Rhyous

Continued from Not Firefox, Chrome, or IE: Its Opera’s new 10.51 boasts being the fastest browser on earth (Part 1)

Opera, you had promise. I tested you out and you did seem a little faster. I used you all day long.

For the first half of they everything went smooth.

• I loved the zoom feature, and if other browsers have it, it is not as obvious. I liked how every element zoomed. It wasn’t just the text that got bigger, everything got bigger.
• The speed dial feature is nice.

But then things went downhill fast.

• Opera didn’t work with the forum software my company uses. This was a deal breaker in itself, but we are upgrading in a few weeks and the browser should work in the new version.
• Then I tried to download the Voice interface and it just says failed and won’t tell me why.
• I tried to make my book marks toolbar and it wasn’t as easy as I would have liked. I still don’t have one made.
• My brother called and needed me to connect to his computer remotely, but the remote control is initiated at a web page, which didn’t work with Opera, but worked with IE or Firefox. I used IE.
• Don’t ask me why I checked this site today (I am not really a Trekky) but www.startrek.com didn’t work. Then I closed and opened the browser and it started working…that is just odd.
• I could have surpassed and forgotten about these issues with something like IE Tab. I found one but no easy installer, and I am not up for research and tweaking for this review. The lack of an easy install for this feature was the final straw.

Opera has been around a long time, and I am quite surprised that it didn’t work out for me for even a full day.

Not Firefox, Chrome, or IE: Its Opera’s new 10.51 boasts being the fastest browser on earth

This article says: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/can-microsoft-really-build-a-better-browser.ars

Opera 10.50, released a few weeks ago? It’s the fastest browser on the chart. It’s faster even than prerelease versions of Firefox and Chrome, not to mention faster than the public IE9 Platform Preview build

I tried it personally today and I have to say that there were times when it did feel faster to me. But there is a lot of testing to do before I can decide whether to make the jump to using Opera as my primary browser.

According to this article: http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/03/firefox-may-never-hit-25-percent-market-share.ars
Opera only has a 2.35 percent of the market share.

To me there are pros and cons to Opera based on the details above:

Pros

• Lower market share means it is less likely to be a target for hackers as they usually target larger distributions.
• It is the fastest browser.

Cons

• Sites are probably not testing their browsers on Opera.
• Less users could mean less reported issues, less features, less plugin development, etc…

I am going to use Opera for the next week or two as my primary browser and I will post a second review about Opera. I will update this post with a link to it. This article will discuss whether Opera will remain my primary browser and if so, why? If not, why not?

Update: It wasn’t weeks, it was a day: Sorry Opera 10.51, though you’re a fast browser, I had to get rid of you fast: (Part 2)

Why does Firefox prompt for Domain (AD) Authentication? or How to get Firefox to automatically login to web sites with Domain Credentials (Sharepoint for example)?

Hey all,

I am sure you have been annoyed by the fact that when you use Firefox, the sites that require Domain credentials can popup and ask you to login. Sites like Sharepoint can ask you to log in over and over and over and over again. And then just when you are about as annoyed as you can be with typing your Domain user name and password, it prompts you some more.

For those of you who know, I work for LANDesk and we have server software and our Web Console uses NTLM authentication or Active Directory Domain credentials. You can log into the LDMS Web Console using Firefox using this method.

Well, this is really easy to make this “authentication prompt” go away. A quick search in your favorite search engine will resolve this (on a Windows box at least).

I found this site rather quickly:
http://www.1stbyte.com/2008/03/15/automatic-windows-authentication-with-firefox-networkautomatic-ntlm-authtrusted-uris/

Step 1 – Gather the lists of Sites that require domain authentication

1. Determine all the sites you go to at work that require domain or active directory credentials and put them in a text file.
   

   http://CompanyName-Sharepoint
   http://CompanyName-HelpDesk
   http://InternalServer1
   http://InternalServer2
   http://InternalServer3
   http://LDMSCore

2. Now format them like this:
   

   CompanyName-Sharepoint, CompanyName-HelpDesk, InternalServer1, InternalServer2, InternalServer3, LDMSCore

   Don’t worry if you don’t get them all, you can add new sites at any time.

   Note: Save this text file as you may want to do this again for someone else or you may want to do it again yourself computer gets rebuilt/upgraded.

Step 2 – Configure Firefox to Automatically Authenticate to these sites

1. Open Firefox.
2. Enter the following for the URL:
   about:config

3. When warned to be careful, click the “I’ll be careful, I promise” button.
4. In the Filter field, enter this value: network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris
   Note: If the value is not there, you can add it as a new string.

5. Right click on the value and choose Modify.
6. Enter your servers as we formatted them above:
   

   CompanyName-Sharepoint, CompanyName-HelpDesk, InternalServer1, InternalServer2, InternalServer3, LDMSCore

7. Click Ok.
8. You shouldn’t have to close and re-open firefox but some poeple like to do this anyway.

You should now be able to browse your sites without having to enter credentials.