Google Chrome Promoted on the Most Valuable Online Property

Google’s new browser Google Chrome is being promoted on arguably the most valuable property on the web – Google Homepage.

The browser itself is “google cool” with Javascript applications performing much better. Flash performance seems a bit sluggish. Need a password manager and status bar perhaps, and a Linux version of course.

The open source project behind Chrome is called Chromium. The rendering engine is Webkit, and Javascript “monkey” is a new JS virtual machine V8.

Safari on Windows Crashes Too Often

I’m not much of a fan of Apple softwares on Windows. I like iTunes though, even if it’s a bit bulky. I’ve tried using Safari on Windows for its super pleasing font rendering, aesthetics and, of late, some testing on WebKit/KHTML. However, it crashes just too often to be of any serious use and, of course, doesn’t have any DOM inspector. It has a barely usable JavaScript console though.
On a side-note, I’ve read that Safari can work on Linux under Wine. I’ll give it a try sometime. Now, if only I could run iTunes under Wine .

I Nuked My Firefox Bookmarks

While playing with Firefox profiles, I accidentally deleted all my profiles. Murphy was an optimist and, of course, I had no backups.

Apparently, Firefox deletes profile files permanently without moving them to trash first. I tried using “Free Undelete” to recover my profiles (which were in a non-standard location in first place – somewhere on my H: drive). Most of the files were recovered but my bookmarks were all gone, along with a few of my Firefox extensions.

Butterfly Effect

Skype Blog on Skype’s outage over last week (blaming re-boots after regular Tuesday Windows updates):

“The abnormally high number of restarts affected Skype’s network resources. This caused a flood of log-in requests, which, combined with the lack of peer-to-peer network resources, prompted a chain reaction that had a critical impact.”

Too far-fetched to be true!

[Update] : Skype blog clarifies the Mircosoft connection, and that they don’t blame Microsoft for the catastrophe.

Apache Slipping Down?

Netcraft: Apache has lost 15% market share in last two years.

Saving Streaming Windows Media

Many times (or always?) the videos (especially wmv) streaming over internet are not downloadable as Windows Media Player disables the save menu. Windows Media files are usually served through an .asx metafile. ASX is a simple XML format which stores the path to media file(s) to play. e.g.

<ASX version="3.0">
     <Entry>
        <ref href="mms://rx-lvl3-wa37.rbn.com/farm/*/ibmpdc/pdc/open
                   /wmdemand/mar06/rtoranzo/anthem-v125.wmv"/>
     </Entry>
</ASX>

Now, the media files are served over mms protocol, which cannot be saved directly. Here comes the saviour FlashGet. Just put this mms url in FlashGet’s ‘URL’ field and save the file. Done!

wget for Windows

It does feel good to use wget on Windows for downloading. It lets me get rid of some windowing/visual overheads.

The link – http://users.ugent.be/~bpuype/wget/#download
move the file to C:\windows after downloading, and type wget -h for options.

[Thanks Scott]