Backtracking for a second, you might be wondering what exactly these “about pages” are that I keep speaking of. You may notice that when you open a new tab in chrome, the address bar contains the text “about:blank”. That code simply tells Google Chrome to display a blank page. Varying the text after “about:” allows you to access special pages. I outline some of the most interesting and useful of these below.

1. about:about

This page lists most (but not all) available about pages that you can access. In my testing, however, the links on this page are not functional despite being clickable, and you need to manually type them into the address bar.

2. about:flags

One of the most interesting about pages, this allows you to turn on what Google terms “experiments”, modifying various functions of the Chrome browser. Some examples are an FPS counter that displays when hardware acceleration is in use, the option to disable VSync, and the ability to enable an in-tab preview of print. I tested a couple of the experiments and found some working, while others didn’t seem to do anything. Please report your findings here.

3. about:plugins

This gives you direct access to the options page where you can enable and disable any plugins that you may have installed for Google Chrome.

4. about:net-internals

A very useful backend tool that gives you access to a list of currently open connections, the ability to check what current proxy settings are in effect, and even a test tool that will try and identify why a certain page is not loading properly. Be careful with what you do here, as I could not find any documentation for it.

5. about:memory

This shows you the memory in use by Chrome as well as any other browsers you may have open. Furthermore, it shows you the memory in use by specific tabs and other processes running under Chrome. This allows you to get a better idea of the resource load of the browser, and to perhaps compare it to other browsers you may use. The memory use summary is currently buggy on OSX.

6. about:cache

This allows you to view everything currently in the browser’s cache. The only catch here is that if you click on a link, it does not actually load the image or the file in a normal way. It will display a hexadecimal & ascii form of the file. You could likely copy and paste this into a hex editor if you wanted to retrieve the contents in a usable format.

7. about:version

This displays the current version of Google Chrome that you have installed, along with the version of JavaScript, Flash and the User Agent that it will be giving to pages that it accesses. It also shows you the currently installed directory as well as the location of your profile. The latter might be useful if you want to back it up.

What other about pages did I miss out?

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.

This Windows-based news-reader will run in the background of your PC and continually monitor websites RSS feeds for you. When it senses that something new has appeared or changed on your preferred sites, it will immediately let you know.

Awasu, your new eyes and ears will watch what’s happening around the globe and let you know about events almost as soon as they happen, eliminating the wasting of time while surfing the web.

Additional Features & Services

With Awasu you’re not limited to just news services, you can keep an eye on the current weather in New York, the latest sales data in let’s say London, or which band is playing at your favorite place soon.

Utilizing its powerful plug-in architecture, Awasu is easily customizable to monitor absolutely anything at all. Awasu comes with a sample Java program that lets you monitor a database. For example, if you wanted to keep track of stock levels in your warehouse’s inventory database per say, it’s possible. It’s also easy to write a plug-in that talks to it and feeds the results back into Awasu for quick and convenient viewing.

This application also allows you to hook into the flow of information to perform your own custom actions. You can analyze the information as it arrives by reading it or quickly making note of it, then send out an email or SMS message to someone informing them on the RSS feed of your choice.

The Conclusion of Awasu

With Awasu you’re no longer restricted to only using the web browser tool, you can monitor information as it arrives from your selected feeds, view it and then respond to it as well through the use of comments on the site from which the feeds originated from. Awasu is free and it seems as though it arrives at your desktop with endless possibilities of adding hundreds and thousands of feeds.