Ramblings of a Coder's Mind » Browser http://karunab.com Got Tech? Will Hack. Sun, 04 Jul 2010 06:35:51 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Chrome Tips http://karunab.com/2008/09/07/chrome-tips/ http://karunab.com/2008/09/07/chrome-tips/#comments Sun, 07 Sep 2008 09:59:47 +0000 Karun http://karunab.com/?p=82
  • Custom Search Engine: Right click the address bar and click Edit search engine. Click add, fill in a name and a keyword followed by the search query.
    For adding the Messenger Plus Forum Search engine I used the name as “Messenger Plus! Forum Search” (doesn’t really matter what you use here), the keyword as “mpf” and the url as “http://msghelp.net/basicsearch.php?do=search&keywords=%s” where %s represents the search query entered. As a result of adding this, I can now search the MP!F simply by typing “mpf “. I love search shortcuts :)
  • Searching Google.com instead of your local (regional) google site: This is really a continuation of the previous tip but I just felt it was worthy of being here :P There is a fault (imo) with the default google search engine in Chrome. The keyword is set to “google.com”. Why type all that when you could simply use “g” ;) Also, if you have a look at the google search url in chrome, it uses a base query identifier to redirect to your local google. I just changed mine to “http://google.com/search?q=%s” because while posting google links (especially on irc) to have to remove my browser info every time and sometimes even my country tld in the google domain. This way, it makes it easier for me to paste links though I do realise that google might lose out on accurate statistics of its users because of this but I don’t think it’d mind a handful of users changing their queries when it has billions of searches everyday ;) I’ve also changed my wiki keyword to “w” and urbandictionary.com keyword to “ud“
  • Memory stats for nerds: Well I am a geek/nerd who likes his stats, memory or otherwise ;) Typing about:memory in your url bar ought to take you to some stats while you can do the same by clicking Shift+Esc for basic stats and then clicking “Stats for nerds“. The advanced stats also shows details of Chrome vs other browsers (which should be running at the same time). So you can run Chrome,  Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and Safari at the same time and compare statistics if you wish ;) Having it update live would have been cooler but that might take up a lot of resources in itself :P Maybe it should auto refresh when someone’s watching but if you go switch to another tab/application or are idle you could stop refreshing it automatically. :)
  • Resizing Textboxes: You can now resize textboxes by holding down the left mouse button at the bottom right corner and dragging it. And here’s poor dt who wrote a ton of javascript to do the same in dtblog.
  • Check Loadtimes: Want to know what took the page so long to load? Do you want to know how long it took your javascript code to execute? Chrome is here to help! Right click anywhere on the page and select “Inspect Element”. Just move on over to the resources tab and analyse away :)
  • Detaching and reattaching tabs: Tired of having so many tabs in one single window? Want to sort tabs according to what kind of work you’re doing? Sure that’s possible! Drag a tab outside the tab area and drop it. Voila! Brand new chrome window. Each tab in Chrome is a new process anyway so it doesn’t really matter ;)
  • Private Browsing: You could need to browse privately either to not tell the world of your searches on medical histories, viewing porn (:P) or planning that secret trip for your significant other, who cares? Incognito to the rescue! Press ”Ctrl+Shift+N” or just click the new page icon followed by “New Incognito Window”. Incognito is basically opens a private browsing session for you where no traces of what you were doing show up thus maintaining full privacy.
  • Easter Eggs: Lets end with something fun! Hopefully most of you already know of the about:mozilla easter egg in Mozilla Firefox which pulls out a quote from The Book of Mozilla. Here’s one for Chrome that doesn’t work on Vista. Type in about:internets in the chrome window and you’ll see sspipes.scr run with the title “Don’t clog the tubes”. Doing so on Vista will show a gray tab with the title “The Tubes are Clogged!” since it doesn’t have sspipes.scr. If you don’t get why this screen saver was used, you should know that the Internet is a “Series of Tubes” ;) Don’t clog them with your p0rnz! :P
    • Here’s a list of the about pages under Chrome that we do know of right now.
    • about: does the same thing as about:version
    • about:cache Shows all cached pages
    • about:crash Shows you the Chrome Crash page (ie what happens when a tab crashes.
    • about:dns Shows list of prefetched DNS records. (Note: Doesn’t work if an incognito window is open).
    • about:hang Simulates tab hanging (Note: Don’t try this in a tab with unsaved data)
    • about:histograms Shows histograms for statistics
    • about:internets Don’t clog the tubes ;)
    • about:memory Stats for nerds :P
    • about:network More stats for nerds
    • about: plugins Lists out all the plugins used by Chrome
    • about:shorthang Simulates crash (Note: Don’t try this until you want your tab to crash. You’ll lose unsaved data in that tab)
    • about:stats Seemingly secret stats page ;o
    • about:version Shows version information for your Google Chrome
    ]]>     http://karunab.com/2008/09/07/chrome-tips/feed/ 3     Browser Tryouts: Google Chrome http://karunab.com/2008/09/07/browser-tryouts-google-chrome/ http://karunab.com/2008/09/07/browser-tryouts-google-chrome/#comments Sun, 07 Sep 2008 08:28:17 +0000 Karun http://karunab.com/?p=77 Google Chrome: The Next Gen Open Source Web Browser

    Google Chrome: The Next Gen Open Source Web Browser

    Having heard all the rage about Google Chrome, I decided to try it out this Friday morning before leaving for college. What’s this I see? An online install? Of course it doesn’t mean much to people who have connections which can download the 7.3MB installer in a few seconds but for others, its a bit more arduous. Here’s a direct download link to the Google Chrome installer for others like me who have connections which are as slow as if not slower than broadband ;) To download the full Google Chrome Installer (7.3 MB) click here.

    Chrome is Google’s Next Generation browser and I must say, it does feel good :) (This post is being written in Chrome :P). It did take some time to load up the page but I suspect that’s because of the page not being cached yet and that Chrome doesn’t seem to have Google Gears. O.o I distinctly remember reading that Chrome has the Gears engine in the Chrome Web Comic but when I tried enabling Turbo in the WordPress panel for Chrome it said that I didn’t have Gears installed. So it sent me to the Gears webpage which said my browser wasn’t supported. :P Seems like I’m not the only one who noticed ;)

    Like most other Google products, Chrome has a simplistic yet powerful UI which puts UX above everything. Its technical specs are pretty impressive too. The process isolation for tabs, sandboxing them for extra security and omnibox are things that almost every experienced internet user would want. Moving from Firefox to Chrome would be easy considering that all the shortcuts remain the same :P Ctrl+J opens the downloads window in Chrome, Ctrl+T for tabs (pretty standard), Ctrl+Shift+T for opening recently closed tabs etc. If you don’t already know about memory fragmentation and how Google Chrome deals with it, you should read Page 6-7 of the Google Chrome Web Comic.

    You can right click any web page in Chrome and click “Inspect Element” and this would take you to the page source. Viewing page source in a browser was never so awesome. Chrome highlights and formats the code beautifully but I can’t get it to search through the source for some reason. Also the resources tab allows you to “put the blame where it rightfully belongs” when it comes to memory leaks ;) But the Firefox addons development community is huge and the 3 addons that are going to keep me using Firefox are delicious bookmarks synchronisation (for access to bookmarks across multiple computers), FlashBlock and the almighty AdBlock! :) Also, having individual processes for each tab is a neat thing when it comes to functionality but for someone like me who lives half his life in the processes tab of Windows Task Manager, seeing all those chrome.exe processes does get a tad bit annoying :)

    Chrome is an excellent start and I’d say, with a few tweaks and changes its going to be a great browser. I’ll just wait a few builds (or at least till I have ports of AdBlock and del.icio.us bookmark syncing) and then use Chrome a bit more regularly.

    PS: Why do I have the feeling that the age of the browser war threads on forums across the intarwebs are back? :P

    Update: Oh I knew this would happen!

    ]]>     http://karunab.com/2008/09/07/browser-tryouts-google-chrome/feed/ 0