Yes I know you can tweak some settings in the config and download a extension that delivers 25% faster browsing but I really can’t be arsed if I’m honest.
I like that the Chrome browser just works quickly from the start just like the old versions of Firefox when it first appeared on the scene. Opening the browser and waiting for 2 minutes isn’t ideal and time is more of a managed resource in my day-to-day live now.

I’m not saying that Chrome is perfect but in my opinion the pros certainly outnumber the cons when I compare it to Firefox. For now I’m enjoying the change of scenery.

Perhaps I just need to wipe my Firefox install and give it another chance I know there are most likely files in my profile that date back to when it was branded Phoenix, I’ll keep notes on how it goes.

My old SATA discs were a little old and both had snapped the plastic support for the data cable off. This meant they were a little flaky at times and the one drive hadn’t work for the last 3 months.

I planned on cloning the OS and migrating the whole lot over to the new discs this would have been fine, only due too my partitions things weren’t going to be so easy.

Happily I have discovered that there are 2 great benefits to how I game.

MMOs – all my mmo games that I moved over worked off the bat, which is rather good considering their size and the potential downloading that could have been required to re-install them. (LoTRo was a game that didn’t like this last upgrade but It wasn’t installed this time around)

Steam – Horrah for Steam, well nearly. You see my steam installation wasn’t exactly the same as the one described in the Steam Knowledge base. They assumed my steamapps folder was under the main steam folder (steam\steamapps) when in fact it was located at steam\config\steamapps.
This resulted in a bit of a headache because moving the apps folder to that new location resulted in Steam not loading up. But after some trial and error I found that I needed to boot Steam up without the apps folder and it would be created, then keep the files that it generated as they held the correct path. A little awkward but worth it as downloading 43GB of game data wasn’t as appealing as you’d think.

So I’ve now got my shiny Christmas presents installed and a massive 500gb Free

As you may be aware I enjoy looking at the stats that GamerDNA captures for XFire usage, it is a simple yet effective  method of showing how much time was spent and what percentage was spent on each game. I’m truely suprised that XFire doesn’t capture such data already.

At the start of January I reviewed my XFire data for the month of December, I wanted to see how frequently I played certain games. I pumped the data into the handy Google Chart API which then displays an image based on the information provided.

When February came around I wanted to do a similar task but rather than having to trawl through the data and craft the url to generate the Chart I decided to automate the process. So in a frenzied weekend of wracking my brain into remembering PHP, I created a page that automatically reads the RSS feed of my gamerDNA experiences and uses the XFire data held within to generate the URL for the Google Chart.

After a few hours cursing at stupid errors I finally created a fully working tool that achieved the result I was aimming for. Once this had been tested a few dozen times it suddenly occurred to me that It would be easy enough to allow other GamerDNA members with XFire experiences to generate their own charts.

http://charts.welshtroll.co.uk/

It’s not all that pretty but providing the username entered has XFire experiences on GamerDNA in the last 30 days it will “hopefully” generate a nice little chart. I’m hoping to enhance the functionality to include the ammount of time played as well, but that can wait for now, small steps to start.

A great podcast to obtain when you have the time.

I decide to grab Stephen Frys last night, but sadly when I visited the site it was down. As it turns out there was a good reason for this. Stephen Fry Version 2.0!

I must say that the new website is rather awesome, it also linked me to Stephens twitter which is the busiest  account I’ve seen, with pictures and map locations to help you track Mr Fry accross the global.

For those that haven't used the browser yet, there is a feature in Chrome that allows you to add shortcuts to your Desktop/start menu/quick launch bar. It's a nice way to add links to applications and favourite websites into your operating system desktop.

It all sound rather good and looks great when you click these shortcuts it pops up a Chrome browser window and displays your stored favourite. The only problem is the window that appears is stripped of all interface tools including the URL “omni” bar.

Not a problem you may think, but considering that continual phishing attempts occur on a frequent basis, is this shortcut a path to dangerous destinations?
The Chrome browse will highlight the main website of a url when used in full mode, but this feature isn't even visable if opened from a shortcut, plus there appears to be no way to force it to appear.

Now the shortcuts that are added are effectively only application shortcuts that open a browser window:

Example:
“chrome.exe” –app=http://www.mybank.com/

With increasingly more creative cyber-villains around at the moment, is there a chance that a nasty virus could alter this shortcut, pointing it at a lovely bank clone website?
Or even worse call home for a continually changing phishing website URL making them harder to track, block and blacklist.

To further add to the problem there is no indicator on these shortcut browser windows to show you are on a website that is encrypted!

The lack of a url (omni) bar and an encryption indicator means there is no way of telling if you are infact pointing at a real or fake website.

Hopefully these issues will be squashed as the Beta moves forward, but it's certainly one to ensure gets fixed.

So what is it about?
Well the phrase that this project is labelled with is “An experiment into connecting the Web with language”. This indicates what the application hopes to reach in terms of long term goals, using command keywords to perform various actions when the user needs it.

This experimental Firefox extension that could allow you to reclaim time spent looking up that address on Google Maps. I for one like the wikipedia functionality as it's a daily stop of mine. So will the time needed to perform online tasks be reduced overall? Hopefully, but I think there are some steps in learning that will need to be mastered before you'll see any benefit.

There are some dangerous with such a system becoming bloated and full of useful functionality that nobody wants or finds useful. I'll keep my fingers crossed that  it remains that way, currently the functionality appears limited to a set of tools that I'd happily use on a daily basis.

There is a video here that displays the functionality:
http://www.vimeo.com/1561578

Some screenshots can be found one this tutorial:
https://wiki.mozilla.org/Labs/Ubiquity/Ubiquity_0.1_User_Tutorial

I must admit that I haven't had quite as many problems in the past as I'm experencing now with IE6. Only my laptop has IE6 running now which makes for fun testing, yet I managed to get VirtualPC installed and using a hardrive image I have IE6 working on my desktop.

In addtion to having that resource for testing available I've also being using http://browsershots.org which is a free open-source service that takes screenshots of the website you specify on various browsers on windows/Mac or Linux operating systems. It cant take a little bit of time the screen capture to be returned as each request is placed in a queue.

Here is an example I created for my website http://browsershots.org/http://welshtroll.co.uk/ as you can see the results are interesting. I think you'll agree for those of use without access to a Mac or Linux operating systems it's interesting to see how a website renders for your non-microsoft visitors.

While on the topic of browsers I'll quickly mention the fact that Firefox version 3 is available for beta testing. I only managed to have a quick try of it last night and from what I've seen it's shaping up nicely.

Here is some of the functionality that you can expect to see : The ability to click the Favicon on the address bar and have infomration relating to the website pop up is a nice feature. That along side the warning for potential hazardous websites via a blacklist or google certainly brings security to the forefront again. 
The MIME system appears to be greatly improved, which wasn't that difficult as previous versions weren't user friendly or intuitive. 

A new feature that is quite far down the list but one of my favourites, is the save password functionality. New functionality aims to offer you the ability to save the username/password once you can see if you have logged on successfully. 

I'm not sure how hopefully starring and tagging URL's will be in the overall big picture, but you never know it could become a common feature.

Well considering how much effort Microsoft has put into the Windows Genuine Advantage program. It's suprising to learn they are going to disable it in Internet Explorer 7 for users on XP.

But since launch IE7 hasn't really seen a big uptake. people choosing to remain on IE6 either by choice or because they can't pass the WGA validation. Another reason is that people are using other browsers now and like some of the options other browser offer.

Personally I have IE7 on my desktop and still have IE6 on my laptop, but always I use Firefox on both, unless i'm website testing.

Source : IE Blog

• Message Tags: Create your own tags for organizing email. Messages can be assigned any number of tags. Tags can be combined with saved searches and mail views to make it easier to organize email.
• Visual Theme: Thunderbird 2's theme and user interface have been updated to improve usability and maximize screen real estate.
• Session History Navigation: Back and Forward buttons allow navigation through message history.
• Advanced Folder Views: Customize the folder pane to show favorite, unread or recent folders.
• Easy Access to Popular Web Mail Services: Gmail and .Mac users can access their accounts in Thunderbird by simply providing their user names and passwords.
• Improved Support For Extensions: Extensions can now add custom columns to the message list pane in addition to storing custom message data in the mail database.
• Improved New Mail Notification Alerts: New mail alerts include information such as the subject, sender and message preview text.
• Folder Summary Popups: Mouse over a folder with new messages to see a summary of the new messages in that folder.
• Saved Search Folder Performance: Search results for saved search folders are now cached, improving folder loading performance.
• Find As You Type: Finds and highlights message text as you type.
• Improved Filing Tools: Recent folder menu items for moving and copying messages to recently used folders. Move / Copy again functionality.
• Updates to the Extension System: The extension system has been updated to provide enhanced security and to allow for easier localization of extensions.
• New Windows installer: Based on Nullsoft Scriptable Install System, the new Windows installer resolves many long-standing issues.
• Windows Vista Support: Many enhancements and fixes for Windows Vista.

You can find the new release here