I have been playing around with FireFox 4 for the Mac, since I absolutely adore the Windows version and it has replaced Chrome on my main PCs. My experience hasn’t been all that great – I tend to run loads of things all at once on my Mac and have found the performance … lacking. Turns out I am not alone, as a new review from Macworld shows that while FireFox 4 is much better than the last version, it still lags Safari and Chrome in terms of key performance.
Here are a few graphs they shared:
If you’re a heavy Google user such as myself, then you probably noticed the new mandatory “Everything” bar now located on the left side of your Google search page. Some may not care but me being a daily Netbook user, I need all the screen space I can get. A friend emailed an article from TweakGuides on how to get rid of this new annoyance. I thought I would pass along the information in case anyone else finds this new Everything bar as useless as I do. With a desktop machine or native widescreen it’s not as much an issue because the search results usually don’t take up the entire span of the screen anyway… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
(Image courtesy of Agile Web Solutions)
With more people creating a variety of online accounts and putting more information online and with the increase in the number of hacks trying to get into accounts, having a password manager is worth looking into. One of my favorite password managers, 1Password, has been available on the Mac platform for years and works seamlessly with a variety of browsers. 1Password is also available on the iPhone/iPod Touch and iPad. Well, imagine my surprise to see that Agile Web Solutions has released a beta of 1Password for Windows!
While it does not yet have feature parity with the Mac version, it’s an excellent first version. There are plugins… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
Like everyone else, I get a lot of spam. (My recent favorite was for penile extension “trial offer!”. I didn’t want to know what happened once the “trial” period had concluded . . .) The other day, something from Amazon actually caught my eye:
I tend to be highly suspicious when a big company uses my personal data and presents me with an offer to supposedly help me. I mean, companies aren’t in the business of helping their customers unless it makes them money. And I also don’t like to install extra plug-ins. So yeah, I was reluctant.
But heck, I review stuff for Gear Diary, so I plunged in anyway. And here’s what I found.
(Courtesy of The Economist)
To the surprise of almost no one, ad revenue has taken a downturn with the rest of the world economy. The bright spot is in internet ads; sadly, this means those awful ads that start playing video the second you visit a webpage or accidentally mouse over them won’t be going away anytime soon.
This also means Google, the king of internet ads, is that much closer to taking over the world.
Do you use an ad blocker? Or do you just accept that advertising is the trade off for browsing the interwebs? Share below!
Via The Economist
kwiclick is a fabulous new Firefox extension that enhances the way you interact with content from services like Google, Twitter, YouTube, and more.
I just installed it and after on a few minutes of use am hooked.
In a nutshell kwiclick allows you to perform a search of text in Firefox by simply highlighting and clicking. And going one step further kwiclick pulls your search results out into a separate, smaller window you take with you as you browse. You can bring up the window to view your previous results at any time. You can tell kwiclick what services you’d like it to… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
This is one of those bits of news that bears repeating, particularly if you use online banking. CNET is reporting about a new type of Trojan horse, known as URLZone, that is designed not to steal your login information for online banking sites, but rather to actually steal your money while you’re on the bank’s website. URLZone is sophisticated enough that it calculates how much money to steal based on how much is in your account, then displays a false balance to the user so as not to arouse suspicion.
The Trojan is being distributed through emails, infected sites that carry the malware, or an Adobe PDF. It exploits a hole in Firefox, Internet Explorer… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
Following the Google Labs and Gmail Labs, the people behind the Google Toolbar Team has chosen to free their imagination and build and deliver fast improvements to the Google Toolbar.
Here are the first two creatures of the Google Toolbar Labs.… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
For some time now, there has been a gap between PDA/phones and notebook computers, various form factors have been introduced to fill this void, but until the ASUS eeepc, none have been particularly successful. Of course, with the Asus, we were given the device which we now know as the netbook, and finally that gap began to close. Some devices, however, started at the other end of the spectrum, trying to fill the gap up from PDA/phones. Chief among them has been the Archos Internet Media Tablet and the iPod Touch. Well, now we have another newcomer to this gap-filling venture: The Clarion Mind, which stands for Media Internet Navigation Device. I’ll be honest here and say that I had never really heard of Clarion before, so I was interested to see what they would put together.
As I’m sure many of you will remember, a few months ago Gear Diary suffered a server crash, and a whole lot of data was lost. Fortunately, some of the data (reviews mainly) was stored in Google Cache, a fabulous little repository of lost websites. Whilst very handy for recovery, it’s can also be of use when a website is down for maintenance or their server is temporarily offline.
Today I was trying to look up some information on XDA-Developers, and I found that they are having some kind of service difficulties. I was able to get to the page I wanted to view using a search on Google, then clicking the “Cached” button below the search result. Now while that is pretty easy, surfing between pages on the… Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
I’ve been using the final release version of Firefox 3.0 since it was released a few days ago, and I’ve been very impressed. It is considerably faster than Firefox 2.0, both when first started and after several days of having hundreds of tabs opened and closed (without restart, and often 20 or more simultaneously).
This morning when I fired up my Eee, I got online using my USB HSDPA modem and downloaded the new version. Since my Eee has the tiny 7″ 800×480 display, web browsing isn’t the most comfortable experience, since 1024px wide seems to be the norm in website formatting these days. In Firefox 2.0 zooming was next to useless, and didn’t provide any benefit. I’d resorted to using AsTray to force the display res up to 1000×600, which to be honest doesn’t look good at all. … Continue reading on Gear Diary ...
Firefox is trying to set a Guiness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Starting at 1pm EST, you can download the latest Firefox version 3. New features in Firefox 3 include spell checking, session restore, phishing and malware protection and instant site ID.Link: Firefox 3 Download Day
Now that Mitchell has shared his views, I will share my views on the Eee.
The 8 GB drive on my Eee is fine for almost any OS. Once you start using the machine, it becomes clear that the 2, 4 and 8GB drives available are simply not enough. Plus Asus, in their infinite wisdom, has used the Union FS so that you can quickly restore the Eee back to the factory OS. You can do this without needing to have a External Optical drive or a USB thumb drive. It’s very convenient, but it takes up a tremendous amount of space on the 8 GB drive. One of these days I need to follow the instructions on eeeuser.com to remove the partition. This will make the full 8 GB of flash available. I have already bought a external USB drive from Best Buy, which goes with me when I need the extra storage. I have most of my music on that drive with a subset of music on an SD card. I also have some video and a backup of all documents on the Eee stored on this drive. Because it’s a portable drive, it’s completely powered by the Eee’s USB ports. It takes up two of the three ports. It runs just fine when it’s on battery but it does suck the battery down faster. Soon I am going to be purchasing a 16 GB SDHC so I can leave the USB drive behind occasionally.
