Posts Tagged ‘Web Browsers

A little over a month ago, Google released its own web browser, similar to Internet Explorer, Firefox, or Safari. Their new web browser is called Google Chrome, and has some great features and some great speed, but is currently available for Windows only.

I’ve been using it off and on for the last month, and I’ve found a few missing features that really bug me:

Read the rest of this entry »

Headers printing in Google Chrome

Posted in Technicalon Sep 11, 2008

I have a project which requires me to print from a web browser. Firefox wasn’t printing things very correctly, which prompted me to consider printing through Google Chrome.

Google Chrome did a reasonable job at rending the pages, but it has one problem. It wants to print headers on the top and bottom of all the pages including: the url, the page title, the date, and the page number. For my print job, I don’t want to reveal all that information, and I would prefer to print my pages without it.

In Firefox, I am given a Page Setup option from the File menu where I can customize headers, footers, and margins for printing. I cannot find any such option in Google Chrome.

Acid 3 revisted

Posted in Technicalon Sep 8, 2008

In March I ran the Acid 3 web browser stress test against all the most modern browsers at the time to see how they performed. Since then, there are new versions of browsers which justify a re-run of the tests. Here are the results:

  • Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 – 71/100
  • Google Chrome 0.2.149.29 – 79.100
  • Opera 9.52 – 83/100
  • Windows Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 – Too bad to tell. Perhaps 5/100?
  • Apple’s Safari 3.1.2 (525.21) – 75/100
  • Flock 1.2.5 – 53/100

All the web browsers were run on the same Windows XP system.

Then, out of curiosity, I decided to check the memory usage of each browser and found the following:

  • Mozilla Firefox 3.0.1 – 55M (After all add-ons were turned off)
  • Google Chrome 0.2.149.29 – 41M
  • Opera 9.52 – 27M (But then crashed on subsequent loads)
  • Windows Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13 – 41M (But still couldn’t render the test at all)
  • Apple’s Safari 3.1.2 (525.21) – 41M
  • Flock 1.2.5 – 54M

Flash on the Nokia N810

Posted in Technicalon Aug 28, 2008

In my continuing evaluation of the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, I was delighted to see that Adobe Flash was included as part of the web browser. This means that I can watch Strongbad’s Emails and Youtube from a device that fits in my pocket.

However, I am disappointed that the version of flash installed does not recognized the built in camera or microphone. This means that I can’t send video messages to my friends on Facebook.

So, plus on the fact that flash is included, but a small negative because the flash doesn’t support that camera.

Acid3 Test

Posted in Technicalon Mar 5, 2008

The Acid tests are various tests for web browsers to see how well they can adhere to standards. If a web browser was a computer science project, these would the tests the teaching assistant would run on your project to see how well you did and to assign you a score.

The Acid3 test was recently released, and I ran it on a few web browsers I had installed here. Here is how they performed:

  • Firefox 2.0.0.12 on Windows: 49/100
  • Safari 3.0.4 on Windows: 38/100
  • Opera 9.26 on Windows: 46/100
  • Internet Explorer 7.0.5730.13: 12? (It was so screwed up I couldn’t hardly see the score)
  • Flock 1.1 (based on Firefox) on Windows: 52/100
  • Firefox 1.5.0.12 on Linux: 50/100

I also ran it against Konquerer on Linux, but it kept crashing. Other people are reporting other various scores with various versions.

Update March 7. I’m a little confused about how the tests work. For example, I’ve run it multiple times on the Flock browser, but I’ve seen three different scores come out. I’m confused how the same test can yield different results at different browsers on the same browser. I want things to be more deterministic.

Update March 25. I ran the tests against the new Safari 3.1 on windows, and it scored an impressive 75/100.

Update March 26. Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Windows scored for me today a 53/100.

According to an article on Mozilla Links, Firefox takes 28% market share in Europe. Hungary showed the greatest growth in market share, while Slovenia is the European country with the greatest market share support for Firefox.

This report comes as Firefox 3 is in its sixth alpha version. Firefox 3 will have a number of new features and refinements, including support for “contentEditable” fields, better memory management, text zoom memory, native ogg audio/video support, and many other features.

Feed free to find out more about Firefox, including the ability to download Firefox with the Google Toolbar.

Hiding IP address with Firefox

Posted in Technicalon Sep 30, 2006

Quick answer to the title: you can’t.

One of the search queries on my other blog was: firefox how to keep ip address off internet. I thought I would help this person out and explain things to them.

When you load up a web page, Firefox (or any Internet browser) sends a request to a web server that in English might say, “Please send the contents of this page http://example.com/ back to me at address 10.1.2.3.” The web server receives this request and sends the contents of the page back to Firefox at the provided address where it is displayed to the user. This makes it really difficult to download web pages while not revealing your IP (Internet Protocol) address to others.

There are ways by using a proxy so that your address doesn’t go all the way to the end web server. In this way, your browser sends the request to the proxy, and the proxy creates its own request to the web server. The web server sends the page contents to the proxy, and the proxy forwards the contents back to your Firefox browser as a response to your original request.

There is this proxy service out there called the Anonymizer which does this sort of thing. I believe they charge money for their service, but you might be able to find a similar service out there. I do not endorse or recommend any products, I’m only stating here that they exist.

Firefox however, is a browser that is designed to be more secure and keep your information more private. You can download it by clicking here.


Categories