Trying new browsers

These two new browsers have caught my attention

• Flock – this is a social web browser. You can access lot of your social websites, blog engines, photo sharing from one place. You can directly upload photos, blog etc from this browser without using website.
• Lunascape – this browser has multiple engines. You can switch to FF or IE on the fly. You can also designate engine by the websites to get best web experience. I think it gives best of both FF and IE.

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Some updates on this. Flock is now my social web browser. I have given up on Lunascape, its still not there yet. Its slow and UI is cluttered for easy use, may be I will if they get better in future versions.

Another browser I am trying now is Opera. After not much enjoying Opera Mini on blackberry, I was not that much excited. But as I have used almost all major browsers in the market except Opera, I felt obligated. They claim to be “Fastest browser on Earth”. It has best interface out of all other browsers I have been using or tried. I won’t call it the fastest browser though, chrome sees to have an edge on that part. But overall it has great potential and I am liking it.

Firefox Gmail attachment issue behind proxy

Lately, I started running into an issue while uploading attachments in Gmail from Firefox. Once in a while proxy server would start asking for authentication. Even after providing correct credentials, attachment upload process would hang. Firefox would sometimes hang as well.

I found solution for the issue. If you are behind a proxy follow these steps:

Solution 1 – one time fix:

• Use secure Gmail: https://mail.google.com/

Solution 2 – permanent fix:

• Click on Settings on Gmail page
• Change Browser connection value to Always use https
• Click Save Changes and restart Firefox

Feel free to leave some comments on whether it worked for you or not!

Useful Firefox add-ons for web developers

If you are a web developer and looking to make your life little better, try some of these useful add-ons for Firefox.

• CacheViewer – Allows searching and sorting memory and disk cache files.
• Fiddler – Web Debugging Proxy which logs all HTTP(S) traffic between your computer and the Internet.  I think it works better with IE but comes with FiddlerHook for Firefox as well.
• Firebug – Allows you to edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.
• iMacros – Record and replay repetitious work. I stopped being repetitive and started being productive after finding this add-on.
• Page Speed – Evaluate the performance of your web pages and to get suggestions on how to improve them.
• Pixlr Grabber – Edit, Share, Save or Copy screen shots
• Poster – Tool for interacting with web services and other web resources that lets you make HTTP requests, set the entity body, and content type.
• ShowIP – Show the IP address(es) of the current page in the status bar.