Computer trivia

The greatest feature available in IE7 is tabbed browsing which allows you to open new pages in tabs rather than popping up a new window for each page. This makes the taskbar clutter free by not placing one icon each instance of Internet Explorer. However, IE7 by default, opens pop-ups in a new window. By pop-ups, I mean the pop-ups allowed by the user. If you are a regular of some website that uses pop-ups to deliver information, you may want to see these pop-ups in a separate tab rather than having them opened in a separate window.

To make IE7 open the pop-ups in a separate tab, follow these steps.

- Launch Internet Explorer and goto Tools->Internet Options

- In the ‘Internet Options’ window click on ‘General’ tab

- Under the Tabs section, click on Settings

- Here you will find a section named ‘When a pop-up is encountered’

- Under this section select, ‘Always open pop-ups in a new tab’

- Click OK and you are done

If you are habituated to launching programs from the command prompt, there are certain handy parameters that can be passed. Open RUN box and type ‘cmd’ without quotes to launch the command prompt window. At the command prompt use the following commands.

1) To launch IE without the home page, type “iexplore.exe -nohome”

2) To directly open a website after launching IE, type “iexplore.exe www.today.com”

3) To open IE without all the add-ons and toolbars installed, type “iexplore.exe -extoff”

Note that these will effect IE only for one time, and the next time IE is launched in the usual way, you will have the default settings.

This is for those few souls who did not come across this very popular shortcut. In Firefox (and in most of the browsers) it is possible to auto complete the address of the website.

It is very annoying to type ‘http://www.” and the suffix ( .com, .org, .net etc) each time you want to visit a website. As this stuff is common for any website, the browsers provide you a way to automatically fill in the address.

Here are the shortcuts with examples:

Say, you want to visit http://www.today.com, all you have to  do is type ‘today’ in the address bar and then hit ‘Ctrl+Enter’ (Press and hold the Ctrl button and now hit Enter) and the browser will automatically fill in the complete addtess.

If you want to visit http://www.eenadu.net, type ‘eenadu’ and then ‘Shift+Enter’

If you want to visit http://www.baba.org, type ‘baba’ and then ‘Ctrl+Shift+Enter’

Cool?

Wanna have some browser shake?

What you are gonna read is some totally useless and fun stuff. This is a simple to trick that shakes the browser window rapidly and could be used to wake yourself when you feel sleepy in a class to fool your friends!

Open the browser window (works with any browser - Internet Explorer, Firefox etc) and paste the following code in the address bar (the place where the web page address is typed.

javascript:function Shw(n) {if (self.moveBy) {for (i = 35; i > 0; i–) {for (j = n; j > 0; j–) {self.moveBy(1,i);self.moveBy(i,0);self.moveBy(0,-i);self.moveBy(-i,0); } } }} Shw(6) 

After pasting the above code hit “ENTER” and you will see the browser dancing. Observe the ‘i’ and ‘j’ values in the above code. Incrementing these values will shake your browser for more time. Note that the you cannot close or stop the shaking browser and thus using very high numbers for these variables may frustrate you rather than amusing you.

But if you want to tease some one, make the values as high as you please and start the shake!

Home page is a standard feature offered by any browser and not any thing new. It is a very widely used feature and there would be hardly anyone who is not aware of  the home page setting. Since many years, it was possible only to set one home page which would open every time the browser is started. What if you have more than one page that you would like to be opened as your home page.

Internet Explorer has recognized this necessity and added this feature of having multiple home pages in their IE7 release. In IE7 you can go to the location where you previously set your home page and now you can type as many addresses as you like one in each line. Whenever the browser is started all the pages are opened at a time, each in its own tab. 

In case you do not know how to set a home page, open the browser and go to Tools->Internet Options and you will see the space to set your home page. 

If I’m correct Firefox also has this feature in its latest release, but I’m not sure. 

There has been a very common complaint since the release of Firefox 3 about the browser logging out of already authenticated sessions and not logging into the approved websites automatically. This problem was not existent in the Firefox 2. Not only after restarting the browser, but Firefox 3 also logs you out of the website after a certain period of time.

The most obvious place where you can find a solution for this is to check if the cookies are enabled and allowed by the browser. However, this is not a solution as Firefox will log you out even all the cookies are present and allowed. There are many reasons cited for this abnormal behavior like the way Firefox is quit, plug-ins etc.

Here I present the solution I found and that worked for me. But I’m not sure if this will work for everyone.

I read somewhere on the Internet the files in which Firefox stores cookies are getting corrupted when it is upgraded from version 2 to version 3.  The cookies were stored in cookies.txt in the older version and in cookies.sqlite in the newer version and this transfer seems to be corrupted. I deleted both these files and started all over again and this has solver my problem,  though this means that I have to start from scratch logging into all the sites manually once. But that was only once and now my browser logs me in automatically.

This is in continuation to my previous post about IE 8.0 where I mentioned all the problems with the beta version of Internet Explorer 8.0. This release is very unstable and crashes very frequently. However, as I generally use Firefox, I never bothered to uninstall IE 8.0 and revert to IE 7.

Yesterday, for some reasons, I had to use IE and as the beta version crashes very frequently, I decided to uninstall it and work on IE 7. But then I realized that uninstalling IE 8.0 is not too trivial. There is a catch which I thought I should share with you.

The usual way of going to the control panel, looking for all the installed programs and uninstalling the particular program will not work. You will not find IE 8.0 in the list of installed programs. This is because, IE 8.0 is installed not as a program but as an update. So you got to go into the updates and then uninstall it.

Here is the procedure.
- Go to control panel
- Click on uninstall a program
- In the left pane, click on ‘View Installed updates’
- Select ‘Windows Internet Explorer 8 beta x’ and click on uninstall.
- Confirm the uninstall.
- Restart windows and you will have your old and stable IE 7.

Snapshots.

This is a useful tip for Firefox.

We know that it is possible to save a window with multiple tabs (session), so that all the tabs get reopened the next time you use Firefox. Pretty cool feature.

But it is quite common that you might be using two different windows, say one for personal stuff and one for office work each with many tabs. Now how do you save both the windows? Firefox will only save the session of the last closed window.

So, when you want to save the sessions of multiple windows, open windows task manager and end the ‘firefox’ process (I mean it). This way when you restart Firefox all the windows that were open, before the process was ended will be opened.

There is also a simpler way around. When you want to save multiple window sessions, use File->Exit instead of the close(X) button and this will have the same effect.

Hope this tip is useful.

Ok.
After trying Google Chrome browser, I have immediately downloaded Microsoft IE 8.0 beta to try and compare it with Chrome. Now I sincerely repent for having done that. Previously I was using Firefox and IE, but now I’m only left with Firefox.

I should have listened to the Microsoft website, which said IE 8.0 may be unstable and install it only if you really want to try it out. I have downloaded it and upgraded i and had a our of all the cool features of their new browser. I don’t remember the features as I hardly used that browser, but I should say, like every time Microsoft has once again come out with a really cool browser (I didn’t use the features but I know they are there). They have added almost all the features that Chrome offered and also had a very good interface with more space for the webpage and lesser for the browser.

Unfortunately, this being a beta version, the program behaves very unreliable and I don’t know what happened exactly. Whenever I start the browser, it will first turnoff the phishing filter in my Norton Internet Security and then in a few minutes goes into non-responding state (this happens even when I stop my Norton).

I tried to see if it is possible to revert to the IE 7 which I had been using for the past one year, but couldn’t find out anyway (I believe it is possible. Please tell me if you know how). But as of now, I just have one browser - Firefox and I’m waiting for IE 8.0 full to be released, so that I can get back into my normal flow of Internet browsing. If Google also comes with a stable version, its much better. Let all of them compete to provide me a better browser

Its been a month since the over hyped Google Chrome Browser was released. Google has advertised this product on the Google Search Engine homepage(a place which no Internet user would miss) and like millions of Internet users, I’ve downloaded the product and started using it. The following is what I had to say about this product, though I’m not a tech-geek by any means.

I was really impressed with the size of the setup file(not even 1MB) and the ease of installation. I started Chrome for the first time to find the very attractive user interface it had and the trademark Google colors. The application was very light weight and loaded very fast each time it was opened.

A unique feature of Chrome is the large viewing space. It feels good if you can see more of the webpage and less of the browser. Chrome did exactly that by removing all buttons and putting the tabs at the top(completely top, where windows has its title bar). Then comes the sleek look of these tabs and the feature to pull the tabs and make them a new window or push a separate window into the tabs. As I was learning these features I thought I’m gonna shift completely to Chrome. But I didn’t.

Within around 10mins of using Chrome, it crashed for the first time. I restarted it and started using again and it crashed again in another 10mins. As I used it for a few days I found, it too so unstable and totally unreliable. You open some 10 tabs and all of a sudden Chrome will crash and will not even open those 10 tabs on restart. So, I happily bid adieu to Chrome and moved back to Firefox.

Google says that the JavaScript executes in Chrome 97% faster than other browsers. But as an end user we want the browser to aid us surfing the web without failing repeatedly in which Chrome failed. I sincerely believe Chrome is not a kind of product expected from a brand like Google.

Another problem I faced is the lack of page load status in Chrome. Like in IE and Firefox Chrome doesn’t show how much of the current web page has loaded.

Finally, I’m gonna mention one more problem assuming most people use Windows Vista. You set your taskbar in ‘autohide’, launch Google Chrome and you will never get the taskbar out as long is Chrome is open. You either need to minimize the Chrome window or press ‘Windows’ button to get the taskbar. This is like hell to people like me at least, who have the habit of putting the taskbar in autohide mode.

My advice to people who are thinking about Chrome - You don’t need to try the product. Wait for Google to release the next beta version and lets hope they fix all the problems in that release. Till then stay with IE or Firefox.