Google Chrome Security Update

If you’re using Google’s Chrome browser, be sure to update it to the latest version (version 1.0.154.48 as of today). A critical security flaw has been found which is fixed in the latest version.

Google Chrome is a great browser for limited applications, especially Google’s own applications like GMail, Google Documents, etc. Chrome has been optimized for Javascript and runs Javascript noticeably faster than Firefox or IE.

I use Chrome for GMail, Google Calendar, and Google Documents, primarily. I use Firefox for everything else because of the rich set of plugins available. It’s a bit of a pain switching back and forth, but the additional speed in GMail is well worth it, IMO.

John The Geek

Google Chrome First Impressions

Yet another shot has been fired in the ongoing browser wars. You may or may not know that Google has launched its new browser Google Chrome. I downloaded it yesterday and installed it on two different machines, one running Windows XP Professional and another running Windows Vista Home Premium.

The first thing I noticed about it was the significant increase in the speed of GMail in Chrome. According to a blog post I read, which was one of the things that convinced me to give Chrome a try now rather than wait, Google has done some very serious optimization of their Javascript implementation. Since GMail is an AJax application which makes very heavy use of Javascript, this makes sense and explains the difference in speed vs. Firefox or Internet Explorer.

Firefox is my browser of choice for a number of reasons. Not the least of these is the vast array of add-ons available for Firefox, many of which have become integral parts of my daily activities. I don’t know of any add-ons for Chrome yet, but given that it’s open source I expect there will be many very soon.

I’m limiting my use of Chrome to Google applications for now. It’s a bit inconvenient having to have Firefox open at the same time to make use of all its plugins and Roboform (which doesn’t work with Chrome yet, either), but the speed difference in the Google applications is worth it. I fully expect that gap to close quickly as developers port their add-ons to Chrome and create new ones.

One interesting glitch: when I installed Chrome on my XP laptop, Chrome asked me if I wanted to import my bookmarks, history, etc. from Firefox. Since Firefox is my default browser, of course I did so.

When I installed Chrome on my Vista laptop, I was only given the choice to import bookmarks from Internet Explorer. Firefox was nowhere to be seen in the dropdown list. Needless to say, this is an annoyance, but since I’m only using Chrome for Google apps for now anyway, not a show-stopper.

The bottom line: if you like playing with new software or you really want GMail to be faster, download Chrome and check it out. If you want it to replace IE or Firefox, wait a while. Because Chrome is in beta, I expect things to be pretty fluid for a while. I’ll keep you posted on significant news as it happens.

John The Geek

Firefox 3 – XP vs. Vista and CYA

My laptop at work runs Windows XP. My laptop at home runs Windows Vista Home Premium edition. I didn’t have a choice with the latter machine so I’ve been trying to reach some sort of truce with Vista since I bought the machine back in February.

My wife’s laptop also runs Vista, so if nothing else when she has a problem I have some clue how to deal with it. Usually, I’ve already been there on mine.

The reason I bring up that dreary subject is that I installed Firefox 3 on my work laptop first. As related in my previous post there was some consternation with add-ons that were no longer functional under Firefox 3. Other than that, Firefox 3 installed just fine and runs great now that the add-ons situation is straightened out.

Because things were going swimmingly on the work laptop, I decided to upgrade Firefox on my home laptop, as well. I expected the same heartburn with add-ons and felt like I had a pretty good handle on how to deal with it.

Silly me.

I ran the Firefox 3 installer and did not get the expected dialog listing the add-ons that no longer worked and the helpful “May I look for updates?” button. Instead, Firefox simply started up as usual and I was looking at the blank Firefox 3 interface.

I went to the Tools menu and click Add-ons to bring up the Add-ons dialog. I was greeted with a list of add-ons, most of which displayed the message “Incompatible with Firefox 3.” Some of them had the Uninstall button active, others didn’t. All had the Disable button greyed out along with the Options button.

I clicked the Uninstall button on one of the now-defunct add-ons. Firefox did its thing then displayed the familiar message “Add-on XYZ will be uninstalled when Firefox is restarted.”

I restarted Firefox. The browser came back up. I went to the Tools menu and clicked Add-ons. There at the top of the dialog was the add-on I’d previously uninstalled, its Uninstall button now greyed out, happily displaying the message “Add-on XYZ will be uninstalled when Firefox is restarted.”

Huh? I’d have sworn I just did that. Okay, restart Firefox again. Check the Add-ons dialog again. Same result. This is beginning to look suspiciously like an infinite loop.

After trying a few things and getting nowhere, I decided the better part of valor was to simply uninstall Firefox 3 and go back to Firefox 2 which had been working just fine previously. The result of that exercise was Firefox 2 coming up looking as expected.

Since I knew Google Browser Sync was dead, and I’d been impressed with Foxmarks, I figured I’d go ahead and install Foxmarks and make the switch now. I visited the Foxmarks site, clicked the Install button and got an “unexpected error -203″.

Mind you, this is the first time I’ve ever had an add-on install fail for any reason. Obviously, something was amiss. After some research, the consensus seemed to be that my profile was trashed.

Thinking that perhaps this was one of those Vista-isms where something should have been run in Administrator mode, I re-ran the Firefox 3 install as Administrator. Firefox 3 came up okay. The install of Foxmarks failed again with the same error message.

By now, it’s apparent that the only way to get Firefox 3 and its add-ons sorted out is to create a new profile. Now, mind you, had I thought to BACK UP my existing profile before starting this odyssey, I probably could have simply restored it and been good to go.

Ya gotta love 20-20 hindsight.

Creating a new profile solved the problem, but of course, I had to reinstall all the add-ons I wanted, not to mention redoing all my preferences since I couldn’t find a way to copy them from the old profile to the new one. I wasn’t real confident that it would have worked anyway since I don’t know what part of the old profile is still good and which is corrupted.

The moral of the story is, of course, to back up important things like your Firefox profile before upgrading things that might affect it. I get lazy just like everybody else, even though I know better, and in this case it bit me in the keister.

Was it Vista that caused the corruption? Who knows? It really doesn’t matter, it’s my bad for not properly covering my aforementioned keister and making sure I had a backup to fall back on in case things went awry. That seems to happen a lot more often in Vista than in XP, at least in my experience, so if you’re thinking of upgrading Firefox or any other software, for that matter, do yourself a huge favor and make sure you’re backed up before you start!

John The Geek

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Firefox 3 – Browser Sync is Dead, Long Live Foxmarks!

I downloaded Firefox 3 the other day along with approximately 8 million of my closest friends. I installed it on my laptop at work a couple of days ago. My first impression was a dialog box that came up and said that most of the add-ons I’d been using with Firefox 2 no longer worked.

The dialog very helpfully offered to go look for updates for the outdated add-ons and I clicked the button to have it do that. It found a few updates, but not nearly all of them. Once Firefox launched, I went to the Add-ons dialog and found that there were a number of add-ons simply marked “Incompatible with Firefox 3″. My only available option was to uninstall the affected add-ons.

Several of the affected add-ons were ones I’d mentioned earlier in my post on my favorite add-ons for Firefox. The most important one was the Google Browser Sync add-on. This is the add-on I used most since it ran literally every time I ran Firefox on any of my three machines. It was also the most important to me because I didn’t want to have to keep the three machines’ bookmarks synchronized manually!

I went to Google to see what was up with Browser Sync and found after a bit of research that Google has stopped supporting Browser Sync! There will be no Browser Sync for Firefox 3. In the same article, however, was the good news: there’s a bookmark sync tool available for Firefox 3 that actually gets better reviews than GBS.

It’s called Foxmarks and it flat out rocks! You go to http://foxmarks.com, sign up for a free account and install the add-on in Firefox. When setting up your new account, Foxmarks copies your existing bookmarks to your account and keeps any new ones synchronized with the online site.

Now that you have your Foxmarks account, you can set up additional machines quickly and easily. Go to the Firefox add-ons site or Foxmarks and install the Foxmarks add-on. Log in to your account and you’ll be prompted to do one of three things:

• Merge the bookmarks with those on your machine
• Replace the bookmarks on your machine with those on the server
• Replace the server bookmarks with those on your machine

That pretty much covers what you’d want to do, so pick one and go. When Foxmarks is done updating, it goes off into the background and pretty much leaves you alone from then on. Any new or modified bookmarks get updated to the server silently.

When you start up Firefox, the Foxmarks add-on goes out to the Foxmarks server and updates the bookmarks on your machine silently. You don’t get the popup list of the tabs you previously had open as you used to with GBS because Foxmarks doesn’t handle that. Firefox 3 has the ability to “remember” which tabs you had open and just open them again when you start up without asking, if you choose that option.

Obviously, I’m a Foxmarks fan and I highly recommend it to replace Google Browser Sync. You’ll have to anyway when you upgrade to Firefox 3, also recommended, but more on that later.

John The Geek

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My Current Favorite Firefox Add-ons

I currently use 20 Firefox add-ons, or plugins, if you prefer. Some of them are for specialized purposes, but there are 8 that I use virtually every day that I would rather not live without. In alphabetical order, they are:

• Autocopy – a cool utility that saves keystrokes when you want to copy and paste text within a document, blog post, or whatever. Simply highlight the text you want to copy, wait a second or two and it’s automatically copied to the clipboard ready to paste. You do have to be careful not to highlight text you don’t want copied, but once you get used to it, you’ll wonder how you ever lived without it. It can be turned off, if desired, for special circumstances.
• Colorzilla – if you do any web design, or other work where you need to match colors, this is very handy. Colorzilla puts a small eyedropper icon in the lower left corner of the browser window. Click on that icon and the cursor becomes a cross. Click on any area of the browser window and the color under the cursor is copied and displayed as its RGB and hex values. Right click the icon and you get a whole menu of things you can do with the color you captured. The cursor picks up the pixel directly underneath it so areas with non-solid graphics can be a bit tricky.
• DownThemAll! – I very often download multiple files from a single web page. Until I found this tool, it was tedious to do them one at a time. Now, I right click on the page, click DownThemAll!, select which files I want to download from the page, select the directory to which I want to save them, and click Start. DTA downloads up to four files simultaneously and continues until all the selected files are downloaded successfully. DTA is a download manager so if the download gets interrupted, the download can be resumed (sometimes automatically) without having to start over. This is very nice for large files. I use this capability often with single files that are larger than a couple of MB.
• FireFTP – a basic FTP client that works in a separate tab within Firefox. If you need to up- or download something to your web site quickly, you can do it right from Firefox without having to open your FTP client. Very slick.
• Google Browser Sync – another lifesaver for those of us with multiple computers. I use three computers on a regular basis and I have GBS on all three of them. GBS keeps track of my bookmarks and history so that I only have to bookmark a site once. The bookmark is then duplicated on the other machines. GBS also remembers what tabs I had open when I closed Firefox and reopens the same ones on another machine when I start Firefox.
• Google Notebook – another killer little application from Google. Make notes, gather clips or URLs of web pages and more right from within Firefox while you’re browsing. Make multiple notebooks to keep different subjects separated.
• McAfee SiteAdvisor – I’ve been using SiteAdvisor since before McAfee acquired it. So far they haven’t managed to screw it up, which was a concern of mine at the time. This application puts a dropdown on the status bar at the bottom of the browser window that changes color based on the relative safety rating of the site you’re currently visiting. Green is safe. Any other color indicates either that the site has not been evaluated or there are warnings about it. SiteAdvisor also puts ratings next to sites found during Google searches so you can see at a glance whether you should visit a site or be cautious about doing so.
• NoScript – the bad guys keep finding more ways to drop nasties on our machines through so-called “drive-by” methods. Simply by surfing a “toxic” web site it is possible for malware to be placed on your machine. This is usually done via Javascript or Flash or other scripting tools that have unpatched exploits. NoScript turns all these off by default. You tell it which sites are okay to turn scripting on to see the full dynamic wonderfulness of your favorite sites. There seems to be an update at least once or twice a week as the developers keep on top of the ever changing scripting technologies. A word of caution: NoScript will be a bit annoying until you have it “trained” to know which sites are allowed to run script. This will be especially apparent with e-commerce sites that you haven’t visited before, and with sites that use PayPal for their payment processor. If you don’t okay the sales site first, the link to PayPal won’t work properly. Fortunately, this is easy to fix by simply clicking the Back button, okaying the sales site, then clicking the Order button again. IMO, NoScript is well worth the small inconvenience for the added safety.
• SearchStatus – this is an SEO (Search Engine Optimization) tool for marketers and others who want to see how a given web page ranks in Google’s PageRank and Alexa’s ratings. Very unobtrusive, it puts these two values at the bottom center of the browser window where you can see them at a glance.

I’m sure this list will change in the future and as I find others that I add to my must-have toolbox, I’ll let you know.

John The Geek

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