Google Chrome users, type about:internets into the address bar to get a fun little animation. Don't clog the tubes, yo. (Check out some more of our favorite software Easter eggs here.)
Web site SoundUnwound is Amazon's new music web site designed to provide comprehensive articles and information on bands, musicians, and their discographies and lineups. Mimicing Wikipedia's user-edited model, anyone can edit a SoundUnwound article; the main difference is that all changes are approved by SoundUnwound staff before it's included on the site. Beyond that, the layout of the site is interesting and will potentially provide lots of great information, allowing you to drill down into everything you'd want to know about the artist. Right now, however, the site feels a bit low in info, and considering the existing strength of Wikipedia as a go-to source for this sort of info, SoundUnwound's got its work cut out for it. If you give it a try, let's hear how you like it in the comments.
Windows only: Free application Desktop Takeover is like a rotating digital photo frame for your desktop, embedding user-defined images in an overlay on your desktop. The cool thing about Desktop Takeover is that it can embed several images at a time, and it can rotate the pictures from your hard drive, online photo sharing sites, or even webcams. If you've got a good eye for desktop customization (like our readers' featured desktops), there's a lot of potential for an app like this. The biggest drawkback is the 20MB+ memory footprint, so if memory is a concern it may be a pass (hopefully the big footprint will be reduced when the app leaves beta). Desktop Takeover is freeware, Windows only.
The internet is atwitter with Google Chrome's innovative new features, but there was no clear winner in our speed test comparing Firefox and Chrome—which means your choice of browser may depend solely on features. Apart from a few specific issues (namely process management), many of Chrome's best features are already available in Firefox 3, proving yet again the power of extensibility. From incognito browsing and the streamlined download manager to URL highlighting and improved search, let's take a look at how you can bring some of Google Chrome's best features to Firefox.
Chrome's Incognito browsing allows you to shop for your significant other look at porn without keeping any history of that browsing session anywhere on your computer. In Firefox, the Stealther extension does the same thing. The main difference: In Chome, a single window can enter Incognito mode, whereas in Firefox it's enabled globally (this is probably possible in Chrome because of how it manages each tab as a separate process). But let's be honest, are your multi-tasking skills really that good? (Original post)
Chrome is all about saving space, so files you download don't break out into a separate window. Instead, they live in your status bar. Not bad, but guess what: The Download Statusbar Firefox extension has been doing this for five years, and it offers lots of additional options and wastes even less screen real estate. (Original post)
Chrome's empty tab page—which displays your most visited sites, most used search boxes, and even your recently closed tabs—is awesome. There isn't currently anything quite as full featured for Firefox, however there are a couple of options that are very close. The Speed Dial extension (which itself is a ripoff of the Speed Dial feature in Opera) provides a very similar thumbnail-based new tab page, but you decide which sites you want in your speed dial and you can quickly access any of them from your keyboard with shortcuts. (Original post)
Google Chrome's "omni bar" sports root domain highlighting, a cool feature that doubles as a nice anti-phishing device (if you see the root domain more easily, you are less likely to give your information to an imposter domain). That sort of domain highlighting isn't new by any means, though; the Locationbar2 Firefox extension has been boasting this same highlighting—in addition to several other excellent features—for well over a year.
If you want to break out a webapp you use all day long into a separate window and desktop shortcut, Chrome makes it easy on you. Just click x and do y. The concept of separating webapps into their own application isn't new by any means, though. At Mozilla, they've been cooking up Prism to do just that for quite some time. With Prism and the Prism for Firefox extension installed, just go to Tools -> Convert Website to Application to do break an webapp into a separate window and application. Right now this extension is Windows only, but hey—so is Chrome.
Chrome boasts that after using a site's search engine once, you can perform that same search from the address bar next time. For example, after you search Amazon once, the next time you may just be able to go to your address bar, type 'a', press Tab, and then perform your search. That's pretty saucy, but it's also not much of an innovation over keyword searches in Firefox. Granted, you have to manually add a search box (here are 15 of our favorite Firefox quick searches), but you can also define exactly what you want that shortcut to be. Chome also doesn't currently support keyword bookmarking in general, which is one of the most time-saving features in Firefox.
On the other hand, previously mentioned Auto Dial automatically populates the new tab page with your most frequently visited sites. It's not as attractive as Speed Dial or Chrome's new tab page, though. Either way, give Firefox extension developers some time. We'll have an even better alternative before you know it.
Googler Matt Cutts gets official word from the big G clarifying Chrome's vague Terms of Service: "We are working quickly to remove language from Section 11 of the current Google Chrome terms of service. This change will apply retroactively to all users who have downloaded Google Chrome." [via]
Open-source application KeePass takes home the gold from last week's Hive Five Best Password Managers poll with a strong lead. RoboForm (Windows) and 1Password (Mac) were neck and neck for the silver and bronze.
The image associated with this post is best viewed using a browser.
If bright colors tire your eyes and distract you from the task at hand, check out how Windows user j33f darkens Vista and subtly embeds system monitoring details, RSS feeds, and currently playing music information into the desktop. Here are the styles and apps j33f uses to create a sleek Vista head up display:
- Transblack Visual Style
- Dark Wood Wallpaper Pack
- Rainlendar 2 wearing the Rainmeter HUD Vision skin
- Miranda Mire customized instant messenger client
- Object Dock with the Stacks Docklet
- Pure Adium CD Art Display Winamp skin
Hit the Flickr link to mouse over areas on the desktop to see what's what. If you're desktop's tricked out for productivity, be sure to add it to the Lifehacker Desktop Show and Tell Group on Flickr.
Mac OS X only: Free iTunes add-on GimmeSomeTune automatically fetches missing album artwork, lyrics, and automatically embeds them in your music library. GimmeSomeTune runs in the background, and in addition to the metadata tools, it also supports scrobbling your music to Last.fm, universal hotkeys, iChat status updates, and even Apple Remote control. Apart from all that, GimmeSomeTune is also an excellent iTunes desktop remote, complete with a fully customizable song notification window. The donationware GimmeSomeTune is a must-have for the iTunes lover, Mac OS X only.
Google's new Chrome web browser beta is getting a lot of attention for its slick looks, helpful features, and performance, but how does it rank against the early releases of more established browsers? We've previously put the major browser releases to the speed test, but today we're measuring Chrome against the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, as well as the beta of Firefox 3's next iteration, 3.1. We tested tomorrow's browsers on startup and page-loading times, JavaScript and CSS performance, and, perhaps most importantly to the average user, memory use on launch and with lots of content loaded. Read on to get the scoop on which bleeding-edge beta has the edge in the browser time trials.
As with my previous browser tests, I installed completely fresh copies of the three browsers on my Windows Vista laptop, with all settings left to defaults. With the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, I reset the browser to factory settings and chose whatever Microsoft suggested during the click-through setup.
My test system has the same specs as before: A 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, and running Windows Vista Home Premium. For the time-based tests, I again used Rob Keir's ultra-lightweight timer app, simultaneously tapping the "\" key with "Enter" to launch a browser shortcut or folder full of bookmarks. I performed each test on each browser three times and averaged out the results, while eliminating obvious oddities. (With Vista's often empirical hard drive usage, there were definitely artificially long start-ups).
It's the same system I used to test Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 RC3, Safari for Windows, and Opera 9.5, so you can make fair comparisons between all the browsers. It's not scientific in the strict sense, but it's meant to measure browser performance as real humans experience it—load, click, and wait.
Drawing inspiration again from Mark Wilton-Jones trend-setting tests, I timed each browser loading up "cold" load (straight off a system restart) and "warm" (having run twice already). I used a locally-saved copy of Google's minimalist home page to negate net connection variations, and, to compensate for Vista's start-up fickleness, timed each browser exactly two minutes after boot-up. Here are the first results:
Note the small scale of the time on the X-axis: Even though Chrome was (quite surprisingly) slower at startup than Firefox or even IE 8, it's less than a second of difference between them all. That's a bit more than an error from my twitchy fingers, but probably not enough to rate any one browser on. Let's check out the warm boots:
As you can see, Chrome's noticeably fast on reload, although all the results are so close it's hard to confidently crown a winner. Just like last time, IE 8 slightly edges out Firefox on warm boots, but lags just a bit behind when starting up.
You don't start your browser to look at clean, white, locally-saved pages, do you? No, you speed around your must-visit sites, and often keep a bushel of them open at once. For the next test, I led each browser page-by-page through the assortment of web sites pictured at right—some heavy with interactive elements, some just text and pictures—before jumping back to a blank page (entering about:blank does this in any browser) and loading all the links at once. Each browser keeps a spinning icon on tabs as they load, so I measured from first click to the last tab settling in.
IE 8 and Chrome clock in too close to call, but Firefox fell behind. Based on the minuscule difference in cold-boot time and the two warm tests, I'd call Chrome the fastest, but definitely hand IE 8 a Most Improved Player trophy at the awards banquet.
JavaScript continues to grow in importance as a browser benchmark, because it's the backbone of no-reload interfaces like Gmail, Facebook, and lots of other webapps. Once again I used Sean Patrick Kane's revised JavaScript speed tests and averaged out three results to measure the browsers:
Firefox bests Chrome in this test by a handy lead, while IE 8 takes nearly twice as long (in milliseconds, of course) to perform all the actions Sean runs it through. It's anybody's guess who's got the most objective test—CNET's testers show Chrome wrecking all comers, while Mozilla's own tests declare their orange scrapper the winner in tight races. I can only take away that IE 8 is definitely an improvement from IE 7's fall-behind pace, while Chrome and Firefox are pretty evenly matched...
...until I ran the CSS tests, that is. CSS determines the layout and appearance of a page, and nontropp's downloadable form makes a browser work like a page designer on an all-guarana-and-coffee diet.
In the CSS test, as you can see, Chrome takes a commanding lead, Firefox doesn't lag too far behind, and IE 8 actually stalled and froze on just about one of every two loads I ran. When it came out of memory freeze, it did report consistent times, though—consistently behind. One could hand the Dynamic Web Performance title to Firefox for the probably weightier JavaScript test, but Chrome also shows a notable grace in running down the type frequently found on blogs. Let's call this a tie.
How far the great-great-nephew of Netscape has come in its respect for your system's resources. Measured by Vista's Task Manager from cold boots and then with eight tabs loaded, Firefox shows some serious savvy with megabytes:
Do note, however, that Chrome handles tabs differently than others—each tab loads as its own process, so that if it crashes or stalls, the rest of your reading doesn't go down with it. So if you've got solid-state chips to spare, it's not that much more of a hit to run Chrome in a busy session.
As with our last test, we'll note that browsing is much more than speed and bit usage—many of us can't imagine web life without our favorite extensions, or Windows integration, or, soon enough, Chrome's unique features.
What's been your experience with the newest competitors in the web field? Got your own criteria to compare? Share it all in the comments.
Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, wrote this feature in all three beta browsers. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, normally appears Fridays on Lifehacker. Subscribe to the Open Sourcery feed to get new installments in your newsreader.
Windows only: Desktop application College Alarm Clock wakes you up on time for class (or an irregular work schedule) seven days a week. Set a custom alarm time on a per day basis, Sunday through Saturday, and set the sound to just a plain beep, or choose a song from your computer's digital music library. College Alarm Clock can skip any day of the week, and you can save an alarm schedule to easily switch between holiday break and the new semester of wakeup times. College Alarm Clock is a free download for Windows only.