Browser Wars

So: we’ve got lots and lots of new browser upgrades. That’s always fun, right? Except when it’s not. My experiences with Safari 4.0, the latest Firefox 3.5, and Opera 10 beta 1 have been something of a mixed bag. Far be it for me to pretend any sort of expertise in this area, but it seems as though some of what’s been promised hasn’t lived up to expectations. Diving in:

Safari 4.0 does the Speed Dial - Apple style.

Safari 4.0: Like all the other updates, this one is supposed to be faster. That’s all well and good, only I can’t tell any difference. That’s partially because I’m constantly dealing with subpar internet access, but partly because the speed enhancements are on such minute and insignificant little bits that most users can’t tell. Souping up the use of bandwidth-intensive resources is good, but right now I’d rather them give me some killer features or add-ons for the browser. That brings me to my next point. Safari has incorporated a Top Sites page that comes up if you don’t have a home page or whenever you open a new tab. It’s basically a copy of Opera’s Speed Dial, but all shiny and more visually attractive. It works well enough, though I’m not such a big fan of how it sorts through my browsing and automatically adds stuff. That’s great, unless you don’t want people seeing what you do. I’d like to keep my 4chan activity to myself, thanks very much, nasty den of iniquity that it is.

Private Browsing Might Actually Be Good For Something

I’ve been meaning to post some of the pictures I’ve taken with my new Nikon D60, but unfortunately my internet access has been absolutely terrible of late, particularly when trying to use WordPress. It doesn’t help that China blocks access to my beloved blog to begin with, but I’ve been forced to use proxy servers to bypass the Great Firewall of China, thereby further slowing an already-slow connection. Lo and behold, I think I may have stumbled across the solution today.

While fiddling with the settings on Firefox in a futile attempt to tweak what limited bandwidth I’ve got access to, I happened upon Private Browsing. Normally, I’ve really got no reason to use it, but I started it out of morbid curiosity and a little quiet desperation. I was thinking to myself, private browsing is mostly used to prevent any sort of browsing history from being stored on your computer. What if it does more than that? What if it also encrypts outgoing packets, or something similar? So I entered the link for my admin page on here, hit enter, and watched with faint amusement, expecting to see the “server is taking too long to respond” message that signals a blocked site in China. Instead, the dashboard pops up! I almost did a little dance of joy. Almost.

Computer Reformat

It was a long and arduous journey, but my computer’s completely and thoroughly reformatted. Everything is clean and new and shiny, and I haven’t lost or accidentally misplaced any files (so far). It was… an interesting experience, and I’ll elaborate on this post later after I’ve gotten some pics uploaded and finished up a couple projects.

Over the past four days, I’ve:

• Pulled an all-nighter in an attempt to get the reformat knocked out quickly and move on with my life, only to have the error-checking I’d scheduled for the next reboot take from 5pm Monday night to 7am Tuesday morning.
• Almost forgot to export all my important stuff to an external drive.
• Just about had a heart attack after I reinstalled iTunes only to be told that it couldn’t locate any of my music.
• Felt guilty for putting off a music review I agreed to do before starting the reformat.
• Tried to install more RAM even though I knew that one of them had been DOA when I bought them.
• Took out my secondary HDD for the reformat, and had my PC complain that SATA 2 was enabled in BIOS but there wasn’t anything there. I was too lazy to change it. When I put it back in, the comp wouldn’t recognize it, even though I’d never technically disabled it.
• Ranted against Microsoft for making the Microsoft Update site an Internet Explorer-only thing. It’s so dumb! I hate IE. Firefox+Chrome FTW.

And most recently, I just received an email (that I hope was clever spam) asking me to review a male enhancement product on my blog. Because, you know, that’s clearly relevant to the content on here. *end sarcasm*

Google Chrome (it’s shiny)

Google has finally done it! They went and created a web browser, borrowing various elements from Opera, Safari, and Firefox to get there. It might sound like a bit of a frankenstein (or frankenstein’s monster, if you want to get technical), but I assure you, Google’s new browser, named Chrome, is anything but clunky.

Google Chrome