The author of the A Word A Day newsletter is going to be giving a talk in Bombay on the 2nd of January about the Indo-European connection between English and Indian languages, the similarities and whatnot. Fascinating stuff, and right in line with what I want to study at the Masters level in university: comparative linguistics and PIE.
It’s at 7pm at the Crossword in Kemps Corner, down the road from where I grew up. More info here.
I’m certainly going to be attending. Care to join?
Since I posted my review of Google’s now not-so-new web browser, I’ve been mostly tied to my Mac because of work and what not. So, I haven’t been using Chrome much. But about a week ago, I took my MacBook Pro in for repairs (its webcam was on the fritz). Unluckily for me, the service centre discovered that another part (the inverter board) needed to be replaced and so they had my laptop with them till yesterday, when Apple’s customer relations department told me to cancel repairs, as they’re giving me a replacement (yay!). And so I’ve had some more time to play with and try and work around aspects of Chrome I don’t like, one of them being the lack of ad-blocking.
After some googling—one search, actually—I found this Lifehacker post that suggests using the open source proxy tool, Privoxy, to block ads in Google Chrome. The instructions are fairly simple:
- Download and install Privoxy.
- Click on the Wrench icon in Chrome in the upper right corner.
- Choose options>Under The Hood>Change proxy settings.
- In the Internet Properties dialog’s Connections tab, click on the LAN settings button.
- Check off “Proxy settings” and in the address setting add 127.0.0.1 and in the port 8118.
- If you have the option, you can also check off “Bypass proxy for local settings”.
- Click “OK,” close Chrome and restart it.
There are more tedious ways of blocking ads in Chrome, with the help of a bookmarklet, for example. But as I said, they’re tedious, and that’s no good. The only drawback with the above method is that doesn’t collapse elements that housed the ads it blocks. So, instead of seeing ads, you’ll see white-spaces. In Firefox, I use either the self-descriptive Adblock Plus Element Hiding Helper or Remove It Permanently (which, in my experience, is more straightforward and easier to use) to make pages look like they never even had ads on them. No point in doing it half-arsed, right? There doesn’t seem to be a way to collapse page elements in Chrome, though.
So glad to be rid of those awful matrimonial ads that are served up to you as a rule, if you're surfing from an Indian IP
Another thing that bugs me about Chrome is the default blue-coloured theme. I’m using the Royal Noir dark grey theme in Windows XP, and so the two clash. I was using this user-created black theme, but it no longer works with the latest version of Chrome. Maybe the Chrome team at Google are working on a plug-in architecture and an easier way to theme the browser’s chrome. Until then, the default look will have to do.
Since Google released its open source web browser a little over a week ago, I’ve been using it regularly on my Windows desktop. My standard browser on Windows is usually Firefox, although I did try using Safari for a while. But now I think Chrome has taken its place. Here’s why.
The first thing one notices when running Chrome on a slower PC like mine is that it launches much faster than any other browser. It’s never more than two seconds from the time I double-click the icon on the desktop till the cursor’s blinking in the so-called “Omnibar”, ready to go. That brings me to the second point.
The idea of combining the address bar and the search box is ingenious. To be fair, I believe the ability to search from the address bar has been a feature of Internet Explorer since version 6 or earlier. But it was poorly implemented and, as far as I can remember, it only worked with MSN Search. With Chrome, Google has done it right. As you start typing, the browser offers you results from your history, bookmarks, and Google.com, and puts them in a drop-down menu that doesn’t get in your way, as Safari’s auto-complete always seems to. This, put together with the default speed-dial start page that seems to have been borrowed from Opera, makes Chrome very usable and the user (me!) more efficient. It gets you where you want to go. Quickly.
The Omnibar
It’s worth noting that this feature is also one of things about Chrome that’s raised privacy concerns, since a lot of what one types into the Omnibar is sent to Google. Entering text into the Omnibar is equivalent to doing a search on Google.com.
Its extremely bare-bones and non-intrusive UI is another thing that makes it appealing to me. If you look at the amount of space a browser takes up on the screen, you’ll see that from the top down there’s the title bar, the menu bar, the toolbar/address bar, the bookmarks bar, the tab bar, and the status bar at the bottom. In addition to those, one might install a third-party toolbar (Facebook, Google, mininova, etc.). Which doesn’t leave enough room for the content itself! Chrome has taken back some of that UI space. It has done away with the title bar by moving the tab bar to the top. The status bar doesn’t take up as much horizontal space and only appears when you need it (while hovering over a link, for example). And as with IE 7, the menu bar is gone.
John C. Dvorak, one of the hosts of the This Week in Tech podcast, mentioned on last week’s episode of the show that a number of pages didn’t load properly in Chrome for him. I can’t say I’ve experienced the same. The only site that is glitchy and unresponsive for me in Chrome is the ‘new’ Facebook.
Another much talked about feature has been Chrome’s Incognito mode. It’s almost exactly like Safari’s Private Browsing setting. Basically, everything you do in an Incognito window is not stored on your computer. That is, no cookies are saved and the pages you visit aren’t added to the browser’s history.
Me? Watch Bleach? Never!
All in all, I think Chrome really pushes the envelope when it comes to minimalist UI design and browser performance and speed. Try it out for yourself: www.google.com/chrome
Update: Looks like I’m not the only one that likes Chrome a lot. According to TechCrunch, some 8% of their readers use Chrome. Initially, it was IE users switching, but now it appears to be eating away at Firefox’s market share, at least among the Web 2.0-savvy lot.
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