Google Chrome offers a new perspective on the browsing experience

I have been testing the beta version of the Google Chrome browser for the last few days. I am redoing a video of it now after having some technical difficulties. All of my personal issues aside, the browser is very promising. While it doesn’t boast the community backing of the Firefox browser yet, I would suspect that by the time it is launched in it’s final version it will start to close that gap and be more expandable via third party developers.

Watch me download and install Google Chrome.

Getting to the nitty gritty of the browser it is very fast to install, use and uninstall if you don’t like it. Some of the features that it boasts such as the dynamic tabs is rather cool (You have to see it to believe it). The crash control features are a God sent. How many times have you had an unresponsive tab or window and lost your entire browser session because of it. Say goodbye bad browser, Google Chrome has included a task manager feature whereby an unresponsive tab can be closed without affecting the browsing experience of your other windows.

The incognito mode is cool if you are working in a corporate environment where big brother is constantly watching. This mode enables you to surf the web without adding entries into your History file. Typically, when you visit a page it is recorded and essentially a trail of your web surfing is created.  Incognito prevents all of that, but it retains any downloaded files or bookmarks created during that session.

One other thing that should be mentioned about this browser is the Home Page that you are given whenever you open a new tab. When you first navigate to Google Chrome or create a new tab with Google chrome you have a page the shows your most visited or favorite pages listed as thumbnails. This enables you to visually recognize where you want to go and rapidly get there. You also see your most recently bookmarked sites among other things.

Overall, I would give this browser a 7 out of 10. It has not arrived, but it does show promise. Check it out. You might end up crossing over.

Where did my sound go? Firefox 3 flaw

Here I am sampling some files to create a nice intro for my video tutorials and I can’t hear anything.  So I take a look at my speakers, is the power on? Yes. Let’s turn up the speakers, nope that doesn’t work. How about restarting the browser, nope that doesn’t work either. Ok, I reluctantly fall back to Internet Explorer 7 and voila! I hear sound again. Let me check the master volume controls on my PC, no such luck. I’m getting tired so I quit for the night and think maybe tomorrow it will fix itself.

OK tomorrow is now and I still don’t have sound, NO Youtube, No internet videos or music. Quick search on google for “no sound in firefox” reveals there are many people having the same problem with a bunch of different suggestions. Cut to the chase, the one that worked for me was to disable and re-enable the Flash Shockwave plug-ins in Firefox.

Go to Tools-> Add ons -> Plug ins->  disable both Shockwave Flash and Shockwave Flash Director, then enable both again. Close the browser for good measure and you should be ok. This worked on my windows xp box. I haven’t tested it on my ubuntu install, but it should affect that also.

I’m not sure if mozilla was rushing on this one but there is no excuse for that one. This should have been caught and a fix implemented. Good thing we have the community.