Start pages are always a mess in web browsers. Firefox put up a design contest for users to design a perfect start page recently. Be it Chrome’s most used pages or Firefox’s default Google search page. Well, Chome does the work to a pretty good extent not to mention opera’s and safari’s speed dial pages. But it is totally a different experience when you have the start page on the cloud that is perfectly customized according to your needs. All those web services on your home page for you to access at a click. Doesn’t that seem perfect.
Symbaloo - Start simple, is a simple interface that basically focuses to refine your first contact with the internet everyday. The symbaloo pages houses draggable boxes that link to your favorite web services like feeds, mail, radio, search, translate and what not. If even that doesn’t make you scream enough. You have free places where you can add your own boxes that link to a service specified by you. Now that’s too much YOU.

To set it as a start page. Just click the button at the bottom of the page that says “Set as startpage“. The following light box a the center of the screen gives you the instructions. OR simply drag the link http://www.symbaloo.com to the home in firefox.

Today I lost my bookmarks bar in Google Chrome. Tried to find a good shortcut list to tackle this problem. I found this:

To toggle the bookmarks bar, all you have to do is use the key combination: Ctrl+b. Then I realized I must have pressed this accidentally when I was copy pasting something. One of my favorite blog (BlogsDNA) had these shortcuts posted. Learning to use shortcuts make your life really easy.

Another great page for Chrome shortcut list: LIST

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I used to be a Mozilla fan. It was recently when Google started an add-on place for Chrome, I was tempted to use Chrome. Since then I’ve never used Firefox. Chrome has some fantastic features like:

Refined add-ons – The chrome extension website features some refined addons, they do their work perfectly. You need not install a dozen of plugins, most of the features are built-in in Chrome. Plugins like Google Translator, Wave notifier, Facebook notifier, Chrome bird (twitter), Gmail notifier and Stumble upon are almost enough for all purposes.

NOTE: You need Chrome beta to use plugins.

The plugins are small in size and you don’t have to face problems while downloading them on a poor connection. They are probably hosted on a good server. Chrome downloads them like normal .crx files. They get installed in a wink and you don’t even have to restart the browser.

Render Engine (WebKit) - Chrome and Apple Safari use a far superior rendering technique than the gecko (used by mozilla). It renders pages faster. This makes Chrome browse faster than Firefox. As features grow, Firefox suffers bloat, crashes, memory leaks, speed hits and generally performance degradation. Chrome doesn’t.

Start-up speed – This is one feature everyone must have noticed. Unlike Firefox (doesn’t start fast even after 100 tweaks) Chrome starts and readies itself in half a second. Don’t have to wait for ages anymore, even after installing add-ons like lambs.

Tabs stability – The new tabs opened in chrome are totally separate windows. So even if a malicious script crashes a tab the other tabs work completely fine. This make Chrome more stable with the tabs.

Slick user interface – The Chrome user interface facinates me. It is not like a normal VB type window. It has a tweaked UI, neat animation everywhere, be it tabs or the default new tab page. Plus the look is clean with no unnecessary clutter.

Misc:

Though Chrome uses less RAM you can control it and reclaim memory with the memory purge tool. [DOWNLOAD]

Bookmarks get synced with your Google account into the docs automatically, thus you can access them from anywhere.

Right Click a tab and pin it to the browser.

You can create web application shortcuts.

Chrome has integrated developer tools (javascript console, task manager etc)

Flash and some other plugins come installed with chrome.

Chrome has made a visible statistical improvement, now it is being considered a threat to the Microsoft/Mozilla dominated browser market. Microsoft is no competition for the browser kings.  The only reason it gains the momentum is due to the default browser (IE) it packs in with Windows.

Just when everyone stopped using Chrome (atleast I did), Google launched the chrome extension sites. Now we can get back our high speed browsing and start-up with Chrome because it supports extra features now. Starting to compete with firefox?

Add features to Google Chrome by installing extensions here:

[Chrome - plugins]

Some of the best picks as selected by lifehacker, worth installing are:

1. Google Mail Checker
2. RSS Subscription Extension
3. Xmarks for Chrome Beta
4. iMacros for Chrome
5. Aviary Screen Capture
6. Flash Block: turning off Flash on all web pages
7. AdThwart and AdSweep
8. Brizzly: for facebook and twitter
   
9. Google Voice Notifier, Google Wave Notifier, and Google Alerter
10. Chromium Delicious Plugin
11. ChromeMilk: To-do list
    
12. LastPass: fills in the gap that Xmarks‘ lacks
13. Fittr Flickr

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