Fell in love With Firefox, happily married to Chrome

When Netscape Navigator died It gave birth to Mozilla Suit, and when the Mozilla Suit was taking its last breath Firefox was born. Firefox’s close relatives are Seamonkey, thunderbird, Sunbird and some other Animal named  free and open-source softwares. ( If anybody knows why all of them are named after animals please let me know )

It was Mozilla Firefox who showed the world that what a web browser could do and hence started the mighty browser war. It was the salvation for Internet explorer victims.

Firefox’s power is its extensibility. Even today nobody beats Firefox when it comes to add-ons.
But it has became cluttered with lots of tool bars. Well there are some add-ons and themes that can be used to hide toolbars and give it a sleek look like chrome, but add-ons are memory hungry and will make your browser more snailious ( it is a word, right? anyways what I mean here is slow like a snail ).

The biggest irritation with Firefox is the start-up time. It feels like ages and you might want to pull your hairs in that time or may want to get a manicure or pedicure .
I have tried Firefox 4 beta-4, and its not better then Firefox 3.6.9, Instead you will not be able to use most of the add-ons, because Firefox 4 is in beta state and add-on updates are the soul responsibility of their individual creators. So without add-ons it is lame.

On the other hand Google Chrome is going from good to better.

The Google Chrome and Chromium (A open source project which is behind Google Chrome ) were started as a minimalistic looking browser with fast browsing experience, but It lacked the extensibility. So I did admire it but never used it as my primary browser.

But two years after the the Chrome’s appearance, Today I see it as the fastest browser with sleek look and a huge Library of Extensions. Chrome is attracting more and more programmers now and extension count is growing very fast.
Plus Chrome works fine with lots of extensions installed and doesn’t go unresponsive.

I will be writing a post about Google Chrome extension equivalent with Firefox Add-ons. So check back soon.

You can download Google Chrome from here.

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How To Bypass Firefox 4 Beta’s Incompatible Add-on Error and use them anyway

Firefox 4 beta is out but you can't use your favorite add-ons yet because most of add-ons have not been updated. this tutorial will tell you how you can still use them.

1. The Easy and Safe way.

Download the extension named add-on compatibility reporter 0.5 from here.
This will enable add-ons . You can also help Mozilla by reporting which add-on still works and which need attention.






2. The hack

Basically what you need to do is:
 - Go to about:config (enter in browser bar)
 - Add the key ( rightclick, new key") "extensions.checkCompatibility" (=>boolean)
 - set to "false" by clicking on it
 - restart firefox

for more info on this go here.

Important Note: Most of the add-ons will work smoothly, but few like Greasemonkey and fast youtube downloader can make your browser unstable by opening endless windows or by showing extra big status-bar. so its better to disable them and hope that they will be updated soon by their respective owners.

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Who Will Win ! Chrome , Firefox or Opera

Type: Re-posted review from my other blog.


I Installed Opera 10.54 and Firefox 4 today for review ( on usefulness and looks and not a technical review),  Already had IE  (and who doesn't!) and Firefox 3.6 on my PC .

So here it goes on different aspects:

Space utilization:
All the software are nice in looks. Firefox is going quite a Chrome way in looks and so does the Opera, but Firefox has miss-understood the tab on top thing.Windows 7 style toolbar button is present on top-left (on title-bar) but the whole space next to it is wasted, Chrome and Opera are better in space utilization to give user maximum space for page viewing.

old style menubar is not present in Firefox (you can access it by pressing alt) but statusbar is present by default, eating space. Only Crome is better then Firefox in this because Opera too have a status bar cum service buttons present.

Smooth Scrolling:
Opera beats both Firefox and Chrome on this in-fact it scrolls like a charm. Both Chrome and Firefox are bumpy when it comes to scrolling a long page. 

Add-ons:
Opera lacks in useful add-ons, it does have bunch of add-ons but I found none of them useful. so it is not useful for a power users.

There was a time when Chrome did not have add-ons, but now you can find nicely crafted addons for Chrome.

But Firefox is the browser that wins on add-ons, you name it Firefox has it. It has millions of useful add-ons there to please you.
Note: Firefox 4 is a pre-beta release. so it doesn't have any supported add-ons yet , but once it is graduated you will be able to use all your favorite add-ons.

Bookmark Sync(on S60):
Opera provides you a way to sync both your PC and mobile bookmarks through Opera links( a web based sync service) which no other browser provide, because we don't have Firefox or Chrome for s60 yet.

however with Nokia OVI suit you can sync your mobile bookmarks (s60 browser's and not Opera's) with IE and Firefox (it crashes with Firefox). s60's default browser is itself not a good option to browse web on your phone.

At Last:
So if you are not a power users and use your browser only for surfing sites, I suggest Chrome or Opera ( Opera is better if you use Opera mobile or Opera mini on your phone ), and if you want more power then just to browse then go for Firefox.

For a technical review see here.
Download Firefox 4  From here.

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Hack: Portable Firefox

Image via CrunchBase

Goal Of the Tutorial: To make a portable Firefox folder that you can carry or access from both windows and Linux.
I hate it when i have to install same things at many places, same is with Firefox bookmarks and add-ons.
I am having a system with both windows and Linux and I work on both as I please.
but Installing same add-ons and bookmarks in different places is not a good idea.
I found out that you can make Firefox to use a user specified profile folder.
profile folder is the place where Firefox save Your add-ons , bookmarks, cache and even history.
So I decided to use only one Firefox profile folder.