MELANCHOLY404 TECHNOLOGY

Back in the days of yore, Adobe’s Flash used to rule the internet. Everything from the tacky animations to navigation was built on Flash. Not to mention the millions of small browser based games. Of course, this was before the smartphones took over. In 2010, Steve Jobs openly banned Flash from iOS devices (and it doesn’t come installed on Macs). Soon Android followed suit and just like that, almost all of mobile web was Flash free.

But that’s just mobile web. Of course, the fact that developers are using HTML to code up responsive, mobile-first websites means the advantages have clearly transferred to the web at large. But still, a lot of stuff on desktop web pages does run on Flash.

Recently, there’s been a movement online to kill Flash once and for all – Occupy Flash. I’m not joking. It’s an actual movement. They have a manifesto and a website and everything. It’s like Occupy Wall Street, only this time, it might actually work.

But why does everyone suddenly want to kill Flash? What did it ever do to them, or us? Can we, the people who spend 8 hours a day essentially in the browser live without it? Read on to find out.

It’s not that Flash is clunky and not modern or sophisticated. Tons of legacy software still survives. It’s that Flash just went from being annoying to being downright dangerous. We all know that Flash is a battery and performance hog, especially when flash games or apps are poorly coded.

It started when the Hacking Team leaks emerged. The company known for producing malware and selling it to the highest bidder seemed to be exploiting a vulnerability in Flash that instantly put millions of users across the world in danger. When the reports came out Adobe quickly released fixes. But then a couple of days later new vulnerabilities surfaced and let me tell you,this isn’t going to end.

Since then Facebook’s Chief of Security has called for Flash’s demise. Even Mozilla has said that they’re going to disable Flash till Adobe solves all the major vulnerabilities that recently came to light.

Yes, even if we disbar everything else and just look at it from a security standpoint, Flash must go.

This is the interesting question and the answer as always comes down to – “depends”. But let me elaborate. The biggest sources of videos – YouTube, Vimeo and Facebook are not dependent on Flash. And most websites don’t use Flash anymore.

I turned off Flash a couple of days back and whenever I came across Flash based content, I didn’t care for it. It was either an embedded video in an article from big news site, or one of the annoying auto-play video ads on sites.

If you feel like taking the plunge, type “chrome://plugins” in Chrome’s omnibox and from the plugins list, disable Adobe Flash Player. If you have Flash installed on your computer, follow these guides to uninstall it from your Mac or Windows PC.

It’s important to note here that Chrome’s version of Flash is sandboxed. In that, it runs in its own little environment inside Chrome and its code isn’t spread across your OS. This means the chances of infection when using Chrome’s built-in Flash are much less.

This is the perfect compromise. Flash stays far way most of the time, saving you from battery drain and from security issues. But when you do want it, it’s just a click away.

Most modern browsers have a click-to-play feature when it comes to plugins and the same can be achieved for Flash as well.

So for instance in Chrome, instead of disabling Flash, go to Settings -> Show advanced settingsand from Privacy, click Content settings and scroll down to Plugins. From here, select Let me choose when to run plugin content. For a detailed look at how to do this on all major browsers, check out this guide at How-To Geek.

Seriously, the days of Flash are nigh. I’m just waiting for Chrome to make a move. Once Google does that, Flash is as good as dead. But we can all do our part in the process of killing Flash and seeing it replaced by HTML5 or some other open source technologies. And it starts by you disabling Flash.

Occupy Flash.

Consider the fact that we as consumers only get to know about the vulnerabilities when a hacker/media organization highlights them. There’s a lot more going on in the background. And because Flash is a proprietary format, we’ll never really feel safe with it.

You start your day at work by opening your inbox, then check the news, some social media and click some links based on your intrigue on the topic. Before you know it, your Chrome browser is filled with tabs which outnumber the embarrassing moments the Kardashians have had on reality TV.  So, how do you keep a tab on tabs?

Tab Manager is a good extension which does exactly what it sounds like. The default view gives you an icon overview of all the open tabs within the current open Window as well as other windows. There is also a search bar from where you can quickly get to a tab that you can’t otherwise find. To its right are options to Add Window, Pin Tabs, Delete Tabs and Change layout.

If you do not like the icon view layout, you need simply to click on the layout icon on the bottom right to get a different view. This view has more details about each tab with the ever-present search bar and the options to its right (like pinning and deleting tabs) also present. Right above these are also options to close the current tab and open a new one.

Where this extension excels, though, is in the ability to search and show tabs from multiple windows of Chrome. Whether you’ve got 2 (or more) windows of Chrome open, it will show you the list of all the tabs open and all you have to do is click on the tab you want to jump to and it takes you there effortlessly.

I usually like to keep 2 Chrome windows open, one for work-related tabs and the other for social media and personal mails. With Tab Manager, you can see all the tabs from all your open Chrome Windows, all in one place.

Another great extension to try out is TooManyTabs, which we had spoken about a while ago. The advantage of this extension is that visually it is much nicer than the previous one and gives a card-like view which makes it easy to identify which tab is which. The whole look can be customized as well, plus there are nice options for sorting different tabs like Sort by Name, Sort by Web Address and Sort by Creation Time.

There is also a tab count on the icon itself which will always give you a quick idea of the number of tabs open.

It also gives a You are here identifier so you know where your current tab is, in the myriad of all the other open tabs within Chrome. Additionally, hitting the yellow arrow next to the top of the tab moves it to the empty Suspended Tabs section on the right. This feature is akin to pinning a tab, which temporarily closes that tab to be accessed at a later stage.

Although this extension won’t work in showing you all the open tabs across multiple windows of Chrome, it does have a nice option to to export tabs to Firefox, if you so wish to. This can be found in the Options menu of the extension and your existing tabs in Firefox don’t get affected when you do this.

There is also an option to back up your tabs as a simple text file to Google Drive, something that I’ve personally never really found useful, to be honest.

Quick Tabs is a lot like Tab Manager in the way it looks and handles tabs. You get all your open tabs aligned in neat rows with a search box at the top and a nice addition of Recently Closedsection at the bottom, showing the tabs you had closed recently. This is the same feature which Google Chrome also gives by default, but you don’t need to go hunting for it in Chrome’s Menu for it.

Although this extension shows the number of tabs across multiple Chrome windows, it doesn’t show it as a separate section like Tab Manager. However, it does show a tab count on the icon itself, reflecting the number of tabs open across all Chrome windows. Right-click on the icon and hit Options and you will notice some interesting choices that the developer has included.

Not all of the keyboard shortcuts might work but the developer is working on getting around the default keyboard shortcuts of Chrome to make this extension better.

These were some of the options that we think can help any user keep a tab of their open tabs in Google Chrome. How about you? If you can think of better solutions to avoid clutter while browsing, do meet us in the comments section below.

Browsers are one of the most important apps on our smartphones. Whether you are a normal end user or a geek, you really need a good web browser on your smartphone. On high-end flagship phones with 2GB of RAM or more and GBs of internal memory, Chrome, Firefox, and other such high-end browsers do the trick.

However, I have heard my friends using devices like Moto E and Android One complaining about how browsers like Chrome hog their resources. After all, all they want is a simple web browser to read articles or browse some shopping websites. So here are three lightweight browsers you can install on your Android to browse the web like never before.

Let’s start and have a look at these browsers one after another. I have arranged the browsers in ascending order of their file size on the Play Store.

The Now Browser APK file is unbelievably small in size, at just 178 KB. After installation, it doesn’t take more than 4 MB and that’s just about 4% of what browsers like Chrome and Firefox take on most Android devices. But when it comes to usability and features, it will really surprise you.

The browser loads up as soon as you tap the icon and there is hardly any delay in loading the new tab page. You can browse websites, add it to bookmarks and check out history just like any other browser. The browser supports native downloading and a user can also choose if he would like to browse a website in a desktop or a mobile view. You also get incognito mode options to maintain privacy.

The page load time was also faster than Chrome. We’ll cover more about it in a table at the end of the post.

Apus browser is just 600 KB in size when it comes to the installation APK and takes only 9 MB after installation. One of the most remarkable features of Apus Browser is its Navigation page. The page has the top 10 websites from your region and also gives you a glance of the top news. The default search provider for the home page can be changed from settings. You also have voice search facility powered by Google.

When it comes to features, Apus doesn’t have many options. You just get basic functionalities like bookmarks and history. You don’t have the option of private browsing, but all the browsing data can be deleted from the settings in just a single tap. The page loading time is significantly lower when compared to Chrome, but lags behind Now Browser. But in terms of graphics and looks, Apus stands ahead of the former.

Last but not least, we have the KK Browser at 1.2 MB in size, which installs up to 6 MB. The load time of KK Browser is next to nil when it’s not running in the memory. In the home page, you have some pinned websites along with links to most popular websites for News, music and videos.

The page loading time is bit higher when compared to other browsers, but then you get some interesting features like changing font size and user agent in KK browser. You also get the option to remember the data for forms and passwords you fill out online for faster browsing. No private browsing here either, so you have to clear your data manually when needed.

Look-wise, KK Browser is nice and the option to bookmark and share pages can be found in the three-dotted menu. Enable Text Only mode for super-fast browsing with a load time less than any of the other browsers. The night mode is an added bonus for a browser of this size.

KK Browser might take some additional seconds while loading pages, but feature-wise, it’s the best you can get for just a MB. Now Browser is not great when it comes to looks, but has the lowest memory footprints and page loading times. Apus Browser is great when it comes to looks and has decent memory footprints and page loading speed.

Here’s a table to compare the page loading time for all the browsers. The time is in seconds and is an average of three sample sets after resetting the browser before every run. I used Guiding Tech and The Verge as the testing playground.

So go ahead and pick a faster, streamlined browser, but don’t forget to keep us in the loop.