Thursday 23 December 2010

Sign in & Access Multiple Google / Gmail Accounts at Once from the same Browser

Google introduced a new feature which lets you sign in and access two  different Gmail / Google accounts at once on the same browser.  Most of us have more than one email Id which we use for different purposes. Previously , one can login to only one account at a time through one browser. This new feature eliminates the need of signing out or using a different browser for using other account. Here is the procedure to use multiple accounts in the same browser at the same time..
  • Go to google.com/accounts
  • Navigate to Multiple sign-in option – “Use multiple Google Accounts in the same web browse” and turn it on.
  • Sign into your first account.
  • After that, you can sign in with up to two additional accounts using the new accounts menu.
After enabling it, You can open  and use multiple Gmail / Google accounts in different tabs of the same browser. The feature can also be disabled by going to the above path and turning it off.
Although the multiple account sign-in feature is available for users, it doesn’t support all Google services like like Blogger and Picasa Web Albums, etc. For these services, the default account will be the first account you signed into. As of now, This feature is supported App Engine, Code, Calendar, Gmail, Reader, Sites and Voice and is restricted to desktop broswers and cannot be enabled on your mobile phones.

Firefox 4 Beta 1 Review

Firefox 4 Beta 1 was released . The newer version of Firefox from Mozilla is definitely better than Firefox 3.6 and is definitely worth trying out. Firefox 4 runs on the Gecko 2.0 web platform. Earlier today I downloaded Firefox 4 and put it through some drills, here is a review of Firefox 4 Beta 1 where you can find the new features and also the how Firefox 4 fares against other browsers in web browser benchmarks.

New User Interface

Firefox 4 New User Interface
Firefox 4 sports a completely different interface, some of which are from Opera and Google Chrome. Firefox 4 has some new buttons and also a unified menu which is similar to the one Opera 10.6 has. In addition to that the tabs also default to the top which is similar to Google Chrome.
However, the menu bar is initially hidden and users can unhide it to go back to the older navigation found in Firefox 3.6 and below.
Firefox 4 Bookmarks menu
Firefox 4 also has a new bookmark button giving users easy access to their bookmarks with one click. You can find and navigate through all your bookmarks and folders using the bookmark button next to the search box.

New Add-ons Manager

firefox_4_addons_manager
Firefox 4 sports a new add-ons manager which integrates into the browser. However, the interface is still under construction and you cannot use the add-ons manager to browse and install add-ons yet. However, it is definitely much better than the earlier version and also has some new developer tools.
Mozilla also says that the add-ons manager UI will be changed before the final release, so don’t start falling in love with it yet.

Search and Switch to Open Tabs

firefox_4_switch_to_tab
Firefox 4 also has a hidden gem in the smart location bar, which will allow you to switch to an open URL by typing in the URL or searching for the title of the page. The feature is very handy if you have several open tabs and want to switch to it without navigating through all the tabs.
When you want to switch to an open tab, just start typing the URL or the title of the page and you will be shown an option to Switch to that open tab. Pretty neat.

Windows 7 Integration

firefox_4_windows_7_integration firefox_4_windows_7_jumplists
Firefox 4 tightly integrates into Windows 7 by having tab previews and Jumplists. Using the tab previews you can easily preview all open tabs. In addition to that the jumplists allows you to quickly perform tasks and open frequently opened URLs.

Native HTML5 WebM Videos Support

firefox_4_html5_video
Firefox 4 has native support for HTML5 WebM videos. WebM is an open source royalty free codec for HTML5 videos which is an alternative to H.264 and Theora codes .  In my tests HTML5 videos works pretty good on YouTube.

Speed and Other Benchmarks

firefox_4_peacekeeper_benchmark
Firefox 4 is definitely much more lighter and faster than Firefox 3.6 and it uses much less memory than the earlier versions. However, Firefox 4 is not yet the fastest browser and it was beaten by both Google Chrome 6 (dev) and Opera 10.60 in the Peacekeeper benchmarks I ran.
firefox_4_acid_3
Firefox also failed the Acid 3 test, but the results were far better than Firefox 3.6. This shows a lot of improvements being done under the hood. Firefox 4 was also slower than in the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark  and way too slow in the V8 benchmarks I ran (screenshots coming shortly).

Other Features

Firefox 4 also has Crash protection for Flash, QuickTime and other plugins, however, this was introduced in Firefox 3.6. Firefox 4 also has a HTML5 parser which allows you to run the latest apps, support for WebSockets for real-time online interactions like chatting and gaming and IndexedDB which will allow users to use offline storage.

Monday 13 December 2010

Use of Ctrl + C can Leak Our Personal Information

Well we all know the use of Ctrl + C of any computer. The use of Ctrl + C has a very great disadvantage sometimes which can leak our personal information and ruin our life. I know this long back but when I read the article about Ctrl + C yesterday in the Times of India newspaper, I thought many people may not be aware of this evil use effect of Ctrl + C. So I am sharing the same article with you today.
Everytime you do a harmless keyboard shortcut Ctrl + C in your computer, the text you copy online may be stolen on the web. This copied data is accessible on the internet when you visit websites that use the combination of javascript and ASP or any server-side-language like jsp, php, from which the data that you copy can be transferred to another server. Most web server. Most web sites are javascript enabled.
Not convinced? Try copying some text and just visit sourcecodesworld.com/special/clipboard.asp, a websiteƂ  that provides free source codes and projects. You necessarily need not even press the ‘paste’ button. The ‘paste’ happens automatically. The website just provides an example of what could potentially happen to you, especially if you have copied your credit card details, bank details or any other sensitive information.
“This is one of the main reasons that credit card companies and banks ask you not to copy, paste your card and bank details. Everytime you copy some information, it gets stored in your computer clipboard. In case, you end up visiting a malicious site, your information can be easily stolen. This information can be read in a hidden manner, that you will not be aware of it being seen by someone else”.
Sourcecodesworld.com says this hacking can be done by a simple source code. This happens especially if you are using Internet Explorer. One of the ways it can be avoided is to use a better browser because Internet Explorer, one of the most famous browsers has had many technical glitches over the years.

Wednesday 1 December 2010

Debugging Silverlight application using Fiddler

Debugging RIA services is not always plain and simple. When you start a new application using RIA services if things are not setup properly you have initial hick-up for debugging the code. If you were using Authentication services then the error will be most common error that login failed without giving any other details. There are lot of blogs out there specifying how to debug this situation, but what I want to mention in this blog is that, use Fiddler when possible to see what is going between the wire.  It works just fine when your web site is hosted and you are monitoring the request and responses from client side.

When it comes to debugging the localhost environment only thing you need to remember is to start the web site as http://localhost./website (emphasis on the ‘.’ at the end of the local host). because of the limitation in fiddler, If you run the normal localhost, it will not monitor. So make sure you use ‘localhost.’ with that you should able to see all the traffic going between client and server.

This link has alternate way of doing it as well.  If you do not want to add ‘.’ at the end of the localhost or the solution in the fiddler web site, then other option is to modify the hosts files (%WINDIR%\System32\drivers\etc\hosts) and then add the following like

127.0.0.1 name

With that change if you would access the web site or the app, instead of calling http://localhost now you can call http://name, fiddler will capture the traffic.