Set your bookmark

Keyword bookmarks are my absolute favorite time-saving Firefox feature. I use them literally hundreds of times a day—a good system of keyword bookmarks saves all kinds of time in the browser. Unfortunately Chrome isn’t so friendly to keyword bookmarkers.

After searching high and low for a way to tweak the bookmark dialog in Google Chrome to display an option to add a keyword to my bookmarks, turns out all I needed to do was turn to the help of a few clever readers who’d emailed in how to achieve keyword bookmark bliss in Chrome. The imperfect-but-workable solution:

Edit the bookmark

I just realized that keyword bookmarking is as easy as managing your search engines. Right-click the omnibox (address bar), click “Edit search engines,” and add a search engine. Use a Name you will recognize, enter the keyword you want to use, and just enter the URL for your bookmark in the URL box. Voila!

Chrome’s keyword search tool, like Firefox’s, replaces %s in the URL with your search terms. However, you can add a keyword search in Chrome without adding the %s bit at all, so when you execute that keyword, it’ll just take you to the keyword’s URL.

To clarify, check the screenshot above to how I set up a keyword bookmark for Lifehacker would look like. After setting it up, any time I want to visit Lifehacker in the future, all I have to do is type ‘l’ and hit Enter. Chrome’s autocomplete is certainly smart, and for some people is enough to replace the need for keyword bookmarks, but if you’re a keyword bookmark junkie like I am, this is an important feature to ease any browser transition.

Unfortunately it’s more of a hack than a bookmark feature, and the search engine manager isn’t nearly as robust as the regular bookmark manager, but until the Google developers decide to add this feature (my birthday’s coming up, GOOG), it’s better than nothing.

Though Internet Explorer has been panned for lack of web-standard compliance, many are forced to use the browser because of stubborn IT departments. Fortunately, Google has issued its latest “up yours” to Microsoft with the Chrome Frame plug-in for IE.

The Chrome Frame allows IE to use HTML5 and other open source technologies, including high performance JavaScript enhancements, that Internet Explorer’s Trident Engine is unable to render. One of the largest barriers to the mass utilization of HTML5 was IE’s lack of support for the standard. When people install the plug-in, and developers add a X-UA compatible tag, websites can have HTML5 elements without sacrificing losing a large segment of the potential user base. Without the X-UA tag, pages render normally using the Trident engine instead of the WebKit Chrome renderer.

One of the major advantages for Google in issuing the plug-in is ensuring IE compatibility for Google Wave. Users with the plug-in will also have the benefits of offline storage and utilization of the canvas tag. It’s no secret that Google believes that the traditional desktop base is going the way of the dinosaur—making HTML5 and enhanced JavaScript a ubiquitous standard is the first step to emulating desktop environment via the web.

OK, great. Now let’s see how many of the IT departments that refuse to upgrade from IE6 allow their users to install some crazy Google plug-in. [Ars Technica and Google Chrome Blog]

via Gizmodo

If you have anything to do with IT or computers you know about the Google Chrome browser. No matter where you stand on your opinion of Google, you can not deny the Chrome browser is fast. In fact, Chrome is setting the standard for browser speed such that the competition is now playing a serious game of catch up. The Chrome browser is so fast (at both startup and page load) that the difference goes well beyond noticeable. Next to all of its competition Google Chrome looks as if it is running in a completely different gear all together.

Now if you are running the Windows operating system, installing Chrome is as simple as downloading the .exe file and having at it. With the Linux operating system a simple installation is lagging a bit behind. So in this article you will learn how to install Chrome on Ubuntu and Chromium on Fedora.

Two different versions? Why? Simple: Chromium is the open source project behind Chrome. But why can you install Chrome on Ubuntu and not on Fedora? The Chrome developers decided to support Debian-based first. From that support a group of developers for Fedora created the necessary RPM files to enable installation of Chrome on Fedora. Of course both versions are still in beta (as of this writing) and are not 100% fool proof. Even with that stated, you will be surprised at just how well the betas of Chrome and Chromium work. And whether you are looking for an alternative to Firefox, Konqueror, or Opera or if you need something faster, you need to get Chrome onto your system. Let’s take a look at how.

via Linux.com