The internet is everywhere. Literally. It’s in coffee shops, city parks, and likely every room in your home. If you have a smartphone, you’ve even got it in your pocket. It’s probably safe to say that you, like all the rest of us, take this constant connectivity for granted. But this ubiquitous access aside, you might not be getting the best browsing experience. Here are a few recommendations to help you remedy that!

Google Chrome (Windows, Mac, & Linux)

This browser is our top pick for a reason—it really does have it all. It’s super fast, easy to use, and has tons of features like tabbed browsing and thumbnailed site images to help you get what you need from the ‘Net. It’s got a neat mode called Incognito that allows you to open a browsing window free of your regular cookies and autofill information whose history won’t be saved, which is both secure and handy if someone else wants to check their email on your computer. It also opens each Incognito window in isolation, without affecting or requiring you close your other open windows. But the real feather in its cap is its stability: Chrome runs each open window as its own process thread, which means if the massive Flash game you’re playing in one window crashes, it won’t take any other windows down with it (like that important email you’re drafting). Other perks include synchronizable bookmarks, built-in reader view, and bundled Flash (so you don’t have to deal with those annoying Adobe update panes). The downsides? While Google has opened up the season for extensions, the options are still a bit less expansive than the competition. And you are, of course, giving a larger share of your internet presence (and info) to Google.

Mozilla Firefox (Windows, Mac, & Linux)

Firefox is the original alternative: a fast, open-source solution with more downloadable tools and add-ons than you can shake a stick at.  It has the full complement of convenience features like tabbed browsing, space for bookmarks on the toolbar, built-in reader view and customizable search bar, and synchronizable bookmarks. While it also has a private browsing feature, enabling it will force all other windows to close. And though it is easier to update than, say, Internet Explorer, it prompts you to update when you open the program and forces a restart (whereas Chrome downloads updates as you browse and applies them after you close). The biggest pain? It’s kind of a memory hog and can really slow things down if you browse for long periods without restarting the program or your computer.

Apple Safari (Windows & Mac)

Apple has quite a reputation for the sleek look of their interfaces, and their internet browser is no different. You can browse your site history and bookmarks with big, colorful Cover Flow thumbnails, use the reader view to strip ads and extraneous formatting from articles on the web, and even enjoy super-sharp text thanks to the font-smoothing on every page.  And while the aesthetic components of Safari are (of course) on lockdown, the rendering aspect is, like Firefox, open source. That means geeks of all colors can submit bug fixes and improvements as they find them, which helps build a more stable platform. The problems? Most of the really good, innovative stuff is reserved for Mac owners (check out Apple’s site to see how Safari interacts with Mail, Address Book, iPhoto, and the Dashboard). And remember how Steve Jobs hates Flash? Yeah. Though lots of non-Apple technologies can be accessed through “extensions,” some of them (cough, FLASH!) really slow the browser down. Also, the automatic update window is irritating in the PC environment. In OS X, you get all your system updates at once, so it’s no big deal. In Windows, it’s yet another popup demanding your attention.  And who wants that?

Opera (Windows, Mac, & Linux)

In a word? FAST.  Opera is blazing fast. Opera will load even the heaviest of pages, like CNN.com or Yahoo!, in the blink of an eye.  This super-speed is thanks to the fact that Opera multithreads every download, which is the technological equivalent of creating a widemouth bottle. Unfortunately, thanks to an ill-conceived attempt at creating a for-pay browser in its early days, Opera doesn’t have nearly the user base of Firefox or Chrome; so a lot of sites don’t bother to check for compatibility with it. There are also no add-ons or extensions available, so what you see is what you get.  Though we confess, those side-anchored tabs are pretty cool.

Internet Explorer (Windows only)

There is really nothing to recommend this browser.  If you’re still using it, please stop reading this article immediately and go download either Firefox or Chrome. Internet Explorer is full of security holes, slow as molasses, and its version of the new browsing standards (tabs, bookmarks on the toolbar) are clunky and unintuitive.  Internet Explorer is like a gaudy tie or a tacky sweater—you got it as a gift and you have to keep it, because there are those rare instances where you absolutely have to bring it out into the light. Like when Aunt Mildred’s visiting from out of town. Or you’re trying to fill in an “interactive” form on a shoddy government website. There are some times when, we confess, you will need Internet Explorer. But for all those other times, have something better at the ready.

For a more humorous (albeit more cynical) take on the five browsers we higlighted, check out CollegeHumor.com

Thanks to InternetBrowserSoftware.net for the image

If you’re like me you use the built-in functionality of your web browser to save and manage your passwords to various online sites.  If you’re being careful and protecting your passwords from prying eyes you’re using a master password to protect your password list.  What happens if you forget your master password?  Before now you were kind of stuck.  Your passwords would remain safe but inaccessible, rendering them useless.  Now a recovery tool called FireMaster that can help you recover your passwords.

Before I go any further I’d like to remind everyone that these tools can be used for both good and evil.  Please use this to recover a lost password for yourself or someone that asks you, don’t use this to snoop on someone else’s online business.  These tools are a godsend for tech guys, but if people misuse them it just makes it harder for legitimate users to get their hands on them.

FireMaster let’s you ran password recovery using several different methods

You can have it try words out of a dictionary to see if there’s a match.  This is very fast but often times won’t work (because you put a number or special character in your password, right??).

It can try with a brtue force method.  Brute force password cracking is when you guess the password by going through every possible permutation (aaa, aab, aac, aad, and on) until you successfully guess the right one.

The third option is a hybrid mode.  This uses the dictionary method but then adds random characters on top of the basic words (pass123, test987, etc

This can take hours or even days depending on the complexity of your password, so if you remember some basic parameters of your password you can speed things along greatly.  A string such as

FireMaster.exe -q -b -l 8 “pass????” c:\testpath

Would do a brute force scan of the password, however you remember that the password was 8 characters long and started with “pass”  this type of focused scan can literally shave days off a complex password’s scan.

This is worth trying if you need your passwords from Firefox’s password manager.  If you’ve used FireMaster let us know in the comments.

[ securityxploded.com via ghacks.net]

I love Firefox, but there are always minor issues with any piece of software that should to be addressed to make them run even better.  Here’s one that has bothered me for quite some time.  If Firefox has been running for a while and I have a bunch of tabs open Flash performance, especially video, tends to suffer.  It turns out there’s a simple fix.

If you’re watching video on Firefox and it seems to skip or stutter every ten seconds or so it’s because Firefox is taking a snapshot of all your open tabs in case your browser crashes.  You can either disable the session restore feature (not really recommended) or you can just change the interval from every ten seconds to something a little more reasonable.

To do so simply type about:config in your address bar, then type browser.sessionstore.interval in the filter box.  It’s default value is 10000 (10 seconds in milliseconds) so just change this to something like  60000 for 1 minute intervals 120000 for 2 minute, etc.  You don’t even have to restart Firefox for this to take effect.

I made this change earlier today and I cannot believe the difference.  Even after having Firefox open all day and dozens of tabs open youtube videos play totally smoothly.

Found via Lifehacker

Do you switch back and forth between Internet Explorer and Firefox and miss the bookmarks of the one when you’re in the other?  Then check out the Firefox extension PlainOldFavorites for a quick fix to this and get your bookmarks in sync.

What PlainOldBookmarks does is creates an extra option in your menu bar called “Favorites” right next to your “Bookmarks” in Firefox.  This is a list of all the favorites in Internet Explorer that you can now access, sort, add to and delete from right through Firefox.

Grab it for free from:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/668

Sure you can get around your computer using the mouse to point and click on everything, but sometimes keyboard shortcuts are faster and easier.  One of the biggest benefits is that you’re hands don’t have to leave the keyboard.  Let’s say you’re working on writing a document and need to have some bold text inserted.  You could stop typing, move your hand to the mouse, move the mouse to the “B” icon and click it, move your hand back to the keyboard and type what you need then move back to the mouse to deselect bold (phew) or you can just hit Ctrl-b, type what you need in bold and then hit Ctrl-b to turn off bold.  Simple choice, right?

The biggest reason people don’t use keyboard shortcuts is that they don’t know what the shortcuts are.  The are hundreds of available shortcuts, some that you could use multiple times a day, some that are almost never used unless you’re in a specialized job (I almost never use macros ier

Below is a list of some of the more frequently used shortcuts that I’ve come across.  Most of them are easy to remember (ctrl-n for new, ctrl-o for open, etc) but a handful seem less obvious (ctrl-v for paste??).  Programmers choose the keys for shortcuts for one of two reasons, either to make it easy to remember or to group similar functions together.  The shortcuts for copy, cut, paste, and undo don’t seem to have correlation until you look down.  You can see that they’re all on the bottom left of the keyboard, right next to the ctrl key.  This was designed to make it easy to do all the editing with one hand while you kept your other hand on the mouse or in place on the keyboard.  Also many shortcuts have become system wide standards, so ctrl-c means copy in word, Firefox, Photoshop and every other program.  That means there’s actually a lot less to remember and a lot more to gain by taking a little while to remember these little time savers.

System wide shortcuts:

Ctrl-C copy to clipboard

Ctrl-V paste from clipboard

Ctrl-X cut to clipboard (delete the selection but save it in the clipboard for pasting later)

Ctrl-Z undo

Ctrl-P print

Ctrl-A select all

Ctrl-O open (select file to open prompt)

Ctrl-B set text to bold

Ctrl-I set text to italicized

F5 refresh page/window

Shift-Del delete selected object (file folder) without sending it to the recycling bin)

Shift+ L or R arrow select text one character at a time

Ctrl+ L or R arrow move cursor one word at a time (jump to beginning of previous/next word)

Shift+Ctrl + L or R arrow select text one word at a time

Windows:

Win-M minimize all windows

Win-D show desktop (press Win-D again to show your open windows again)

Win-R open run prompt

Win-E open new windows explorer window

Win-F or F3 open search window

Win-Pause open system properties window

F2 rename selected object

Ctrl-Shift-Esc open task manager

Alt-Tab and Alt-Shift-Tab cycle between open windows

For a full list of shortcuts for windows go to:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/126449

Firefox:

Alt-Home go to homepage

Ctrl-L select the address bar in order to type a url

Ctrl-T open new tab

Ctrl-W close tab/window

Ctrl-N open new window

Ctrl-F open search bar

Ctrl-Tab and Ctrl-Shift-Tab cycle between open tabs

Alt-L or R Arrow move forward and backwards in history

Ctrl- – or + change zoom

F11 full screen mode

For more shortcuts in Firefox go to:

http://support.mozilla.com/en-US/kb/Keyboard+shortcuts

Outlook:

Ctrl-N open new contextually (i.e. if you’re in mail it will open a new message, in calendar new appointment, etc)

Ctrl-R reply to the currently selected message

Ctrl-Shift-R reply to all

Ctrl-F forward message

Hit the link below to see more shortcuts for Outlook:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/outlook/HP012303961033.aspx

Word:

Most of the system wide shortcuts apply in Word, however here are a couple that are special and only used within Word.

Ctrl-[ or ] grow or shrink the font one point size at a time

Ctrl-L, Ctrl-E, Ctrl-R justify text to the left, canter and right respectively

Ctrl-Shift-8 show all hidden markings (spacing dots, paragraph marks, etc)

There’s a full list of shortcuts in Word here:

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/290938

Know any other good shortcuts or want to see more?  Let us know