Browsers

I tried searching for something in Chrome a few minutes ago and found that my search was being handled by something sinisterly named Facemoods. Aghast, a few more checks confirmed that I had a toolbar installed on my system of the same name, the Chrome search engine was set to Facemoods by default and that I had an extension installed as well. A little more digging revealed that all this was jDownloader's fault as it installs the toolbar during its own installation process. Not good.

Removing all this junk involves the following steps:

I have gotten used to relying on Opera's tab recycle bin feature to reopen closed tabs. However, earlier today, I found myself accidentally closing a tab in Google Chrome, and what's more I had an unfinished forum comment which I had worked on for 20 minutes in said tab. When I saw no recycler icon in the tab bar and no obvious feature in the preferences or options sections, I panicked.

With the advent of the Opera 10 Beta, I highly recommend that users check it out or upgrade to it. The biggest news is that one of my primary gripes, i.e., the lack of inline spell-checking, has been solved.

If you, like me, are not fond of the new Veoh interface, this post is probably of interest to you. Veoh's new Web X.0 interface sucks eggs esp. with respect to its search functionality, but, thankfully, considering the large number of users with IE6, the old interface can still be accessed if you are one of the lucky (?) users who still have IE on their systems or if you set up your browser to identify itself as IE6 by modifying the user-agent string.

To modify the user-agent ...

I've been something of a fanboy of Opera for a long while now. It's quick-loading, has strong caching and doesn't hog memory like Firefox used to. However, with FF cleaning up house for its 3.x family, by fixing all those memory leaks, improving performance by leaps and bounds and introducing those little features (page zooming for e.g.) that make things ever so friendlier, I'm of a mind to switch back to it.

It's a bit unsettling how Opera (9.25) starts your download even before you've clicked "Save". For e.g., just now I wanted to download the Windows version of wget and visited the appropriate site and clicked on "download". I didn't click "save" and specify a download folder etc. and switched over to a video I was watching. There was also another download progressing at the same time.

A couple of the guys at work were having this rather inane argument yesterday on which was the better browser - Opera or Firefox.. apparently vi vs. emacs is no longer 'in' any more :S I generally keep away from these ultimately inconclusive arguments, but I thought that I might blog about it..

So here's my take on it (Versions: FF 1.5.0.4 Opera: 9.0). This is something of a draught at the moment:

Firefox plus points:

• Free and Open Source.
• Extensions, extensions, extensions.. the biggest plus point of Firefox.
• Vibrant developer community.
• Second most popular browser out there.