The Chrome extension Rain Alarm provides users with up to date precipitation warnings. The extension adds an icon to Chrome’s address bar upon installation that acts as a warning indicator, as it changes if it needs to inform the user about local weather warnings. The icon itself is rather small and definitely not the best [...]

The last test version of Internet Explorer 10 shipped exclusively with the Windows 8 Developer Preview. The platform preview that shipped with the Windows 8 system was actually the third preview version that Microsoft released publicly (see Microsoft Pushes Out Second Internet Explorer 10 Preview for previous coverage). Microsoft today made available the fourth platform [...]

Pixiv is a popular Japanese art community that is in many regards similar to Deviant Art. Pixiv artists concentrate mostly on drawings, either on the computer or on paper or other materials, and less on other forms of art. The website supports manga and novels as two other forms of art that can be uploaded [...]

Many Google Chrome extensions add a button to the browser’s address toolbar. If you have installed more than a dozen or so extensions, you may notice that space can become a issue, especially if the majority of extensions has added a button to the address bar. While you can hide individual extension icons with a [...]

I had my eyes on the FastestFox add-on for the Firefox browser for some time now. In the beginning, I thought it was just another add-on to speed up the browser like Fasterfox which tweaks the network performance of Firefox. Turned out that FastestFox, and its FastestChrome clone, offer a lot more than that. The [...]

The standard location for Firefox add-ons to place icons in is the add-on bar, which was previously known as the status bar of the browser. That’s different from the Chrome browser where extension icons are plastered on the address bar instead. The functionality and information that the icons provide is usually not needed all the [...]

Internet users are accustomed to seeing ads on Internet pages. One of the most prominent advertisement schemes used these days is Google Adsense which is available for websites, searches on websites and for mobile devices. Adword ads dominate the Google search result pages, and other Google properties are also displaying their fair share of ads. [...]

Firefox cannot be minimized to the Windows system tray, at least not without add-ons or third party tools that add the functionality to the web browser. One of those add-ons is the newly released TrayHotKey extension which, unlike related extensions, has a few aces up its sleeve. Firefox users who have installed the extension and [...]

One of the not so comfortable experiences that users can make on the Internet are websites where small images or thumbnails are displayed that reveal little to no information due to their size. Some of those images link to a bigger version, and while that may provide the information the user is looking for, it [...]

I have to admit that I’m not using Firefox’s built-in search bar to search on the Internet. I use the space for other interface elements and search directly on sites that offer search. It is a trade-off, other users make use of the search bar in the browser. One of the things that is missing [...]

Last year Google started to push the HTTPS protocol on many of their services which basically meant that users always connected to the https version of the site regardless of their own preference. Before that, https was only an option in a service’s settings. Gmail users for instance were able to enable https for their [...]

Many football fans use the Internet regularly to check for football scores, results, tables, fixtures and news. While it is easy to open the homepage of your favorite football club to read up on the latest news, you could also visit sport news portals like BBC Sport that cover all big European leagues and competitions. [...]

You may remember that I published a news article on November 16 about the release of Firefox 8.0.1. The release was available on Mozilla ftp servers and on third party sites like Softpedia, but not officially announced by Mozilla on the Firefox website. While that has not been a big problem in the past, with [...]

Sometimes when you read news on a site you may be interested in additional information or perspectives for a deeper understanding and better picture. While you could use a search engine for that, you could also try the browser extension Periscope of the news aggregation service News360. The extension basically works like related post links [...]

I’m not using private browsing modes that web browsers like Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome and even Internet Explorer offer. The core reason is that I’m the only user on the PC so that it is not necessary to protect my privacy using private browsing sessions. Plus, I delete my browsing data at the end of [...]

Every third party script that gets loaded on web sites when a visitor loads the page increases that page’s load and rendering times. Web browsers have made big improvements performance wise in recent times which has speed up page rendering times considerable. The rise of social networking sites on the other hand has seen an [...]

Are you currently shopping for a new digital camera? Then you probably would like to see a few test photos taken with cameras that have made it on your list. Or maybe you own a camera and want to know what it is capable of. Whatever it is, the Chrome extension Photo Finder can help [...]

Remember BrowserID, the Internet sign-in system developed by Mozilla? The project went silent shortly after the initially announcement in July, and it was not really clear if Mozilla was going forward with it or putting it on ice for the time being. A recent post on the Mozilla Identity team blog revealed that Mozilla was [...]

Even if you are living in a big city like me, you sometimes need to know the times the sun or moon rises and sets. Maybe you want to photograph the sun or moon at a specific time, go fishing or believe in something that requires you to know the exact times. Or, you simply [...]

I often find items on Steam that I’d really like to buy and play but consider to be to expensive. This is usually the case with recently released games but sometimes even with games that have been out for some time. The same is true on Amazon, even though I’m not usually finding games to [...]

I have already talked about Google Verbatim, a new search tool that is currently rolled out for all users of the Google Search engine. With Verbatim, users can search for contents that match their search query exactly. This means no interpretations by Google, no adding of synonyms, removal of words or personalization of the search [...]

One of the biggest issues that Firefox users have with the rapid release cycle introduced earlier this year is the fact that updates often disabled their add-ons in the browser due to incompatibilities. Most of the time though those incompatibilities can be attributed to the maximum compatible version number assigned to an add-on, and not [...]

One of the strengths of the Internet is that it is possible to pack a lot of information on a page. I’m talking about links, images and other media that can really add to the reading experience and information transfer. The biggest strength can however be a weakness as well, if the additional contents are [...]

Have you ever been on a web page that would not stop loading? That would go on forever until you tapped on the ESC key to stop it? When you search on Google for “page loads forever” and comparable phrases you come up with thousands of pages filled with user reports about that problem. A [...]

We do know at this point in time that Mozilla is investigating means to update Firefox more effectively. Back in October we revealed that Mozilla was planning to add a silent update process to the browser to streamline the process and make it more comfortable and unobtrusive. Firefox engineer Ehsan Akhgar is now discussing another [...]

Mozilla is about to release an update for the latest stable version of Firefox. Firefox 8.0.1 will be released less than two weeks after the release of Firefox 8, the latest stable version of the popular Internet browser. A fast release like this usually indicates a serious problem that needs to be addressed right away. [...]

Depending on your work environment you sometimes may get distracted or interrupted by noise. In my particular situation for instance, I tend to get distracted by dog walkers or service cards outside of my apartment. Others may be distracted by co-workers chatting on the phone, a refrigerator, television or anything else that is distracting them [...]

One of the two issues that I identified in yesterday’s review of Opera’s NotScripts extension was that it has not been updated for a long period of time. A script by the same name for Google Chrome, NotScript for Chrome, has also not been updated for almost a year now. Ghacks reader Vineeth just sent [...]

When it comes to add-ons, the noScript add-on for the Firefox web browser is my favorite one. It basically blocks script from running on domains until I allow them to run. NoScript offers more functionality than that like XSS protection among a plethora of others. I have covered the Google Chrome extension NotScript in the [...]

If you are on the Google Chrome Stable channel you may have noticed that Google recently changed the new tab page in the web browser. The page now opens with the most visited sites and navigational elements on the right and bottom of the screen to switch to the web apps listing or bookmarks. The [...]

Web browser bookmarks seem to have lost much of their appeal in past years. The same can be said for bookmarking sites like Delicious which have seen a drop in user count. Question is: What are users doing instead? Are they posting interesting links to their social networking profiles to have them available there? This [...]

Avatars are profile photos on social networking sites, web forums and other places where users can create accounts and post publicly. Some users like to use their own photo, that of their cat or car as their avatars, while others find use images that they find on the Internet for that. It is often possible [...]

After having some initial troubles getting my add-ons to work under Firefox 10 Aurora I had time to look at the changes and new features of this release. Firefox 10 will be the next but one stable release of the web browser which means that stable channel users will have to wait about 12 weeks [...]

Youtube account owners can not only upload and view videos on the world’s most popular video hosting website, they can also write comments and rate videos with a simple up and down vote. These ratings sometimes can help you make decisions about a video before you have watched it. The problem here is that YouTube [...]

Cookies, those small data files that can do good (saving preferences or session information) or bad (tracking), have all an expiration date. The expiration date is set by the webmaster of each visited website and can range from seconds or minutes to years. Cookies will expire eventually and when they do they cannot be used [...]

Firefox 9 Aurora was updated to Firefox 10 Aurora a few minutes ago. The update dialog listed several incompatible add-ons which I ignored at that time as I’m using the Mozilla Add-On Compatibility Reporter to make add-ons compatible. When I started Firefox 10 after the upgrade installation I noticed that the web browser listed all [...]

Having to work with tables in a web browser is not the most pleasant experience, unless you are on a site like Google Docs that offers more than just the ability to copy table cell data into other programs. Tables are displayed using the HTML table tag or by formatting elements with the help of [...]

Prerendering in the best case speeds up specific processes. When it comes to web browsers the technology could pre-load and render websites to display them faster for the user. This only works if the browser gets the site right. If you look at a standard web search for instance, you will get ten search results [...]

You may have heard that Microsoft plans to integrate a spell checking module into their upcoming web browser Internet Explorer 10. Up until now, Internet Explorer users had to install third party software like SpeckIE (Spell Check IE) to have spell checking functionality at their disposal in the Internet browser. Users who are interested in [...]

With the fall of the once popular Digg social voting site came the rise of better alternatives like Reddit. If you look at Digg today you will notice that the site took a big dive in recent years. From thousands of so called diggs (that is votes) for popular stories to one or two hundred [...]

Sometimes when you are reading a page full of contents you may come upon a passage or element that you want to bookmark for later use or sharing with other users. While you could send the page url to someone or bookmark it, you would need to explain or remember where that element or content [...]

The Opera web browser is the only popular web browser – and with that I mean market share wise – that ships with its own built-in email client. While I have not used Opera Mail in a long while thanks to the excellent desktop mail software Thunderbird, I have always followed the news closely. Opera [...]

The Mozilla Firefox web browser has quite the bad image when it comes to memory efficiency. You see claims all over the Internet that the browser is eating up more memory than other browsers. Comparisons often are not entirely fair to begin with, considering that most Firefox users have their fair share of add-ons installed [...]

While I have not used my Google Reader account for a long while, thanks to the awesome desktop RSS reader RSS Owl, I have been following recent news with interest. Especially the latest Google Reader update has infuriated part of the service’s user base. The update has been part of a larger scale redesign of [...]

When you look at Google Chrome’s feature set and compare it to that of other browsers like Opera, Internet Explorer or Firefox, you will come to the conclusion that web browsers are more alike than they are different. Two items that will definitely be on the list are the built-in PDF viewer and the native [...]

If you are on the Firefox stable channel, which most users certainly are, you are currently working with version 7 of the browser. The next update for the web browser is said to go life on the Mozilla website on November 8. As always, Firefox releases are available early on Mozilla ftp servers where they [...]

One of the things that I migrate to new computer systems that I build or but are my bookmarks. I have a collection of a few hundred sites in my bookmarks that I use regularly thanks to browsers recommending bookmarks when entering text into the address bar. A corrupt or accidentally deleted bookmarks file could [...]

You may already know about Mozilla’s plan to retire the built-in Firefox profile manager to replace it with an external program called the Profile Manager. This new program, available for all supported operating systems that Firefox runs on is not only compatible with the web browser but also with other XULRunner-based applications like Mozilla Thunderbird [...]

Flash applications can be very taxing performance wise. If you ever had to run Flash apps on underpowered hardware, e.g. a netbook or tablet PC, then you know that you may experience frame drops and other performance related issues. Most performance issues are caused by games which can be very taxing. I remember that I [...]

Opera Software, developers of the popular Opera web browser, have released Opera Mini 6.5 for various mobile devices including Apple’s iPhone and iPad, Blackberry devices, Symbian S60 and Java-enabled phones. Opera Mobile 11.5 has been released for Symbian S60 devices in addition to that. Before we look at what’s new, we should take a quick [...]