Chrome Access extension allows you to quickly access all the about configuration pages of Google Chrome.

Google Chrome has this powerful hidden feature called “about pages” where you can tweak the behavior of Google Chrome in great depth. The only problem that you have is to remember all those pages which  as of now count to at least 11. If you don’t want to remember the lengthy list of about pages Chrome Access extension can help you.

Chrome Access is a simple Google Chrome extension that provides quick access to all the hidden “about://” and “chrome://” pages with a dropdown menu.

• ‘about:net-internals’ –  gives an overview of network status and usage.
• ‘about:memory’ –  gives an overview of chrome memory usage, by tab and in total.
• ‘about:dns’ –  gives an overview of stored DNS data.
• ‘about:plugin’ –   lists all the plugins Chrome is using (such as Flash, QuickTime etc.).
• ‘about:cache’ –  displays all the items in the browser cache.
• ‘about:sync’ –  displays bookmark sync data if you have bookmark sync enabled.
• ‘about:histograms’ –  displays low-level performance data (this is only useful to the techies).
• ‘about:version’ –  displays a detailed version page with the Chromium, WebKit and V8 builds currently being used.
• ‘about:credits’ –  lists the (open-source) software and API’s that Chrome uses and links to their respective websites.
• ‘about:about’ –  lists all of Chrome’s about pages.
• ‘about:flags’ –  allows you to enable/disable some of Chrome’s experimental features.

It also provides quick access to some of the “chrome://” pages,

• extensions
• history
• downloads
• bookmarks
• settings

If you used to tinker with some of Google Chrome’s settings you’ll find Chrome Access a handy extension to keep it around on the Chrome toolbar.

Install Chrome Access.

Firefox helps you tag your bookmarks so you can get back to them easily.

If you don’t use any of the online bookmarking services but rely on your browser’s bookmarking capabilities for all your bookmarking needs then you might like the way Firefox allows you to leverage your bookmarks. When you save a bookmark in Firefox it allows you to add tags to the bookmark. Once tagged you can just type the tag on the URL box to get to the URL very easily.

Start by bookmarking a page or organize your bookmarks.

Once the Edit This Bookmark page pops-up, name your bookmark and choose the folder where you want to save the bookmark. Before you hit the “Done” button type-in the tags for this bookmark; separate them with comma if you want to assign multiple tags to a bookmark or choose from the list. Once done hit “Done”.

From now on, you don’t have to remember those lengthy URLs; instead you can just type the tag name to locate the bookmarked URLs. I think it’s very handy to have this shortcut to get to the many URLs that I have bookmarked in the browser itself.

Carry all your Google Chrome bookmarks, extensions and themes with you on to all your computers with Google Chrome Sync.

Even though we have delicious and a bunch of other tools to make our bookmarking life a lot easier there is nothing that can beat the simple bookmarks bar on the browser itself. I use it to keep the most frequently visited sites handy.

It’s not just the bookmarks; Google Chrome does come with some extra goodies, extensions and themes, for example. I’m sure you hate settings these things up on all your computers. You don’t have to. In fact Google Chrome does come with a feature called “Google Chrome Sync” which allows you to keep all your bookmarks, extensions and themes synced across your computers.

To make use of it,

Click on “Tools” (the wrench icon on the far right on top) and hit “Options“.

Navigate to the “Personal Stuff” tab and then click on the “Set up sync…” button.

Chrome will open up a dialog asking you to enter your Google account information. This is the key that it uses to keep your Chrome features all synced. So enter a Google account that you want to use across your computers to keep things in-sync.

Then you will be asked to configure what needs to be synced. You can choose to keep everything synced or you can pick and choose the individual data elements that you want Google Chrome to keep it synced.

Let Google Chrome do its job and once done it will inform you about the status and if all goes okay then you’ll see Chrome reloaded with all the data elements that you indicated to be synced.

That’s all it takes to keep all your Google Chrome bookmarks, themes and extensions synced across all your computers.

Google Alarm Add-on can notify you when a website pings any of Google’s web properties.

Have you ever had a feel that the mighty Google might be tracking what you are doing on the web? Given the fact that majority of the websites these days use one form or the other of Google’s web properties including Analytics, Adsense, Maps, YouTube Videos and the list goes on and on…you got the point. 

Have you ever thought you might change your browsing behavior a little bit if you know a website is informing Google passively about you browsing their website? If that’s the case then Google Alarm, a simple Firefox and Chrome add-on, can help you find out if a site is informing Google about you being there on their website.

Google Alarm is a very simple plug-in that pops-up a red color Growl type notification indicating the Google’s web properties the site is communicating with for various purposes. Realize this, these are not those websites fault or Google’s; but a way for Google to track your IP address, the time you’ve spent on the site, the links you’ve clicked, the videos you’ve watched etc. If you think that’s passively invading your privacy you can leverage Google Alarm add-on to get a feel of what is being communicated to Google.

When Google Alarm warns you of the communication that’s happening between Google and the website you are on it plays a weird alarm audio. If you are in a workplace and don’t want to hear the audio you can install an audio-less version of the Firefox and Chrome extensions.

Learn more about Google Alarm.

Even though it’s slightly different than other browsers Google Chrome does have a simpler way to handle pop-up windows.

Everyone agrees, pop-up windows are one of the annoyances of the world wide web and that’s the reason all modern day browsers come with the default setting to not allow pop-up windows, which is a good thing. But at times you might visit a site that intentionally wanted to pop-up a legitimate window. For these circumstances you would have to configure your browser to allow pop-up windows.

Handling pop-up windows in Google Chrome is slightly different than other browsers, you would have to look in a different place to set this up.

Go to Chrome “Preferences” (“Options” if you are on Windows).

Click on the “Under the Hood” tab. Under “Privacy” click on the “Content settings…” button.

Then on the Content Settings dialog click on the “Allow all sites to show pop-ups” option. If you leave this option open to all the sites then just be careful to turn it off once you are done.

On the other hand if you wish to allow pop-up windows for just one or few websites then you can use the “Do not allow any site to show pop-ups” option and then click on the “Exceptions…” button to add websites that you wanted to allow pop-up windows.

Even though the settings are slightly different Google Chrome has a simple way to handle pop-up windows. Make use of it.

Basket Buster can help you find the best price for the product you are shopping for.

Earlier we’ve mentioned about InvisibleHand, a very helpful browser extension that helps you find the best shopping deals without you doing much. Along the same lines but with a slight twist, Basket Buster informs you about better shopping deals available than the one that you are currently looking at. In simple visual indication Basket Buster notifies you of any available better shopping deals.

Basket Buster comes in as an add-on for both Firefox and Internet Explorer. Once installed you’ll see an icon that turns colors when you visit product sites.

– indicates that the site you are currently viewing has offers available

– indicates that the current site don’t have any offers but similar sites do

– indicates no offer available for the product you are viewing

When the icon changes to Amber color and when you click on it a sidebar opens up to reveal the deals that are available for the product. This way you don’t have to leave the site you are on but still be aware of the better deals available.

If this looks a bit vague to you here is a video that can visualize it better.

Basket Buster is in closed beta testing as of now. You need a password to install the plugin. If you really really want to try Basket Buster send them an email and they will set things up for you.

Note: I apologize for the slow posting schedule for the last week and a half. Still things are quite busy but should get better and so you can expect a better posting schedule. Thanks for your patience and understanding. Special thanks to those who emailed and asked.

These 5 useful Safari plugins would certainly enhance your browsing experience using Apple Safari.

Firefox is the king when it comes to browser extensibility, no doubt about that. But the bloated feel of Firefox always make me stay away from it as much as I can. And I’m sure people have preference for other browsers too. My next best browser is Apple Safari. Even though it is not the most extendable browser out there it is certainly slick and quick enough to get me the page.

I was on the lookout to find some plugins that could enhance the browsing experience with Safari. And I did find these 5 plugins really help enhance the experience.

Glims

Glims is a very powerful plugin that does quite a lot of interesting things in one package. Instead of me going over each one here is a list of features that Glims support (from the plugin site),

• Adds thumbnails to Google.com search results
• Adds thumbnails to Yahoo.com search results
• Adds search engines to the default Google search tab
• Adds full-screen browsing capability
• Adds Favicons to tab labels
• Adds keyword search from address bar
• Undo “Close Tab” (cmd-z)
• Re-opens last session when Safari starts
• Auto-Closes download window
• Adds new tab position option (right/left/leftmost/rightmost)
• Adds tab closing using middle mouse button
• Focus last selected tab
• Always open links in a new tab
• Type-ahead support (auto cmd-f)
• Sets the focus on the search field when opening a new window
• Adds Amazon’s information banner on Google.com search results
• Adds Amazon’s information banner on Yahoo.com search results
• Adds a “Max Window Size” menu item to resize the Safari window
• Forms autocomplete always on
• Autocomplete search phrase
• Adds bookmark separator
• Adds bookmark actions
• Dated download folders
• Localized to Japanese, French, Polish, German, Spanish, Italian, and Korean

Cooliris

Cooliris is a plugin that brings a whole different experience when it comes to browsing photos and videos from the web or your desktop. Instead of navigating photos page by page Cooliris makes it a seamless experience scrolling through the stream of photos from Facebook, Google Images, YouTube, Flickr, Picasa, Kodak Gallery, or any supported site. It’s a gorgeous plugin to slideshow the pictures from your desktop or the web.

Greasekit

One of the beloved Firefox extension was the ability to extend custom page behaviors using custom scripts (mostly from GreaseMonkey). If you dearly miss the capability in Safari Greasekit is for you. It fills the user scripting hole in Safari.

ClickToFlash

We all know by now that iPad was not well received because of its lack of support for Adobe Flash. That’s at least one of the reasons. Even though Flash is useful in many instances it ruins the browsing experience many times and it’s a resource hog. I dread watching YouTube videos these days as I get scared of seeing the CPU usage graph shoot up and my remaining physical memory goes down to the lower 3 digits. Many people agree to the reason given my one of the iPad engineer for not supporting Flash technology in iPad. If you are one of those who would love to have a way Flash can be disabled on Apple Safari ClickToFlash is for you.

TabExposé

Dealing with many tabs on the browser is always a nightmare. Many times we have to take a guess to look around for the correct tab we wanted to navigate to. At the same time we all love the handiness of Mac’s Exposé feature which displays a great thumbnail preview collage of all open windows. TabExposé does the same for all the open tabs in your Safari browser. If you can’t get rid of the habit of keeping at least 20 tabs open then TabExposé is your best rescue.

I hope these 5 plugins help you have a better browsing experience using Apple Safari browser.

Note: I apologize for the slow week last week here at DemoGeek.com. Got caught up with many other things and don’t want to write something just for the sake of writing that may not be useful to you. So until things settle back, DemoGeek.com would go through a slow posting schedule for the next week or two. Thanks for your understanding.

Quix is an extensible bookmarklet for your browser that makes it easier to do the many tasks that you do everyday using your web browser.

Imagine having a whole bunch of browser bookmarks that you use everyday to do the many mundane tasks that you do using your web browser. At times it would be overwhelming, especially if you don’t have those bookmarks well organized and handy.

Imagine forgetting about all the places in your browser that you have to jump to do the tasks that you have to do and instead imagine a single browser bookmarklet that can take your commands and execute it for you so you can get things done a lot quicker on your browser. That’s exactly what Quix does.

Quix is a simple browser bookmarklet that when invoked can execute simple commands to do the many tasks that you do with your web browser. It understands commands like “g” to search the web using Google, “e” to email a link, “d” to define a word etc.

To start using Quix, first you drag the “Qiux App” bookmarklet to your browser bookmarks (visit their site to see the bookmarklet). If you’d prefer to customize the way your browser handles the bookmarklet you can read more from this page for your particular browser. Quix supports Firefox, Chrome, Safari, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari on your iPhone.

Once you click (or use your browser shortcut keys) on the bookmarklet it’ll launch a small popup window that takes Quix commands. The commands ranges from,

• Basic Commands
• Social Commands
• WordPress Commands
• SEO Commands
• Webmaster Commands
• Quix Commands
• Analytics Commands
• URL Shortening Commands
• App Integration Commands
• Mac Integration Commands

There is a comprehensive list of commands that Quix understands on this page. Here are some interesting commands that I thought is worth mentioning,

• d – define a word using Google
• e – email a link
• f – Flickr search
• g – Google search
• tr – translate the page
• w – Wikipedia search
• db – bookmark the current page in Delicious
• fb – share the current page on Facebook
• tn – tweet the current page
• yt – YouTube search
• plugin – WordPress plugin search
• wp – WordPress function search
• h – header info for the current URL
• seo – quick SEO checkup for the current page
• host – host info for the current domain
• ruler – show a ruler to measure elements in a page
• help – Quix help
• bitly – shorten the URL with Bit.ly
• evernote – clip current page with Evernote

Many of the commands you’ve seen above would involve multiple steps if done manually. With Quix it takes out couple of those repetitive steps and make you get the job done quicker. If you think your needs are not met with the commands that Quix supports (as of now) you can extend Quix commands by following the instructions on this page.

If you’d rather like to watch a video of Quix in action, here is a video that explains in detail.

Overall, Quix looks interesting but the adoption of it will be completely based on the wide variety of commands that Quix can understand. Since we cannot expect everyone to write their own Quix extensions I hope the Quix team pushes out as much commands as they possibly can imagine. Setting up a page to get those command ideas wouldn’t be a bad idea too.

I know Quix will be most loved by those of you who use Terminal or Command window to get anything done on your Mac or PC. For the rest of us if you still find any better usage of Quix please share with us in comments.

QuickNote allows you to take quick notes within the Firefox window as you browse the web.

Quite often we take notes of what we come across when we browse the web. If you are an organized note-taker, using Evernote or OneNote or any of the leading note-taking solutions, by all means go for it. I don’t want to interrupt the workflow that you are very used to with those tools. But if you are not a heavy note-taker but instead would love a simple solution to take notes while you browse then I would like to introduce you to QuickNote.

QuickNote is a Firefox extension that allows you to take notes as you browse through the web pages. It is a simple text-only window that can either be docked as a floating window, or a sidebar window in your browser or a tab within the browser. Once docked it sits there quietly waiting for you to scribble it with notes. The notes can be saved to plain simple text files which gives you flexibility over what you do with those files.

If you are convinced that QuickNote might be something you wanted to give it a try, head over to the Firefox Add-ons website, download and install the add-on. Once installed you might want to tweak some simple settings to make sure it meet your needs.

Go into “Tools” > “QuickNote” > “Settings“.

On the “Main” settings tab, you can customize where you want QuickNote to send the selected text to, Number of note tabs and when you invoke QuickNote how do you want it to load, either as a Sidebar, Floating Window or a Tab.

On the “User Files” tab, you can specify the text file where you want the notes to be saved to. Think about the flexibility this would give you if you are to take the text file and do something with it.

As its name implies the “Customization” tab allows you to customize the look and feel of the QuickNote window itself. You can even define custom CSS styles for the window.

On the “Advanced” tab, you can set the file encoding option and the auto-save settings.

You don’t have to set all these settings but you might surely want to specify the text file where you want to save the notes to, over at the “User Files” tab.

Once done, invoke QuickNote either as a sidebar, tab or a floating window and you should be able to scribble notes on to it as you come across interesting information while to browse the web.

I hope you find QuickNote an useful extension to your Firefox browser. I’ve already started to use this extension quite extensively. I do use Evernote big time but I felt QuickNote is a bit handier as it sits closer to the browser and I don’t have to switch to another application to save my notes. But I do reconcile the notes with Evernote for the notes that are going to live for a while. So even if you use Evernote or OneNote you might still find QuickNote useful. Give it a try.

Hyperwords browser extension enhances the browser context menu and adds much more useful information.

All modern browsers has quite a lot of useful information packed into their context menus (the menu that pops-up when you right-click on a web page) but nothing comes closer to what Hyperwords provides.

Hyperwords is a browser extension that brings so much choices to the right-click context menu. You don’t have to leave the context you were in to research on a selected word or sentence. It punches in a variety choices for you to search, reference, shop, share, copy and translate text all from within the context menu. It is quite rich in features that would make you not even think of leaving the page you are in to research about a certain word, sentence or topic.

If things are not fitting to your need you can hit the Hyperwords “Settings” page where you can customize quite a lot of its default settings including the layout, pop-up, toolbar, localization, conversion, services, views, command cache and backup.

The best thing to note about this plugin is that it tries to avoid as much as possible not to take you out of the context you are in. The plugin is available for Mozilla Firefox versions 5.6.5 & 6.0 Beta. It is also available for Google Chrome.

Install Hyperwords browser extension.

Use this simple technique to increase the standard download limit on Internet Explorer 8.

To effectively use your available bandwidth most modern day browsers enforce a limit on concurrent downloads. Internet Explorer 8, for its share, enforces a limit of only allowing 2 concurrent downloads at a time. What that means is that you have to wait till any of the two downloads finish to start another download.

This is well and good if you have a slow internet connection. But if you have a high-speed internet connection and if you know your bandwidth limitations and such, sometimes, it might be useful to increase that download limit. To your rescue, Microsoft makes it a lot easier to increase the download limit.

Just visit this page http://support.microsoft.com/Default.aspx?kbid=282402 and click on the “Fix it” button.

Follow the installation wizard to complete the installation and your Internet Explorer 8 would then be able to allow you to download 10 concurrent downloads. Yes, that true, the wizard only allows you to make a one time change to allow a fixed number of 10 parallel downloads. The number must have been fixed to reduce the abuse but still help a few, that’s just my thought.

So, if you are a fan of Internet Explorer 8 or has been forced to use IE8 (at work) why not make use of this simple hack to get the most out of your downloads?

In this article let’s see how you can make use of add-ons in Internet Explorer 8, find custom add-ons, how to manage them and also how to diagnose issues with it.

According to Wikipedia,

An add-on is an optional computer hardware or software component that, if installed, significantly supplements or enhances the functionality of the original unit.

Add-ons (similar to plug-ins) certainly enhances the core functionality of Internet Explorer 8. IE8 comes with some default add-ons like Accelerators and Web Slices and you can also add custom accelerators that you see fit.

Accelerators

Accelerators, as its name implies, helps you accelerate some of the common actions that you take when you select a text in a web page. It does that by showing a little icon as soon as you select a text in a web page and when you roll your mouse over the icon shows you a context menu with some of the common actions that you can take with the selected text.

Web Slices

Web Slices allows you to add a piece of a web page to your Favorites Bar and helps you keep an eye on the updates to that portion of the web page. It is a convenient way of keeping track of tidbits of web page content.

Custom Accelerators

Even though Internet Explorer 8 comes with some default accelerators (as you can see above) you can add custom accelerators from IEAddons. Apart from accelerators you can also find other add-ons such as web slices, visual searches and plug-ins at IEAddons.com.

IEAddons Gallery might not be as comprehensive as Firefox Add-ons gallery but it still has a huge collection of custom add-ons on these categories,

• Blogging
• Bookmarks
• Dictionaries and References
• Email
• Finance
• Mapping
• Music
• News
• Photos and Videos
• Search
• Sharing
• Shopping
• Social Networking
• Toolbars
• Translation
• Travel
• Weather
• Other

Manage Add-ons

As with any good thing comes a bad thing, it’s quite easy to keep adding all these add-ons which then would become an overhead to manage. Internet Explorer 8 provides a way to manage these add-ons.

Click on the “Tools” menu and then click on the “Manage Add-ons” option. The dialog that pops-up displays quite a lot of information about the available add-ons. The list of add-ons it displays include,

• Toolbars and Extensions
• Search Providers
• Accelerators
• InPrivate Filtering

You can select the add-on from the list to see more information about the add-on and also you can enable or disable add-ons using the above dialog.

Diagnose Add-on Issues

Once you start adding more and more add-ons it could possibly slow down Internet Explorer or can sometime give so much trouble even launching it. When you run into a scenario like that you can run Internet Explorer without add-ons (by disabling all add-ons).

You can create an IE shortcut with a command line switch of “-extoff” that will disable all installed add-ons when launching Internet Explorer.

Locate “Internet Explorer” item on your Start > All Programs menu and right-click on it to get to the Properties dialog. On the Target box where you see the path to “iexplore.exe” add an empty space and then append “-extoff” to the end. Hit the OK button to dismiss the dialog and from now on when you launch Internet Explorer it will launch without add-ons.

If you are not feeling comfortable doing it this way and if you know how to create an Internet Explorer shortcut on your desktop you can set “-extoff” on the shortcut’s Properties dialog. With this way you leave the primary Internet Explorer shortcut as it is and you can use the extension-less shortcut if you want to diagnose issues with IE.

If you don’t like to keep these shortcuts adjusted you can also just type-in “iexplore -extoff” at the “Search Programs and Files” box at the Start menu.

Use whatever way you prefer to launch Internet Explorer without the add-ons and you’ll gain access to the bare-bones IE that you can use to diagnose the misbehaving add-on. You can start enabling one add-on at a time to identify the problem add-on and can then decisively remove the problem add-on.

Conclusion

Internet Explorer add-ons surely adds value to the browser, no doubt about it. You could feel the usefulness of them once you really start to leverage them in your day-to-day browsing. Along with the tools to manage and diagnose issues with the add-ons, on top of the add-on marketplace at IEAdddons.com, I think Internet Explorer add-ons are something you definitely want to give it a try.

If you find any other use of it or if you find any issues IE add-ons in general please share with us on comments.

Pin Tab for Firefox helps you deal with tabs on Firefox better.

The latest version of Google Chrome introduced a very nice feature to handle tabs, it helps you pin a tab to a fixed position along with shrinking it to just its FavIcon. It gives you more space to handle more tabs along with reducing the tab clutter.

Now, Firefox has got the same capability with Pin Tab.

Install Pin Tab add-on from the official Firefox add-on site. As you can see, it’s an experimental add-on so install it at your own risk (basically none!).

Before using Pin Tab it might be worth giving the Pin Tab Options a visit. It lets you customize the shortcut key to use Pin Tab along with few other options.

You can either use the shortcut key or you can right-click on the tab and use the "Pin Tab" option.

Once installed and activated your pinned Firefox tabs will look like the above image. It looks like there is a bug with using Pin Tab on Mac OSX. The tabs seem to be not aligned properly (I hope the developer fix it soon). The above image is a sample from a Windows based Firefox install.

Overall, Pin Tab is a very helpful add-on to handle the many tabs we tend to keep open in Firefox.

Make the backspace key not take you back a page in Firefox.

Modern day browsers make the backspace key act as a key that can take you back a page in your browser. But with the heavy usage of that key already in action on many web forms and any other typing needs it would make more sense to disable the default behavior of the backspace key in your browser to act just like a backspace key when it comes to text editing.

Follow these simple instructions to disable the backspace key’s default behavior of taking you back a page in your browser.

Type "about:config" in Firefox.

Click on the "I’ll be careful, I promise" button to continue.

Type-in "browser.backspace_action" on the Filter box.

When the filtered entry show up double-click on the entry and change the value from 0 to 2.

Close out all the dialogs and from now on Firefox won’t treat the backspace key as a back button on your browser.

Camino browser release candidate packs some nice upgrades.

Mozilla Firefox’s light-weight cousin for Mac, Camino browser, got some nice upgrades with the 2.0 release candidate.

Here are some of the features that comes with the 2.0 release candidate version,

• Phishing and Malware Protection: Camino 2.0 Beta 4 includes phishing and malware protection based on Google Safe Browsing.
• Full Content Zoom: The scale increment used by full content zoom has been reduced to provide smoother zooming. There is also a new Zoom Text Only item in the View menu to toggle the zoom keyboard shortcuts between full content zoom and larger or smaller text.
• Software Update: When quitting for an automatic update, Camino will now save and restore pages that were open before quitting regardless of whether the “Load the pages that were open before quitting” preference is enabled.
• Updated Appearance: The tab bar, Bookmark Bar, and folder icons now better match the appearance of Mac OS X 10.5 and newer.

Since this is not a stable version it has its own known issues as well,

• Delete no longer functions as a keyboard shortcut for Back.
• Scroll bars will appear active at all times.
• If “Ask me before accepting each cookie” is checked, Camino will display a cookie dialog for each cookie request from a web page.
• Camino no longer supports Shockwave Player 10 and older; to display Shockwave content, install Shockwave Player 11 or newer.
• Version 2.2 of the Flip4Mac (F4M) plug-in for displaying Windows Media content causes major rendering issues in Camino. The Flip4Mac team has fixed this problem in version 2.2.1.11 of the plug-in.
• After visiting enough pages with Flash content while browsing, Camino may stop functioning correctly. Quitting and re-launching Camino will resolve the problem. This behavior is caused by a bug in the Flash plug-in and is fixed in version 10.0 of the plug-in.
• Some versions of the third-party add-on 1Password are not compatible with Camino. These versions can cause Camino to crash on launch, hang when importing bookmarks, and hang when pasting into the location bar. Make sure that you are running the latest version of 1Password, and if you continue to experience issues, disable 1Password’s integration with Camino and contact 1Password support.

Download Camino browser 2.0 Release Candidate.

InvisibleHand Firefox extension recommends the best price for anything that you shop online to help you shop better.

Of the bazillion Firefox extensions only a few stands out and provide true value. One of that extension could be InvisibleHand.

When you shop online how would you make sure you get the best price available. Sure, you can visit different online retailers and can compare the price manually. Or you can use some of the price comparison sites such as PriceGrabber.com and find the best price available.

Well, as you might realize that’s a bit involved process and certain price comparison websites can only recommend prices for certain type of products. On the other hand, InvisibleHand, a tiny Firefox add-on, waits on your browser for you to shop online and recommends you of the best price available to help you shop better.

When you view a product online it pops-up (non-intrusive) an infolet to let you know of the best price available online for that product. It even let you see the other retailers that it compares against along with the prices they offer for the product without you leaving the browser or navigating to another website.

Let’s walk-thru a sample scenario where I have the InvisibleHand Firefox add-on installed and pretending that I’m looking for a PC Memory module. Using Firefox I visit Amazon.com and search for the memory module that I need. I was told a price of $36.60.

Without the add-on I would have went ahead and placed an order but with the trusted InvisibleHand add-on installed I wait for it to do the job and there comes the pop-up. To my surprise InvisibleHand suggested that I can save 48% by purchasing the same from NewEgg.com.

If you look towards the right side of the pop-up you could see 2 buttons, “View this item on…” and “View other retailers“.

For some reason, let’s say you don’t prefer to shop at NewEgg.com. Instead of cutting you off right there or forcing you to shop at NewEgg.com InvisibleHand on the other hand helps you still shop better by providing you with a list of other retailers who are offering the same product which it used on its comparison. As you could see that it conveniently lists the retailers in terms of their price offering…pretty neat!

Since I see the price being less on NewEgg.com I clicked on the “View this item on Newegg.com” button. I was taken to the NewEgg.com site and the price was $18.99, fair enough!

Wait, it gets interesting from here. While I was looking at the page, in a few seconds, InvisibleHand pops open another infolet and told me that the price is even cheaper at Buy.com.

With 19% further discount that seemed to be a steal and so I clicked on the “View this item on Buy.com” button.

As expected, InvisibleHand loaded the Buy.com page where I saw the final price of that memory module (as of this writing) being $15.37 after discounts. With the satisfaction and confidence of finding the lowest price I can, without me doing much, I went ahead and placed an order.

Just before I placed the order I thought why not check out the price for the same at PriceGrabber.com. Well, it turned out to be that I would have paid more if I must have used just PriceGrabber.com to base my comparison on.

Isn’t that a cool extension on your book if you shop online much? On top of saving time InvisibleHand can make you feel confident that you found the best price you could find from those trusted retailers.

With all the convenience it offers I do find an inconvenience factor, why not show me THE BEST price right on the first pass itself rather than asking me to jump to NewEgg.com in between (affiliate?). That’s just one gripe that I have but wouldn’t put it in a complainy-way.

Overall, InvisibleHand is one of those few Firefox add-ons that makes a clear difference and I’m sure this will get better from here. If you find other uses of InsivibleHand or if you have any personal InvisibleHand experience that is worth sharing with others please do so on comments.

Visit InvisibleHand website at GetInvisibleHand.com

Install InvisibleHand Firefox add-on to shop better.

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Free Download, Shopping, Shop Better, Find Best Price, InvisibleHand, Firefox, Firefox add-on, Firefox Extension, Best Shopping

NotAwesome Firefox Add-on can hide a site from the AwesomeBar list.

Earlier we’ve mentioned about how to disable the Awesome Bar on Firefox 3. Sometimes you might find the Awesome Bar useful but want certain websites to not show up when you use the Awesome Bar to search.

NotAwesome Firefox Add-on can make sure certain websites don’t show up on the Awesome Bar on Firefox.

Install NotAwesome Firefox add-on from Mozilla Add-ons.

Once you restart Firefox you can make any website from not showing up on the Awesome Bar by clicking on the bookmark button and then choosing the “Hide from AwesomeBar Searches” option.

Once you do that Firefox won’t show those specific sites on the AwesomeBar list.

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Firefox, How To, Firefox Add-on, NotAwesome, AwesomeBar

Integrated Gmail Firefox extension brings all your favorite Google services to Gmail.

If you use Gmail, Google Calendar, Google News and the other Google services a lot then you might surely love this Firefox extension.

Integrated Gmail is a nice little Firefox extension that brings all (or most) of your favorite Google services to your Gmail page. Once you configure to tell the extension what services do you need in one page it does a pretty neat job of laying out one service after the other on your Gmail page.

It doesn’t stop there. The developers must have cleverly thought about this scenario. Since Gmail boasts those sidebar for navigation and chat and what not, it’s sometimes a screen space that’s not properly used. So the extension allows you to get rid of those sidebars. This would be particularly helpful when you use Google News or Reader or other services that would look better on a full screen.

Start by downloading the Integrated Gmail extension from Mozilla Add-ons site.

Once installed you might have to restart Firefox. Once done, it would be better to configure the extension to suite your need than to compromise with the defaults that it comes with.

Click on “Tools” and then on the “Add-ons” menu. Once on the “Add-ons” dialog locate “Integrated Gmail 2.0.1” (your version number might vary) and then click on the “Preferences” button.

On the Integrated Gmail Options dialog you could see a bunch of options. The most interesting and useful being the “Element Selection” section. You might see “Mail”, “Reader” and “Calendar” options listed there.

If you use other Google services then click on the “Add” button to add new services to the list.

You can arrange it using the arrow buttons below. On to the right-side you can see couple more options that’s mostly to make the extension fit to your needs. Choose the ones that make sense to you.

Once done and when you dismiss all the open dialogs, refresh your Gmail page and you should be able to see the Integrated Gmail extension in play. You can collapse and expand the services that you like to avoid long scrolling.

If you could notice there is a green arrow that’s stacked on the top-right-side, bottom-left-side and at the bottom-right-side. Those arrows helps you get rid of the header and sidebar spaces. You can always reclaim those spaces by clicking on the buttons again.

I was just so impressed with this extension because of the fact that I don’t have to load those many different tabs to get to all my favorite Google services. Of course, it comes with a price that you might incur a minor performance penalty. On my tests it wasn’t noticeable much but depending on the connection speed that you have you might experience. But given the usefulness it’s up to you if you can trade-off the minor performance penalty for the handiness that this extension brings in.

I hope you liked the Integrated Gmail extension for Firefox. If you find any other use of this or if you have any comments on this please share it with us on the comment section below.

Download Integrated Gmail Firefox extension.

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Firefox, Integrated Gmail, Google Apps

Simple trick to add Twitter Search to the Firefox Search Box.

If you are a heavy Twitter user then you might prefer to have that convenient access to Twitter on pretty much all the places, including your Firefox browser. Why not? Firefox, at its browser level, supports search capabilities using its Search Box (on the top right side of the browser usually).

As you know, Twitter Search is a powerful tool. But by default, Firefox doesn’t support Twitter Search on its Search Box. Why not bring your favorite Twitter Search to the Firefox Search Box? It’s just ridiculously easy.

Just visit “http://search.twitter.com” using your Firefox browser. Once on the site click on the Firefox Search Box dropdown arrow. You’ll see an option to “Add Twitter Search” to the search engines. Click on it to add Twitter Search to Firefox Search Box.

Once done, you should be able to see that there is a new option available at the Search Box “Twitter Search“.

Choose “Twitter Search” if you use a lot of search on Twitter. It’s just damn convenient, you just type-in what you want to search on Twitter and it does the job perfectly.

I hope you find this useful. If you have any questions/comments please share with us on comments below.

Technorati Tags:
Firefox, Firefox Customization, How To, Twitter, Firefox Search

Google Chrome Beta allows you to customize the look and feel.

Google Chrome is a great browser with some creative innovations baked right-into the browser along with the built-in super-speed Javascript engine. Along with missing plugins management, the only other thing that’s (majorly) missing was the ability to customize the browser to have a different look.

With Google Chrome Beta (Google Chrome 3.0.195.3 and above) you can apply themes to customize the Google Chrome browser. There are around 29 different themes available at this point of time and you can expect it to grow further and get cleaner. Right now, it looks like some of the themes are pretty silly. Having said that, there are some themes that brings you a different feel when using the browser.

Select the theme you wish to try and click on the “Apply this Theme” button.

Chrome will ask you to save the “.crx” file. Save it to any location, it doesn’t matter.

Once saved, Chrome will apply the theme and will acknowledge the change.

There are a total of 29 themes available at this time. Of those 29 I liked these themes,

What are your favorite Google Chrome themes? Please share your thoughts in comments.

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Google, Google Chrome, Chrome Themes, Themes

Change the default mail client of Firefox to Gmail.

If you use Firefox as your preferred browser and Gmail as your email client then you must have found it convenient if Firefox can launch Gmail when you click on any mailto: links. By default Firefox knows nothing about Gmail and so when you click on a link it opens up the default mail client that’s associated with the system, Mail, Entourage, Outlook etc.

So how do you make Firefox launch Gmail instead when you click on any mailto: links? Simple, just customize Firefox to make it use Gmail as the default mail client.

Go to Firefox > Preferences and then navigate to the “Applications” tab. Scroll down to locate the “mailto” entry. Whatever you see on the “Action” column for the “mailto” entry just change that to “Use Gmail“. Close out of the dialogs and go ahead and click on any mailto: links. You should see that it now opens up Gmail’s Compose window for you to conveniently send emails. Isn’t that a simple tweak for a pretty annoying problem?

Technorati Tags:
How To, Firefox, Gmail, Firefox Customization

GButts brings all the Google services under one Firefox button.

With so many Google services out there it becomes (or it will become once Google expands to many territories) harder to keep track of all the Google services that you make use of every day.

Not anymore! If you use Firefox as your web browser GButts Firefox add-on can help you get to your favorite Google services with a click of a button on the Firefox toolbar.

Go ahead and download the GButts Firefox extension from Firefox add-ons site and restart Firefox to get the extension usable.

Once restarted, you might want to head over to the Firefox Add-ons dialog to configure GButts to use the various different Google services that GButts support and also to configure the way GButts play with Firefox. Select the “GButts” item and click on the “Preferences” button.

On the GButts Settings page click on the Google Services that you use or interested to quickly get to it. Make sure to uncheck the services that you don’t want to be listed on the GButts toolbar or menu.

Choose the way GButts buttons should be shown, as a toolbar or as a dropdown menu. Also, choose the orientation and the tab behavior to suit your preference. Once done hit the Ok button.

Still, you might not see the GButts button anywhere on your Firefox browser. Don’t panic. It’s just hiding behind for you to explore. You have to customize the toolbar to drag the GButts button to the toolbar. If you are using a Mac then click on the “View” and then “Toolbar” and then “Customize…” menu option.

Now you should be able to see “GButts Toolbar” as one of the item available for you to drag to the toolbar.

Do it (drag the button to the Firefox toolbar) and you’ll now have access to the one-click convenience to all your Google services.

GButts is a simple concept but can help you save some clicks and frustrations if you use a lot of Google services (which I do).

Technorati Tags:
Firefox, Google, GButts, Firefox Extension, Firefox Addon, Google Services

Top 5 reasons why I like Apple’s Safari browser.

Firefox, no doubt, tops the list of browsers I use everyday. Given all the usefulness of Firefox and its sleuth of extensions and themes it’s a bit harder to take it off of my top list.

The only turn-off with Firefox is the bloated feeling when you use the browser. It’s understandable that with all those add-ons you would get the feel of weight but sometimes it goes beyond the threshold to keep it aside for other light-weight feeling browsers.

On the second from top is Apple’s Safari browser. Even though it doesn’t have that many extendability features it still feels cool to me to use the browser for most of the tasks. But to keep up with the intention of this post I’ll share some of the best 5 reasons I use Safari everyday.

Text Rendering

Of all the features I like the most with Safari is its text rendering. The fonts look pretty nice when you use Safari. That of course improves the readability factor considerably. I’m sure there are people who might complain about the text rendering of Safari but I LIKE IT!

Top Sites

Of all the browsers out there with Top Sites (or similar in feature) I like the way Safari has done the Top Sites. It makes you use the Top Sites feature than any other browsers. If you don’t know much about Safari you can read to understand how Top Sites on Safari can improve your browsing experience.

Bookmarks Cover Flow

Bookmarks on Safari can be viewed using the Mac specific Cover Flow technology that gives you a better visual of the bookmarks and can help ease the navigation of bookmarks if you have tons of bookmarks.

Web Clip on Dashboard

With this less-used feature you can basically bring a portion of a website to the Dashboard. Think of it as Web Slices on the new Internet Explorer 8. It makes more sense to have these web clips on the Dashboard as widgets. Some people might find it useful, some people might not. I have couple of web clips that I find it useful to just have a peek at it at the Dashboard itself.

Web Inspector

It is not Firebug, no way closer to what Firebug on Firefox offers but still a decent inspector to find out about what’s happening and how it’s been done. It has a little Javascript Debugger and also a Console for you to execute commands.

Of all the things I like about Apple Safari the two things that stands out is the font rendering and the lightweight feel of using it. I’m sure you’ll have you own feature-sets that you might like on Safari. If you have some let us know in comments.

Technorati Tags:
Browser, Apple Safari, Safari

Use this trick to temporarily patch a JavaScript vulnerability on Firefox 3.5.

Firefox 3.5 is great, particularly for its performance. The new JIT Compiler that ships with Firefox 3.5 makes executing JavaScript code a snap and is a main contributor to the performance improvements you see on Firefox 3.5.

Unfortunately, the JIT Compiler that shipped with Firefox 3.5 has a bug which can be exploited by a hacker to execute code that you are not supposed to.

Of course, Mozilla is working on this bug and is planning to issue a patch within the next 2 weeks.

In the mean time, if you are concerned and wanted to make sure your computer is not compromised you can make this simple settings change to close the back door temporarily.

Launch Firefox 3.5 browser and type-in “about:config” on the Address Bar and press Enter.

Click thru the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button on the Warranty page.

On the Filter Box type-in “jit“. Firefox will filter the entries down to “javascript.options.jit.content“.

Double click on “javascript.options.jit.content” to change the value to “false“.

Restart the browser and the JIT Compiler is less exploitable now.

Remember this trick is not the final fix for this issue as this trick makes the JIT Compiler perform a lot slower and that’s not acceptable for the claim of Firefox 3.5 being super fast.

Make Firefox 3.5 start faster on Windows with this simple trick.

With the many advantages of Firefox 3.5 it is worth upgrading to Firefox 3.5. For Windows users there is an open bug that makes Firefox 3.5 to start really slow on certain instances.

Basically, given the way Windows keeps track of history information, once your Windows temporary folders build up Firefox 3.5 takes more time to load than normal.

How do we make Firefox 3.5 start faster? Simple, just clean up these folders.

On Windows Vista or Windows 7 systems,

C:\Users\username\Local Settings\History
C:\Users\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
C:\Users\username\My Recent Documents
C:\Users\username\Temp\

On Windows XP,

C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\History
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
C:\Documents and Settings\username\My Recent Documents
C:\Documents and Settings\username\Temp\

Replace “username” on the above path with the actual username of the user logged-in.

You can also setup Firefox to cleanup these folders automatically when exiting. But if you use both Firefox and Internet Explorer then IE might keep those folders bulky and you might want to do the above cleanup anyways.

The other option is to write a batch file to cleanup these folders if you don’t want to do this manually,


del /s /q %TEMP%\*.*
del /s /q %TMP%\*.*
del /s /q %SystemDrive%\temp\*.*
REM del /s /q %SystemDrive%\tmp\*.*
del /s /q %windir%\prefetch\*.*
del /s /q %windir%\Temp\*.*
pause


Just save the above to a .BAT file and execute it at your convenience or schedule it to run at some interval.

I’m sure this bug would be fixed in the near future but in the mean you can use these tricks to speedup Firefox 3.5 to startup faster.

Turn off the location awareness feature of Firefox 3.5 with this simple hack.

One of the many features of Firefox 3.5 is that it can be location-aware and by that what it means is, a website can be aware of your location of physically where you are. They figure out your location based on your IP address and the nearby wireless access point coordinates/information.

If you are concerned about your privacy and don’t want to share your physical location with anyone else you can disable the location-aware feature of Firefox 3.5 with this simple hack.

Launch Firefox 3.5 and type-in “about:config” at the Awesome/Address Bar and press Enter.

As usual, Firefox 3.5 tries to scare you with a warranty void prank message. Just click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button. If you don’t want to see this message again you can uncheck the “Show this warning next time” checkbox. If you don’t know what you are tinkering with Firefox 3.5 then you might want to read thru this message and be cautious as doing things erratic from now on will have severe consequences in your ability to use Firefox.

Once in the about:config page type-in “geo.enabled” at the Filter box. Firefox will filter the entries down to “geo.enabled” and you should be able to see that the location-aware feature is enabled by looking at the value being “true”.

Either double-click or right-click and choose “Toggle” to flip the value to “false“.

Once done, restart Firefox and you should now be least concerned about your privacy being exposed with the location-aware feature of Firefox 3.5.

Technorati Tags:
Browser, Firefox, Firefox 3.5, How To, Firefox 3.5 Feature

Apple does Top Sites the correct way in Apple Safari 4.

With the many news at its WWDC event yesterday Apple hit a milestone with its Safari browser. Safari 4 Beta was out there for the risk-taking public for a while now to try.

It was pretty impressive in pretty much all the aspects, look and feel, performance, reliability, standards compliance etc. It even adopted a Google Chrome’ish window bar with tabs pushed all the way up to the title bar.

When Apple took Safari 4 out of beta that UI change was gone and it was reverted back to almost the old look. But the performance is pretty impressive (at least with the high-speed FiOS internet connection).

Top Sites is another feature that Apple pretty much took it from Google Chrome but made it better. Instead of a blank look, the Top Sites on Safari have the touch of Apple’s UI magic. It even allows you to edit the top sites so that you can pin your favorite sites so you won’t lose those sites from Top Sites.

Click on the Edit button on the Top Sites page (at bottom left). Safari will put the Top Sites page on Edit mode where you can clear a Site Preview from Top Sites or you can pin a Site Preview so that it stays there for easy access. The blue push-pin indicates that those site previews are pinned. When you close a site preview, another website from your browsing history will show up on the site preview.

If you happen to pin too many websites then you might run into screen real estate issue. After all, by default, Top Sites has only 4×3 site previews. So if you happen to pin too many websites and need more space you can use the “Small”, “Medium” and “Large” tabs at the bottom right of the page to adjust the number of site previews on the Top Sites page.

A “smaller” Top Sites page can display 6×4 = 24 site previews whereas a “medium” Top Sites page can only display 4×3 = 12 site previews. As you must have guessed by now, a “large” Top Sites page can merely display only 3×2 = 6 site previews.

At times, Top Sites “site preview” images might be out of sync, wrong preview or entirely missing. When that happens Apple provides a convenient way to update the site previews with the latest preview images. Just click on the “View” menu and then the “Update Preview Images” option. Safari 4 will take a while to update the preview images and the menu option of “Stop Updating Preview Images” confirms that.

Overall, I feel Apple did add some nice features to the Top Sites concept. It may not be a day-to-day useful feature but certainly can help enhance the browsing experience. If you have any questions or comments regarding this please let us know in comments.

Since Top Sites is a feature that’s pretty much available on most of the recent browsers, which browser, from your perspective, has done the Top Sites better? Please share your thoughts.

Technorati Tags:
Browser, How To, Safari, Safari 4, Top Sites

Opera 10 Beta allows you to configure the number of websites available to you on Speed Dial page.

It has become one of the basic requirements of a modern day web browser to have some sort of page from where you can quickly get into your favorite web sites.

Opera 10 Beta is no exception and they call it Speed Dial. By default, Speed Dial has the number of web sites set at 3 x 3 which is 9 sites. Other browsers doesn’t allow to change the number of pages displayed on the Speed Dial (call it different on different browsers) page. Opera 10 Beta does allow you to change the number of pages displayed on the Speed Dial page.

And it is pretty simple and straight forward. Click on the New Tab (menu or tab bar icon) and when on the Speed Dial page look for an option “Configure Speed Dial” at the bottom of the page.

Clicking on it will give you a dialog where you can set the number of pages based on your preference, monitor size etc. You can even disable Speed Dial if you don’t like the small time lag when you open a new tab with Speed Dial.

Technorati Tags:
Browser, How To, Opera

Opera 10 Beta’s Turbo Mode loads web pages faster than ever on slower networks.

Opera released its Opera 10 Beta browser and it has some pretty neat features along with an interface revamp. The most talked about are,

Opera Turbo

“Using state-of-the-art compression technology, Opera Turbo unclogs your connection so you can get to your content. Opera Turbo easily delivers 3x to 4x the speed of slower connections and can offer broadband-like speeds on dial-up.”

Visual Tabs

“Drag the handle underneath the tabs to reveal thumbnails of your open Web pages. With visual tabs it is easy and fast to get an overview of all your open tabs and their contents.”

Customizable Speed Dial

“Choose between 4 to 25 favorite Web sites for quick access every time you open a new tab. You can even add a custom background so you feel right at home.”

Of these, the most interesting is the Opera Turbo feature that makes web pages load faster on slower networks. As quoted, it uses some sort of a compression technology to speed-up page downloads. The net result is 3 to 4 times faster page load performance on slower network connections.

Opera 10 Beta doesn’t come with Opera Turbo turned on. Follow these steps to turn on Opera Turbo feature on a Mac.

Download Opera 10 Beta

Download and install Opera 10 Beta.

Open Opera Turbo

Click on the dashboard icon at the bottom left on the browser window.

That will open up a page that gives you some information on Opera Turbo mode.

Now when you browse some web page you’ll be able to notice Opera Turbo in action. In the above screenshot it indicates that it’s making the page download 3 times faster than normal connection.

Configure Opera Turbo

You can configure Opera Turbo mode by right-clicking on the Opera Turbo icon and choosing “Configure Turbo…”.

Opera will open up Opera Turbo Settings dialog and in that you can force it to enable Turbo mode all the time or you can set it to go automatic.

Opera Turbo mode would certainly come in handy for those who are on slower network connections. Since it’s in Beta I can’t tell for sure how much it improves the page download performance but I hope it sure does some improvement.

If you notice any explicit speed improvements or if you have any questions regarding this please let us know in comments.

Download Opera 10 Beta.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Browser, Opera, Opera Turbo

Use this simple trick to change the default search engine on IE6.

TechCrunch reported earlier that Bing.com is being forced on to Windows users, particularly the ones who use Internet Explorer 6. Any attempts to change the default search engine results in an error.

Even though Bing.com seems to perform better in terms of search it still is the young kid in the town and it has to be time tested before you might trust it with all your searches.

Until then, if you still wanted to continue using Google as your default search provider on Internet Explorer 6 then all you have to do is to go into,

Tools > Internet Options > Security > Restricted Sites tab. Then add “bing.com” (and “www.bing.com”) to the list of restricted sites.

Now Internet Explorer 6 can get rid of the forced-upon Bing.com and can use Google as the default search engine.

Technorati Tags:
How To, Windows, Internet Explorer, Bing.com

A simple way to resolve a Gmail Self Redirection bug.

When I tried to logout of my Gmail account on Safari today I ended up facing a bug (I loosely call it a bug) in Gmail that for some reason it redirects to itself and so it never signs-out.

Instead Safari complained about too many redirects and stopped displaying the page. After a bit of trial and error I got that resolved. Here is how,

With the Safari browser open click on the “Develop” menu and then click on the “Disable Caches” option.

Close the browser and relaunch it and I got it resolved that way. Later on, if course, I enabled the Cache.

I hope you don’t face this issue ever but in case if you do I hope this helps in some way.

Technorati Tags:
Gmail, How To, Safari

GCal Popup allows you to access Google Calendar from Firefox Status Bar.

If you are a heavy Google Calendar user you might really like this. I used to dedicate a tab in Firefox for Google Calendar so I can get to it any time. The problem is that I might not need the calendar all the time but I might check the calendar any time. Dedicating a tab for this is acceptable but not preferable.

Now I can make Google Calendar available on Firefox Status Bar with GCal Popup. When I click on the GCal Popup icon it overlays the Firefox browser with a Google Calendar page. Once I’m done with the calendering work I can just dismiss the overlay, given the fact that it’s available any time for me to get to.

Start by installing GCal Popup.

Since GCal Popup is an experimental add-on you might want to make sure that you check the “Let me install this experimental add-on” option. There is no harm in installing experimental add-ons. It might just be a bit unstable at times (may be not, for the most part) but if you are okay with it then proceed further.

Once installed you should be able to see a calendar icon on your Firefox Status Bar (a small Calendar icon as you can see 2nd from left on the screenshot above).

Click on the Calendar icon and GCal Popup will overlay your Firefox browser with a neat little Google Calendar page. It’s a full-fledged page where you can do pretty much of all what you do with Google Calendar.

Go ahead and enjoy the new convenience. If you have any questions/comments regarding GCal Popup please let us know in comments.

GCal Popup.

Tree Style Tabs gives you a different perspective in dealing with tabs in Firefox.

I don’t know about you but I have a habit of opening too many tabs in my Firefox browser. Well, it’s no harm to the machine (if you have enough RAM sticks installed) but it certainly is not a pleasing experience to deal with those many tabs. Often times we won’t even know from where we opened a new tab. The default tab setup in Firefox is simply not the best, it might get the job done, but certainly not the best.

Tree Style Tabs is a Firfox extension that gives you a whole lot of different experience when dealing with tabs. As its name reflects it organizes tabs in a treeview structure (as you can see on the left side of the screenshot), so it’s neatly organized and gives you drill-down capabilities. If you don’t like the way it works TreeViewTabs can be configured to suit your needs.

Download and install Tree Style Tabs from Firefox add-ons site. This involves a restart and so restart Firefox to get the add-on enabled. You might get surprised that you don’t notice any tree views on the left side of the Firefox window.

Well, that’s because Tree Style Tabs kicks-in only when you visit a website. Try visiting any website and you’ll see Tree Style Tabs open a Firefox sidebar with the tab laid out. The usefulness of Tree Style Tabs starts from here.

You’ll be able to notice that as you open news websites the default tab strip across the browser is gone and is replaced with the sidebar tabs. As you open more and sites from the same website you might notice that Tree Style Tabs neatly organizes the tabs as child of the current tab and the more fantastic feature is that it allows you to expand/collapse the set of tabs as you do it in a Tree View.

Then when you open a totally new tab it knows where to place the tab and it does a good job of placing the tab at the parent level. As you drill down to the links on the subsequent websites Tree Style Tabs keeps the tab structure also drilled-down.

If you don’t like the way Tree Style Tabs performs the tab organization you can tweak the behavior under Preferences. The sections of interest would be the “Links” and “Action for entering URI to the location bar”.

Once you start using it, I’m sure, you’ll absolutely like the pretty usefulness of Tree Style Tabs add-on. If you find it useful in any different ways please let us know in comments. As usual if you have any questions regarding Tree Style Tabs please let us in comments as well.

Readability bookmarklet strips a web page to just plain text so you can read better.

Browsing not allowed or encouraged at work? Would like to still browse but wanted to not show up that you are browsing? How about reducing all the colorful and flashy advertisements and media contents that confirms that you are browsing, even from a mile away?

Readability is a simple bookmarklet that converts a web page into a simple text page. You drag a simple bookmarklet into your web browser bookmarks and every time you click on it, it reloads the web page with all the media stuffs from the page stripped off, giving you just a simple plain text version of the page so you can read as if like reading a text document.

You start off by configuring the settings for the bookmarklet. You can set the style to Newspaper, Novel, eBook and Terminal. You can adjust the size of the text and the margin as well.

Once done, drag the Readability bookmarklet button to your web browser’s bookmark area.

The bookmarklet would look something like above on your browser. Whenever you want to strip the media content from a web page just click on the bookmarklet after you load the web page.

Here is a sample web page from DemoGeek.com,

As you can see above, there are so many page elements that makes is visible that you are browsing a website. After you’ve loaded this website just click on the Readability bookmarklet on your browser.

This is what you’ll see now, just the plain text version of the page. The bookmarklet is intelligent enough to keep some of the graphics within the main content and it is good at stripping the graphics that are not part of the main content, including the graphics on the sidebar, header, footer etc.

Readability is a great bookmarklet if you just feel like reading and not to get distracted with so many media content of a webpage. Readability is a bookmarklet and not an add-on, so it should work on most of the modern web browsers. If you have any questions/comments regarding Readability please let us know in comments.

Get the Readability Bookmarklet

Extend the list of suggestions on Google Chrome’s Omnibox.

Google Chrome’s Omnibox is the equivalent of Firefox’s Awesome Bar. By default Omnibox suggests 5 suggestions as you type the URL. If 5 is not enough for you then you can extend the number of suggestions with this simple hack.

Step-1: Google Chrome Properties

Right-click on the Google Chrome icon and click on the Properties menu option.

Step-2: Update the Target Textbox

When the Google Chrome Properties dialog pops-up add a empty space at the end of whatever is there at the Target textbox and then add this to the end,

-omnibox-popup-count=15

Replace the number 15 with the number of suggestions that you want Google Chrome to suggest. Hit the OK button and restart the browser.

You should now be able to see Google Chrome Omnibox suggesting as many of possible suggestions as you’ve keyed-in. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please let us know in comments.

Run Internet Explorer 7 in “No Add-ons” mode to diagnose some of the common Internet Explorer 7 issues.

Internet Explorer 7 allows add-ons to extend the functionality that comes with the basic browser. Add-ons are a good thing to Internet Explorer but it comes with a disadvantage that a bad add-on could bring the whole Internet Explorer reliability down and could lead to a worst browsing experience.

If you encounter issues with Internet Explorer 7 then the first thing to try out was to identify the add-on that most probably would be the cause of the issue. To help diagnose issues with add-ons Internet Explorer 7 comes with a “No Add-ons” mode. Let’s see how we can make use of the Internet Explorer “No Add-ons” mode to identify and disable the add-on that could be the culprit.

Step-1: Internet Explorer (No Add-ons) mode

Type-in Internet Explorer in the Start menu Search Box and you’ll find “Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)” item. Click on the “Internet Explorer (No Add-ons)” link to launch Internet Explorer without add-ons.

Internet Explorer will launch without add-ons. You can confirm this with the page that Internet Explorer 7 displays on startup.

Step-2: Internet Options >> Programs Tab

Click on the “Tools >> Internet Options” menu option to launch Internet Options dialog. Navigate to the Programs tab and click on the Manage Add-ons button.

Step-3: Manage Add-ons Dialog

On the Manage Add-ons dialog select the add-on that you want to disable and make sure to check the Disable option. To identify the add-on that could be the culprit I would start with disabling one add-on at a time and then would try to launch Internet Explorer to see if the problem is resolved.

If the list of add-ons are a bit too much for you to handle you can filter the list of add-ons using the dropdown on the top.

I hope this helps you diagnose Internet Explorer 7 issues that could be caused by add-ons. If you have any questions/comments regarding disabling Internet Explorer 7 add-on please let us know in comments.

All modern day browsers support multiple tabs and it is certainly a big convenience. But there is an annoyance that comes with it as well. The Close Tab button. The Close Tab button is visible on all tabs to, obviously, close those tabs when not needed. The placement of this Close Tab button is such awkward that it gets hit accidentally when you try to switch between tabs with your mouse.

If you are using Firefox then you can customize the Close Tab button so that you can either completely hide it to not display on any tabs, or to display on only the active tab, or to display at the corner of the tab strip.

Follow these simple steps to configure the behavior of the Close Tab button on Firefox,

Step-1: Firefox Configuration

Launch Firefox and type-in “about:config” on the address bar (without the quotes, of course).

Step-2: Voiding the Warranty

Firefox will threaten you with a warranty message. Just click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise!” button.

Step-3: Browser.Tabs.CloseButtons item

Type-in “browser.tabs.closebuttons” (without the quotes) at the Filter box and Firefox will filter the long list down to browser.tabs.closebuttons item. You should be able to see a default value of “1”.

Double click the entry to change to one of these values,

• 0 – display close button only on the active tab
• 1 – display close button on all the tabs – default
• 2 – don’t display any close buttons
• 3 – display a single close button at the end of the tab strip

Display Close Tab button only on the active tab

Setting the value to 0 and restarting the browser will make the Close Tab button to only appear on the Active Tab.

Display Close Tab button on all tabs

Setting the value to 1 and restarting the browser will make the Close Tab button to appear on all the tabs. This is the default behavior.

Display Close Tab button at the corner of the tab strip

Setting the value to 2 and restarting the browser will make the Close Tab button to only appear on the corner of the Tab Strip.

Don’t display the Close Tab button at all

Setting the value to 3 and restarting the browser will make the Close Tab button to not appear on any of the tabs. You have to use the right-click menu on the tab to close the tabs.

I hope you find this trick helpful to customize the Close Tab button behavior to your convenience. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please let us know in comments.

Use HP Smart Web Printing tool to print portions of web pages and help save the environment by reducing paper usage.

Everyone is talking about saving the environment and going green. One step toward green environment is to reduce the usage of papers. Papers are hugely wasted when printing web pages on its entirety. There are so many elements on a web page that we really wouldn’t need but unnecessarily gets printed. Of course, there are some websites that provide a printer-friendly versions but again not all websites offer this capability.

Irrespective of whether a website offers a printer-friendly version or not you can print exactly what you want on a web page using HP Smart Web Printing tool. It supports both Internet Explorer 6.0 or higher and Firefox 2.0.

Follow these steps to make use of HP Smart Web Printing tool in Internet Explorer 7,

Step-1: Download and install HP Smart Web Printing tool

Download and install the HP Smart Web Printing add-on. Make sure to close all the web browsers before installing this tool.

Step-2: Launch the web browser

Once installed, when you launch Internet Explorer you’ll notice a “Clip Book” window on the right side of the browser. “Clip Book” window lists the page clips and lets you print selected page clips.

Step-3: Clip the web page

Click on the “HP Smart Select” tool on the IE Toolbar.

Now, select the portion of the page you want to clip. Just draw a rectangle around the portion of the page that you want to clip and when a menu pops-up click on the “Clip…” menu option.

You should be able to see the clips on the “Clip Book”.

Step-4: Print Web Clips

Select the clips that you want to print and click the “Print” button.

There are settings that you can change to check for updates and if you’d prefer to collect the clips without having them selected.

I hope HP Smart Web Printing helps you save the environment a little bit by printing only what you want. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please let us know in comments.

Download HP Smart Web Printing add-on.

Add Google Reader to Firefox Sidebar with this simple Firefox trick.

Firefox is great and Google Reader is great too. How about bringing Google Reader to the Firefox Sidebar? Firefox has a great Sidebar which would be greatly helpful if you have a widescreen monitor. Why not make use of that space to keep an eye on your Google Reader stories?

Google released an iPhone version of Google Reader which is pretty slick and can be a good candidate to go on the Firefox Sidebar so you don’t have to keep a tab open in Firefox all the time. This would be particularly helpful if you mostly skim thru the headlines in Google Reader.

Follow these simple steps to add Google Reader to your Firefox Sidebar,

Step-1: Organize Bookmarks

Launch Firefox and click on the “Organize Bookmarks…” menu option.

Step-2: Create New Bookmark

When the “Library” window launches click on the “Organize” menu and then click on the “New Bookmark…” menu option.

Step-3: Add the Google Reader iPhone location

When the “Add Bookmark” window pops-up, type-in a name “Google Reader” for example and in the “Location” box type-in “http://www.google.com/reader/i/”. Click on the “Add” button to dismiss the dialog.

That’s all to it. Now you should be able to read all your Google Reader feeds on your Firefox Sidebar. When you come across a feed item that you think is worth reading it thru then you can just click on the feed item and it will expand to display an excerpt of the story. If you’d prefer to read the full story then you can click on the “See original” link to open the story in a new tab.

I hope this simple Firefox trick of adding Google Reader to Firefox Sidebar helps you in some way. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please make sure to let us know in comments.

FireTune is a freeware that speeds up Firefox to the extreme.

Now that you’ve taken the baby step to speed up Firefox why not take an extra step to make Firefox superfast? FireTune is a freeware tool that helps you optimize Firefox so that it can work on the turbo speed mode.

FireTune allows you to configure the level of optimization that it can do by letting you choose the kind of computer and the internet connection that you have. The optimization that FireTune does is possible because of the fact that the developers of Firefox (or any other browsers for that matter) targets the users who have dial-up connection. They assume that if they can make the browser perform decent for the dial-up users then obviously the high-speed internet connection users will get a better speed performance. But that’s not the case all the time. That’s when FireTune comes in to speed up Firefox to the extreme.

Follow these steps to configure FireTune to optimize Firefox to get better speed,

Step-1: Close all of the Firefox instances

Close all of the Firefox instances that’s running on your computer. FireTune will fail if Firefox is running, so close all the instances of Firefox on your computer.

Step-2: Download and run FireTune

Download FireTune and unzip the file. You can use one of these WinZip and WinRAR alternatives if you don’t have WinZip or WinRAR installed on your computer. Once unzipped, launch FireTune.exe.

Step-3: Backup Firefox configuration

Once you run FireTune it asks you to backup Firefox configuration. Just click on the “OK” button.

When FireTune launches click on the “Create backup of configuration” button as shown above. FireTune will acknowledge with a “Backup successfully created!” message once done.

Step-4: Performance Optimizations

Click on the “Performance Optimizations” tab if the focus is on another tab. Here you can choose the type of computer and internet connection that you have. In my case I have a fast computer and a really high speed internet connection, so I chose “Fast computer/Fast connection” option. Choose the one that applies to you the most.

Step-5: Other Optimizations

Click on the “Other Optimizations” tab and make sure to check the “Enable some performance tweaks common to all configurations” option.

Step-6: Other Useful Settings

Click on the “Other Useful Settings” tab and make sure to check the “Optimize Firefox memory usage” option.

Step-7: Speed up Firefox now

Click on the “Tune it!” button once you are ready to let FireTune do its job.

FireTune will optimize your Firefox installation to the chosen settings and will notify you of the status like above. The message to restart Firefox is erroneous. Since there is no instance of Firefox running there is no point of restarting Firefox. Anyways, ignore the details of the success message and just go ahead and launch Firefox.

You should be able to see a remarkable improvement in the performance of your Firefox browser.

In case if things go wrong you can always use the “Restore original configuration” button to restore your Firefox configuration to an earlier stage. Things will be back to normal if you use this option, if you have to.

I hope FireTune helps you to speed up Firefox to its extreme. If you have any questions or comments regarding this article please let us know in comments.

Increase the pipeline requests Firefox makes to download a page from a web server to speed up Firefox.

If you have a high speed internet connection (which most of us do have these days I believe) you can make use of your high speed bandwidth to speed up Firefox. By default Firefox uses 4 pipelines to get the information from a web server. With a high speed internet connection you can increase that number to a higher number to let Firefox use more pipelines to download more information from the web server which eventually will improve the performance of page loads.

Follow these steps to speed up your Firefox performance,

Step-1: Firefox Configuration

Launch Firefox and type-in “about:config” on the URL bar and press Enter.

You’ll get a funny warning about your Firefox warranty. Just click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button. Firefox will take you to the configuration page.

Step-2: Network.HTTP.Pipelining

Type-in “Network.HTTP.Pipelining” (without the quotes) on the Filter box. Make sure it has a value of “TRUE”. If not then double-click to change the value from false to true.

Step-3: Network.HTTP.Proxy.Pipelining

Type-in “Network.HTTP.Proxy.Pipelining” (without the quotes) on the Filter box. Make sure it has a value of “TRUE”. If not then double-click to change the value from false to true.

Step-4: Network.HTTP.Pipelining.MaxRequests

Type-in “Network.HTTP.Pipelining.MaxRequests” (without the quotes) on the Filter box. By default it will have a value of 4.

Double-click to change that value to 25. I would to recommend to keep the value between 20 and 30 depending on your internet connection speed.

Step-5: Restart Firefox

Restart Firefox for the changes to take effect.

There is a theory that even if you increase the Network.HTTP.Pipelining.MaxRequests to 30 it is not going to open up 30 pipelines but instead it only opens 8 pipelines. I have a really high speed Fiber Optic internet connection and I noticed some difference when I set the value to 10 and then to 20. So it depends on the internet connection speed you’ve got. The initial value of 4 is for dial-up connections and so you can take a guess with the numbers that best suites your internet connection speed.

I hope this trick helps you to speed up Firefox in terms of downloading pages. If you have any questions or comments regarding this please make sure to let us know in comments.

Adobe’s Flash is a great technology, no doubt about that. But some times even the modern browsers finds it hard to keep up with Flash. Particularly when you open a web page that contains Flash video in Internet Explorer 7 you might either see IE7 crash or you might notice that the Flash loaded page in IE7 is consuming too much of your computer’s processing power.

With “Manage Add-ons’” feature in Internet Explorer 7 you can enable and disable Flash but practically that’s not feasible every time you want to enable or disable Flash. Toggle Flash is a tiny little add-on to Internet Explorer 7 that helps you toggle Flash with a click of a button.

Once you download and install Toggle Flash you’ll notice a Toggle Flash icon on your IE7 toolbar. If you don’t see the Toggle Flash button then you might want to customize your IE7 toolbar to bring the Toggle Flash button to the top.

To do that right-click on your IE7 toolbar and click “Customize Command Bar” and then click on “Add or Remove Commands…”. On the “Customize Toolbar” window make use of the “Add –>” button if “Toggle Flash” entry is on the “Available toolbar buttons” list and not on the “Current toolbar buttons” list. Use the “Move Up” and “Move Down” buttons to move the Toggle Flash button to a position that’s convenient to you.

Download Toggle Flash (.msi download)

I hope Toggle Flash helps you deal with those Flash object issues in your Internet Explorer 7. If you have any questions/comments regarding this please let us know in comments.

If you use Firefox as your web browser you might find it pretty handy to have the search box right next to the URL box (aka, Awesome Bar). But the inconvenience is that the search results open in the same active tab and sometimes that’s not what we want. If you’d prefer to have the search results from the Search box always display in a new tab, follow these steps,

Step-1: Open Firefox Configuration

Launch Firefox, if you haven’t already, and type-in about:config in the URL bar. When you get the message of “This might void your warranty!” just click on the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button.

Step-2: Filter down to “browser.search.openintab”

Type-in “browser.search.openintab” in the “Filter” box. Firefox will filter down to “browser.search.openintab” entry. You might notice that the “Value” column has a value of “false” by default.

Step-3: Change the “browser.search.openintab” value to TRUE

Double-click on the “browser.search.openintab” entry to toggle the “false” value to “true”.

Step-4: Restart the browser

Restart your Firefox browser for the changes to take effect.

Now. when you use the Search box on your Firefox browser the search results will open up in a new tab.

If you have any questions/comments regarding this please make to let us know in comments.

One of the initial thing that grabbed my attention with Google Chrome was its simple installation process. Before I even got to experience the browser I was impressed with the simple installation process. So when it was time for me to upgrade Chrome to the latest version I was pretty sure there has got to be a simple upgrade process than to download and install again.

Google Chrome didn’t disappoint me on this as well…follow these simple steps to upgrade your browser as simple as clicking a button and restarting the browser,

Step-1:

Click on the “Tools” icon on the top right side of the browser window and then click on the “About Google Chrome” menu option.

Step-2:

b

Chrome will display its About dialog and there you can see that it would check for latest version and will enable the “Update Now” button. Once you click on the “Update Now” button you should be able to see that Google Chrome would change the status message to “Checking for updates…” and then to “Installing new version…”. Wait till it installs the new version.

Step-3:

Once done you should be able to see a status message of “Google Chrome has been updated”.

Also at the same time Chrome will inform you to close all the open Chrome windows and restart Chrome to make use of the latest version. Click on the OK button to dismiss all dialogs.

Step-4:

Close all the open instances of Google Chrome and restart Chrome again. This time go into the same “About Google Chrome” dialog (“Tools” >> “About Google Chrome” menu option). You should be able to see “Google Chrome is up to date (version number…currently at 0.4.154.25)”.

That’s all….your Google Chrome browser should be up to date now. So what’s new with this 0.4 version update?

New Features

• Bookmark manager with import/export.
  Use the ‘Customize and control Google Chrome’ (wrench) menu to open the Bookmark manager. You can search bookmarks, create folders, and drag and drop bookmarks to new locations. The Bookmark Manager’s Tools menu lets you export or import bookmarks.
• Privacy section in Options.
  We grouped together all of the configuration options for features that might send data to another service. Open the wrench menu, click Options, and select the Under the Hood tab.
• New blocked pop-up notification.
  The pop-up blocker formerly just minimized pop-up windows to the lower right corner of the browser window, create one ‘constrained’ window for each pop-up. Now, Google Chrome displays one small notification in the corner that shows the number of blocked pop-ups. A menu on the notification lets you open a specific pop-up, if needed.

Known Issues

• Sites that use Gears to synchronize offline data may occasionally hang. You should disable offline access for sites until a fix is released. (We’re working on it and hope to have the update later this week.)

Security Issues

• This release fixes an issue with downloaded HTML files being able to read other files on your computer and send them to sites on the Internet. We now prevent local files from connection to the network with XMLHttpRequest() and also prompt you to confirm a download if it is an HTML file.
  Severity: Moderate. If a user could be enticed to open a downloaded HTML file, this flaw could be exploited to send arbitrary files to an attacker.

[Source: Google Chrome Releases]

They even brought back the much dreaded “Reload” menu option on the right click context menu! It was missing on those earlier versions and was a bit annoying. Thank you, Chrome team, for sticking with some Windows standards!

I hope this article is useful to you. If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask in comments.

If you are an active internet user then it is imperative that you may collect tens of hundreds (or may be thousands) of bookmarks over a period of time. If you don’t use any online bookmark services like Delicious and rely on your web browser’s bookmarking capabilities then you are on your own to manage those long list of bookmarks.

Over a period of time the links that bookmarks point to might not work any more. The website must have got shutdown, must have got moved to a different domain etc. might cause your bookmarks to not get to the website any more. Imagine if you have tens of hundreds of non-working bookmarks like that.

Help is there to clean up those non-working bookmarks. AM-DeadLink is an utility that you can download and use to clean up those non-working bookmarks on Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera. If you use any other browsers then you can save your bookmarks in a .URL file, comma separated file or as a tab delimited file and can use AM-DeadLink to find the links that are dead.

Follow these steps to download and install AM-DeadLink utility to cleanup those non-working bookmarks,

Step-1:

Download and install AM-DeadLink utility.

During the installation process you might be prompted to choose to install as a normal Windows application or as a portable application. Choose the one that best suits you. I’ve chosen here to install as a normal Windows application since I was installing it on my desktop. If you are installing AM-DeadLink as a portable application make sure to choose the USB drive on the location box.

Step-2:

Launch AM-DeadLink.

By default AM-DeadLink will display the list of bookmarks from your Internet Explorer bookmarks.

Along with the name of the bookmark AM-DeadLink displays the URL, Absolute Path and the Folder names of the bookmarks. The Error and Status column might be empty to begin with. Those will come into play later.

Step-3:

Once you are ready to analyze your bookmarks you have to click on the green color button with a tick mark as shown above. That will trigger the process of analyzing your bookmarks.

And once done AM-DeadLink will display statuses for every bookmarks. If it can reach to the websites then it displays “OK” on the status column. If the website is getting redirected to another website then it displays “redirected, OK”. If it couldn’t locate a website then it displays “404” in the Error column and a “file not found” in the Status column. If there is a timeout encountered when trying to reach to the website then it displays a “timeout” message on the Status column.

Now you can choose the bookmark that’s not working anymore (with a 404-file not found status) by right clicking on the bookmark and choosing “Delete” from the context menu.

It is that easy to check for non-working bookmarks and clean them up with a simple right click.

Let’s walk thru a sample scenario to cleanup Firefox bookmarks

These steps work fine for Internet Explorer. What if you wanted to cleanup your Firefox or Opera bookmarks? You have to do some extra steps to get the bookmarks to AM-DeadLink and once cleaned should get the bookmarks to the browser.

Let’s see how we can cleanup Firefox bookmarks,

Step-1:

Before we try to import Firefox bookmarks into AM-DeadLink we need to save our Firefox bookmarks as a HTML file. Launch Firefox and click on the “Bookmarks” menu and then choose “Organize Bookmarks…”.

Step-2:

Once on the “Library” window click on the “Import and Backup” menu option and then choose “Export HTML…”.

Step-3:

Firefox will ask you to save the HTML file. Choose a location that’s convenient for you and hit the “Save” button.

Step-4:

Launch AM-DeadLink and choose “Firefox” on the dropdown list at the top left.

Step-5:

AM-DeadLink will ask you to choose the HTML file that contains your Firefox bookmarks. Choose the file from the location that you’ve last saved on Step-3 and hit the “Open” button.

Step-6:

AM-DeadLink will list all your Firefox bookmarks along with the URL and other details. Now click on the green button with a tick mark to start the analysis.

Step-7:

AM-DeadLink will analyze and displays the Error and Status for each bookmark. If you’d prefer to see the bookmark in action choose the bookmark and hit the “Internal Preview” button (last but next to the Recycle Bin button). AM-DeadLink will open up the website in its internal browser so you can see where the link is getting redirected to.

Step-8:

Now, if you are sure that you don’t want a bookmark that’s not working just right click on the bookmark and choose “Delete” from the menu.

You can also find duplicates of your bookmarks using the “Find Duplicates” button. it lists the duplicate bookmarks so you can remove them forever.

Step-9:

Once you are done with cleaning up your bookmarks now it’s time to import those cleaned-up bookmarks into Firefox. Click on the “Bookmarks” menu and then choose “Organize Bookmarks…”.

Step-10:

Once on the “Library” window click on the “Import and Backup” menu option and then choose “Import HTML…”.

Step-11:

Firefox will prompt you with an “Import Wizard” asking you where to import from. Choose “From an HTML file” and hit the “Next” button.

Step-12:

Choose the HTML file where you’ve saved the Firefox bookmarks and hit the “Open” button.

Now, you’ll have your Firefox bookmarks cleaned-up. Follow similar steps for other browsers like Opera etc. For Opera, Safari and other browsers you can save the bookmarks as a comma separated file or a tab delimited file and can import the file into AM-DeadLink.

I apologize for the lengthy post and I hope you can make use of AM-DeadLink tool to cleanup all your browser bookmarks and make your web life a bit easier. If you are using any other tools to do the same please let us know in comments. If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to ask us in comments.

Download AM-DeadLink utility and clean up those non-working bookmarks.

Are you a staunch Internet Explorer user and don’t have a choice to switch to Firefox or other browsers (blame: corporate policy)? Ever felt that Internet Explorer is left on the cloud with more of a decade old browsing experience? There is one simple answer with IE7Pro.

IE7Pro is a add-on for Internet Explorer 7 (yes, you can add some stuffs to IE7 as you do on Firefox). IE7Pro extends the basic experience that you get with the standard Internet Explorer 7 and brings you a whole list of rich browser experience that Firefox users tend to enjoy. Of course, the base model of open-source extensions are not there for Internet Explorer 7 but that puts you in a spot where every bit of better experience with the browser counts.

IE7Pro includes features like,

• Enhanced Tabbed Browsing – Enhances the way tabs are being handled in IE7. Gives you a lot more control in handling tabs.
• Spell Check – checks any text you enter in text boxes and alerts you to possible errors by adding a red underline to any potentially misspelled words.
• Inline Search – more of like how Firefox handles search. You can just type in a web page to start searching and navigate thru search results using the F3 key or the Enter key.
• Super Drag Drop – allows you to open new links by simply dragging and dropping the link on the page.
• Crash Recovery – automatically restores all opened pages after a crash happened. More of like Session Manager in Firefox.
• Quick Proxy Switcher – as it says a real quick proxy switcher than to deal with those “Internet Options…”
• Mouse Gesture – allows you to execute some commonly performed tasks (open or close a tab, go back, go forward, print, scrolling page etc.) by drawing a simple symbol on the screen.
• Tab History Browser – allows you to browse the tab history right from the status bar icon.
• Webpage Capturer – allows you to capture the whole web page’s content into JPG, BMP, GIF, PNG or TIFF on the fly.
• AD Blocker – blocks all forms of advertising, including Flash ads, rich media, fly-ins, slide-ins, pop-ups, pop-unders, spyware and adware ads, and messenger ads.
• Flash Block – blocks Flash plugin which at times would improve the page performance.
• Greasemonkey like User Scripts platform – allows you to enhance the page’s default behavior with extendable user scripts, more of what Greasemonkey is for Firefox.
• User Plug-ins – allows you to write custom plugins for IE7Pro. It’s like more of extending the IE7Pro experience. There is complete tutorial on how to write a plugin for IE7Pro.
• MiniDM – a handy download manager that helps if you download a lot of stuffs.

Download and install IE7Pro from the official IE7Pro web site. During installation IE7Pro will ask you to configure default settings.

I would recommend to uncheck the “Set IE7Pro Search as the default search engine” option and the “Set EasyHome as Home page” option. Uncheck those and finish the installation.

Once installed IE7Pro adds an icon like this to the status bar and will launch Internet Explorer and you can see kind of a Quick Guide page.

If you would like to read it thru to get familiar with IE7Pro go ahead and click on the links to the right to get familiar with some of IE7Pro’s capabilities. Once done, you can make use of some of IE7Pro’s features by right clicking on the icon on the status bar.

There are whole bunch of menu options that you can use to enhance the browsing experience with IE7Pro.

I hope IE7Pro brings you some enhancements/features that Firefox users tend to enjoy and I hope there are more feature sets on the work for IE7Pro. If you have any questions regarding this make sure to ask us on comments.

IE7Pro Download Link.

Google Chrome allows you to selectively remove cookies if you want to. This would be particularly helpful if you are into web development and wanted to selectively remove cookies for your website for testing purposes. Follow these steps to selectively remove cookies on your Google Chrome browser,

Step-1:

Launch Google Chrome browser.

Step-2:

Click on the “Tools” menu (the wrench icon on the top right) and then click on “Options…”.

Step-3:

Once the dialog comes up go into the “Under the Hood” tab.

Step-4:

Scroll down to the “Security” section and then under the “Cookie Settings:” section click on the ‘”Show Cookies” button.

Step-5:

Chrome will popup a Cookies dialog and will list all the cookies stored on your computer. Click on the cookies that you want to remove and then click on the “Remove” button. You can hold down the Ctrl key to select multiple cookies or if you want remove all the cookies then you can click on the “Remove All” button (don’t do this unless you are sure you want to clear off all the cookies).

Step-6:

Click the Close button on the Cookies dialog as well as on the “Google Chrome Options” dialog.

Now, the cookies that you have removed will not be available on your system anymore. Of course, they’ll come back when you visit the web site again.

To restrict those third-party cookies, on the “Google Chrome Options” dialog, under the “Security” section and under the “Cookie Settings"” section click the dropdown to change to “Restrict how third-party cookies can be used”.

If you want to block all cookies from getting to your system you can change the dropdown value to “Block all cookies”.

If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to let us know in comments.

If you use Firefox as your web browser then you know you can do a lot more than just browse web pages. Firefox has many add-ons that makes Firefox a true web browser that can be extended to pretty much whatever the functionality that we want in/beyond a web browser.

One such add-on is ScreenGrab. What ScreenGrab does is that it allows you to take a screenshot of an entire web page that you are viewing and store it as an image. At times you might not just want the portion of the web page that you see but rather you might want the entire web page and ScreenGrab is the way to go if you are using Firefox.

Grab ScreenGrab Firefox extension from Firefox Add-ons. Once installed Firefox will ask you to restart the browser. Do so at your convenience and after the restart you should be able to see this icon   at the bottom status bar of your browser. Click on the icon and Firefox will prompt you with these menu options.

Choose the one that you want the screenshot to be (entire page, active region or selection) and ScreenGrab will make the screenshot for you accordingly. If you don’t want to save the image permanently then you can use the “Copy…” menu option and the screenshot image will be placed on your clipboard.

Grab ScreenGrab Firefox extension from Firefox Add-ons.

Download Firefox and make Firefox your default web browser if you haven’t done it already.

If you love Firefox and the many ways you can extend your web browsing experience then you might want to set Firefox as your system’s default browser. Here is how you can set Firefox as your default browser,

Step-1:

Launch Firefox and click on “Tools” menu and then on “Options” menu.

Step-2:

Firefox will open up the “Options” dialog. Go into the “Advanced” tab and on the “General” sub-tab look for “System Defaults” section at the bottom of the dialog and make sure to check the “Always check to see if Firefox is the default browser on startup” (make sure to have a tick mark in front). Then hit the “Check Now” button.

Step-3:

Firefox will prompt with the “Default Browser” dialog asking to acknowledge to make Firefox the default browser. Click the “Yes” button and then click the OK button to dismiss the dialog.

Firefox should now be set as the default browser on your computer.

If you are reading this but you haven’t installed Firefox on your computer yet, then download Firefox from Mozilla.

If you have any questions regarding this please make sure to let us know in comments.

One of cool features of Google Chrome is its ability to convert web pages into web applications. Web Applications are same as the web sites but with Web Applications Chrome allows you to creates a desktop shortcut, add it to the start menu or add it to the Quick Launch bar. Once you launch web applications Chrome opens those applications on a separate trimmed down version of the browser that makes it look like a standalone application.

Follow these steps to convert a web page into a web application using Google Chrome.

Step-1:

Launch the Google Chrome browser.

Step-2:

Click on the Page options (a square icon on the top right side)

Step-3:

Click on “Create application shortcuts…” menu option.

Step-4:

On the Google Gears dialog box put a check mark next to where you want the shortcut to be added. You can add a web application shortcut to Desktop, Start Menu or to the Quick Launch Bar.

Step-5:

Click the OK button to dismiss the dialog.

Now, if you go into one of the places where you asked Google Chrome to create shortcuts you should be able to see the shortcut there. Just click on it or double click on it to launch the web application in its own window.

If you’d prefer to watch The Geek convert a web page into a web application then you can watch the screencast below.