Me: I live in Seattle with my wife, child and cat. I have worked at Microsoft since I graduated from College, both in the Macintosh Business Unit on products such as Outlook Express, Entourage, IE, and Virtual PC and in Windows Live on Hotmail, Calendar and People. I am currently a Principal Lead Program Manager on the Windows Live Social Networking team. I basically manage a team of Program Managers responsible for delivering features to support our web and client applications. I've been blogging since 2001 and like to play around with .NET in my spare time working on projects such as dasBlog (the blog that powers this site) and Send to SmugMug (an application for uploading photos to SmugMug). I blog about a number of technology and productivity related topics.
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© Copyright 2010, Omar Shahine
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For one reason or another I have managed to end up in a situation where I use 3 browsers on a regular basis. It really comes down to the following:
Internet Explorer 8 – this is what I use to browse all intranet sites, since AUTH just works. Also sites like Sharepoint really work best in IE not to mention all the Line of Business apps that require IE. I would love to use IE more, but due to stability issues with browser toolbars, and the Firefox extensions I have come to rely on, I use this less than 100% of the time. Firefox 3.5 – I use this browser a fair amount, mainly because of the following addons: Lastpass, Better Amazon, Grease Monkey. Other than that, I could care less about this browser. I don’t find it’s any more stable than IE, and it’s performance not noticeably better. I also find that it has a habit of updating itself about as often as I use it. I would prefer a “just update the dammed browser and leave me alone” feature. Chrome – A year ago I questioned why the world needed another browser (I still do, which is why I don’t even bother with Safari). However, what I have found is that Chrome is fast and stable. It’s also clean and simple, about as minimal as you can get which is a breath of fresh air these days. I just sort of keep it hanging around all the time. It’s fast like my SSD drive in my laptop, or my iPhone 3GS. I only notice how fast it is when I’m not using it. The problem with Chrome is of course, I can’t replace Firefox with it since it lacks many extensions I rely on, namely Lastpass, XMarks and Grease Monkey. Another neat feature of Chrome is “Application mode” where you can turn certain web pages into Applications. I do this for Facebook and Google Reader for example. Each has their own entry in the Windows 7 Taskbar and operates a lot like a windowed app.
Internet Explorer 8 – this is what I use to browse all intranet sites, since AUTH just works. Also sites like Sharepoint really work best in IE not to mention all the Line of Business apps that require IE.
I would love to use IE more, but due to stability issues with browser toolbars, and the Firefox extensions I have come to rely on, I use this less than 100% of the time.
Firefox 3.5 – I use this browser a fair amount, mainly because of the following addons: Lastpass, Better Amazon, Grease Monkey. Other than that, I could care less about this browser. I don’t find it’s any more stable than IE, and it’s performance not noticeably better. I also find that it has a habit of updating itself about as often as I use it. I would prefer a “just update the dammed browser and leave me alone” feature.
Chrome – A year ago I questioned why the world needed another browser (I still do, which is why I don’t even bother with Safari). However, what I have found is that Chrome is fast and stable. It’s also clean and simple, about as minimal as you can get which is a breath of fresh air these days. I just sort of keep it hanging around all the time. It’s fast like my SSD drive in my laptop, or my iPhone 3GS. I only notice how fast it is when I’m not using it. The problem with Chrome is of course, I can’t replace Firefox with it since it lacks many extensions I rely on, namely Lastpass, XMarks and Grease Monkey.
Another neat feature of Chrome is “Application mode” where you can turn certain web pages into Applications. I do this for Facebook and Google Reader for example. Each has their own entry in the Windows 7 Taskbar and operates a lot like a windowed app.
So, my biggest frustration with this situation is what happens when I click a link in a program. I often find that the default browser that I normally use (Internet Explorer on my laptop, and Firefox on my home computer) is not the one I actually wanted to launch when a link was clicked. It often depends what I want to happen.
Well bless the Windows ecosystem, “There’s An App for That” .
Brower Chooser acts as a proxy by intercepting all URL clicks outside of the browser you are using. It does this by registering itself as the default Browser on your machine and then giving you big icons to chose from. You can then just type 1, 2 or 3 to launch that browser.
Really useful. I only wish that this app auto detected what browsers were installed rather than making me add them manually.