Make Firefox better than Google Chrome - more screen space!!

I got some ideas from this post on LifeHacker. but didn't find it necessary to use everythng they did and went further to get more screen real estate.

What I like about Chrome is the fact that there's more space for you to see the web page. The excess "chrome" ironically has been removed. The Window's title bar is gone, the status bar is gone, and so that opens up a lot of space.

So all I wanted to do was get the same amount of real estate in Firefox, but I ended up with more!

How?

First, under the Firefox View menu, uncheck Status Bar. That gives you a bunch of extra space at the bottom of the window. And now you're getting close to emulating Chrome.

Of course you wont' see the status of the page as it loads, but that's the price you pay. BUT you can install Firebug, in which case you would have much better status information accessible anytime by pressing F12.

Second you need to install

Personal Menu by Merci Chao (Version 4.1pre)

What that does is allows you to hide the menu bar, which is what Chrome does, that gives a bunch of space at the top of the page. After installing Personal Menu make sure you go back into View and unselect Toolbars > Menu Toolbar

Now that hides the Menu bar, which you can still get to by pressing ALT.

Now you're almost there.

Next, you go back into View > Toolbars and unselect Navigation Toolbar.

Now, lo and behold you have more space in Firefox than you have in Chrome!!!

Isn't that awesome? Do you really need the navigation bar? No, because if you want to type something there, you press the CTRL-L shortcut anyway, and that continues to work.

You can also install this:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/8769

That will allow you to toggle the navigation bar using the F2 keyboard shortcut. Very handy!!

That's the one feature I wish Chrome would have-the ability to toggle the navigation bar. If Chrome did that, the amount of screen real estate would expand tremendously.


ps, You can use this theme if you want your Firefox to look more like Chrome:

Chromifox by Falconer (Version 1.0)

Labels: browsers, chrome, firefox

The fastest browser is Google Chrome

About the new Chrome 1.0, the first version of Google Chrome out of beta, PC Magazine says:

The retest shows a 24 percent speed improvement, bringing this released browser to the same level of performance as Firefox's second beta 3.1 version. The new numbers far outstrip what Microsoft's Internet Explorer was capable of, by a factor of nearly 100, and even bested the released version of Firefox 3.0's results more than threefold.

I'm generally pleased with Chrome but still have privacy concerns. I think Google needs to put in place an opt-out feature.

Labels: browsers, chrome, privacy

Google Chrome Privacy Problems

From the ACLU of Nothern California:

Google Suggest is a new Chrome feature that suggests possible completions for partial search queries, such as when you misspell a Web address or otherwise encounter an error. This feature comes at a high price paid with personal data, however. Every keystroke typed into a Google Suggest-enabled area is sent to Google, along with your IP address and any Google account information stored in cookies on the user’s computer.

While Google Suggest is found in several products, it is particularly problematic in Chrome because Chrome features only a single input area, called the OmniBox, for entering both URLs and search queries. Chrome users are thus likely to send information about all of their Internet activity to Google, not just search queries.

Google says they will "anonymize" the data they collect:

To provide its recommendations Google Suggest needs to know what you've already typed, so these partial queries are sent to Google. For 98% of these requests, we don't log any data at all and simply return the suggestions. For the remaining 2% of cases (which we select randomly), we do log data, like IP addresses, in order to monitor and improve the service.

However, given the concerns that have been raised about Google storing this information -- and its limited potential use -- we decided that we will anonymize it within about 24 hours (basically, as soon as we practically can) in the 2% of Google Suggest requests we use.

But bloggers are calling bullshit:

Google has now revealed that it will change "some" of the bits of the IP address after 9 months, but less than the eight bits that it masks after the full 18 months. Thus, instead of Google's customers being able to hide among 254 other Internet users, perhaps they'll be able to hide among 64, or 127 other possible IP addresses.
By itself, this is a laughable level of anonymity. However, it gets worse.
First, remember that Google will not delete or anonymize user cookies from the logs when it slightly smudges IP addresses after nine months. Second, remember that as long as you use a Google Web property at least once every two years, the company will maintain a unique identifiable cookie value within your Web browser.

The alternative to Chrome is Iron but who knows if they can keep up with development. Chrome should have its own opt-out system. It's not hard to implement, and most people won't even bother to opt-out so they'll still get the data they want while protecting privacy of people who want that privacy. So why won't Google just do it? Don't be evil!

Labels: chrome, iron, privacy

Google Chrome Privacy - Iron vs. Chromium

So Google as always is being very creepy with Google Chrome, which they use to collect a ton of information about you, like every site you visit and so on. So some people are like, well we like the browser but we don't like the company behind it or how they're collecting and using personal information. Google Chrome does assign a unique ID apparently to each browser, which makes everything you do trackable.

Enter the Germans. SRWare Iron came out with a stripped down version of Chrome which doesn't collect any data.

* unlike the current Chrome beta it uses the newest Webkit version of the current Chromium build

* it does not generate a unique ID of every client for use by Google

* no installation timestamp ill be generated for google

* no "suggest feature" that phones home to google (for help) what you type into the address bar

* will not phone home to google in case you mistyped a URL

* no phoning home for error reporting

* does not send RLZ tracking info to google, e.g. about when and where Chrome was downloaded

* NO frickin updater that installs itself as a startup app to run in the background

* does not load google homepage in background when the browser is loaded

But the question is does Iron actually do anything different from Chromium? Chromium is the open source project that is behind Google Chrome. Does Chromium do all this stuff for Google? Like sending your data to them, and so on?

I don't know. Does anybody know the answer to that question? Is it safe to use Chromium? Or do we have to go with Iron if we don't want Google tracking us?

Labels: browsers, chrome

Google Chrome Scrolling Bug FIXED!!!

Hey if you have a laptop of any sort (I think all Synaptics scroll mouse thing laptops), you may have noticed that the latest release of Google Chrome does not work. The scrolling feature is broken. You can scroll down (too fast anyway), but can't scroll up. It's a big pain in the butt.

The issue was tracked by the development team, and has been resolved. But it's not in the latest official release, so if you want to be able to use Google Chrome with your laptop RIGHT NOW, with the scrolling features working properly--and it's a real pain if they don't work, then download the latest version of Google Chrome from the trunk. Keep in mind that these are development versions, and not necessarily as stable as the latest official version:

The download page is here. As of this moment, the latest version is 2868. Download the file that says mini_installer.exe.


Almost all laptops are affected by the bug but these are some of the confirmed ones:
Toshiba P200
HP nx6310
Toshiba Tecra A8
Asus X50RL XP Pro
Dell Inspiron 1520
HP Compaq 6910p
Dell Latitude D620
Dell Vostro 1500
Dell XPS M1330
Dell Inspiron 6400

Now you truly can browse happy. Right now Google Chrome is faster than Firefox because of its V8 Javascript virtual machine, which makes everything snappier, but in the next version of Firefox, Firefox will release a new version of its own Javascript runtime, TraceMonkey, which is supposed to be even faster than Chrome's V8.

Labels: browser, bugs, chrome