Chrome and Firefox showing JavaScript improvements

With new betas for both Firefox and Chrome being released, CNET decided to find out how good their JavaScript performance was. Both browsers got a performance boost with Firefox slightly edging out Chrome. You have to turn on TraceMonkey, Firefox’s new Javascript engine in 3.1b1, to get the improvement. We never thought Google was that serious about building a new browser. They just want wanted Firefox to get their act together and suck less. It seems to be working.

Faster browsing with RAM disks

A coworker approached us today wondering if they could get a performance boost using Samsung’s newly announced 256GB SSD. Most of their work is done in browser, so we said “no”. They’d only see benefit if they were reading/writing large files. Their system has plenty of RAM, and we decided to take a different approach. By creating a filesystem in RAM, you can read and write files much faster than on a typical hard drive. We decided to put the browser’s file cache into RAM.

Securing your data

Lifehacker has published an overview of some of the many ways you can secure your data. The post was prompted by recently released browser vulnerabilities: first IE, then Firefox. They cover techniques far beyond just browser security, like how to properly wipe your iPhone. They mention disk encryption go-to TrueCrypt along with password management tools like KeePass. They also suggest using temporary credit cards to mitigate the impact of fraud.

Lightweight Webkit based browsers

With netbooks being slim and mostly utilitarian, it seems a bit contradictory to use a standard and somewhat bulky web browser with them. After all, we’re trimming down the operating system to perform faster on these little devices, so why not thin out the focal point of the netbook: the browser. Firefox, Chrome, or Safari may be well and great for a full powered desktop or laptop, so how about something a bit more trimmed? Enter the lightweight Webkit based browsers: Arora and Midori.

Arora and Midori are relative newcomers to the browser wars, but each offers a great alternative to Firefox, especially for netbooks. They’re both based on the opensource Webkit project, which is the same engine used by Chrome and Safari, so pages load quickly. Flash is supported and fully enabled in both with video playback working just as well as other browsers. The main advantage is the loading speed of the browser itself. On an ASUS Eee PC with Ubuntu, Firefox takes a few seconds to load, where Arora and Midori load in under a second.
These projects are maturing pretty quickly, and some great features come out with each version. For our money though, Arora takes the cake, and has replaced Firefox as my browser of choice for my netbook. It’s quicker, offers a somewhat similar feature to Firefox’s “awesome bar”, has a privacy mode, and is generally a little bit faster than Midori.

Firefox CSS hack: change navigation icons

Why settle for the standard home icon on your browser? If your home button brings you to hackaday.com, why not make the icon reflect that destination? This hack is quick and simple. We’ll take you through it using Firefox 3 and the default theme with standard sized icons.
We start by using our favorite graphics program to make an icon that is 24×24 pixels, and then saved is as a PNG file without compression.

Custom shortcuts from Firefox address bar

We picked up a great Firefox bookmark tip from [Colin]. He wanted an easier way to look up bug numbers on the launchpad bug tracker. Because the url is always the same with the bug number at the end of the address, he replaced the final portion of the url with %s. Now, when he types the keyword followed by the bug number in the address bar the bug page loads right up.
We don’t do all that many bug searches but it’s immediately obvious that this can be useful in a lot of ways. In the photo above you can see we’ve set up a shortcut to the tag pages for hackaday.com. Now we just type “hack” with the tag we want after it. Add this to your bookmarks and try typing “hack firefox” into the address bar.