1. Auto-block Suspicious Add-ons:

A new feature of Firefox 8 is its capability to automatically block third-party add-ons (those secretly installed by some software) if you not approve them first. Also, when you upgrading from Firefox 7, incompatible add-ons and add-ons installed by third party programs will be disabled until you select them. From a security perspective, this is a great feature; however, currently Chrome has no such feature.

2. Better Memory Handling:

One of the most talked subject concerning about Firefox is its excessive memory consumption. But, now this situation has changed. The implementation of MemShring feature (available since Firefox 7) significantly improved Firefox’s memory leakage issue. It is claimed that the average improvement in memory usage is between 20 to 30% and on some systems, it is nearly 50%. According to Mozilla, Firefox has the best memory management than any other browser.

3. Load Selected tab on Browser Start:

Firefox users can now configure the browser to load only the selected tab on browser start and the remaining ones loads once the user activates them. This can speed up the browser start significantly. The feature can be enabled under Tools – Options – General – Don’t load tab until selection.

4. Protection Against Website Tracking:

Do-Not-Track option (Introduced by Microsoft in IE9 and has been available since Firefox 4) is a built-in privacy feature for Firefox that explicitly tells website do not track you. It is designed to prevent third-party sites from tracking your surfing activities. You can check whether this option has enabled by going to Tools – Options – Privacy – Tell website I do not want to be tracked. Of course, Chrome lets you block third party cookies but you need to opt in to do so by installing an add-on called Keep My Opt-Outs by Google.

5. Firefox Telemetry Feature:

Firefox has a new capability called ‘telemetry’ (available since version 7) that collect real-time performance data such as memory usage, CPU core count, cycle collection times, and startup speed from your computer. These data are used to improve future Firefox releases. You can use the about:telemetry extension to check on your browser performance. Chrome has such option to send usage statistics and crash report to Google, but I think Telemetry can provide a more thorough analysis of browser performance.

You can download latest version of Firefox from here and Google Chrome from here.

To make your new Google Reader even better, here is a Chrome extension called New Google Reader Rectifier. It can fix some of the design issue of the new Google Reader’s layout.

Once installed, the New Google Reader Rectifier extension removes unnecessary white space and gaps, adds a border to the content to separate it from the interface, and leaves you with a pleasant condensed UI.

Interested users can download New Google Reader Rectifier from Chrome Web Store.

Once you update your Google Chrome browser to the latest version, you can see a redesigned tab page with a dedicated footer bar. By default, there are two sections or tabs called ‘Most Visited’ and ‘Apps’.

If you have installed too many applications from Chrome Web Store in different category, for example, email, video, games, documents, etc, you can create new tab for each category for better management and usability.

1. To create a new section for a particular group of apps, just drag the app icon to the footer bar, which will automatically create a new tab section. Then, drag and drop other similar apps to this new tab.

2. To rename this newly created tab, just double click on it and rename it. For example, for email tab you can rename it as ‘Email’.

Similarly, you can create multiple tab sections and add  Chrome apps for easy management. The new redesigned tab page is certainly a very useful feature, if you love to install lot of applications from Chrome Web Store.

What is new in Firefox 7?

1. Reduced memory consumption. Mozilla’s MemShring project doubles Firefox’s startup speed.

2. New rendering backend to speed up HTML5 canvas operations on Windows

3. Bookmark and password changes now sync almost instantly when using Firefox Sync feature.

4. Support for CSS3 text-overflow: ellipsis (additional way for developers to display CSS 3 text that overflows the layout area).

5. Support for the Web Timing specification: Enables developers to measure page load time and site navigation.

6. An opt-in system for users to send performance data back to Mozilla to improve future versions of Firefox.

7. In addition, this new release fixes several stability issues.

Firefox 7 is currently not available on the official homepage, but expected to be available on next day.  However, Mozilla’s FTP servers are already listing Firefox 7 for all supported operating systems and languages. Before installing Firefox 7, reading this article may useful to you.

On New Tab page, installed apps, bookmarks, and most visited sites appear in three different sections. You can switch to each section by clicking the section labels shown at the bottom of the page or the arrows at the side of the page. Chrome will remember your last section.

Another interesting and a handy feature of New Tab page is that you can create your own app section and rename this section by double-clicking the label. For example, you can create a section of apps for “Work” (full of productivity apps) and a section for “Play” (full of games) and the like.

Besides, to handle each app more smoothly, you can rearrange apps by just dragging and dropping them on the page. And to remove items from any section, drag and drop them to the bottom right of the page where a trash can icon will appear, just as in Android Honeycomb.

As I mentioned above, this feature is now available on Chrome Beta channel, and perhaps it will soon available on stable version.

Note: You can browse thousands of new apps and games for the New Tab page at Chrome Web Store. [via]

You can capture part of a webpage precisely or the whole page (support horizontal and vertical scroll when capturing whole page) with a click and save the captured image as PNG or JPEG file.

Moreover, you can edit the captured image – highlight parts of your captured image, ad text, draw lines and arrows and even black out or blur certain sections on the screen.

This handy screen capturing add-on also supports keyboard shortcut for capturing webpage that you can configure as per your needs from the add-on option menu.

Screen Capture add-on works on Windows, Linux, and Mac and can be downloaded from Chrome Webstore

In their own words (Opera desktop team) “You will not see any real difference testing against popular benchmarks (which focus on rendering and JavaScript performance); this kind of work is more likely to have an impact on regular “day to day” browsing.”

“However, it can result in pages loading in half the time! You are most likely to see a difference if you have a poor network connection and others may notice improved performance when connecting to a web server hosted on another continent”.

Interested readers can try Opera 12 development build by downloading from here for Windows, Mac, and Linux.