In this article I am going to introduce you to some of those alternative web browsers and show you what they have to offer. I will skip over the installation of these browsers as you will most likely find them in your distributions’ repositories. These browsers will be in no certain order.

Arora

Arora

Arora is a light-weight, cross-platform web browser (so long as the platform will run Qt) that offers many of the features you have come to love on your browser (and then some). Arora uses the QTWebKit port of the WebKit layout engin. The feature list looks like:

• Fast startup
• Desktop integration
• Smart location bar
• Session management
• Privacy
• Search engine management
• Flash plugin support
• Download manager
• Tools for web developers
• Translations for thirty languages.

Elinks

Elinks

I can’t help but add a text-based web browser to this list. Elinks hearkens back to my old Lynx days where browsing the web was not interrupted by images, ads, and flash. Why would you want to use such a browser? Simple: Elinks is fast. Not Chrome fast…even faster. Elinks is so fast you will miss your pages load if you blink – that kind of fast. But remember, you only get text here. You use Elinks from within a terminal window. Open one up and enter the command elinks. Hit the <Esc> key and then enter a url. Simple. Fast. What more do you want from the web? ;-)

Epiphany

Epiphany

Epiphany is supposed to be the web browser for the GNOME desktop. It isn’t really, but it does try. Epiphany lives somewhere between Elinks and Arora. It’s not text-only, but it will handle your fancy-shmancy plugins. Epiphany lets you concentrate on the content, not the application displaying the content.

Epiphany does offer a few nice features:

• Security
• Customizable interface
• Smart bookmarks
• Extensions and plugins

I was pleasantly surprised that Epiphany handled, out of the box, Flash plugins (and handled them well.)

Final thoughts

There you go: Three browsers you most likely have never heard of nor ever tried. I have run the gamut of browsers and I can say that each of the above browsers certainly has their place in the landscape of the internet. Will any of them threaten the monsters of the ball? Absolutely not. Does that mean you shouldn’t give them a try? No, you definitely should…especially if you’ve never experienced the web in its purest, text-only form.

I would highly recommend you give one of these browsers a go. You might find your new favorite app!

If you drag an image on a website with your mouse you download that image automatically to your computer. This is great if you download images regularly and think that the right-click -> save image dialog is to laborious. The images are saved in the default download folder of Firefox automatically.

URLs, those that are clickable and those that are not, can be dragged to open them in a new tab in Firefox. This saves some time especially if the url is not clickable, for example if the webmaster did not use the http://www part of the url.

The last feature performs a search in the default search engine if you drag and drop text. Just mark anything and a new tab will open that displays the search results of the default search engine for that term that you selected.

This obviously only works if you have added the website to the bookmarks in either Firefox or Opera. When doing so you can add a keyword or nickname for that url which in turn makes it possible to access the website by typing in that keyword in the address bar.

Instead of accessing the website http://www.windows7news.com/ I simply type w7 and hit enter. The website loads just fine. Now, I do not recommend to add keywords for every bookmark that you have. This would surely lead to problems remembering the keywords for those urls unless you have a photographic memory.

I have about ten keywords for domains that I access regularly to speed up access. I do not add keywords for very short urls like cnn.com for instance but everything with 5+ chars makes sense. (it’s enough to enter cnn for cnn to enter the website in Firefox because Firefox will automatically load the first website in the Google results if no matching keyword was found.

It recognizes a lot of social sites like Youtube, Facebook, Del.icio.us and integrates these sites, allowing you to navigate them using the browser interface. A great example of this is the Flock toolbar, which has a small icon for people. By default this shows you a sidebar with your registered social sites, along with the people associated with them. If you have new friend requests, the icon turns red, giving you a cool visual indication.

Flock also supports bookmarking to your favorite sites automatically, it has an awesome web clipboard that recognizes links, pics and text, a great RSS reader, much like Google Reader and it is riddled with small but handy features everywhere. All Firefox extensions have worked for me so far, but some people do report that a large number of extensions slow Flock down more.

There is a full blog editor in there which works fine for simpler entries and for most bloggers, but for the pros it won’t be enough. It is able to post, but I couldn’t get it to select categories for me, only tags. If you have a simple private blog though it will work great.

All in all I favor Flock over Firefox, now that I am using a lot of these social sites. A Flock rep told me that once Firefox 3 is out, they will also change their version and Flock will be built on the new Firefox, so that’s something to look forward to. On the negative side there are some more sites that could be built in like Digg for example, which is a mystery why it has been left out. I see a lot of potential here just waiting to be developed, I do hope it will be!

At the moment only English speaking users can be helped and only Firefox related problems can be discussed. The chat opens in a browser window. I decided to test it out and I immediately was connected to a helpful person named Jessie who tried to help me with my problem.

I do have a problem at the moment. Firefox hangs whenever I try to load a website without Internet connection. This happens when my Internet connection dies or if my Router is not establishing one automatically. The hang lasts for about 5-10 seconds and Firefox is not reacting at all in that time.

Jessie knew about the Firefox configuration and about:config. We could not locate the problem though and she told me to try to start Firefox in safe mode, that is without add-ons, and see if the problem persisted.

I’m currently at that stage. If any of you have a solution for this problem I’m facing let me know please because those hangs are really irritating.

Firefox Live Support is fast, know the browser very well and are very helpful. Great service that increased the value of Firefox tremendously.

To counter this problem, I scour a whole host of online TV sites to catch up. My personal favorite used to be TVLinks but that site got shut down some time in October. Ever since then, I’ve turned to Alluc, which is short for ‘all you see’. This is one of the better show aggregators out there. It has extensive links to movies, TV shows, anime, music videos, documentaries, and sports videos.

Like other sites, Alluc itself does not host any of the files. They simply link to files present on video sharing sites like Youtube, Stage6, Veoh, etc. The home page has the most popular links in each category. If you are looking for something specific, simply click on the desired category and then browse through to see if it’s available. Most of the time, you will definitely find what you are looking for.

The only downside to this site is that they do not have any control over the quality of the videos, since they accept links from all over. Most of the files are in ‘flv’ format, which is not exactly DVD quality. Do not despair since new links are constantly being added. If you come back the next day, you will often find the same file in ‘divx’ format. At the same time broken links are removed so you are not likely to get dead links very often.

Alluc ranks high on my list largely because they have a lot of links. While popular shows are available easily, this site even has files pertaining to older TV shows as well as obscure ones, which got cancelled halfway.

There are lots of online TV sites out there. I’ll be checking them out in the coming weeks and will post reviews of good ones over here. Suggestions are always welcome.

‘Youtube is banned you fool, The administrators didn’t write this program guess who did?? MUHAHAHA!!’

I couldn’t for the life of me figure out how this had happened so I decided to search and see if this problem had cropped up somewhere else. Turns out, it’s pretty common. These messages are courtesy of the W32.USB worm. This worm copies itself to removable drives as Microsoft Power Point.exe and will infect your PC when you connect the infected drive to it. The infection is via a hidden Autorun.inf file.

Luckily, it’s fairly easy to get your browsers back to normal. Just follow the following steps.

1. Right click the system tray and select the ‘Task Manager’ or just hit ‘Ctrl+Alt+Del’. Once the task manager is open, navigate to the ‘Processes’ tab.
2. Under the ‘Image name’ column, look for all entries marked ‘svchost.exe’, which are running under your USERNAME ONLY (not system, local or anything else). Terminate these processes by hitting the ‘End Process’ button. Close the task manager.
3. The next step is to delete the files itself. Open ‘My Computer’ and type ‘C:\heap41a’, then hit Enter. The folder will have the files ‘svchost.exe, script1.txt, standard.txt, reproduce.txt, and an audio file.’ Delete all the files in the folder and then delete the heap41a folder itself.
4. Now we have to delete the registry entry as well. Go to ‘Start –> Run’ and type ‘regedit’. Once the registry opens, on the menu bar, go to ‘Edit –> Find’ and type ‘heap41a’. After searching, you should have some entries with ‘heap41a’ in them. Delete all these entries.
5. Your PC is free of the worm.

However, you also need to get rid of the worm from the USB drive, lest it infect your computer again. Connect your drive to the computer’s USB port (disable the drive from auto playing) and delete all entries marked with ‘autorun’. They may sometimes be in a separate folder. Once these entries are gone, your USB drive is clean as well.