and site into a full-fledged applications.

Due to the complex nature of the way it processes Web pages for better security, the browser’s performance is more tortoise than gazelle, but the researchers think a few tweaks can make it faster.

I believe the highlighted gazelle reference is supposed to be IE instead. Otherwise the sentence wouldn’t make a lot of sense to me. If true, and with IE already the slowest, how much tweaking can they put into the browser to bring it to the level of the slowest, which is already too slow!

via InfoWorld.

First look at Google Chrome for Mac

Bashar — Sat, 14 Feb 2009 19:16:21 +0000

With the deadline of end of June for Mac and Linux releases of Google Chrome, the first screenshot of Google Chrome on Mac has been published, and it may not be what you expected.

Nevertheless, explaining the difficulty Google faces in porting the code and getting it to run, this is still a step in the right direction it seems. Google have also announced their Linux version will use the GTK package for graphical interface components that are used with the GNOME user interface.

Read the full story on CNET.

Firefox-like Extensions for Chrome in May?

Bashar — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 17:42:24 +0000

It would seem that the missing most critical element of Google Chrome is about to be fulfilled with what seems to be more than just plain rumors about possible Firefox-like extension support for Chrome this May. The conclusion was made by an alerted blogger who witnessed the already made announcement of future undated Chrome extension support, and then noticed the program of the Google I/O developer conference, highlighting a session on “Developing extensions for Google Chrome”. The conference is to take place on May 27-28, thus the likely availability of such feature.

While it’s still unlikely the support will be annoucned for public, developers can most likely get their hands dirty by then with it. I’m looking forward to it and hope to see the hot Firefox extensions ported here.

Opera Mini for Andriod Finalized

Bashar — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 08:29:13 +0000

G1 holders, Opera have finalized the Opera Mini browser version for the Android, bringing some cool new features, like the ability to access SD cards for page upload, download, and saving. There is also the double-tab for zoom in feature, and the video playback handover to the OS.

The thing that sets Opera Mini apart from others, is the rendering of pages on the Opera servers before data ia sent to the handset according to the user device and network speed.

While I don’t have one to test with, this is the download link of Google Mini for T-Mobile, or you can simply visit mini.opera.com from your mobile browser and it will guide you through the process. Wish I had one to try it :). Hmmm… (Thinking of…) well maybe not. I’ll just wiat for next generation and be more rational about it.

IE8 RC1 Benchmarks… SLOWEST?

Bashar — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:28:58 +0000

Internet Explorer 8 RC1 speed benchmarks have been released by ZDNet Australia, and guess what? Chrome is number 1, and the positively reviewed IE8 so far still falls maginicintly behind when it comes to speed at least.

Read the full post for more details here.

Update Google Chrome to Latest Beta Release

Bashar — Wed, 28 Jan 2009 00:57:28 +0000

If you’re so much into Google Chrome, and would like to stay at the edge of its latest Beta releases every month, Google Chrome Channel Changer is your tool for this. Sysdigg posted a more detailed article about how to get the latest Beta releases here.

For the record, following their foot-steps did not really take me any place further. Not sure why maybe I need to give it some time! Doubt it. If it works with you do let me know.

UPDATE: While it has worked with others, the Beta update did not work for me and my Chrome just updated to 1.0.154.46 which is the latest stable release! Reading their release details explains it though:

“Google Chrome’s Beta and Stable channels have been updated to 1.0.154.46. (Note, we won’t have a different release for the Beta channel until we have something Beta-worthy come out of the Dev channel in February.)”

So let’s wait till Feb and see.

How to add RSS Subscriptions to Google Chrome

Bashar — Sun, 25 Jan 2009 19:23:50 +0000

Google have the best RSS Reader in the world, and they released and graduated their favorite new Chrome baby out of Beta as the future of web browsing. Yet they somehow miss a simple easy way to subscribe to RSS feeds and add them to their Google Reader. This is a quick workaround for now.

Google Chrome For Mac & Linux

Bashar — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 15:16:14 +0000

For those waiting, Google have commented of continuous efforts for bringing the Chrome browser to the Mac and Linux operating systems as their top priority, and the new Chrome 2.0 pre-Beta release already contains pieces of code that are in the direction of one common source code for multi-platform support.

Alas, no release date have been announced yet, but one can expect it I guess in the next 3 months.

Chrome 2.0 dev Preview

Bashar — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 16:43:06 +0000

This is a nice Chrome 2 Preview by ars technica covering some of the cool promising new features in Chrome 2.0 dev edition. Some of the features in short are:

Support for some of Apple’s non-standard CSS features like gradient, reflections, and masks. Frankly this non-standard CSS stuff is all new to me! But looks cool.
Edge Docking, to give more Windows feeling.
some light custom javascripting on pages
Autocompletion
Import from Google Bookmarks (Yeay!) But no sync so I still won’t use it.

Read the post for some screenshots as well.

50 Recommended Firefox Extensions

Bashar — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 23:06:13 +0000

I came across this list of 50 recommended Firefox loyal users, or Mac Chrome to-be ones. And while I haven’t gone through all of them, the ones that caught my attention, or I am enjoying already are:

1- ColorZilla: One of the reasons I still open Firefox is to get the color of a certain element on a web page.

2- DownThemAll: The best download manager I have for downloading multiple files from a site at once, and with full bursting speed. Don’t expect to enjoy convenient browsing however meanwhile :).

3- Firebug: if you’re a web developer, this is simply a must. period.

4- FireFTP: Convenient and quick way to FTP to your server from within the browser. Though for large files, I would pick a stand alone FTP client.

5- Fireshot: This doesn’t only make taking screen snapshots easy. It allows further editing and annotations. For bloggers, and debuggers who want to share screen erros extremely useful. No need to launch a separate app to do little photo editing. There is a Pro commercial version of it as well.

6- IETab: This is a common statement. I only open IE when Firefox can’t open the website. Well, this plugin allows you to keep IE shut down for good. It would simply open the IE window inside a Firefox tab, allowing you to even do Microsoft update through it.

7- Web Developer: Set of tools for web developers to help altering, editing, and viewing various types of page info, like image sizes, element names, etc. You can even do resize for pages, and go through the CSS files and edit them.

8- Pencil: Sketch and prototype tool to create mockups of screenshots. While tempting, it didn’t work for me as I hoped it would. Try it out and see.

9- Cooliris: he extension that would transfer your browser into a 3D Wall easy way to navigate the web. Extremely useful for photos and videos, though have been crashing frequently with me recently. By my whole PC isn’t really in one piece anymore.

I wouldn’t prepare a top 50 Firefox extension list my self and leaveout Cooliris. The extension that would transfer your browser into a 3D Wall easy way to navigate the web. Extremely useful for photos and videos, though have been crashing frequently with me recently. By my whole PC isn’t really in one piece anymore.

Don’t ignore the remaining items, and don’t get tempted to try them all. Never feed your browser more than it can eat :)

Congrats Open World Browsers…

Bashar — Fri, 02 Jan 2009 07:18:00 +0000

For the first time in eight years, IE browser users percentage dropped to less than 70% (Thanks to IE 7) as Firefox soared above 20% for first time for a whole month. Chrome has it’s 0.8% share as well, and surprisingly, their launch did not stop Firefox from their expansion.

Guess it is a happy new year for Firefox then :).

Ubiquity – The Firefox Game Changer

Bashar — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 22:22:48 +0000

No Comments.

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

Visit Ubiquity page for more info.

BlogAllAlong » Browsers

Google Chrome Super Fast

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