Google’s Chrome blog recently wrote a post about changes coming to Chrome. The latest beta for Google’s web browser came with tweaks to the Javescript engine, allowing it to run javascript even faster (30% improvement for the Sunspider and V8 benchmarks) and added more HTML 5 capabilities.  Also included was a way to add themes to chrome.  The new themes give Chrome’s previous no-frills Spartan look a much more visually appealing appearance.  While not available in the stable release of chrome, you can download the beta to use the new themes. The Beta can be downloaded from http://www.google.com/landing/chrome/beta/. The easiest way to access the themes gallery is to go to https://tools.google.com/chrome/intl/en/themes/index.html.  However you can also open Chrome’s options and select the “Personal Stuff” tab and click the “Get Themes” button.

Google started by releasing 29 themes and plans to add more when Themes are added to the stable version of Chrome.

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Mozilla just released the final version of Mozilla Firefox 3.5.  Here are some noteworthy changes for the newest version of Firefox.

1. Support for HTML 5 and support for Open Video.  Which does not use a plug-in like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Siverlight
2. Adds Private browsing mode.  Useful for keeping birthday presents a surprise :)
3. Adds support for location aware browsing
4. Improved performance rendering Javascript using the new TraceMonkey Javascript engine.

Here is a video released by Mozilla introducing Firefox 3.5.  You can get the video at http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/video/firefox-3.5.html.  If I’m not mistaken, if you navigate to the page using Firefox 3.5 it uses HTML 5 Open Video.

As always you can get the latest Release of Mozilla Firefox at www.getfirefox.com

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One of the Great advantages Mozilla Firefox has are all the plug-ins and extensions.  Firefox extensions and plug-ins can greatly enhance its abilities. TableTools is a nice gem that solves a big problem with HTML tables.  It is difficult to extract the table from the webpage without breaking the table.  If you cut and paste a table into Mircosoft Excel, the table will all be stuffed within a single cell.  Moving tables from the web to a spreadsheet application is a very time consuming process.

TableTools is a Firefox Extension that gives you greater abilities to manipulate data stored in tables on the Web.  Currently in version 0.26, You can sort and run filters on the data from within the browser.  While the filters and sorting abilities by themselves can be useful, What Is really great about TableTools is that it lets you quickly and easily copy tables from the web into your favorite spreadsheet application.  Simply copy the contents of the table as tab-delimited text (right click anywhere on the table and select “copy as Tab-delimited” from the menu item “Other table operations”) and then you can paste the copied data into a spreadsheet for use offline.  You can get TableTools at https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/2637

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To see the difference in philosophy between Windows and Macintosh computers you only need to look at the toolbars on their applications.  Microsoft will try and fit many of the most commonly used commands onto the toolbar in order to reduce the number of mouse clicks it takes to perform the task.  While functional, This tends to make Windows applications look cluttered.  Apple takes a different approach and removes all buttons from the toolbar except the most important.  This gives a cleaner and simpler look and feel to Mac Applications.

By default the only buttons that Safari, the Mac’s web browser, has on its toolare is a forward/back button, refresh button, A button that will clip part of the page and pin it to the Mac dashboard (not present on the Windows version of Safari), and the Add bookmark button.  Safari does not have a “home” button that takes you back to your homepage like other browsers.  I find the home button to be very useful and it’s something I want to be able to use in Safari.  Adding the home button to the toolbar is very easy, and there are a couple other buttons you can customize the toolbar with.  Thre are a print button and a button to increase and decrease the text’s font size.  There are versions of Safari for both Macs and Windows computers.  The following instructions will work on both versions.

Customize the Safari Toolbar

1. Click on the “View” menu and select “Customize Toolbar”
2. Drag and drop the icon from the popup onto the toolbar.  You will see the other icons move to the side and make space for the new icon.

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Firefox 2 introduced Inline spellchecking for the browser.  This alerts the user of misspelled words and offers suggestions for correcting spelling mistakes.  However the worlds most popular browser (Internet Explorer) does not offer this feature.

The lack of any type of spell-checking for form fields in IE is crazy, especially considering that Microsoft has included an Inline spell-check feature in Microsoft Office for years.  Since IE doesn’t have this feature natively, you need to use a plug-in to get it.  IE7Pro is a very good plug-in for IE that adds a spell-check feature as well as other useful functionality.  For instance, ad blocking for instance.  While the name includes IE7, it also supports IE6.

Here are instructions for downloading and installing IE7pro.

http://wiki.ie7pro.com/index.php/Download_and_Install_IE7Pro

Screenshot of a form using IE7pro:

The spell-checker works quite well.  The performance of IE7Pro doesn’t quite seem as snappy as the spellchecker in Firefox.  Although,Firefox supports the inline spell-check natively and not through a plug-in.  However if you have to enter a lot of text in IE then it is a very valuable tool.

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Free webmail services such as Microsoft’s Hotmail, Yahoo mail, and Google Gmail are inexpensive, easy to use, and accessible anywhere that you have a browser.  Over time you may collect many email addresses and contacts that you would like to share with other email addresses.  This tip is for exporting contacts from Hotmail and importing them into the Mozilla Thunderbird email client.  However, the process is similar for most other mail services.

Step 1: Export your contacts from Hotmail

1. login to your Hotmail (or Windows Live Mail as it is now called)
2. Click on the “Contacts” button on the left of the screen
   
3. Click on the options button on the top right corner of the next screen to pull up the options for contacts
   
4. Select Export Contacts
   
5. Click the Export Contacts button and it will save you contacts as a .csv (Comma Separated Values) file

The Comma Separated Values file that you export can be read by Microsoft Excel.  You can use this same process to move all your contacts over to an excel spreadsheet.  If you are using a different webmail then hotmail, you may export your contacts as a Tab delimited file (.tab) and this file type functions in pretty much the same way as a .csv

Step 2: Import contacts into Thunderbird

1. From the Thunderbird  tools, click on Import.
2. Select “Address Book” as the type of material to import.
3. Choose “Text file (LDIF, .tab, .csv, .txt)” as the format and click on Next
   
4. From There you can browse for the contacts file  which you previously exported.

Related Posts:
Part II: Edit your contacts using Microsoft Excel and import them into Thunderbird
(added Oct. 7, 2008)

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At Microsoft’s 08 MiX conference the beta for the upcoming Internet Explorer 8 was made available for download. If you want to get the beta you can go here. This is only a beta version and is meant mostly for developers. And it’s a good thing because IE 8 will break sites designed for IE 7 because with IE 8 Microsoft is supporting CSS and other web standards. Wait did I hear that right? Yes, Microsoft which from the very beginning was breaking web sites by its quirky implementation of CSS, is now breaking web sites with proper use of web standards.

User Interface

The user interface is very similar to the IE 7. Lets look at the screenshot.

If you’re used to the icon positioning in IE 7 than IE 8 will come naturally, but if you are switching from another browser like firefox you will probably be confused with the placement. For example the refresh button is placed on the address bar where the rss feed icon used to be. One thing that I like about the UI for IE 8 is that they brought back the file and edit menus. Its absence on IE 7 is the main reason why I never used it.

Emulate IE 7

As I said earlier IE 8 will now follow web standards for CSS, AJAX, and RSS. However many web sites were written to work with the quirky behavior of IE 7 and older versions. Many of the hacks used in these pages will cause the page to break in the beta of IE 8. Currently Google maps will break if viewed in IE 8.

However the folks in Microsoft have a solution and IE 8 has the ability to run in several different modes. Web developers have the ability to tag a page as only running in an earlier version of IE and the browser would be able to render the page as it would have in IE 7 or 6. Users can also manually change the browser to emulate IE 7 by pushing the emulate IE 7 button. I’m very happy that the strict adherence to web standards is activated by default, but my only complaint is that in order to switch to the IE 7 mode you have to close the browser and restart it. It would be much better if you could switch between IE 7 mode and standards mode more seamlessly.

Other Features

IE 8 keeps the heightened security “protected mode” that was introduced in IE 7 which makes the browser significantly more secure. It has another new security feature which bolds the root domain name on the address bar.

This is a great feature to protect against phishing attacks because it will be easier to identify the actual root domain and domains such as secure.ebay.someothersite.com.

IE 8 has a couple other new features that are quite interesting. One is called activities which would easily allow users to share web content with services like facebook, or to look them up with encarta. The Other is WebSlices which are similar to feeds and allow users to monitor items on a web site while they are surfing. Activities and WebSlices are very interesting, and I will devote a future blog post to them.

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