Tag Archives: Browsers

Attendees
Frank Donnelly, Stephen Francoeur, Gerry Jiao, Ellen Kaufman, Jim Livornese, Rita Ormsby, Ryan Phillips, Stella Varveris, Michael Waldman, Kevin Wolff

Overview of Browser Wars
Today’s meetup focused on comparing different browsers. Prior to meeting, we sent out a survey to library staff about their browser preferences (you can still take the survey or just view the latest results).

Maxthon Browser
Ryan Phillips showed his favorite features in the Maxthon browser:

• Features the ability to sync favorites to multiple locations and soon will sync browser settings and history as well
• Allows customizable speed dial on your start page
• Has dual rendering to optimize display for old and new web sites
• Customizes your preferences for searching by mouse, open and closing new tabs, mouse trails et cetera
• Includes Smart address bar that suggest links and results by viewed sites

One issue that we have to keep in mind when using browsers other than IE or Firefox is that they may not be supported by the college to work in various applications and services we have licenses for.

Opera Browser
Frank Donnelly demonstrated the aspects of the Opera browser that appeal to him:

• Has built in AVG anti-virus and malware detectors that alert you to pages that may be security risks
• Since the browser is less popular, it is less likely to be targeted by hackers
• Speed dial when you open up new tabs
• Turbo feature can speed up rendering of slow-to-load pages
• Has a built in HTML validator
• Has a recycle bin that lets you easily view a list of pages you recently closed in a tab
• Works across many operating systems

It was noted, though, that not all pages render properly in Opera, including pages on the Census.gov site.

Spam
The discussion of viruses and malware prompted a quick discussion of the spam filtering technology we use at Baruch (Proofpoint) and the disparate amounts of daily spam caught on our behalf by the filter (some people get 30 spam messages caught a day, others get hundreds or more)

Chrome Browser
Stephen Francoeur showed his favorite features and extensions in Google Chrome:

• Nearly as fast as Opera and much faster than Firefox and Internet Explorer (at the moment)
• Speed dial feature is automatically populated as you surf; items added are the most visited pages; you can customize which items are on the speed dial
• The Evernote extension lets you clip web pages into your Evernote account. When you search Google, the search results page from Google also includes search results from your Evernote account.
• The Google Translate extension will recognize that a page is in a foreign language and offer to translate it for you.
• The Chrome Notepad extension gives you a clipboard on the toolbar where you can save snippets of text; this content will get synchronized across multiple Google Chrome installations that you may have set up on different computers

Firefox Browser
Stephen Francoeur switches between Chrome and Firefox regularly. Firefox’s advantages are:

• The Zotero add-on for citation management. It was recently announced that Zotero will eventually release a desktop client and extensions so Zotero can be used in Chrome, Safari, and Internet Explorer.
• Web Developer add-on, which is great for any web design work.

Next Tech Sharecase
Today’s somewhat planned meetup was an experiment. It was agreed that we should try it again, though maybe not every meeting. The next Tech Sharecase will not feature any topics scheduled in advance; the one after that, though, will be a day for all us to share various Microsoft Office tricks.

Microsoft Office 2010
Jim Livornese showed us a bit of the help pages and tutorials that are now available on the BCTC pages to help the Baruch community get up to speed on Microsoft Office 2010.