Once installed, you can access Gui:Config via Tools > Advanced Settings … The options are organized under two tabs: Accessibility and Browser. Under Accessibility, you have settings for Mouse Behavior, Awesomebar, Websites, Session Restore and Miscellaneous. Under Browser you get settings for Browser Cache, Websites, Extensions, Bookmarks and Security and Privacy. Each setting is adjusted via checkboxes and drop-down menus. Helpfully, hovering your mouse pointer over any of the options provides a short description of what it does in a pane at the bottom of the window.

The organization of Gui:Config’s options window may take a little while to get used to, and it doesn’t provide access to all of Firefox’s advanced settings, but it does make tweaking many commonly-used settings really easy. If you need to adjust any other settings, you can still get to the regular about:config page.

Gui:Config can be downloaded from the Firefox add-ons repository. It’s compatible with Firefox version 3.5 to 5.

(via Ghacks)

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That’s an impressive result for Google’s WebKit-based browser, which was only released in December 2008. One of the reasons Chrome originally gained so much traction, apart from its novelty, was its clean design, blisteringly fast V8 JavaScript engine and support for newer web standards, which, when Chrome was released, meant it ran complex web applications, like Gmail and Google Docs, much faster than the crop of browsers that existed at the time. Its release forced the other browsers vendors to catch up, even Microsoft, sparking a new round of browser wars. This resulted in an across-the-board improvement of browsers that’s not only good news for users, it’s good for Google, too, as the company wants to make using its web apps feel as close to a desktop experience as possible.

Note: Browser market share statistics should always be viewed with a healthy slice of skepticism, as they can be skewed depending on where the data is collected from. StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the U.S.) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites, but it should be pointed out that Net Applications, for example, reports Chrome’s marketshare at 12.5 percent in May.

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Firefox stores your about:config settings in a file called prefs.js, which is kept in your profile directory. So to back it up, all you need to do is find your prefs.js file (on my Mac, my profile directory is stored in /Users/simon/Library/Application Support/Firefox/Profiles, while on Windows it’s in \Users\Simon\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\) and copy it to a safe location (Dropbox account, USB stick, etc.). Then if you ever need to reinstall Firefox, you can simply overwrite the prefs.js file in the profile directory with your backup. Restart Firefox and your settings will be restored.

If you want to backup both add-ons and preferences, there are add-ons that can help, such as the Firefox Environment Backup Extension (FEBE), which can back up extensions, themes, bookmarks, preferences, passwords, cookies and more. You can also use Firefox’s built-in Sync tool or MozBackup (a third-party Windows app) to back up profile data, as I detailed in this post.

(Note: Be careful when fiddling with Firefox’s about:config settings. If you want to know what each setting actually does — and some of the descriptions are quite arcane — you may want to install the What’s That Preference add-on that I’ve written about previously).

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Installing an extension to QuickFox Notes is not quite as straightforward as installing a browser add-on. You’ll firstly need to download the extension script, which is found here (right-click, and save it as a .js file). To install the script, open QuickFox Notes and then click on Tools->Add-ons->Open add-ons folder, then move the .js file you downloaded into that folder. You’ll need to restart QuickFox Notes for the change to take effect.

Once restarted, you’ll find that you now have an extra button in your QuickFox Notes window for uploading the note to Google Docs, as shown in the screenshot above. Hitting that button will pop up a window asking for your username and password before saving the note to Google Docs. Note that notes are only saved to Google Docs — this extension does not provide a two-way sync.

(Via Addictive Tips)

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As Google’s Venkat Panchapakesan noted in his post, Google Apps takes advantage of the newer technologies supported by more recent browsers, such as HTML5, to power some of its advanced features, like drag-and-drop file uploads. Maintaining support for older browsers that don’t include these newer technologies, or only have partial implementation, means not being able to implement certain features, or having to invest considerable engineering efforts to produce workarounds in order to implement them. As more vendors come to rely on the capabilities and power offered by HTML5 and related technologies to produce web apps that can match the power and functionality offered by desktop applications, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more web apps going down this route.

It’s probably not a decision Google took lightly, as this change will affect a significant number of Google Apps users. Taking a look at WebWorkerDaily’s stats, for example, shows that a small percentage of users do continue to use the older browser versions affected. However, as Google will simply stop testing new features and bug fixes in unsupported browsers, it’s unlikely that affected users will see any serious degradation in functionality for some time.

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Out of the box, Drag & DropZones is automatically set up with your current set of search engines, but you can customize it by repositioning the dropzones, changing the grid size and coloring the zones, as well as altering its behavior, like whether Drag & DropZones activates when dragging images and links.

Drag & DropZones can be downloaded from the Mozilla Firefox Add-Ons Gallery. It works with Firefox 2 and later (including Firefox 4).

(via Ghacks)

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To encourage add-on developers to consider this performance hit and optimize their add-ons, Mozilla has started testing the 100 most popular Firefox add-ons and releasing a weekly-updated list of their impact on browser start-up time. Here is a “rogue’s gallery” of the 10 add-ons with the worst impact on start-up time:

1. FoxLingo – Translator / Dictionary
2. Firebug
3. AniWeather
4. FlashGot
5. FoxClocks
6. FoxyTunes
7. Video DownloadHelper
8. FastestFox – Browse Faster
9. Xmarks Sync
10. SimilarWeb – Find the Best Sites on the Internet

The two worst-performing add-ons in the list, FoxLingo and Firebug, add a whopping 76 percent each to Firefox’s start-up time.

As well as publishing the slow add-ons list, Mozilla will also be adding warnings to the Add-On Gallery listing of any add-on that slows Firefox’s start-up time by 25 percent or more. The Mozilla effort to improve add-on performance is not just about “naming and shaming” poor performing add-ons, though,  Mozilla is also providing assistance to developers to optimize add-ons by updating its performance best practices documentation, and by releasing tools to help developers test their products.

The availability of a wide range of useful extensions is one of the reasons I use Firefox; I compiled a list of my favorites here. But Mozilla’s testing data shows that it’s good idea to regularly review the add-ons you have installed and disable those you no longer or rarely use, particularly if they appear on the list of the worst offenders above. Disabling an add-on stops Firefox from loading it, so it will no longer affect start-up time, but keeps the add-on in your add-on manager list so it can be re-enabled when you need it. Firebug, for example, is a really useful debugging tool, but I only use it very occasionally, so from now on I’m going to keep it disabled.

Photo courtesy Flickr user Photo Monkey

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To check out how IE9 compares to its competitors, I installed it (which, unlike other browsers, required me to restart my machine) and ran it through a few different benchmarking tools.

Acid3

Acid3 is a benchmark which checks how well a  browser follows selected web standards. The browser is marked out of 100.

UPDATE: Replaced figure

Microsoft has made an effort to improve the standards support in IE in this release, and as you can see, IE9 scores a creditable 95 (much better than IE8 which scored a paltry 21), but it still can’t match Opera and Chrome’s perfect scores.

The HTML5 Test

Acid3 doesn’t test for HTML5, as it’s a newer web standard, so I also ran the browsers through The HTML5 Test, which provides an indication of how well they support the upcoming HTML5 standard and its related specifications.

UPDATE: Replaced figure

HTML5 support is important, because as more browsers are able to handle its advanced features, developers will be able to build much more powerful apps (see Why HTML5 Web Apps Are Going to Rock Your World). As you can see, although Microsoft has made a bit of fuss about IE9 supporting newer standards like HTML5 (even providing some online demos to show off the browser’s HTML5 chops), it’s actually lagging behind its competitors here, although none of them scores perfectly. However, I’d take this benchmark with a pinch of salt, as the standard isn’t finalized yet.

Kraken

Kraken is Mozilla’s JavaScript benchmark, primarily based on the SunSpider suite. It tests how well a browser handles JavaScript and is supposed to simulate a number of different “real world” scenarios.

UPDATE: Replaced figure

JavaScript performance is vital, because we’re all increasingly reliant on JavScript-heavy web apps. The Kraken score above is a the time in milliseconds it takes for the browser to complete the test runs; a lower score is better. Note that JavaScript benchmarks should be regarded with a healthy degree of skepticism; it’s incredibly hard to create a realistic benchmark that accurately indicates how fast a browser will be in day-to-day use, so these tests can only give an indication of how fast a browser might be. That said, once again, IE is lagging behind the best here: It took twice as long to complete the tests as Chrome, and nearly three times as long as Firefox (although it’s much better than the beta of IE9, which scored around 50,000 ms).

Overall

IE9 is a great improvement over previous incarnations; it has caught up to the pack and now doesn’t lag so very far behind the other  browsers available. In particular, Microsoft should be applauded for its efforts to support web standards in this release. However, unless you really want some of its novel features, like the ability to pin websites to the taskbar, or your choice is restricted by your employer to Microsoft’s browser, I still can’t recommend it over Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Internet Explorer 9 can be downloaded from microsoft.com; it requires Vista or Windows 7.

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Here’s a list of the fixes that you can apply using the tool:

• Flush / Review DNS IP:  If a bad DNS entry is cached, you can try flushing the cache to get rid of it.
• Re-register IE: There are collections of routines that are stored until a program uses them. If these files are corrupt or out of date, they can cause problems with your computer. To fix this problem, re-register the files.
• Reset IE: If the problem is caused by damaged or incompatible Internet Explorer settings or add-ons, you can resolve the problem by resetting Internet Explorer settings.
• Reset Winsock: Most Internet connectivity problems arise out of corrupt Winsock settings. You will be able connect to the Internet, but the packets won’t transfer back and forth. Resetting Winsock can fix the issue.

SF IE Restorator can be downloaded from Seven Forums. It’s designed to work with IE8 on Windows 7. Other versions of Windows will only be supported if the .NET Framework 3.5 is installed.

Found a useful troubleshooting app? Share it in the comments.

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Rather than using my usual testing suite, WebKit’s SunSpider, for this shootout I used Mozilla’s Dromaeo testing suite. Dromaeo takes a lot longer to run — around 15 minutes or so — but it’s also much more comprehensive than SunSpider (it actually incorporates tests from Sunspider and also from Google’s V8 benchmark suite). For comparison, I also used the Peacekeeper tests, another comprehensive browser performance testing suite. Testing was done on my 2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro; only the major Mac browsers were tested.

Dromaeo

The chart shows the results of the Dromaeo test. A higher score (more runs per second) is better.

Peacekeeper

This chart shows the results of the Peacekeeper test. A higher score is better.

Conclusions

While there is some disparity between the results — it’s surprising that Opera 10.6 does very well on the Peacekeeper test (and in my previous SunSpider tests) but not so well on Dromaeo — it’s clear that although the beta of Firefox 4 shows a definite improvement, it’s still lagging behind the other browsers, particularly Chrome, which was the fastest on both tests. Hopefully that’s something the Mozilla developers will work on as they work towards a final release of Firefox 4, which is due by the end of the year. However, given the rapid release cycles of the other browser vendors, will Mozilla be able to keep up? Firefox still has a few aces up its sleeve — a giant extension ecosystem, an enormous user base and some innovative new features, like in-browser contacts management — but on raw speed it’s still losing out to its main competitors.

If you’d like to try Firefox 4, you can download it here. As with all pre-release software, there may still be some gremlins to iron out.

Let us know what you think of the new Firefox 4 beta in the comments.

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As the web apps we rely on get increasingly complex, we need fast browsers, otherwise the web will begin to feel very sluggish. When Opera 10 was released, I pointed out that while its JavaScript performance wasn’t bad, it couldn’t match the speed of Chrome or Firefox — and since then both Chrome and Firefox have got faster.

So how does Opera’s latest release stack up? Running the latest versions of Opera, Chrome and Firefox through the SunSpider benchmark tests on my test laptop produced some interesting results (I’ve also included the previous version of Opera for comparison):

The chart shows SunSpider scores in milliseconds, where a lower score is better. Opera’s improvement in this release is staggering — the new beta takes roughly a sixth of the time to complete the tests. Opera 10.5 narrowly beats Chrome, so Opera’s “fastest browser on Earth” claim seems justified. It also scores a perfect 100 on the Acid3 test, which tests for compliance with web standards.

Of course, raw speed and web standards aren’t everything, but Opera comes with a nicely designed UI and some neat features, like “speed dial” (for quickly accessing commonly used web pages) and a “turbo mode” for slow or laggy connections. When Opera 10.5 beta is released for Mac (it’s only in alpha currently), it may just become my new favorite browser.

Let us know what you think of Opera 10.5 below.

Firefox 3.6b1 seems quite stable and certainly feels a wee bit faster than 3.5, so to test it out I ran it through the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on my test machine. This new version got a score of 1996 ms, which is quite an improvement over 3.5′s score of 2500 ms.

Meanwhile, as reported by Kevin over at jkOnTheRun, the new beta of Google Chrome 4 on Windows sports a fancy mechanism that syncs bookmarks across devices almost instantly — very handy if you work on a few different machines. The bookmark syncing mechanism uses XMPP (the same technology used by Google Talk) to share the bookmarks. As Kevin notes, surely secure sharing of passwords and cookies must be in the cards as well.

Running the Chrome 4 beta through the same SunSpider benchmark test, I got a score of 1122 ms, which beats Firefox by a considerable margin and is even faster than the last version of Chrome that I tested.

While in real life usage it doesn’t feel like there’s much difference between the two betas, as we come to rely more on JavaScript-heavy web apps, performance becomes increasingly important — so the great improvement in the benchmark scores shown by both of these new betas is encouraging.

If you’re trying out either of these betas, let us know what you think of them below.

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Save Things for Later

Sometimes we don’t have time to read entire articles or blog posts, but we don’t want to miss out on the information we’ve discovered. We all have some way of saving things to read later. Usually it entails simply bookmarking the link, either locally in the browser or, even better, online with a social bookmarking service such as Delicious.

My personal favorite way of saving things to read later is the aptly-named ReadItLater. It’s an extremely simple service. After you add its button to your browser, you’ll be able to add any web page you’re viewing to your ReadItLater list with a single click. For example, let’s say you’re on a page you want to save, simply click the checkmark to the right of the URL for that page.

In order to read all of the links you’ve saved for later, simply click the ReadItLater button to display them.

When you’re done reading the link, or don’t feel you need to read it after all, simply uncheck the same checkmark, which removes the link from your list. You can also sync your ReadItLater lists between computers, and it also has a handy iPhone app. I find this a much quicker and simpler way to save links that I want to investigate further when I have more time to do so. Using Delicious method would require a much more involved process, including tagging each link and then deleting them, as well as marking them private, because you wouldn’t want these temporary bookmarked pages to get pushed into your social networking stream.

Subscribe and Run

I love Google Reader and really appreciate its handy “Subscribe” toolbar button, which allows you to quickly subscribe to any site’s RSS feed. Yes, the RSS icon is usually prominently displayed on every blog these days but not always. Also, clicking the RSS icon merely begins the process of subscribing to that particular blog.

The Subscribe button is a quick shortcut straight to your Google Reader where you just verify the subscription and you are done. To grab it just go to Google Reader and click the “Settings” option and head to the “Goodies” area. Then drag and drop the subscribe button on your browser’s toolbar and you are done.

Speedy Shopping Cart

There are a ton of wishlist services out there, but ever since Amazon released its universal wishlist I’ve given them all up for good. Amazon was the first site to provide the ability to add items to a wishlist, but the problem with that service was that it was totally restricted to only merchandise that you could find or purchase on their site. Opening up the wishlist to allow you to save products from any online store was a brilliant stroke of genius on Amazon’s part. While it might not carry every brand you add to your wishlist, they keep customers connected to its store and manage to sell a great deal more product than they would have otherwise.

So, no matter where I am online, whenever I come across an item I might be interested in purchasing for myself or someone else, all I have to do is click the wishlist button on my browser’s toolbar and the Amazon wishlist window pops up. For example, I have wishlists for each of my three children and spouse, not just for myself. You can do the same for friends, relatives, colleagues, etc.

Quick To-Do Lists

Another indispensable browser button is super-quick access to Google Tasks. Yes, you can get to Tasks many ways, such as within Gmail or from iGoogle as a widget, but for me the quickest and best way to add an item to my to do lists is via a sidebar in Firefox. Here’s how simple it is to do:

1. Drag and drop Google Tasks to your browser’s toolbar.
2. Right-click the button and select properties.
3. Select the option to “Load this bookmark in the sidebar” and click “OK.”

Note-taking on the Go

Evernote has a handy bookmarklet and Firefox extension for its Webclipper tool that allows you to add notes and portions of any web page to your account quickly and easily. Once you set it up, all you have to do is click and save the page or any piece of it to your account.

These were just a few of my favorite browser buttons and bookmarklets that help save me lots of time. There are many more out there but these should be enough to get you started.

What are some of your favorite browser tools that help you save time? Please share them in the comments.

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The interesting thing about this browser is that it includes the three rendering engines that are found in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari/Chrome. There are a few reasons why this browser may be worth adding to your arsenal, even if you don’t use it as your default.

As you can see in the screenshot above, Lunascape asks you whether you want its default rendering engine to be Trident (found in Internet Explorer), Gecko (the same version found in Firefox 3.5) or WebKit (found in Safari and Chrome). You can either manually set Lunascape to use a particular rendering engine, or you can have it select one to use on the fly for optimized performance. Lunascape officials claim that the JavaScript performance in their browser is actually faster than in Firefox 3.5. If it is, the difference is minimal, but there are a few other reasons why this browser is worth having on hand.

If you regularly use multiple browsers, as I do, you’re probably familiar with the fact that many pages render differently on different browsers. There are also certain kinds of live-streamed events, such as webcasts, that look very different depending on the rendering engine in your browser. Lunascape can level the playing field, and let you quickly get to the properly rendered version of a page at which you’re looking.

Lunascape is also used by some web developers and designers who want to rifle through the popular rendering engines on the fly as they create things, to see how they look and to monitor any errors. I suspect most readers won’t use Lunascape as their primary browser, but it’s worth having on hand when you want to switch rendering engines without jumping in and out of browsers.

Have you tried Lunascape? Let us know your thoughts on this new browser in the comments.

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Mozilla’s post says only that the updates in Release Candidate 3 are in response to “user feedback.” The organization intends to move quickly toward a final release of Firefox Version 3.5. In all likelihood, the differences between this version and RC2 consist of bug and/or security fixes.

I’ve been steadily using both the betas and the Release Candidates of Firefox 3.5, and it’s both speedy and substantially more feature-rich. It’s stable, too. If you’re already running a Firefox 3.5 beta or Release Candidate version, you can obtain an update to RC3 by selecting “Check for Updates” from the “Help” menu. Here are the official Release Notes for more information.

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In Firefox 3, there was support for color profiles in tagged images, but it was disabled by default. Christopher Blizzard has a good post up on the support for color correction for tagged images found in Firefox 3.5. He compares images rendered by Firefox 3, Firefox 3.5 and Photoshop.

Firefox 3.5 has support for web fonts (check out this video of Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie demonstrating web fonts to Aliza), and you can find a good demonstration of how to use them and some of the new CSS features in the browser here.

One of the biggest new additions in Firefox 3.5 is the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which can really speed up many web applications. Here, you can find a good video demonstration of what TraceMonkey brings to the table, comparing Firefox 3.5 to Firefox 3.

There are new geolocation features built into Firefox 3.5, and you can find a good discussion of how to work with them here. Some users don’t want the geolocation features enabled for privacy reasons. If you want to disable them, Lifehacker has a good description of how to do so here.

Especially if you’re a web developer using Firefox 3.5, it’s a good idea to keep up with the posts at Mozilla Hacks on how to use the many new features. The folks posting the demos are from Mozilla, and the information runs pretty deep, so it should help you get the very best out of your new browser.

Have you switched to Firefox 3.5 RC? If so, what new features do you find yourself excited about or using most?

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