now covering digital world, life skills, point of views and lifestyle
Browsers
Everyone knows how important search is. You search Google, YouTube, Twitter, Wikipedia, Flickr, Last.fm, Amazon and plenty of other sites for different products, content, images, videos etc. Unfortunately, none of these sites lets you customize the search interface as good as Favitt does.
Favitt lets you simplify the search experience by bringing all these search engines in a customized start page.
I find Facebook’s picture viewing interface inconvenient. When I am viewing a friend’s album, I can view the pictures as thumbnails in the main album page. To view a picture’s true size I have to click it. Then I have to go back to the album (photo thumbnails view) and select another image to enlarge. The process can become quite time consuming. But thanks to two browser extension, I no longer have to click back and forth while viewing pictures on Facebook.
The first is Facebook PhotoZoom (there is no space between the words Photo and Zoom).
You might have been using Chrome for a quite some time now but there is a good chance you are not taking its full advantage. Chrome’s maximum potential lies in the power of its extensions. Below We have gathered 5 Chrome extensions that will enable you all to realize Chrome’s full potential. You will not find these extensions in similar lists on other websites; I hope you find them to be useful to your computer usage.
The internet is not only used by people who like to store their media or connect with friends through social networking sites; it is also a great source of information and knowledge. Major newspapers and magazines have their online versions up as websites. These are accessible versions of their paper versions. There is only drawback: the extra things.
During the keynote at WWDC, Steve Jobs did not mention much about Safari. But Apple made up for it by releasing a press announcement centered on Safari.
The new Safari version is Safari 5. The browser’s new features includes Safari Reader, strong HTML5 support, better performance, Bing Search, Enhanced Keyboard Navigation, Acid 3 Compliance, Nitro JavaScript Engine, Hardware Acceleration for Windows, support for extensions, Geo-location service, Improved Web Inspector. Before discussing it further, I won’t mind to rate Safari 5 as smart, powerful, beautiful browser For Mac and PC.
If you are an Opera (the web browser) user, then there are not many places to go for tips and tricks. Apparently the web is filled with Firefox addons and Chrome extensions. This is so because most people are not aware of the massive potential of Opera. Not only is it a lightning fast browser but it has rich library of widgets. Opera widgets are not only for average browsing users but also for web developers.
I have just finished writing about an Opera widget which Google users will appreciate. Now, on my path to discover great widgets for Opera, I have found yet another tool that will help anybody who likes to keep a virtual diary.
If you are an Opera user who has not familiarized himself with its widgets, you are missing the best Opera has to offer.
Opera has gone with a completely different direction with its widgets. Unlike Chrome’s extensions or Firefox’s addons that need the browser to function, Opera’s widgets are standalone applications that can be executed without even opening the browser. They can sit neatly on your desktop and can serve a multitude of functions.
When I read about web browsers online it seems that all the headlines are captured by Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome. With their massive library of useful extensions and addons, both these browsers offer a great user experience. But the web browser which I have only recently started to extensively use is Opera. Addons for Opera are called widgets and they, too, provide great convenience to their users.
Not all people who use the internet are native English language speakers. Mainly due to this reason, many users come across unfamiliar words on websites. Even native English speakers can run into this problem, but less frequently. To understand the unfamiliar word we can look it up in a physical dictionary or preferably, use the internet to look up the word.
Chrome is a wonderful browser. Its speed and constant updates keep it ahead of the game. The gaps left in the user interface are quickly filled out by great 3rd party extensions.
One type of such extensions pops up a menu of options each time we highlight a word on a webpage. The options in the popup menu can be of searching through a search engine, looking up the meaning or synonyms of the word using a variety of online dictionaries, or even checking which online stores is the ‘word’ available on (if the highlighted text is a product).
Twitter has become a huge sharing source online. Accountholder on the social networking giant keep their followers posted of each and every thing that they experience. It cannot be argued that Twitter is a great way to know what people are talking about, what the trending topics are, and what is concerning Twitter users the most. This information keeps people well informed of their surroundings and the people in them.
Workplaces can be boring especially if we finish our work early. Usually we turn to the internet to entertain us when the boredom gets too much to take. But the Boss’s fear makes us tread cautiously. We need to keep an eye out for our superiors passing by. If they do pass by, we close our browser and resultantly lose all the tabs we had open. Finding those lost URLs can take a lot of time if there were many tabs open.
While websites may allow us to choose from certain available themes, visitors to a site do not have the liberty to change the site’s color scheme. This is disadvantageous for the visitor in case the site’s existing color scheme makes it difficult for the visitor to read text.
Whether you want to change a site’s color scheme because of this problem or because you want to have fun, you can do so via Webpage Decorator.
Most download managers show us a semitransparent floating window. This window indicates the progress of our current downloads. Firefox, unfortunately, does not have this brilliant feature. To view the progress of our downloads we need to have the Downloads window in Firefox in view; surfing the web in other tabs and continuing with our work thus becomes very difficult unless we are fine with being unaware of our downloads’ progress.
Google has released many useful products to the internet community. Most of these products are free and many computer users benefit from them. Take Google Maps for instance; it shows us the map of almost any location in the world. All we do is type up the location’s name or its longitude / latitude to obtain its map.
Internet Explorer 9 will be the next version of Internet Explorer. The first public preview of IE9 was released on 16th of March, 2010 and as Microsoft promised the release of preview every 8th week, the 2nd preview of IE9 was released on 5th May, 2010. You can grab the new Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview by visiting the Internet Explorer 9 Test Drive website. General Manager for Internet Explorer, Dean Hachamovitch, has posted to the IEBlog about Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 2 you can get detailed idea of what it will be like, he discussed some test results with IE9 like with SunSpider JavaScript, Acid3, API Usage, and CSS3.
Streaming music online lets us listen to any song without having anything stored on our computer. Moreover since the procedure takes place in our browser, it does not depend on our operating system so any OS user can stream music online.
One wonderful online music streaming website is Grooveshark. Visitors can quickly create an account (although an account is not necessary to start streaming music), then go on and create their playlist. Playlists are played within the built-in player of Grooveshark.
Streaming videos online is a great way to kill our time. We often find humorous videos that are bound to cheer us up. Sometimes we stream these videos to view what our favorite band’s latest video looks like; at other time we stream educational video to increase our general knowledge. Whatever the purpose of our video streaming, YouTube is the site to visit.
At times after watching a video on YouTube, users want to download it and store it on their computer for easy access later (and also to transfer it to their phone or portable media player). There are numerous tools to perform this task; their main functioning involves the user entering the YouTube video’s URL in the program, after which the download proceeds.
A startpage is the thumbnails view of our favorite bookmarks. It helps us find bookmarks easily. Opera was the first browser that provided a startpage feature; now in addition to browsers supporting it, there are entire websites dedicated to the idea.
Online startpages have the advantage of accessibility. A browser created startpage is only accessible from a specific computer whereas an online startpage can be accessed from anywhere. Having reviewed many startpage websites, I have observed that many of them are somewhat the same. Sitehoover, however, is one truly unique startpage website.
