Camino, Mozilla Power, Mac style
As you all know, I am a fan of Firefox. Mozilla, the creators of firefox, has release a new browser called Camio.
“Camino is an open source web browser developed with a focus on providing the best possible experience for Mac OS X users. The Camino Project has worked to create a browser that is as functional and elegant as the computers it runs on. The Camino web browser is powerful, secure, and ready to meet the needs of all users while remaining simple and elegant in its design. Camino combines the awesome visual and behavioral experience that has been central to the Macintosh philosophy with the powerful web-browsing capabilities of the Gecko rendering engine.”
I’ve downloaded it and I’m going to give it a test run tomorrow sometime. I’ll let you know how “Camino” works out.
Increase Internet/network Broswing speed
Here is a very good tip to increase your internet/network browsing speed in windows XP.
Increasing network browsing speed
Does your computer slow down when you browse your local area network and connect to other computers that are sharing data? One of the most common causes of this slowdown is a feature of Windows Explorer that looks for scheduled tasks on remote computers. This effort can take some time on some computers and can really slow down your browsing. The window with which you are browsing the network may appear to freeze momentarily, as the system is waiting for a response from the remote computer.Although this problem is a complex one, the solution is very simple. Instead of having to wait for the remote scheduled tasks, which is useless information to anyone who is not a system administrator remotely configuring scheduled tasks, you can disable this feature.
In order to do this, you will have to hack the System Registry and delete a reference to a key so that this feature will not be loaded. To do this, follow these steps:
- Open up the Registry Editor by clicking the Start Menu and selecting Run. Then type regedit in the text box and click the OK button.
- Once the Registry Editor has loaded, expand the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE key.
- Next, expand Software and then Microsoft.
- Locate Windows and expand that as well.
- You will want to be editing the main system files, so expand CurrentVersion.
- Because this feature is a feature of the Windows component known as Explorer, expand the Explorer key.
- Next, you will want to modify the remote computer settings, so expand the RemoteComputer key and then expand the NameSpace key to show all of the features that are enabled when you browse to a remote computer.
- In the NameSpace folder you will find two entries. One is “{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}” which tells Explorer to show printers shared on the remote machine. The other, “{D6277990-4C6A-11CF-8D87-00AA0060F5BF},” tells Explorer to show remote scheduled tasks. This is the one that you should delete. This can be done by right-clicking the name of the key and selecting Delete.
Tip:
If you have no use for viewing remote shared printers and are really only interested in shared files, consider deleting the printers key, “{2227A280-3AEA-1069-A2DE-08002B30309D}”, as well. This will also boost your browsing speed.
Once you have deleted the key, you just need to restart and the changes will be in effect. Now your network computer browsing will be without needless delays.
Google Releases its Chrome Browser
Google has announced yet another entrant into the browser wars, which it calls “Chrome”. The browser is sure to turn some heads, notably that of Google inc’s arch rival, Microsoft.
Yes, Google is releasing its own browser. Google Chrome as it is named, is based on the WebKit rendering engine and introduces a pioneering new look on the browser and interacting with web pages.
The Difference
What makes Chrome different is its architecture. The browsing program is no longer a single-threaded process, each loaded web page has its very own dedicated allocation of memory and also would take better advantage of today’s multiple core processors. This also has the benefit of closing the processor thread when a tab is closed.
This would have a few interesting consequences on the security of the browser. If 1 page crashes, then only that page will crash and not the entire program which will continue working until you exit. This is good for the user experience, you make a more stable browser but you introduce new methods of being able to hack the browser because this is the only browser which is made in this fashion and thus we should see in the future some ingenious ways of hacking it.
Security
Chrome also implements a new security feature which will become standard when Internet Explorer 8 is released. Microsoft calls it “privacy mode” and Google will call it “incognito”. Whatever you like to call it, the idea for this mode came from Safari. The purpose of it is to make your browsing covert, not logging any cookies or history - sounds dodgy right?
On another note, an interesting feature is that popups are not blocked but are opened as minimized in another window. If you drag the popup icon, you can reveal them. This does raise an eyebrow, but will probably decrease security in the long run as malicious content will probably find a way to run in the background, even if the popup is not rendered. An especially uncomplicated hack if the user needs privacy mode to hide which sites he’s visiting.
Chrome also provides sandboxing, which is to say that each process will only be allowed to do certain things and not touch anything critical to the operating system.
If Chrome is bug-free, which is doubtful at this stage, then it may turn into a revolutionary browser. However, the new ways of browsing will bring very serious threats to its users and the variety of attacks at a hackers employ.
All in all, I am doubting that it will have any real impact on other browsers share of the market, unless there is something truly revolutionary to it, in which case it will simply be implemented in its rivals. The success of the browser would mainly ride upon Google’s success as a brand and pioneer. If Google is willing to listen to the community and act quickly on new threats and ideas, I am willing to bet that this browser will become a very real threat to Internet Explorer and Firefox, but only time will tell.
