2. Scroll down the list to find the RSS feed icon. Drag it to the top toolbar, either to the left or to the right of the URL bar. Click the Done button.

That’s it.

On a website that does not provide RSS feed, the icon will be greyed out. Once it detected the presence of a RSS feed, it will be active and you can once again click on it to subscribe to the feed.

At 98MB, it is not exactly the smallest distro around (DamnSmallLinux is only 50MB), but it serves a purpose. It allows you to boot up quickly on any computer and be able to browse the web. Need to surf in the cybercafe while on a holiday but afraid that there are viruses/malware/tracking tools installed in the computer? BrowserLinux could fill that niche.

After you have downloaded BrowserLinux, you can either burn it into a CD and use it as a Live CD or create a bootable USB drive. If you need persistent data (storing your session or save files), it is best to create a bootable USB drive.

When you boot into BrowserLinux, it will first ask you to setup your video card.

The default method is to select the “Probe” option. If the monitor detection is not successful, simply choose from a list of generic monitor setting.

This is what you will see on the main screen. As can be seen, there is only a Firefox browser icon on the desktop.

Hovering your mouse at the bottom will show a menu dock where you can access the file manager, text editor and the terminal.

Clicking the “More Apps” option also reveal several other pre-installed apps like gFTP, music player, pdf viewer, image viewer etc.

Conclusion

Since it is a lightweight distro, it loads pretty fast and doesn’t take up too much of the resource. Minimal setup are required and it works right out of the box after you boot it up, so that is really great for bringing it on a USB drive. If you really need a distro solely for browsing, then BrowserLinux is one distro that you can consider. For everything else, you might consider installing PuppyLinux or Ubuntu on your thumb drive.

BrowserLinux

Design Considerations

Designing a browser theme can be very challenging. This is mostly because a browser comes with a list of design constraints that are as unique as the application’s use. In addition to the normal stuff like fonts, logos, file types/sizes, legal availability of images, and color selection… you have to worry about a very limited canvas, tricky dimensions, and a number of other unique items. Not to worry though, this task is far from impossible. Hopefully this little guide will help you along the way.

Note: For the purpose of this post, we’ll be concentrating on advice for Firefox browser themes only, as they offer the most “design real-estate” of the three top browsers. This will help maximize your branding efforts. Additionally, when your design is optimized for Firefox, it will be easy to subtract elements and simplify for other browsers with less options.

1. Take Into Account the Various Versions of Firefox

For example: Firefox 4 shows part of the graphics in the title bar while Firefox 3.6 and below do not.

2. Keep Your Dimensions in Mind??

Vertically, you have about 200 pixels of height available to your design – of which only the top 85 will be visible. This is because you have utility bars, add-ons, search boxes, and bookmarks getting in the way. This means that designs depending on the viewer to see the whole image may not work. At the very least, you’ll have to pay close attention to how all of these obstacles will affect how the viewer sees your design. Or, as we’ll get into in further detail below, the best design choice might be to use multiple images (anchored to either side with a solid color in between) or repeating patterns/colors associated with your brand that will allow you a work-around for this problem of “function-clutter” and limited design real-estate.

3. Large File Sizes May Equal Slow Performance??

One method you might choose as a way of overcoming the challenges mentioned above is to take a large image and simply place it across the whole background. This will work. However, this solution has one major pitfall. Large images/files may lead to a slow performing browser theme which in the course of use may become more annoying than enjoyable for the user.?

4. Focus on Logo Placement and Color

??Probably the easiest and maybe the most graceful design solution is to focus on keeping the logo prominent in the upper left hand corner (this can easily be linked to your brand’s site for quick access by users) while filling the rest of the space with repeating patters or smaller images anchored to the middle or one of the sides. These smaller files will make for a faster performing browser theme while ridding you of the need to worry about feature clutter or window resizing as the colors or patterns don’t need to be viewed in their entirety for the design to work.?

5. Choose Your File Types Like You Would For Any Other Web Design

When designing a browser, you’ll want to use the same file types that you would for any other web project. Such as .gif or .png formats. Or if transparency isn’t an issue, you can use the .jpg format as well.

6. Animation

Animation can be fun way to add a little life to your browser theme, such as a moving highlight on a shiny logo. However, it’s easy to over-due this and annoy your user with overly flashy animations. So keep this to a minimum.

Note: Firefox allows for both animated Gifs and Pngs.

7. Keep It Simple

An important consideration is that the user will most likely be staring at your design for hours every day. Therefore it’s important to keep your design simple and to avoid colors or elements that will fatigue their eyes.

How it works

When you have several tabs open in Firefox, you can use one of the menu options to start the action. Here is a before and after of 4 tabs open pressing Grid option under Tile all tabs.

Before

After

See how much easier it is to see all of the tabs?

Settings

There are some options you can modify when you first start. These will let you add tile more quickly and make Tile Tabs easier to use.

F Keys

By default, the F2, F8 and F9 buttons are set to basic functions.

• F2 – expand tiles
• F8 – Sync scrolling
• F9 – View normally

You can also choose change the F key to active a function or to replace any of the functions to something more useful to you.

It is a good idea to add a modifier key so you can keep this extension separate from other global hotkeys you may already have set up.

Add Shift or Crtl to make it a keyboard combination to activate the Firefox add-on.

Using the tiles

While having several tiles open, there are options to change the configuration, scrolling and other neat tricks. The more you know about the add-on, the more productive it can be when you are using it.

Simultaneous scrolling

This instantly stood out to me. By pressing the F8 button (default) when you have the tabs tiled, the option to scroll all of the tiled windows at the same time. That was a great feature to add.

Tile configuration menu

There are multiple ways to access the tile configuration options. All of which bring you to the same options.

From the menu bar.

The navigation toolbar.

And the right click menu.

More than one option at a time

You are not limited to just Grid or horizontal tiles. you can combine, mix and match the different options. Here is an example of different combinations used in the same window.

As you close the tabs, the grid or the separations disappear. If you want to focus on one tile, you can choose the F9 option to see just the one window. Think of how amazing this could be on a really large monitor.

Final thoughts

If you are sick of having too many tabs or windows open and you aren’t really sure what is on them until you click on it, this Tile Tab wants to be your new best friend. If you get into the habit if using Tile Tab to manage several tabs, I am pretty sure you will find them much easier to manage.

What add-ons do you use to manage tabs?

image credit: Lauren Manning

Search Sidebar is a very useful add-on that allows you to search multiple sites with one query and search interface. The best thing is, all the search results appear in your Google search result page, so you don’t have to get used to any new interface.

Once you have installed the Search Sidebar extension, you won’t see any configuration option in your Firefox toolbar. Instead, you will see a search strip at the sidebar when you perform a search in Google (Note that this extension will not work for Google encrypted search).

When you hover your cursor over the icons in the search sidebar, the search result for that site will pop up.

If you are logged in to your Gmail, Google Docs, Facebook LinkedIn or Dropbox account, it can even search your personal account.

To see all the search results, simply click on the blue “WebMynd” button and the strip will expand to show all the search results from different sites.

You can add more sources for it to retrieve the search results or to remove the default source from the list.

Conclusion

Search Sidebar is useful if you search from multiple sources regularly. My personal favorite is the ability to search your personal accounts, like Gmail and Google Docs, without having to visit the sites.

My only gripe is there is no easy ways to organize the search sources. I prefer to have my Gmail account at the top of the list. To do that, I have to first remove Gmail from the list, then re-add it again to make it appear at the top. You have to do this for every other sources. It would be great if the developer can come out with a drag and drop solution to rearrange the search sources.

Search Sidebar is available for Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari.

Memory Restart will reside on the toolbar just after the awesome bar (Address bar). It will keep showing a green icon when Firefox is using normal amount of memory. It will also show the actual memory usage in the add-ons bar in the bottom right corner of Firefox window.The green icon will turn red in case Firefox starts using more memory. Memory threshold can also be set in Memory Restart. The default maximum memory usage for Firefox is 500MB but you can tailor the value according to your needs.

To change the default threshold value, go to Firefox menu –> Add-ons

Under Extensions, go to Memory Restart and select Options.

You can change the Firefox memory threshold. If Firefox uses memory above this limit, it will inform you by changing the text color to Red. You can change the Red color option to some other color too. You can also specify to automatically restart Firefox without informing you.

Download Memory Restart from Firefox Addons directory.

1. Create an account with BT:Engage. Note: BT:Engage is still in beta and you will need an invite to be able to create an account. (Yes, we have an invite for you. Refer to the end of this article for more detail).

2. Once you have logged in, it will direct you to the theme design area. Here you will see two sections: the top section showing the header of the browser (the part where the theme will appear) and the bottom section with all the custom background and images that you can use.

3. As a start, you can click on any background at the bottom section and it will be applied to the header immediately. You can then drag and resize it to suit your needs.

4. There is the logo tab where you can click and add your own logo to the theme. All logo will be placed at the left corner, beside the Back/Forward button.

5. The “Buttons” feature is what made BT:Engage really useful. You can add custom buttons or quick shortcut to your theme to provide a one-click access to your site. For example, I have added several buttons to provide a one-click access to the various categories of Make Tech Easier.

6. Once you are done with your design, click “Finish”. It will then proceed to create the Firefox and Internet Explorer theme extension for your design. It will also be automatically be populated to the gallery where people can browse and download the theme. Optionally, you can also download the extension and distribute it in your site.

BT:Engage Invite

The BT:Engage team has gladly us provided us with an invitation code to share with all of you. Go to BT-engage, enter the invitation code “maketech” (without the quote) and you will be able to sign up for an account.

Enjoy!

BT:Engage is a product of BrandThunder.

1. Firefox Plumber (FoxBoost)

Firefox Plumber is rather a new addition to the list of Firefox memory leak fixers. Firefox Plumber is a very simple standalone utility. Firefox Plumber sits in the system try in Windows and will try to close all the memory leaks instantly and automatically when they occur. This will ensure that Firefox does not take more memory than needed.

Firefox Plumber come in the form of a zip file. You must unzip to a folder of your choice and run from there. There is no configuration needed nor is any setting available from the utility. Just run the utility and it will start doing its work while sitting in the system tray. The executable file of Firefox Plumber is usually called foxboost.exe.

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Firefox Plumber can be downloaded from the developer’s site.

2. SpeedyFox

SpeedyFox is the most popular utility to fix memory leakage and database optimization issues in Firefox. SpeedyFox actually takes a different approach and tries to optimize the startup time of Firefox by doing different optimizations. Firefox, when installed cleanly, is a very fast browser but it becomes slower and slower with the passage of time. There are several reasons behind the slowness of Firefox, including the fragmentation of the user profiles and growing database size. SpeedyFox will enhance the performance of Firefox by fixing these problems. It will defragment the fragmented user profiles which will help in quicker startup times and it will also fix the Firefox database which stores different user related data including browsing history, bookmarks, cookies and other settings.

SpeedyFox works on a per user profile basis. On its first run, it will automatically detect the default user profile in Firefox and offer to optimize it. You can also change the user profile for manual optimization. Another advantage of SpeedyFox is that it also comes in a portable flavor which means that you can also optimize the databases and user profiles of Firefox on any partition other than the active system.

SpeedyFox is available for Windows and Mac OS X and can be downloaded from the developer’s site.

3. Vaccuum Places Improved

Vaccuum Places Improved is the improved version of the popular tool Vacuum Places. It fixes Firefox database issue to improve startup times and overall response of the browser. Technically speaking, it will tweak and optimize the places.sqlite database – the place where Firefox stores annotations, bookmarks, forms data and browsing history.

After you have installed Vaccuum Places Improved, an icon will be added to the Firefox Taskbar. You can click on this icon to clean and optimize Firefox immediately. In the configuration option, you can check the checkbox “Automatically clean places” and change the option to whatever figure you want. The default is 50, which means that it will run automatically after you have started Firefox 50 times.

Install Vaccuum Places Improved from Mozilla add-ons site.

Tips for improving Firefox performance

Other than the above-mentioned software, here are some manual tweaks that I use to improve the performance of Firefox.

1. Check your installed add-ons.

You should make sure that any of the add-ons that make Firefox slow is not installed. Even if it is installed, it should be disabled normally and enabled only when needed. You can see the list of slow performing add-ons from Mozilla that make Firefox start slower than normal.

2. Keep your download list clean

Do you know that download list takes a long of time to load? If the list becomes too long, Firefox will start hanging for a short while when new downloads start. Please note that deleting download history will not delete your downloaded files. The files will remain in the download folder and only the history will be deleted.

Also, don’t forget to check out 4 other Firefox extensions to improve memory usage.

For advanced user, you can also check out the about:config means to improve your Firefox performance.

What other ways do you use to improve your Firefox performance?

Image credit: akamdar

Firefox‘s built-in spell checking feature has been available since Firefox 2. It even has support for multiple languages, which are very useful if your native language is not English.

Simpler Than You Could Imagine

If you have looked around on the Mozilla add-ons site, you might found the page where language packs and dictionaries can be downloaded. At the time of writing this post, 105 dictionaries are available for 86 languages. These packs are actually extensions and you can install them like any other Firefox extension. They will be listed in the “Tools -> Add-ons Manager” menu or by pressing the “Ctrl+Shift+A” hotkey. You can install as many dictionaries as you wish, without limitations.

I use the English (United States) and the Hungarian dictionaries. Both of them suit my expectations. Apart from the dictionaries for certain commercial spell checker components, these open source dictionaries are maintained continuously and new words are added regularly.

Where Can I Find It?

Right click in the text area where you just typed in the text and find the “Check Spelling” item and the Languages dropdown in the context menu.

The Check Spelling command is activated by default. When you click it, the tick will disappear and the spell checking feature will be disabled. The Languages dropdown will also disappear.

In the Languages dropdown, you can only see those languages that you have installed. If you need a new dictionary, you have an easy job: Just click “Add Dictionaries…“, and it will bring you to the Mozilla Dictionaries & Language Packs page.

How It Works

The spell checking feature works on any web form. It may be the editor of your blog tool or your content management system, the new topic/reply page in a forum, a comment field, or even a contact form on a web page.

Similar to the word processors, an unmatched word is underlined with a red wavy line. When you right click on such a word, you will find suggestions in the pop-up menu, or you can add the word to the dictionary.

Firefox cannot detect automatically the language of your entered text, you have to select it manually in the “Languages” dropdown. Firefox will then perform the spell checking of the text using that dictionary.

Extend It

When you check the Mozilla Add-ons site, you will find a couple of relevant extensions.

Dictionary Switcher

While this is just a small add-on, it is definitely a useful one.. Dictionary Switcher fetches the language from the source code of the page where the web form is available. Another method – the more interesting one – is trying to detect the language of the text you are typing in and switching to that dictionary accordingly.

You can access it from the status bar (now add-on bar since Firefox 4). A dictionary can be selected from the context menu.

When I select the Remember dictionary for current site item in the context menu, it really did not forget the manually set dictionary displayed in bold style.

Quick Locale Switcher

This add-on is more than a simple spell checking dictionary switcher. Quick Locale Switcher cannot detect the language of the entered text, but can automatically set the dictionary for a manually chosen language on a web site you visited.

It also skulks in the add-on bar, perhaps you may access it easier and faster from the Tools menu. The appropriate flags are assigned to the listed languages, still you have to separately download the dictionaries.

Conclusion

Some web based WYSIWYG editors, having their own spell check feature, present a problem, because they may disable Firefox’s right click menu, in addition to this, they may not have a dictionary for your language.

I hope the extensions development will move towards remembering the languages of certain pages. It would be a giant step for the international communities providing international subforums for their members.

In the era of web publishing, the grammatical correctness is not only a human expectation. Due to the sophisticated algorithms of the search engines, it may affect the position of your site in the results list as well.

InstanFox is a Firefox extension that allows you to perform instant search for several sites directly from the address bar.

The usage is simple. After installing the extension, all you have to do is to type the keyword for the respective sites follow by a space and your search term (for example, “g bookkeeping“). It will then perform an instant search as you type.

The default websites and keywords supported by InstantFox include:
g » for Google Search
i » for Google Images
m » for Google Maps
y » for Youtube
t » for Twitter
w » for Wikipedia
a » for Amazon
e » for eBay
b » for Bing
yh » for Yahoo
wa » for Wolframalpha
f » for Weather Forecast
c » for Calulator

As good as it gets, there is no room for configuration. If you are thinking of adding your own search engines and keyword, you are out of luck here. In addition, the search is default to Google (international). If you want to perform a localized search, you will be better off loading the Google site in your country domain.

Another problem is that other than Google search, you can experience lag when searching other sites. For example, when you search “e iphone” (search “iphone” in eBay), it will take a whopping 5 seconds to load up the page. While it is still faster than loading the eBay site and type in the search term, it is still nowhere near “instant”.

According to the developer, the future release will see more features like dynamic autosuggest, ability to add custom sites/keyword and to speed up the instant process. We will see how it goes.

Thanks to Janis Leon for informing us about this addon.

InstantFox Addon.

Here to tidy up that situation and provide a neater way of using those Google service is a tool called “Integrated Gmail”.

Introduction

Integrated Gmail (IG) is a browser add-on for Mozilla Firefox. The add-on supports Firefox versions 3.0 onwards. The function of IG is to provide all the Google applications under one interface and make them accessible through Gmail. Thus all you have to do is sign into your Gmail account in Firefox; other services will be opened within Gmail without opening new browser tabs.

Usage

After installing the add-on and restarting Firefox, if you visit your Gmail account you will see something similar to the image below.

Instead of the Gmail interface automatically loading up on the right, you will links to your Inbox, Reader, and Calendar. The Inbox option will display your Gmail inbox in the regular manner. Clicking on the Reader or Calendar links however will open the respective application right there, instead of opening them up in new tabs. For example here is how the Calendar application will look like when its link is clicked.

You can use applications opened under Gmail in the same manner as you would otherwise use them. Minimization links to the right of each application lets you easily expand and collapse an app to reduce the clutter.

Modification and Customization

By default IG integrates only Reader and Calendar with Gmail. Other Google applications can also be added to this list of integration by accessing the add-on’s options. To add other applications click on the ‘Integrated Gmail’ option under the ‘Tools’ menu.

This action will open the add-on’s options.

The ‘Add’ and ‘Remove’ buttons on the right is where you can add /remove more applications. The add button presents the list of all Google apps that can be added to the Gmail integration list.

The bottom arrow buttons can be used to reposition the application shortcuts.

Other settings of the add-on such as collapsible headers and showing favicons can be controlled through the options present in the right pane.

To change application-specific settings, just click on an application to the left and change its respective settings on the right.

Conclusion

Integrated Gmail will prove to be valuable to all Gmail accountholders who use Mozilla Firefox. By proving easy shortcuts to other Google applicaitons within Gmail, this brilliant add-on saves you a ton of time. Give the tool a try and let us know what you think in the comments.

Get Integrated Gmail from here and check out its official website here.

Google Shortcuts displays all Google services as buttons or as a space-saving dropdown menu next to your address bar (or anywhere you like it). You can then access your frequently used Google services with a single click from the toolbar. It currently supports over 110 Google services and it is highly configurable and customizable.

Install Google Shortcuts for Firefox or Chrome.

After the installation, immediately you will see a row of icons appears beside the address bar. The default list of Google services include Gmail, Reader, Google Encrypted Search, Maps, Calendar, Wave (is anyone still using this?), Dashboard and Settings.

Don’t like the way that it is messing up your toolbar or that you can’t find your favorite Google services in the list? Don’t worry. Just click the Settings button and you will be able to configure it to your liking.

In the Settings, you can add the Google services that you use frequently and remove those that you have totally no interest in. You can also arrange them in the order you like and even edit the URL of the shortcuts. What makes it even more powerful is the various function buttons such as “Gmail This” or “New Doc” to quickly email a selected text from the webpage to your friend or to quickly create a new Google document on the fly.

And if you think Google Shortcuts only handle Google services, then you are wrong. You can even create your own shortcuts with a custom name and URL.

The Advanced Options is where all the good things are. Here, you can define the layout of the Google shortcut, either as a horizontal or vertical toolbar, or as a dropdown menu. I personally prefer the dropdown menu as it does not clutter my toolbar with icons. You can also configure the tab behavior (to open a new tab or in background tab) and also use Google Apps for all your Google services.

The Import/Export Option allows you to backup your Settings and import to another Firefox browser.

The Import/Export feature is only available in the Firefox version. This also means that you won’t be able to export your Firefox Google Shortcuts settings and import it into Google Chrome.

There is no doubt over the usefulness of this Google Shortcuts extension. It is highly configurable and could save you ton of times typing the URL on your address bar. If you are not using it, go install it now.

Google Shortcuts (Firefox | Google Chrome)

However, being the default browser doesn’t mean it is the best Android browser. There are other options out ther. Depending on how you use your Android device, you may need a more feature-rich web browser. If you are running a version of the Android OS below 2.2 or have a device that doesn’t support on-page video, you may want to try a browser that can fix that.

Standard Android Browser

The standard browser is a pretty decent browser that is both lightweight and works out of the box. Whether you have 2.1 or 2.2 installed on your device, the browser is pretty much the same.

Unlike other operating systems (Blackberry 5.0), the Android web experience is more like a desktop app. You can have multiple windows (not tabs) open (4 with Eclair, 8 with Froyo).

Another thing I personally like is how your browsing history carries over from desktop to phone when you are signed into Google.

SkyFire

Skyfire is a fantastic browser for the social web. It is well integrated with Facebook and several other social networks. By using the Fireplace and popular sites features, you can see what your friends find interesting enough to share via Facebook.

The main selling point of Skyfire is that it supports Flash out of the box. I was able to play videos from several sites which I wasn’t able to before. The quality might differ from a desktop experience, but at least it works where others failed.

If you do not like the look of a site’s mobile page, you can toggle to the desktop version easily using the page load button. If you prefer one way over the other, there is an option to set your choice as the default.

What I did not like about Skyfire was the screen seemed cluttered with a lot of icons and other stuff.

Appbrain link

Opera Mini 5

Opera Mini is one of the best all round browser no matter the platform. While it isn’t the most feature-rich browser on the list, Opera has a few things the others do not. For starters, Opera was fastest loading of the browsers tested.

If you are a fan of the Opera desktop application, you will love Opera Mini. Much of your information like speed dials and bookmarks will sync with your Android.

A feature I used a lot on my Blackberry was being able to copy and paste from the web. Opera lets you do just that and also adds in an on-page text search.

While the single touch zoom in on non-mobile web pages is nice, pinch to zoom would be better.

Appbrain link

Dolphin

Dolphin has several versions: Dolphin Mini, Dolphin and Dolphin HD. The differences between them let you choose the amount of features and personalization you need. Dolphin HD is by far the most customizable browser on the list.

Dolphin Mini

Dolphin Mini is a no-frills browser with the emphasis on speed. You get everything you need and nothing you don’t. Mini would be a great choice if you are looking for a speed demon. You will gain Speed dials as well as being able to open as many tabs as you feel you need.

Appbrain link

Dolphin

When you choose the middle tier of the Dolphin Browser line, you gain a lot. Bookmarks from your standard Android browser as well as your Google bookmarks can be synced with Dolphin.

Dolphin lets you gestures to open a URL, reload the page or go forward or back. This will greatly speed up your web surfing.

I don’t think there is a real need to have a middle of the road browser. Most people seem to want all the bells and whistles or a minimalist browser.

Appbrain link

Dolphin HD

The big bad daddy of this group, is Dolphin HD. What you gain is a whole lot of customizing choices. Most of this is done via plug-ins, much like you would use in Google Chrome. Some examples of the plug-ins are: Lastpass, screen capture, Xmarks, speed dial, read later, ad blocker, rss readers, Last.fm, Delicious, Twitter. Many others are available with a quick search in the market.

Other features to set Dolphin HD ahead of the pack include pinch to zoom, unexpected tab recovery and the support of multiple languages.

If you use your phone to surf the web a lot, you may get bored with the look and need a change. Change the look of your Dolphin HD browser with different themes.

Appbrain link

Firefox Mobile

Of all the browsers, Firefox has the most stringent requirement as it only works in Android 2.0 and above devices and requires 32MB internal storage, plus 12MB SD storage. Nevertheless, it does comes with several useful features that make it stand out from the rest.

Mozilla has been working hard to make the mobile experience similar to the desktop version. One very good feature is the ability to sync between the desktop and the mobile version. The Firefox sync is in-built in the mobile browser and you can easily configure it to sync with your desktop browser. It also supports the awesome bar, tabs, session restore, addons (not the same addons as the desktop Firefox’s extension) etc.

Appbrain link

Now that you have seen our choice of browsers, tell us what is your favorite browser and why?

image credit: Johan Larsson

What is KidZui?

KidZui is a web browser that comes loaded with kid-friendly content. As it serves a general population, KidZui is not age-specific but rather includes graphical links to a variety of games, videos, and websites for kids of all ages.

There are currently two versions of KidZui: KidZui Classic, which requires the creation of user accounts, and KidZui 2, which does not require a login and has a new interface design. In both cases, users are required to download and install the software.

The software itself is available as a stand-alone browser for Windows or Mac OS X. In addition Linux and other users may use the Firefox add-on to get the same interface. When downloading, the website attempts to auto-detect which operating system and browser you are using and then serves you the appropriate download link. I tested KidZui on my Linux desktop and on Windows running inside VirtualBox.

Interface Design

As would be expected of a browser for kids, Kidzui is very colorful and has large puffy blue buttons. Each button along the top of the screen has an icon next to its description, which may help children who cannot yet read.

On my 2.6Ghz machine, the animations and mouseover effects are snappy and responsive. On slower machines, it lags a little, but not enough to be unusable. The real lag starts when loading flash games and videos. This, of course, is not something the Kidzui makers can control, and the new 3D graphics accelerated Flash plugin may reduce some of those problems for users with supported video cards.

By design, the interface takes over the entire screen, and the only way to get out of it is to close it or “Alt+Tab” to another window. For the most part, this works well for kids, who will most likely not be multitasking until they are older. On my dual-screen setup, it actually covered my second screen with a grey window, preventing me from using it. Again, this is undoubtedly by design. If, for example, you had this interface up on a kids’ machine and did not want them in other programs, the fullscreen setup would keep their focus only on KidZui.

Usability

The ultimate way for me to put KidZui to the test was to sit my 7-year-old daughter down in front of it. She loved it from the moment she saw it and has no trouble navigating the menus or finding the content she wanted. Because KidZui depends on third-party websites for content, some sites performed better than others on her slower machine, but there were not a lot of dead links or accidentally linked inappropriate content.

Like a normal browser, KidZui includes a search box, back and forward buttons, favorites/bookmarks, and a browser history. Parents can also create logins for themselves to enable extra features such as the ability to receive weekly activity reports, set age and gender relevant content, launch KidZui on startup, and require a password in order to exit the browser.

Content

KidZui includes a great number of games, far more than I had time to play before writing this review (though I certainly was tempted to play all day). The content covers a wide variety, from sports to fashion and includes movies, music videos, television shows, and websites with multiple activities.

Without the parent login, the content is not age-specific, although there is generally nothing that would be particularly alarming to most parents of younger children. As with any website or software, however, it is ultimately up to the parent to decide what is appropriate. The music video section, for example, may include artists that some parents do not consider to be good role models. If they are concerned, they should use their own discretion to decide and make use of the parent login to control content.

KidZui does include some advertisements that are clearly marked with the word “Ad”, not that marking them would stop kids from clicking. But overall, the ads are not intrusive or annoyingly prevalent.

Kid Fun

My children enjoy KidZui and love the content it provides. They no longer have to ask every time they want to go to a site they like, because most of them are already linked within the browser. To expand their reach, the developers should port the Firefox extension to Google Chrome and possibly make apps for other devices. The only real downside is the heavy requirement of Flash player, which will not change until content providers find suitable alternatives.

KidZui is fun for all school-aged kids, and I recommend it for parents who are looking for fun and safe online experiences for their children.

There are many factors that can influence the loading speed of a website. Analyzing and fixing the problems one by one could be a nightmare for non-geeks who happens to have one or two websites. But luckily, there’s YSlow – a Firefox add-on which will help even the most common users of technology to easily track down the hogs on their websites.

Get, Install, And Set Up The Add Ons

You can install YSlow by using the search function in Firefox’s Add-ons Manager, or you could also get it straight from YSlow page.

And after installation, you can see the logo on Firefox’ lower bar. Clicking on it will activate the Add-on.

However, please note that you have to install and activate Firebug prior to using YSlow. And if you are Firefox 4 beta users, you currently can’t use YSlow because the latest version of Firebug (at the time of writing) is only compatible with Firefox 3.x.

If everything is set, click YSlow button while the website that you want to analyze is in focused. YSlow will open as one of the tabs of Firebug. You can choose the option to always run YSlow each time a web page is loaded, but ordinary users who only want to analyze one or two sites should use manual process by clicking the “Run Test” button.

There are several ruleset of test that you can use depending on what kind of website that you have. Most of us amateur blogger might want to use the “Small Site or Blog” ruleset.

You can also edit the sets by clicking the “Edit” button next to the ruleset drop down menu. Then you can include/exclude elements of the set. You can get more information about an item by hovering your mouse over it.

The Test Result

After clicking the “Run Test” button, YSlow will start analyzing your site. A short moment later, it will present you the complete result with overall grades, individual grades and short notes about each items.

You can learn more about a particular item by clicking on the “Read More” link.

You can also filter the result based on the categories.

Next to the “Grade” tab is the “Components” tab. This is the place to see the breakdown list of components that weighing down the page that you analyze.

The “Statistics” tab will show you the result in a more graphical manner. You can quickly compare the size of each components just by looking at the graph.

Tools Of The Trade

After the analyzing comes the fixing phase. YSlow provides its users with a set of tools to improve your websites’ performance. But please remember that YSlow goes only as far as giving you suggestions of the optimized elements of your websites. You still have to manually edit those components yourself – replacing the old ones with the optimized versions suggested by YSlow.

For example. you could click on the “All JS Minified” link to get more compact and smaller script. Then login to your web host and use those minified scripts to replace the ones that you use on your site.

But the tool that I think would be most useful to most of us is the Smush.it. This tool will optimized the images found on the page that you analyze so that those images will be smaller and more fit for the web.

Click the “All Smush.it” link and let Smush.it do the rest. After the process is done, you can download the smushed images and use them to replace the ones that you use on the web page.

The tool also allows you to upload images from your hard drive and optimize them. This will be very useful to compress the size of images before using them for the web.

Be warned though that Smush.it will rename the files and use plus (+) sign to replace spaces. Some sites doesn’t allow you to use non-standard characters for file name and your optimized images might not show up properly. So you might want to rename the optimized images before uploading them to the web.

There are many more aspects of YSlow that can’t be fit described here. For more information, you could visit YSlow User Guide.

WordPress blogs owners could also try 3 more methods to lighten the load and speed up their blogs.

Have you tried YSlow? Do you know other tools to analyze and fix the hogs on your websites? Share your thoughts and opinions using the comment below.

Setting Google Instant as the homepage

While the default homepage in Firefox is set to the Google search, you will find that you can’t perform any instant search on it. The reason being, the Firefox Google home page is a custom page created by Mozilla that doesn’t come with the instant feature. To set Google Instant as your homepage, go to the “Preferences -> General” and set Google.com as your homepage.

For those who are not residing in the United States, you will also find that Google will auto-redirect the Google.com site to a country-specific site. For example, I am living in Singapore, so whenever I access Google.com, it will redirect me to Google.com.sg which does not come with the instant search feature. To fix this, you have to set the homepage URL to google.com/ncr or http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy. This will ensure that the actual Google instant Search page is shown.

Accessing Google Instant from the Awesome bar

To enable Google instant search from the awesome bar, install the InstantFirefox extension.

Once installed, you will be able to perform a Google instant search from the awesome bar.

There are two things that you need to take note:

1. While performing the search, the dropdown search result will overlap with the instant search. This can be very irritating at times.

2. This extension will only work on new tab. If you are using extensions, like Speed dial, that also take control of the new tab, this InstantFirefox extension won’t work.

Accessing Google Instant search from the search bar

You can easily add custom search engine to the search bar with the Add To Search Bar extension.

Install Add To Search Bar extension

Go to http://www.google.com/webhp?sclient=psy.

Right click on the Search field and select “Add to Search Bar”. When prompted, enter “Google instant” as the new search engine name.

Note: You won’t get instant search result when you type on the search bar. However, you can just type the first few characters of your search term, press Enter and it will bring you to a Google instant search result page. You can then continue your search from there.

That’s it. What other ways do you make use of Google Instant in Firefox?

When browsing the Web, there will be times (plenty of times) that you come across sentences/words/phrases that you want to check it out in other sites such as Google, Wikipedia, Amazon etc. Instead of launching a new tab, load the URL and copy/paste the term into the new site, you can now get rid of all these steps with Hyperwords. All you have to do is to highlight the term and select from the popup menu the action that you want to carry out, and it will automate the process for you.

Let’s take a look at what Hyperwords is capable of doing.

Search

After you have highlighted the term, a small orb will appear and you just have to hover over the orb to display the menu. The first option is the Search function. From here, you can perform a search in Google, Bing, Yahoo, Images and Videos, and even search on the current page.

Reference

If search is not your cup of tea, you can also quickly find a reference in Wikipedia, Britannica, Wolfram Alpha or Google Definition.

The best thing is, when you hover on the link, a popup window will appear with the results you want. You can then obtain the info you want, close the popup when you are done and continue reading the page that you are at previously.

Conversion

There are times when you just need to get information quick, just like “How many meters is 10 miles?” and you can get instant result from Hyperwords as well.

Quick Sharing

Hyperwords also allows you to quickly share content in Twitter, Facebook and several other social networks. On the first run, you will have to grant permission for it to publish to your Twitter/Facebook account.

Configuration options

In the backend, there are several options that you can configure. The General tab is where you configure the action when a term is highlighted. You can set the menu to appear immediately after you have highlighted the term, or when you hover over the orb.

In the Layout tab, you can decide what options appear on the menu and arrange the order that they appear. You can also add new items to the list.

The Other tab consists of all the miscellaneous options like “open click in new window” etc.

Conclusion

If you are looking for ways to improve your productivity and have quick access to various information in Google Chrome or Firefox, Hyperwords is definitely one great choice you should check out.

Download Hyperwords for Google Chrome | Firefox

While some of the above functions can be achieved using a dedicated HTML editor like Dreamweaver or Microsoft FrontPage, but why use another program when the same purpose can be achieved without spending time on learning to use a heavyweight designing tool ?

Here is a recommended list of Firefox add-ons for anyone interested in web design or development:

Firebug

Firebug is by far the best add-on for debugging the HTML source of websites, changing CSS parameters and previewing the changes in real time. The extension also allows you to delete specific HTML parts from the webpage under inspection and you can preview the changes right away.

To get started, all you have to do is hit the little “Inspect” button at the far left and choose a web element from the page . The CSS property of that element will be shown on the right panel, now just modify the attributes and you can preview the output in real time.

Firebug is also available as a Google Chrome extension which can be found here.

Web Developer Toolbar

This is again a useful add-on which adds a huge number of useful features in a sleek toolbar, as shown below

Using the toolbar, you can tweak the following aspects of any webpage:

• Disabling Specific items: With one click, you can disable all colors, meta redirects or javascript coding on any webpage. Just check off the required options from the “Disable” dropdown and the webpage will refresh with your defined changes in action.
• Cookies: From the “Cookies” dropdown you can disable external cookies or site specific sessions and test the behavior of the website.
• CSS: This is the most useful thing – handling external as well as internal CSS files with the touch of a button. Just hit the “CSS” dropdown and you can manage all external CSS files called, inline CSS elements, view Style information or add a custom stylesheet. Saves a lot of time, when you want to disable an entire stylesheet and recreate a theme from scratch.
• Images: Another very useful button on the toolbar is “Images” which allows you to disable all images on the webpage, copy all the image source paths, check for broken image links or hide specific images.
• Information: The “Information” button allows you to view the page information, display tab index, table depth, anchor information, color information and much more data about the webpage you are analyzing.

There are other useful buttons as well which includes verifying the CSS validation, checking the outline, browser compatibility – it’s all packed up in the toolbar you can’t afford to miss.

Fireshot

Fireshot is the best add-on for handling or manipulating images on any webpage. Apart from capturing screenshots, the add-on can perform a whole bunch of operations related with embedded images:

• Capture active region or the full page and save it in your computer.
• Capture a region or the full page and open it with your default image editing program.
• Upload a screenshot of the active region to an FTP server or send it as an email attachment.

So when you are done tweaking a webpage with Firebug or any other debugging tool, you may want to save the output as an image file or send it to someone else. In such situations, Fireshot is a really handy tool to save a screenshot or download the processed design on your computer.

To use Fireshot, simply right click on any webpage and choose Fireshot -> Action, as shown below:

ColorZilla

If you need help in finding the hex code of specific colors on any design, use ColorZilla. Once the add-on is installed, just click the small “Eyedropper icon” at the left bottom of the Firefox status bar, as shown below:

This will open a simple crosshair which you can use to know the hex code of any color on a webpage. There are other tools as well e.g Eyedropper, Palette browser ; you can copy the hex link directly to your Windows clipboard and use it on your CSS stylesheet.

Apart from selecting colors, you can also use ColorZilla to zoom in to a portion of a webpage. This is very useful when you want to accurately determine the hex code of borders, navigationsl units and so on. Here is an example:

ColorSuckr

ColorSuckr lets you extract all the colors from any image and build a color pallet using those colors. After the add-on is installed, right click on any image to extract the hex codes of the major colors used on the image and generate a unique color pallette using the ColorSuckr website.

This is very useful when you want to design a new element in your website’s theme and looking for a matching color pallette which dwells with the current design of your website.

GridFox

This is not a must have add-on but can be useful when you want to draw gridlines over a design and want to measure the position of certain elements by pixel width. Grids can be saved for future use and you can measure the width of any row or column, as seen in the following illustration:

Note: a similar add-on - Measure it solves the same purpose, but comes with an additional pixel ruler which can be used to measure the width or height of a web element.

FireFtp

Another useful add-on down the list is FireFTP which allows you to manage FTP accounts and transfer files to your website directly from the browser. You can add multiple websites in FireFTP and upload files from your computer to any of your website’s directory.

This is highly recommended because when you are designing something, you need less number of open applications to work with. Works much the same way as other FTP programs like Filezilla and you can also import/export FTP settings on other computers.

There are some other useful add-ons e.g IEtab, CSSMate, Loadtimeanalyzer but unfortunately they are not compatible with Firefox 3.6.10. You can use them on older versions of Firefox, if you want.

Which Firefox extensions do you use or recommend? Please share your views in the comments.

Here’s what you can find in the new Firefox beta for Android.

Sync

Firefox users who have been using the Firefox Sync feature to synchronize your bookmarks, settings and profile across multiple computers, you can now sync it to your Android phone too. Simply go to the Preferences, fill in your sync credential and tap on the Connect button.

Add-ons

Just like what makes the desktop browser great, the mobile version also comes with addons. You can either browse the addon gallery or just do a search to locate your addons.

Yes, you still need to restart your mobile browser every time you install an addon.

Personalized Start Page

The start page is a good place for you to… well, get started. It shows your previous browsing session, the tabs that you opened and also tabs from other computers. Cool!

Left and Right sidebar

Firefox for Android makes clever use of the sidebar which have been largely ignored by most applications. By flicking the page to the right, the left sidebar will appear to reveal the tabs. Similarly, on the right side (flicking the screen to the left) shows the quick bookmark icon and the forward/back button.

Awesome Bar and Awesome Screen

The Awesome bar in desktop Firefox (the same as the URL bar) continue to be awesome in the mobile version. A tap on the URL bar will bring you to a awesome screen where you can access to your bookmarks, history and other desktop tabs all in one place. Similarly, you can type the URL to load the site you want.

Pinch to zoom

The pinch to zoom is becoming the norm in multi-touch device, so it is not surprising to know that Firefox beta supports pinch to zoom as well. In a quick experiment, the pinch to zoom feature is not as sensitive as the native Google browser, but still, it is a good inclusion.

Increased Responsiveness

Yes, this is the one that we all been waiting for. Firefox beta for Android is definitely more responsive than the alpha build. It is even on par with the native browser.

Can’t wait to try it? Hit the link below to download and give it a test drive. Don’t forget to let us know what you think in the comments.

Download Firefox beta for Android

Getting Midori

If your distribution contains the XFCE desktop environment, there’s a pretty good chance it’ll have Midori as well. Ubuntu users can find it in the Ubuntu Software Center, click here or with the command line

sudo apt-get install midori

If not, a tarball for installation can be found here.

The Basics

As you can see in the screenshot below, Midori has a layout pretty similar to Firefox. The toolbars, input boxes, and menu items are laid out much like you’d find in many other browsers. Tabs in Midori are shown below the address bar, as opposed to Chrome which displays them above.

The address bar has the history searching features we’ve all grown used to, allowing quick access to previously visited sites, and includes options to search for your term using the provider of your choice.

Speed Dial

Midori is certainly not without unique features of its own, one of which is the Speed Dial page which is opened when you create a new tab. At first glance it looks a bit like Chrome’s New Tab page, but it operates differently. Where Chrome would build a table of sites based on your web history, Midori just provides a blank slate to create a simple start page of your own.

Just click on any item and provide the address of the site you want to link, and a title. Midori will fetch a screenshot of that site for you.

Web Application Support

Many of you may be thinking “looks fine and all, but can it run Flash/Java/HTML5/AJAX?” and many other acronyms. In short, Midori seems to be capable of using many of Firefox’s content plugins. Flash, which had been previously installed on the Ubuntu Lucid test machine used for this review, worked immediately in Midori. Moonlight (the open source Silverlight implementation) did not function in Midori but the Quicktime, Google Talk, and Java plugins seem to be working properly.

To test standards compliance, I used the well known Acid3 test. This runs a browser through an extremely thorough test suite to verify standards compliance. If a browser scores well on Acid, it’s a very good sign that it will operate properly with the modern web. Midori very quickly scored the full 100 points.

It didn’t do quite as well for HTML5, though I should point out that HTML5 is still a draft specification and not yet finalized, so it would be rather difficult for any browser to be fully compliant at this point. Still the results from HTML5Test.com give us a fairly mediocre score of 187, as compared to Chrome 6′s score of 217, and Firefox 3.6′s score of 193.

Problems

Midori is not without its share of problems. For example, in the time it has taken to write this review, Midori has so far crashed twice unexpectedly. Normally, that would be reason enough for me to toss it out and maybe check back later, but there are enough complelling features in Midori that it seems worthwhile to focus on the good aspects and trust that stability will be improved in later releases.

The only issue that I would consider poor design is the handling of the text in the address bar. An “empty” address bar is not empty, it points to res:/. This means that if by chance you might happen to want to go to… oh I don’t know… a web site, you have to remove that text first before entering your query ip address.

On top of that, the res:/ text is inserted even when opening a new tab. This means that if you were to do the normal action of hitting Ctrl+T for a new tab then entering your address, you must now first clear out the existing text, otherwise you’ll end up with something like “google.comres:/” in your address bar.

Conclusion

There are a few things about Midori to tip you off to the fact that it’s a small independant project, but for the most part it’s a surprisingly capable browser with a lot of clever design behind it. Aesthetically it may not be able to compete with some of the other popular browsers, but it’s got all the functionality necessary to act as a primary browser for all but the most picky of Internet users. If the developers can iron out a few of the stability and usability problems, it might just make the big names take notice.