PCTips Box

Firefox may be my browser of choice but there are times when it is REALLY slow, so slow in fact that I am sorely tempted to defect to Opera or even gasp Safari!

It’s sometimes even worse when you’re opening up Firefox. You click on that little Fox icon and it sits there thinking “hmmm….he wants me to start up…will I or won’t I? Let’s think about it for a few minutes”. Meanwhile you’re sitting there gnashing your teeth and flirting with the idea of walking on the wild side with Flock.

But you don’t have to wail and despair any more! During a little stroll through SourceForge, I found an interesting program called Firefox Preloader which was short on technical details but long on prospects. It claims to be able to “improve Firefox’s start-up time”. (more…)

The face-off between the most prominent browsers on the market is not only a question of audience and uptake, but also one of security. As browsers are often a preferred attack vector, developers aim to bulletproof the product as much as possible. As far as the browser market is concerned, Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Opera pretty much dive the users, with IE having the dominant position, as a result of the Windows-near monopoly, but with Mozilla’s open source product coming hard from behind. Safari is Apple’s proprietary browser and a component of the Mac OS X operating system, also made available for the 32-bit and 64-bit Windows XP and Windows Vista platforms in 2006. Out of all, Opera is the undisputed underdog, having the smallest reach. But in terms of the amount of security vulnerabilities, each browser brings to the table, exposing users to inherent risks, Secunia revealed an entirely different top. (more…)

One of the biggest complaints a Firefox evangelist encounters is “it doesn’t act or feel like browser X.” Internet Explorer users complain that Firefox doesn’t look like what they’re used to. Opera, Safari, and Netscape users complain that it’s missing many of their favorite features. And the social networking gurus point to the powerful social networking features Flock boasts and Firefox lacks. However, all these users overlook one of the most powerful features of Firefox: support for third-party add-ons, which can make emulating the features of other browsers extremely simple. (more…)

Google is a search technology used by all of you and I bet you admit it. But if you’re a real Google fan you conducted thousands of searches on Google and your browser, no matter it is Internet Explorer, Firefox or any other application, remembers them all. If you want to test this, just go over to Google, click inside the search box and press the “A” key to write a word. If you ever searched Google for a word beginning with the “A” letter, then a drop-down list should appear showing your past queries made on Google. Because this list can become huge and provide numerous words and phrases, some of you might want to delete it but you don’t know how to do that. Well, this is what you should do in order to remove the past searches depending on your browser: (more…)

Download and install went smooth, but for now it looks like this really is just a “bug fix” update with no noticeable added features…Anyone out there try it??

UPDATE: A list of big fixes can be found on Apple’s site here. It looks like Apple just patched security vulnerabilities in Safari for the most part…so sad.

UPDATE 2: Check out some other changes we’ve all found below. (more…)

The world’s best browser. Now on Windows… Experience the web, Apple style, with Safari: The fastest, easiest-to-use web browser in the world.

The fastest web browser on any platform, Safari loads pages up to 2 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. And it executes JavaScript up to 2.8 times faster than Internet Explorer 7 and up to 1.6 times faster than Firefox 2. (more…)