There are quite a lot testing and reviews happening out there and geeks are busy with comparing the web browsers again due to the launch of Google’s web browser. The overcrowded market of web browsers was not really expecting a web browser from Google and Google Chrome came in to the market as a surprise. Anyway, the question is why Google was this late?

In this article, let’s try to do a performance comparison between four browsers that we know; Chrome, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari. When we consider the performance, we need to remember that all the browsers should be in the same status such as same toolbars or no toolbars installed, cache cleared, etc. There are so many users publishing their reviews and I’m not sure how many of them follow the standard guidelines for performance comparisons. If you just open the browsers in your computer and measure the startup times, I’m not sure you are doing a proper and accurate performance comparison.

Anyway, let me summarize what the users have seen so far related to these browsers in terms of performance. Chrome startup is now considered as the fastest and I assume this also depends on the hardware and the operating system configurations. Internet Explorer does a quite good job by starting up with a similar time or in a slightly less time. Firefox and Safari take a considerable amount of time for startup and it is almost 3 times as Chrome and IE.

Summarizing what people say about page load times, some claim that Chrome is the fastest of all. This statement has its flaws as you can expect a browser to be fastest for all the kinds of web pages available in internet. If you do a proper performance testing, then your sample of web pages should have a great diversity. One of those fair tests suggest that Chrome’s performance vary from fastest to slowest depending on what you throw at it. This is fair as Chrome is still at its beta stage and nothing more than this can be expected.

Google has used 1 million web pages as the test sample and there can be important web applications that they have missed. Surely they will perform and another few rounds of tunings based on the feedback received by beta tests.

The remarkable addition to the internet browser world, Google Chrome is making its way to the top. Released today, there have been thousands of downloads, dozens or reviews and blog entries are already available on the internet. In this article, we are going to look at some features Google Chrome offers.

First of all, this is just a beta release; not the full and final version. So, don’t be excited if you see some incompatibilities when navigating through the web. The appearance of the new member seems extremely simple and streamlined. Yes, Chrome has been designed with a vision; to make sure the user is not distracted by the browser features when doing work in internet. Chrome can be installed with just few clicks and Google has taken care of most of the background installation procedures. Now where is the user guide? I’m sure someone may want a user guide as this is brand new software. Yes, read Google Chrome Comic Book and that’s your user guide to Chrome!

A normal browser such as IE or Firefox would run as a process in the operating system and each tab will be a separate thread running in the process. So if one tab stops responding, then the whole process hangs. So eventually, users will have to close the browser, losing all the other opened tabs. Chrome offers a revolutionary solution for this problem; not the browser but all the tabs run as separate processes. So if one tab hangs, you can just close it without affecting others!

Chrome offers you another facility that you wouldn’t find prominently in any other browser; searching your bookmarks and history. What a feature??? If you want some site not to be recorded in history, then you can open a special tab for browsing and nothing will be saved in history (including cache and cookies).

There are many other new features offered by Google Chrome and it is here to stay! Let’s discuss some other features and performance compared to other popular web browsers in the next article.

In the last article we had a look at Clickheat, a usability analysis tool. In this article, we’ll be looking at few other similar tools that can be used for tracking and analyzing user behaviors.

Bobby

This is an initiative taken by CAST for making World Wide Web more accessible to individuals with disabilities. This project has been in the industry for a decade and has helped both novice and professional web designers analyze and make improvements of their web sites. For the service this project has introduced, it has won number of awards from different bodies. From 2004, Watchfire sponsors the project as it was sold by CAST.

Due to the comprehensive accessibility coverage of Bobby, IBM has included this software in to IBM Rational Policy Tester Accessibility Edition and available widely from IBM.

ErgoLight

ErgoLight WebTester is a usability testing software which is focused on human factors. It emphasizes on user friendliness, usability and user reliability. On Dec 31, 1999, PC-Media wrote:

“Not all software developers can afford to use the services of usability labs. This is especially true for small software companies. The new products of ErgoLight Ltd. change the rules of this game. By tracking the details of site navigation on a central server and by intervention, WebTester provides the capability of usability validation to everybody.”

AWStats

AWStats is a free log file analyzer for famous web servers. Although this is not a full scale usability testing tool, this gives many information about user behaviors and application responses. This easy to install tool runs on Linux and can read log files of all famous web servers including Apache. You may have to tweak the logging format of the web server in the configuration files.

AWStats gives detailed information about the page hits, visiting IPs, visiting browsers, most accessed resources and user visiting trend over a period of time. This information can be used for placing valuable information on certain pages where most people do access.

Usability of web applications has been under spotlight for few years as it represents a set of significant qualities of the business application. Improved usability has been identified as a cost saver when it comes to user trainings etc. The business that has a higher attrition rate such as call centers expect their software to have high usability as it cuts down the cost in frequent user training.

In this article we focus on few tools used for tracking user behaviors for usability implementation. If the application to have higher usability, first of all the designers and the developers of the software should know the exact user behaviors. These sophisticated tools help designers and developers to monitor the user behaviors closely and accurately.

Clickheat

Clickheat monitors specific web pages of web applications and track where the users click. After monitoring user clicks for over a period of time, it generates a heat map indicating the click density of the page. This allows the application designers and developers to identify the main areas accessed by the users and perform the optimization for the web page. This information is vital for identifying the places for placing advertisements, important links etc.

Installation of Clickheat is quite easy. You can install Clickheat on a Linux PC and then you need to custom generate a JavaScript code which is about four lines for the web page you are intended to monitor. Placing the JavaScript code at the bottom of the HTML page completes the job and Clickheat starts recording every click on the webpage from there onwards. Eventually, Clickheat generates heat maps for different screen resolutions and time frames. Clickheat is free and open source software and installed on either Windows or Linux. It supports Mozilla Firefox 2, Mozilla Firefox 3, Internet Explorer 6 and 7.

As users of Windows operating systems for years, we exactly know how Windows Explorer works. Windows Explorer is one of the most used applications built-in to Windows from Windows 95 operating system. Although there are minor changes between Windows Explorer offered in versions of Windows, the basics remains the same.

Have you ever felt that Windows Explorer is not enough for you? Especially after using file managers present in Apple Macintosh or Linux? Yes, there are people who feel Windows Explorer can be more that what it is right now and they have offered a good alternative that can be used with Windows Explorer.

AccelMan File Manager is one of the revolutionary software that has taken steps to make users experience more effective and productive. AccelMan was first issued to the market as a shareware application where you have to pay some money in order to get all the features activated but now it is offered free. Let’s have a look at the features offered by AccelMan.
A built-in image viewer is one of most important tools offered by this software. This comes handy if you work with a lot of graphics (ex: a web designer) and needs to preview images frequently. AccelMan offers tabbed view for viewing different folders in the same panel so the hassle of opening numbers of separate windows is answered. This also supports command line integration and also includes a built-in media player. Text editor is one of the most powerful tools when it comes to productivity and it offers the file compression and decompression ability which supports fifteen compressions formats.

If you are a Windows Vista user, you may be familiar with as-you-type search. Unlike previous Windows versions, Vista does not take minutes to search for your document. If you missed that feature in Windows XP, you can just have it with AccelMan. It also displays Microsoft Office and Adobe Acrobat document in the display panel itself.

In the last article we focused on two online word processors; AjaxWrite and ThinkFree. Here comes the rest.

ZOHO Writer – A free productivity suit for individuals and subscription based for organizations. In the ZOHO productivity suit you will find Zoho Writer for word processing, Zoho Sheets for spreadsheets, Zoho Show for presentations, Zoho Creator for database applications, Zoho Wiki for writing and editing article for Wikipedia, Zoho Notebook for note taking, Zoho Mail for collaborative activities, Zoho Business for business solutions, Zoho Projects for project management and scheduling, Zoho CRM for CRM solutions, Zoho Meeting for web conferencing, Zoho DB & Reporting for databases and reports, Zoho People for human resource and recruitment management, Zoho Chat for instant messaging, Zoho Start for a summary of your documents (a dashboard), Zoho 24×7 for monitoring websites, Zoho Polls for online polls, Zoho Viewer for viewing documents online and Zoho Challenge for conducting online tests for recruitment candidates.

Yes, it was a quite a long list. But I find these tools as a complete package of solutions for an organization. Zoho Writer consists of rich functionalities and it has a different look and feel from MS Office. It also has a left navigation panel for managing document while they are been written / edited.

Google Docs – This suit of online productivity software offers the facility for creating documents, spreadsheets and presentations. It offers real time collaboration, search tool for searching for documents and mobile access through your smart phone or PDA. Unlike many of other online productivity suits, Google Docs offer versioning of the documents and you can compare different versions of the document for the difference. If you are creating a document collaboratively, the changes made by the other parties would appear immediately. Google Docs support all popular office file types. Additionally, you can edit the HTML code. Although there are limits for the file sizes such as document size and picture sizes they usually don’t bother users. Talking about another plus point; being available in different languages make Google Docs popular worldwide.

I’m sure there may have been numerous times where there were no word processing software around you when you needed to write something important (I’m not talking about Notepad or WordPad). It could even be that you needed to access an important file away from the office but there was no way of doing that? Yes, these are some common experiences we all share and there are number of solutions given for this problem. One important and effective solution is online word processing facility where it also supports collaborative editing/reviewing. In this short article, we are trying to briefly focus on few of the popular online word processors.

AjaxWrite – This word processor is based on Ajax as the name suggests and this is the online word processor with the least features and most of the hassle. AjaxWrite comes with a bundle of applications which are add-on for the word processor. These add-ons include AjaxPresents, a presentation software (similar to Microsoft PowerPoint), AjaxXLS, a viewer and editor for spreadsheets such as Excel), AjaxSketch, a graphics editor and AjaxTunes, a media player software such as iTunes ;). The interface is kept simple with just essential functionalities. This makes AjaxWrite not useful for people who would like to write and format in fancy ways. Toolbar is more or less like Microsoft Office 2003 toolbar and pages are interfaces as tabs. The main issue with AjaxWrite is that it doesn’t allow users to save the documents online. They need to save it in the local drive which is very inconvenient for the mobile users.

ThinkFree – This has been around for years not offering free online office suit and optionally a low cost desktop software suit. This office suit is compatible with Windows, Max OS X and Linux giving users the true mobility. ThinkFree suit has three main components as ThinkFree Write for word processing, ThinkFree Calc for spreadsheet viewing and editing, ThinkFree Show for presentations. ThinkFree tools are Java based tools and they resemble exact MS Office look and feel. Also, they give you a competitive set of features same as MS Office suit and what you get out of ThinkFree is more than enough for online word processing.

Although you think Google Earth as one of Google’s creative and breakthrough inventions, it is indeed a wrong conception. Google Earth was not written by Google. It was created and developed by Keyhole Inc., a company which was bought by Google in 2004. Anyway, this is a great piece of software which offers a wide range of facilities and services to general public, business organizations and governments.

Google Earth is simply the earth in your PC. You can see every knock and corner of the earth with very little restrictions. The quality of the images is often very high so it is very convenient to find any place on the earth. There are three main resources of obtaining these footages for superimposing the earth surface: satellite imagery, aerial photography and GIS 3D Globe. Currently there are three versions of Google Earth available: Google Earth: a free version but having limited functionality, Google Earth Plus: version which includes some additional features and Google Earth Pro: the version developed for commercial use with many add-ons.

Currently Google Earth client software can be used in Windows, Linux, Mac OS X and FreeBSD platforms. The alternative for the other platforms is Google Maps. You still can see the earth surface but in a map form instead of 3D view the Google Earth provides. Before the latest release of Google Earth (before version 4), 3D structures were not widely available and it was limited to few well known cities while having poor rendering.