Posts Tagged ‘browser’
Google Chrome browser alternative: SRWare Iron
Many people may dislike Google Chrome products for some annoyances, such as the Google Updater installed alongside Chrome or the communications between Chrome and Google. Therefore, SRWare has developed an own fork of the popular browser which is built from the open-sourced Chromium code and is a near perfect copy of chrome, except that it leaves out the things mentioned above. For a comparison of the two, see SRWare’s homepage.
Iron’s interface looks exactly like Chrome’s and all extensions are supposed to work with Iron:
Remember though that Iron does not have an automatic update function – new versions can be simply installed over the old ones though.
You can download SRWare Iron at http://www.srware.net/en/software_srware_iron_download.php. Iron is available for Windows, Linux and Mac.
Disable AVG Advisor memory usage pop-up
Users of AVG 2012 antivirus software will already have noticed the AVG Advisor pop-ups informing you about high memory usage of browsers (I usually get them from 300 MB RAM upwards) which come up relatively often and are quite annoying since your browser uses more memory the more tabs you open.
But as in most cases you can simply disable this feature along with the memory monitoring. To do this, open the AVG control panel from the tray icon. On the top bar, click on Tools and select Advanced settings…. In there, select Appearance from the left panel. Under System tray notifications, uncheck the Display AVG Advisor notification to turn those off and click Apply. You will now no longer be warned about your browser’s memory usage.
Firefox browser alternatives for Windows
Firefox is a browser designed for a large variety of systems and even meant to run on really old ones. This brings along the conflict of improved performance on newer systems and backwards compatibility.
Since Mozilla itself considers the latter more important, other third party developers are providing forks of Firefox that concentrate on effectiveness on newer, including 64 bit, systems.
Waterfox
Waterfox is project based on Firefox and made specifically for 64 bit systems with Windows installed. Its main goal is to improve speed and performance on capable systems. The major plugins such as Flash, Java and Silverlight are all available as 64 bit versions while all add-ons and themes working with Firefox are also compatible with Waterfox. Waterfox uses the same profiles as Firefox – meaning you don’t have to re-enter passwords and such, but also cannot open both programs at once.
Download Waterfox on the official project homepage: http://waterfoxproject.org/
Pale Moon
The Pale Moon project is maintained by a single person and is also designed to boost speed on newer Windows systems, cutting some minor functionality of Firefox away and being available as 64 bit version. It does not pick up Firefox’ profiles automatically but does a tool to do so, which is provided on the homepage however. From my personal tests Pale Moon consumes only half of the RAM Fire- and Waterfox needed.
You can inform yourself about and download Palemoon on its homepage: http://www.palemoon.org/
Clear Firefox Browser Cache
Browser Cache (or Internet Cache) is there to speed up your browser performance by saving sites and items you visited on the internet on your hard disk and recalling them when you visit them again. However there may be times when you want to delete that cache because it either consumes too much disk space (its size can easily climb to 500MB and more) or you do not want someone who has access on your computer to see what sites you visited. In Firefox there is a simple solution for this. Click on the main button and open the Options window:
Select Advanced and go to the Network tab.
The Offline Storage section shows you how large your cache is at the moment. Here you can use the Clear Now button to delete your cache.
If you stayed loyal to Firefox 3.6, go to Edit > Preferences instead.