Since I moved to Chrome as my main browser, one of the most annoying things about it is that you can’t setup a webpage on new tabs. You either have to click the home page button or type in whatever website you are trying to g to. This is specifically annoying for those of us who have Google (or whatever search engine you use) as their home page, where you just open a new tab and start searching on google.

Fortunately there is a nice, simple Chrome plug-in that can fix it. its called Define your own new tab!

Just install the plugin and set your website on the plugin option. As simple as that. Hey I did say its a quick tip.

I am a long time Smashing Magazine fan. They dish out some quality contents all the time and they are constantly improving. But recently they have been a little bit too cluttered with ads for my taste. So when I saw this post on their site I couldn’t stop laughing to myself.

How ironic is it, that a design blog with an opinion piece on why web designers shouldn’t use Ad blockers and yet the site is flooded with ads and has zero content above the fold? This is a full screen on a Macbook, obviously you will get more screen-space on a larger screen, but not much really.

You can also read my opinion on ad-blockers, which seem to be a hot topic now that Safari comes with readability (called reader) integrated into the browser.

 
One of the main reason some power users refuse to make the jump from Firefox to Chrome is the lack of proper alternatives to Firefox Extensions. Sure Chrome extension collection has jumped since they started supporting extensions about a year ago and now they have some ~5000 extensions on the Chrome extension gallery but this is no where close to some 58,000 add-ons Firefox currently has. More importantly, because of the intentional limitations in Chrome extension API you can’t always have the same type of extension on Chrome like you have on Firefox. It doesn’t mean that they will never remove those limitation so that Chrome extensions can be just as powerful as Firefox Add-ons. From my second hand knowledge they are working on extending their API, I can’t verify that at the moment.

These limitations of extensions also effect how all the ad-blocker on Chrome work. Chrome ad-blockers don’t actually block ads the same way Firefox ad-blockers do. You will be still downloading those ads to your browser but the ad-blockers will just hide the ad elements to remove visual clutter. Its still as good as removing ads like Adblock Plus on Firefox.

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Safari 5 may not be the biggest news coming from Apple today  but its definitely a significant update it got in some time and seems to be directly competing with Chrome is features and speed. Some of the major improvements are:

Sandboxed Extensions. Safari 5 is following Chrome’s example by Sandboxing and Digitally Signing extensions for greater security.

Reader. This is a unique and brand new feature for Safari 5. This is similar to how Readability work, which I wrote about earlier today. Reader works by pre-fetching and formatting contents, including removing ads and site-specific styling, giving readers uninterrupted focus on the content. Very cool feature, I can see myself using this often.

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Captchas are necessary evil, they are needed to filter out robots from real people and its a system that needs constant tweaking as robots gets smarter at solving all the deterrence used in captchas. But what do you call captchas that are also good at confusing humans to the point that they are almost unsolvable?

Here is a look at 10 Captchas that are going a bit too far to verify you as a human.

1) Only people with a good understand of Math may apply.

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