Robust Firefox

Today an interesting incident occurred which reassured by trust in Firefox's robustness. Well I was downloading gentoo minimal install image in Google Chrome and after 80mb, the download speed had gone down to some bytes per second. When I started a parallel fresh download, I was getting a speed of about 60 kbps. So, I decided to try and get Chrome download the rest of the original file at about 50 - 60 kbps. I tried the following procedure:

- copy the install*.chrdownload file (i.e. the temporary file into which the file was being downloaded) into some other folder
- cancel the download
- start a fresh download
- pause it
- overwrite the new .chrdowload file with the old one

However, this trick did not work with Chrome. It was still downloading more than 100 mb as if it were the fresh download.

I opened up Firefox and applied the same procedure except for renaming the .chrdownload file to .part file and Firefox intelligently downloaded only what remained of the file completing the download in minutes.

Chromium and Firefox: a comparision

Well I have been a hard-core firefox fan for a long time. However, recently I have found some improvements on the chromium front, that are worthy of notice.

The battle started when Chromium started using Webkit and V8, one is a fast web page rendering engine and the other is a fast javascript engine. Firefox fell behind for some time; but those are old days. I shall just brief on some points of comparision between Firefox 3.6.13 and Chromium 9.0 on Arch linux x86_64.

Firefox:
- It is very stable. I have not seen it crash for over a year now.
- With AdBlock Plus by Wladimir Palant, I can easily get rid of ads as well as unwanted iframes, images etc.
- With Ghostery, I can easily get rid of tracking sited too.

Chromium:
- Its is stable for use but not as stable as Firefox.
- It does not work with a number of sites. I have been posting such sites since when it was in version 4. Even in recent versions (8.0 and 9.0) there still are sites that don't work well with it.
- It however works fine with those sites that are tailored to work with Internet Explorer and not on Mozilla Firefox.
- AdBlock or Ghostery are not completely supported on Chromium yet.

Search Engine Blacklisting extension

Recently, Jason Chen released an Chrome extension to blacklist spam websites in search engine results.

The extension is under active development and is for testers now. As far as I remember, there have been tools for this by McAfee and AVG. However, I believe that such blacklisting should be done at the server side. It is funny sometimes how search engines like Google have fake sites topping their results.