by Sujoy on August 15, 2011
All of us whose work involves staring at a monitor for 6 out of 8 working hours in a day, are also aware that most organisations have PCs with Internet Explorer as the default browser. If you are unfortunate, this could well be something like the dreadful IE6. For us who love the flexibility, stability and customability of Firefox/Chrome on our home PC, settling for a stone-age browser like the IE6 is just very unsettling. After all, the sole purpose for IE over its life time is to download the other browsers. So you have decided which browser you want. But it is not always fully allowed to install them on your work PCs. There’s always that nanny IT dude restricting your admin rights on your work PC. But there’s always a sneaky way to dodge these.
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by Sujoy on August 3, 2010
Now it is not a secret anymore that Firefox rules the Browser pie.
And Axiis have produced an awesome flash interactive pie chart of the browser share of Firefox, Chrome, IE 6/7 and all the other browsers from Jan 2002 onwards. You just need to move over your mouse to see the respective browser share from Jan 2002 to Aug 2009. Go to the link below and have a go.
Axiis – Browser Share Pie
by Sujoy on October 7, 2009
Stan Schroeder from Mashable raised an interesting question of the frequency of visitors now to the main homepage of Google, i.e. Google.com ( etc. depending upon your geographical location). It is true that with browsers which have in-built search functionality in the address bars viz. Chrome and Opera, the middle layer of the Google homepage has been largely eliminated. Add to that, other browsers like Firefox, IE and Safari include a search bar. It’s pretty safe to state that the entire spectrum has been covered. So, is anyone really using Google homepage and why?
One of the major reasons for people still using the Google homepage is that fossilised browser that it still breathing. Yes, IE6. There are no search bars, and the only option to search is Google. Of course, users here would be able to install Google Toolbars and stuff. According to W3counter statistics, as of Sep 2009, IE6 still maintains the fourth position in browser usage share with 13.28%, behind IE7, Firefox and IE8. It is difficult to segment the share of people out of this percentage who use search solely through Google’s homepage. There were no Google toolbar statistics to help us out.
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by Sujoy on September 2, 2009
Initially, when I heard about the idea of a browser on a USB portable pen-drive, I started questioning about its applicability. I mean, why would someone not install an actual browser on the machine itself, and rather have it on a USB pen drive. The answer is simple: Portability. Not only of your favorite browser experience, but also of all that comes with it – bookmarks, addins etc etc. The applicability does not actually matter much if you access internet only at home, through your own machine [ in case of which, its better to just install it]. Or if work does not allow access to USB ports and installing of any new browsers, you are indeed forced to use whatever is available. But, if you do have access to USB ports at work, and you do not want to install your browser [ or are not allowed so by corpo firewall] , and also share your history data, bookmarks etc on your work machine – Portable browsers are the way to go.
Good news is – all your favorite flavours are available in their portable avatars. And here’s the list.
1. Firefox 3.0 on USB:
Portable Apps bring the Mozilla Firefox, Portable Edition. So, now you can take your bookmarks, passwords, history, extension with you. Visit the PortableApps website - Mozilla page to download the browser. It is just 9 MB in size, and after installation it expands to 27 -77 MB. I really don’t know what that * sign, beside the 77MB figure, means on the Download button.
Works fine on Win XP SP2 onwards, Win Vista SP1 and Win 7.
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