The browser boots up, and gives me a list of all those addons which need updates. Of course I’d like to have the latest version. Isn’t it why I had it installed there in the first place? If its my unlucky day, even Firefox would need an update. And there is nothing I can do except wait until all those messy updates are done. Wait, there’s more..After the updates comes the installation. Its very frustrating I need to use a browser quickly for 2 minutes and I need to wait for 5 minutes until Firefox is done dressing up itself. And I almost forgot, update the browser and be assured that atleast 3 out of 5 extensions wouldn’t be compatible. Very, very frustrating.
Chrome updates in the background. I don’t care what you download as long as its from a trusted vendor. 5 seconds and its ready to browse the web, anytime of the day. Installing extensions or themes is just instantaneous with chrome, no restart required.
Because at the end of the day, all I want is to have is to browse the internet. Not just keep looking at progress screens of addons getting updated. Now that Chrome has all extensions I use on Firefox, its been days since I’ve clicked on the Firefox browser. I’ve still not decided to uninstall Firefox, but then I’m getting there.

P.S. When I opened Wordpress to write down this post, I was informed that Wordpress needed to update to 2.9.1. Here I go again…

The best way to try out a new OS would be to run it off a USB drive. Now you can run the early build of the Chromium OS off a USB. Just grab the Chromium OS build from here and follow instructions. If you’d rather not go to all that trouble, you can try running Chrome OS off a virtual machine like I did.

The folks at engadget have even put up a video as to how it works.

The secret behind the builds is all about creating a build. If you’d rather create the build yourself then go to Google’s build instructions page for the Chromium OS.

Running Google Chrome off the USB makes it run faster, lets you have a real feel of the OS. All you need is a bit of time and patience.

The open source chromium OS on which Google Chrome OS is based on, was launched yesterday and soon many torrents were teeming with the Developer preview edition of the Chromium OS. I tried out Chromium from gdgt who had files for running them off virtualbox, (virtual machine software from Sun Microsystems) . The Chrome OS img itself was around 300 MB compressed and I had to download Virtualbox as well. Gdgt requires you to sign up before you download and you can use your facebook account to accelerate the process(Though, in my opinion they do ask for a lot more fb rights than actually required)

If you do not know what the chrome OS is all about, watch the video below:

If you have not setup a virtual machine before, try using this link here for a complete guide.

The Chromium OS login: Enter your gmail id/pw. I used a makeshift id; just in case.

The Chromium OS with a new tab open

The Menu?

These are the specs of the Virtual machine I used to run Chromium OS. And considering I loaded it on my Netbook, it took around 20 seconds to boot up. If I to install it, I’m sure time boot time would be less than 10 seconds.

Watch the Chrome OS launch:

I got myself a new ASUS EEE PC Seashell netbook last week and have been busy setting it up, customizing it and getting software. Considering that a netbook is meant to run more as an secondary system rather than your only laptop, netbooks are not usually as powerful as laptop (why is why they’re called netbooks, duh..)

Even though they’re called netbooks , its not exactly possible to ensure that they’re always connected to the internet. What if the friendly neighborhood cafe did not have free wifi? And Netbooks without the power of the net are well, just books. Or so we have been lead to believe. Until the making this list that is. My list of perfect software had to make sure it fulfilled two primary needs. Firstly, to be able to run on a machine with limited processing abilities. Secondly, the capability to be used even when you did not have internet access.

Browser: Chrome

Chrome had to be the browser of choice. Light, fast and easy to load. I still am a fan of firefox on my laptop but for my netbook I chose the ultra light chrome with the power of Google Gears. That makes sure I can read my feeds offline, my mail offline, my blog and loads of other Gears compatible stuff offline.

Edited on July 17, 2009: Firefox takes over my netbook. Its impossible not to use firefox especially considering that the internet is the center of your netbook. Plus the font rendering on firefox is much more adaptable to netbooks, which means its much more comfortable to browse the web.

Mail: Thunderbird

I couldn’t find a better mail client than this so I had to surrender to the power of Mozilla. Handles multiple inboxes, junk/spam protection, easy to use. Just like all other good Mozilla products you get the power to use extensions just make sure that you are making an application heavier on a netbook. I just have the minimize to tray extension installed.

Chat: Pidgin

This open source chat agent had to take the cake when it came to chat. Lets me run multiple IM services, light and powerful. Though originally designed to run on linux, Pidgin is now available for windows as well. Pidgin is functional, has an interface that’s the least distracting and comes with a multitude of options to customize it. I use gtalk considering that its the lightest around, considering I do not need multiple IM support.

Office applications: Microsoft Works

I still am using the Microsoft works, but this section might update once I install the Open office. Still considering this section, so do leave your choices in the comments section.

Blogging: Blogdesk

For the first time, I’ve considered the use of an offline blogging tool and after trying quite a few of them, I’ve decided that Blogdesk, albeit its limitations is the winner. Blogdesk has support for most common blogging platforms. I would have recommended the use of Scribefire extension if I were using firefox, but since this is a list, Blogdesk is a blogging tool with a functional interface, but lets you write blogs offline, save them and post them later.

Antivirus: AVG

This is really easy. You would want to keep the resource usage to a minimum and still ensure protection. Stick to AVG . Does a good job and is light on the processor as well.

Desktop enhancements: Launchy

Well, just because its a netbook doesn’t mean you shouldn’t dress up your desktop. How about a OSX styled dock? Rocketdock is only of the fastest and lightest docks out there. I would recommend using Launchy , the keyboard based program launcher especially since it works wonders when the super fast chrome is your default browser.

Another post on trying to make your desktop look different. Last time I tried putting up a tutorial on how to get your windows desktop to look like a Mac.
News of the google chrome OS sure has been a hot one on the internet and I thought it would be a great idea to dress up your desktop before Google launches their first screenshots and spoils the party. Google’s design is all about simplicity and that’s what should be the focus of their desktop as well. So I decided to give it a no wallpaper look. Right click on your desktop > properties > desktop and make sure the wallpaper is set to none. Change the color of the background to white (or maybe even blue..)
Now at the center of this desktop design is an application called the circle dock. The circle dock is just the usual mac dock with the icons setup in circle(s) (you decide on the number of circles. Make sure you familiarize yourself with the circle dock’s options/settings to ensure that you get the best of this tutorial.
There’s no installing Circle dock, so you just extract the zip file and run the circledock.exe file. Now for the Google Icons. For the most original looking Icons I recommend the Simply Google Icon Collection by tempest.
You still need to get the big chrome icon, one of which I found here. Right click on the dock and change the center icon to the chrome icon. To link up all the icons to the relevant web applications, you need to create shortcuts to google chrome applications. You create an application shortcut, by right clicking the dock icon and pointing it to google chrome’s location and make sure you put in the website address in the arguments section of the shortcut for the dock icon. For example, for gmail the argument would look like:
–app=https://mail.google.com/mail
If you need help, try creating an application shortcuts from within google chrome. Play around with the settings and you should be fine. Be advised that Circle dock is still an alpha version.
Now to extent the tabbed feature to all applications, not just google chrome, to do this download a program called WindowTabs. But windowtabs is not freeware, but the trial version allows you to group upto 3 tabs with no time restrictions or nag screens. Install Windowtabs and you’re good to go. The final version:

The new google mobile app for symbian brings the google desktop to the mobile phone. Well, almost. It still does not index the contents of your mobile phone, but its a step in the right direction.

The mobile application which starts up at the tap of the backspace key, allows you to load the google search page interface which is linked to the gmail mobile and google maps app, google news, picasa page and few other google services. It still does not include reader in its list which is surprising considering that google reader is one of the finest aggregators out there.
The application is something like a google services control center on your symbian mobile. A bit of android in your symbian?
Read more of the new release on the official google mobile blog or download the application here

A recent survey reveals that most enterprises still love to flaunt Internet Explorer as their default browser. Most of the security updates in the organization are for IE as well. Major reasons which could be attributed to this are:

1. It is bundled with Microsoft windows.
2. Most Microsoft office applications work better with IE
3. Outlook Webaccess works better with Internet explorer
4. Microsoft sharepoint services work with Internet explorer
5. Its easier to put in admin policies for a non-open source browser
6. Other software used in the organization are dependent on Internet explorer
7. It gets updated with the windows updater
8. Its “Microsoft” Internet Explorer.
9. The admin does not know about Firefox or Chrome
10. There is so much you can do with Internet explorer
11. There are no Macs which run Safari or Firefox
12. Users have trouble learning to use any browser other than IE
13. The IT policy says so.

Let us know what you think in the comments..Should IE be the browser of choice in organizations?

Its Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and many of you would have encountered the Holiday Doodle on Google and wondered what is all about. Google has a series of pictures (each of them featuring the google logo in some manner) which make up the Google Holiday Doodle. Each day one picture until you get the whole series on the last day.
We’re on the last  today…so here is what I see on clicking Google’s Holiday Doodle logo! 

You can read more about the Doodle for Google competion here! The Google Holiday Doodle countdown runs until it reaches main holiday…You can see few of the earlier Google Doodles below

All of Google’s logos are trademarks and copyrights of respective owners and they are presented here only for illustrative purposes

I almost forgot, you can see the Google doodler – the google doodle creator here! And…Happy Holidays!!

Google themes now..before that we had google labs which brought into gmail a plethora of features mostly useless..first it was gmail, then it became gmail with chat, then support for new smileys..now it chat with video support..

All because Gmail became too fat!

Isn’t gmail becoming too bloated with features, though definitely most of them useful nevertheless..

Even worse is all those new smileys and video chat doesn’t even find support on the gtalk application..I wish they would have focused on the gtalk application when trying to improve the chat experience..Now what do we have? support for these smileys over mail…yeah! great…and of course I really need voicemail when I am dealing with a mail application…honestly…This is not just with the Gmail but also the same with all their other applications….Take a look at google chrome, I already have firefox (thank you!).. But first it was orkut and now even youtube asks you whether you would like to try google chrome…maybe just so that you could feed it doughnuts! Maybe I am indulging in too much of google bashing, but then I prefer the good old days of gmail when mail was good…and it was just mail with no webclips (don’t I already use your google reader?)…And I almost forgot AIM integration for chat,  which brought in my feeds, no math to work out when you send out mails at night and lots of other silly lab features…

I wouldn’t say that there hasn’t been features on the useful side, IMAP is a great feature to add on to any mail service. I love the space in my box definitely, after all “Who needs to delete when you have over 2000 MB of storage” , the awesome feature of labelling mails, starring important ones, the ability to create instant filters and 100s of other small bits which make my mailing experience pleasurable everyday….

True, gmail has been changed email as we know it..and I have forgotten what mail was, before gmail..but I wish gmail would focus on gmail…the gmail app on my mobile and lots of other things which I haven’t even thought about..but then, that’s what the google team’s job is..I guess, I haven’t even sent a mail from my gmail account in the past few months…so to tell you the truth, I use the chat more than the mail

I remember using this one long back, so I decided to write a post about it…This one is for all of you who use browsers like Google Chrome, Flock and are unable to install the stumbleupon toolbar.

A quick introduction, Stumbleupon is the remote control for the web, websites are voted and reviewed upon by users and lets users stumble upon webpages on the internet…based on your interests, search criteria, keywords etc..

Now, Stumbleupon runs courtesy the Stumbleupon toolbar and if you a browser which is unsupported or you just do not wish to install the toolbar, there is no way you can stumbleupon sites…unless of course you enable the Stumbleupon bar which you can enable by dragging the following link to your bookmarks toolbar or clicking on the following link.

Stumbleupon

The Stumbleupon bar frame lets you stumbleupon on new and exciting sites, just the way it would have done if you had installed the toolbar. But, things aren’t so rosy…hmmm, the bar doesn’t let you login with your SU username and you can’t share your favourites with your friends…but you can send something you like to your email address..And since there is no login, the pages may not be from the topics of your interest…

This bar also works great when you are at a PC on which you can’t install software on and you are bored with no work… (if you liked this post, link to it and help promote SU on unsupported browsers)