10 things to like about google chrome

1. Open Source

Being open source helps open the doors to all sorts of goodies in the form of extensions, plugins, and addons. Firefox’s success today comes from the fact that any feature you can imagine has been implemented as an extension.

Chromium, Google Chrome’s open source project was opened shortly after the beta release. Here’s a couple of tidbits you might be interested in. Chromium uses Subversion as it’s version control system and it was written in C++ using Visual Studio 2005.

2. The Speed

Holy crap, Chrome is fast. The UI is responsive, pages load quickly, and the Javascript is blazing fast. CNET compiled a nice set of benchmarks comparing Chrome to the other major browsers and the end results speak for themselves.

Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News

Chrome won’t be holding the top spot for long if Tracemonkey lives up to its reputation. According to a press release from Mozilla, Firefox 3.1’s Javascript engine will be faster than Chrome’s V8.

3. Existing Rendering Engine - WebKit

It’s not that I like WebKit. It has quirks just like every other rendering engine. What I like is that Google decided to use an existing engine to power Chrome instead of rolling their own. Every site we build here at SOTC goes through the gambit of browsers - Firefox, IE6, IE7, Safari, and Opera. It’s challenging enough making a site work across the board and the last thing web developers need is another browser to add to the list. In most cases, a site made to work in Safari will work in Chrome without any problems.

4. Tab Processes

Every tab you create in Chrome spawns a new process (unless two tabs are visiting sites with the same top-level domain). This prevents a single tab from crashing the browser or making it unresponsive by consuming too many resources. Javascript being executed in one tab does not affect any other tab. Flash, however, still does. In fact a Flash animation can render the entire browser unusable if it’s using the entire processor. It’s something all browsers suffer from and hopefully Adobe will address it in the future.

5. The Task Manager

Every tab and every plugin are displayed in Chrome’s task manager. This helpful little utility makes finding the site or plugin that is hosing the processor much easier than it used to be.

6. Text Search Location Highlighting

Ok, so I don’t know the technical term for this feature, but when you search for text (control-F), Chrome will highlight on the scrollbar places in the document where that term is found. It’s a simple feature, but one that is extremely useful.

7. The Omnibar

Chrome’s Omnibar is pretty close to Firefox’s Awesome Bar, with a few exceptions. First of all, the Omnibar will suggest other sites for you that you haven’t even visited yet. It’s also a replacement for the search box. Just type something in the box and if it’s not a website, it will search for the term using the search engine of your choice (defaults to Google, of course).

8. The Stability

I’ve been using Chrome on two different computers with two different operating systems exclusively for two straight days and I have yet to make it crash. Firefox 3 didn’t fair so well when it first came out. If the announcement comic is correct, they perform some serious testing on each build of the browser.

9. Tab Dragging

In Chrome, you can grab a tab, dislodge it from it’s current window and either drop it on the desktop to create a new window, or drop it inside another Chrome window as a new tab. I don’t know if I’ll ever actually use the feature myself, but it’s really fun to play with.

10. Incognito Mode

In Chrome, you can create a new window, called an Incognito window, that doesn’t save any information about where you’ve been or what you’ve done. According to Google, you might want something like this if you’re buying a gift for someone that shares your computer, and you don’t want them to know what you’ve been looking at. Various bloggers and reviewers, however, have a different use in mind.

Encryption

Privacy has been the prime requirement for the modern day man. We ofter hear - Privacy is dead. Is it? To some extent though it is, but the reason is not those that made it die, but those that left their privacy wide open to all. Privacy is there, as long as you let it be.

Today's cyber world is filled with prying eyes, with people trying to know about you. The information they will try to gather ranges from your email id, passwords, your emails etc. This post will try and concentrate on the email privacy stuff.

Email privacy has been a concern, ever since email became reality. Emails started back in the eighties. The thing that concerns us is that whenever we send mail, it passes through a number of routers, that come in between the smtp server and the pop server. Many routers will make a local copy of these data, and store them for further retrieval. In many places, in cyber cafes, keyloggers would be common, that not only log your passwords, but whatever you type in the keyboard. In short, it will monitor your site visits, your passwords, your emails and what not. Most of this is done due to Government implementations, others for private misuse purposes. But we can actually prevent all this, if we take certain measures.

Email encryption has been around for a long time now, but still there are many that would prefer to send unencrypted messages, unknowing that they can be sniffed in between, used for various other purposes like privacy theft, identity theft etc. But with 4096 bits encryption around, if the misuser does not possess a set of a few supercomputers, there is no way to break the encryption.

One can use the various applications for the encryption and then use a mailer to send the mails through smtp servers. In present date, most mail servers are free and most of them won't allow pop access to mails, unless you upgrade to premium accounts, for which you'd have to pay. Gmail is the only provider, that I know, provides POP as well as IMAP access for free. As for the encryption application, one can use GNU's Privacy Guard the GNUpg and for the mailer application, one can use the MS Outlook, if one uses windows, or the Mozilla Thunderbird or Sea Monkey. I'd suggest Thunderbird, for it's free and it has less bugs as compared to the "MICROSOFT" Outlook. If using Thunderbird, one can use the Enigma Add-On, available on mozilla's site (www.mozilla.org).

All th algorithms will have two keys. One will be the Private key, and the other will be the Public key. While they are generated, the application may ask you to move your mouse or type random things on the keyboard or surf the internet or do disk intensive tasks. This is, so that it can generate random key, that is hard to guess. The public key is used to encrypt the message and the private key is used to decrypt it. After the generation, you will need to distribute the public key, or store it in some website or something. Keep the Private key secure with you.

Routers

Routers are the most insecure computers that exist on the Internet. There are so many routers in this world, that you can 0wn as many as you want. The most predominant reason for this lack of security of routers, is that most are not configured at all. They are left with their default passwords (I know this from personal experience). Because of this, routers are very easy to exploit. All you need to do is find out which Operating System it is using, and then just grep out the default passwords list for that. How to find the OS? Go read about nmap, stupid boy!

As routers have to work all the times, they are always on, but again they may log your data, and you may not be able to delete it. But since routers get so huge an amount of traffic everyday, that your chances to escape, literally increases very much. When you decide to exploit a router, use a wingate first, and then connect to it. Why take chances?

How to find them:

Finding routers is easy. I'll tell the most easy way. One that I had incorporated to find routers. Go to google, and search anything, then traceroute all the sites that show up. All the computers that come between yours and theirs, are routers. Then you have to scan each one for the operating system. It's that easy.

Proxies!!

Proxies are used for the web. In simpple terms, for port 80. That is, proxies will help us forge our IP by forwarding all the traffic through the proxy server. Most proxy servers will allow only simple HTML. Others however help to forward all traffic including asp, php etc, thus making the user totally secure.

There are various kinds of proxies. The ones that provide proxies through their webpages are cgi proxies. They use a cgi(Central Gateway Interface) script in the cgi-bin directory of their web server. That script takes our request, then contacts the web server that we requested, and then forwards the data in a webpage, with their address box at the top. One very good example of cgi proxy would be http://www.anonymizer.ru. This one is a russian website. If you don't know aware of russian, you probably won't understand what's written , but there's an address box at the top, and that's what we're looking for. I'd write, suppose www.google.com there, and I'd get the google.ru and it will not forward me to google.co.in, which it will do if I use no proxy. Similarly, if it is a proxy server in Belgium, google.com would forward me to google.be. For china, it would be google.cn. You get the pattern now. Now these cgi proxies are not good enough, when it comes to php or asp based sites. The solution is simple. I'd rather use socks proxy. Socks is a protocol, that creates a secure connection between me and the proxy server. It usually runs on port 8080. So, if you have to search for your own proxies, you'd write a program, that would search throughout networks for open 8080 ports.