Which is the best browser? That all depends on the purpose. Here’s a short summary comparison of the three browsers:
Internet Explorer 7.0/8.0: It launches slow, loads pages slow and has many irksome features in the general bloated fashion of Microsoft. I have little use for IE for home use. However, on an enterprise level, IE makes a compelling argument for it’s use with integrated authentication and compatibility with its Office and SharePoint products.
FireFox 3.0: Still a mainstay on my desktop, FireFox has an amazing array of browser add-ons that make it a browser of choice for developers. FireFox is hands-down the most flexible and feature packed browser with a large developer community. For an all-purpose browser FireFox takes the cake. One important caveaut, add-ons can slow the launch of the browser down to that of IE which is paltry.
Chrome: The fastest browser by far. It launches quick, loads pages rapidly and simply a slick browser. It’s streamline design, not surprising coming from Google, allows for more screen space. I hope that Google doesn’t get the itch to over engineer the browser as it evolves but leaves the simplicity of it alone. For Mac fans, Chrome is on its way; Just hang on.
A quick search on desktop utilities will reveal a plethora of bells and whistles. Sometimes it’s challenging to discern between the helpful suggestions and self-promotion. After trying many utilities, there are a few that have worked their way into my daily work life, utilities I depend on to help me through my day.
Keepass – I don’t know what I did all those years without a solid way of storing passwords. What a conundrum it poses. On one hand, best practice says to use unique passwords that are long and cryptic. On the other hand there needs to be a system for storing them. Perhaps I’m showing my age but I find it more and more difficult to do so. Keepass is a small utility that stores passwords in an encrypted file on your desktop. I also heard of some IT folks storing the file on a server and opening it locally for a shared resource.
Google Calendar Sync – After years of ambiguous and conflicting appointments between work and personal life, I’ve started syncing my work calendar in Outlook to Gmail. For Getting Things Done enthusiasts, this one is a no brainer. It’s nice to open-up my calendar mindspace and not worry as much about calendaring conflicts.
Beyond Compare – This little utility, free for the 30-Day trial then $30 to by, allows you to synch files between two folders. Originally I used it to synch web folders but have found it very useful for backing-up documents to a network drive.
YouSendIt.com – Moving large files around the globe can be a real hassle. Our intranet system is in development and sometimes there’s no more efficient way to get stuff to folks than uploading it to a second party. The service is free though as a department we’ve subscribed to their first tier of service. They also offer secured service if you have highly sensitive information.
Google Adwords Editor – The Adwords Editor just makes life a little easier for maintaining one or more accounts. Management of the campaigns can be handled from the desktop and then sync’d when done. Works nicely when multiple folks are working on the same account as well.
FireFTP – This FireFox plug-in gets constant use. It keeps life streamlined for me to pop open an ftp client within the browser. It’s quick to launch and works pretty darn good. I’ve used it for upwards of a year now and have very little complaints.
Gmail Manager – Another FireFox plug-in, but probably the most used utility I posess. It enables me to keep a constant eye on email w/out going to the account. If there were such a bird for Outlook my work life efficiency would be near shangri-la.
MeasureIt – A little FireFox plug-in that measures anything on the screen. I should mention Colorzilla as well though for some reason just don’t use it as much. MeasureIt is uber handy for getting dimensions when modifying graphics for a web page.
Ad-aware – We use Norton Anti-virus at work and to put it mildly, it’s under par as an all-encompassing anti-virus utility. I prefer AVG Anti-virus which is free though I have a paid subscription for my home computing environment. Regardless of the version of anti-virus software I use, Adaware does a decent job of catching malware and spyware that they others let slip by.
Microsoft PowerToys Image Resizer – This little utility performs a nice function to resize images with a right-click. While I absolutely love working in Photoshop, it’s a real hoss in terms of launching the program and a pain when a simple resize is all that is needed. Image Resizer is an ideal utility especially for blogging.
There are many other utilities that are credible and that I use fairly regularly, but these mentioned above range between hourly to weekly, stuff I depend on. What ones could you not live without?
There are two really slick FireFox add-ons guaranteed to save you time with site layout and configuration.
Colorzilla – Just click-on the eye-dropper and hover over any area of a web page to get the read-out of its color in either RGB or Hex color. This is most excellent for quick reference for your own site or for selecting colors from other sites you visit.
MeasureIT – Works very similar to Colorzilla. Click-on the icon in the bottom left corner of the browser and drag over the dimensions on your screen to see width and height of a region.
As a developer I’ve spent who knows how many hours using print-screen to capture an image and pulling it into Photoshop just to get the colors or size dimensions. Not anymore with these nifty utilities.
Browser plug-ins present some fantastic efficiencies. Any regular reader of this site knows my affinity for the browser, specifically Firefox and the amazing power of adding the right extensions. One must use constraint however to know the right plug-ins as each one requires more resources which can slow launching the browser and CPU utilization.
One nifty answer to this conundrum is to harness already built-in functions of the browser. The Firefox sidebar presents a handy option for accessing key frequented sites without adding a load to your performance.
With a few simple steps you can access sites independent of the main browser window.
Locate the mobile URL for your favorite site. A few examples of popular destinations are:
Bookmark the site to your tool bar. Notice the Twitter bookmark in the screenshot.
Right-click on the bookmark and click Properties.
Check "Load this bookmark in the sidebar" and press "OK" and you are done.
Now when you click on the bookmark, the site will open-up. One word of caution, your standard browser "back" and "forward" buttons don’t work on the sidebar. Neither does the refresh. To refresh the page, simply click the bookmark and it will reload the page. This is especially handy for streaming content like Twitter.
Do you know other browser hacks? What efficiencies have you learned?
ScribeFire is a very well designed FireFox plug-in that enables a blogger to write posts right in their browser.
The features that I enjoy most about ScribeFire include:
Launch the editor right in the browser with an icon that rests at the bottom of the browser window.
Continue viewing a webpage while you write in the bottom-half of the screen.
Save your posts as notes and return to them later. This is especially handy if you are working on several at one time.
Upload your images from within the ScribeFire FTP function and insert into your post.
Post to multiple blogs from the same application.
Utilize the full WYSIWYG Editor for quick formatting.
Manage your tags from within ScribeFire.
Publish straight to the blog when finished editing.
Built-in spell check with just a right-click.
One of the frustrations I had with blogging directly into WordPresses blogging application was losing my information if I left that window or the connection to the server crashed for some reason. I find that I lose much less information when using ScribeFire. The content is written locally on my machine and even though it does not have an auto-save feature, the "Save as a Note" button is right below where I’m typing so I tend to save often and rarely lose text.
ScribeFire Supports the following blog applications and services:
WordPress
Movable Type
Drupal
Textpattern
Roller
MetaWeblog API
Blogger
WordPress.com
TypePad.com
Live Journal
Windows Live Spaces
Performancing
Jeeran
If your blog is not on this list, you may want to try to manually setup through the Custom Blog settings. I have not yet been able to get Twitter, Jaiku or Pownce to work through ScribeFire.
One feature I don’t recommend: bookmarking in Del.icio.us and technorati.com. I found toggling between the functions to be a bit clunky. There are other more efficient and effective methods for interfacing with those sites than using ScribeFire. Like many programs, they added-in more features than needed. The magic of most well-developed plug-ins is their simplicity. That said, if you ignore that functionality, I think you will find this to be a very streamlined, rock solid method for updating your blog.
This is the best web editing tool I have found to date. Have you had any experience with other web editors? What features do you find most helpful?
Finally, I found a quick and convenient way to launch an FTP session in my browser. FireFTP add-on for Firefox now ranks as my top Plug-in. The program launches quickly within FireFox, is convenient to use because I already have Firefox open and was a snap to setup. The interace worked very similar to FileZilla with drag and drop transfer of files. Once you install the software, you’ll want to customize your toolbar under view by dragging the FireFTP icon to a toolbar. You will need to setup your accounts, which seemed pretty straight-forward. There’s really not the much too it and your done. As with all the other great plug-ins that I use with Firefox, this too is free. And if you don’t yet have the Firefox browser, what are you waiting for?
A developer friend of mine turned me on to the Firefox Add-on Firebug. This tool, not only is invaluable for troubleshooting code for developers, it proved invaluable for revising thoughtsparks.net. This nifty plug-in allows one to walk through the code and stylesheet on the fly while looking at a page. In the sea of WordPress styles, it helped to sort out what div was affected and allowed for fairly rapid revision to my blog. I’ve used this tool in a more robust environment as well and can testify to it’s utility across the spectrum. Check it out at: getfirebug.com.
BTW, any thoughts on the newer look for thoughtsparks.net? I take an evolutionary approach to site revision…a little at a time.
I just discovered Foxytunes. Check out: www.foxytunes.com to download. Foxytunes is a music tool that integrates into Firefox allowing you to control the music player of choice from the browser. It’s highly configurable and as you can see is compatible w/ a good number of players. It also has a slick search function that allows you to peruse with preset searches related to the artist, the album, the song, video, images, etc. Once again, the Firefox community leads the way in developing an integrated browser experience.
I’m not crazy about MS Windows, but until recently I have to say that my Dell Desktop with WindowsXP was pretty rock solid. That all changed after I upgraded to IE7. All of a sudden the machine started running slower, the browser itself grinded along and the CPU utilization shot-up. Finally, this past week, I was having error notifications that were taking down the machine. Talk about a whacked machine. After uninstalling a number of programs, checking the log files and making sure there were no viruses, I discovered the real virus: IE7 itself. After expunging the machine of the updated version it appears to be back to its normal zippy self. Sure IE7, finally catching-up w/ features FireFox has sported for quite some time, may seem like a logical move. Remember my friends, this is not logic you are dealing with, it’s a corporate entity that at times defies logic. As long as I’m running XP I’m going to refrain from upgrading to IE7. For sites that require up-to-date browsers, I’ll stick w/ FireFox.
Beyond Compare
YouSendIt.com
– We use Norton Anti-virus at work and to put it mildly, it’s under par as an all-encompassing anti-virus utility. I prefer AVG Anti-virus which is free though I have a paid subscription for my home computing environment. Regardless of the version of anti-virus software I use, Adaware does a decent job of catching malware and spyware that they others let slip by.
