Your daily dose of practical, easy to follow tech tips!
One of my biggest pet peeves is audio that starts blaring from my computer’s speakers just as soon as I visit a web page.
It makes no difference whether its coming from an ad, a cute video or simple background music, if it starts playing on its own, I don’t like it.
In fact, I dislike it so much I immediately hit my browser’s “Back” button when music or some other sound starts playing just as soon as the page loads unless I REALLY want to view the content on the page. [Read more…]
If you use the standard web browser that came pre-installed on your smart phone, you’re wasting your time. And I mean that literally. That’s why you need Opera Mini.
Opera Mini is a lean, super-fast version of the popular Opera web browser that loads web pages and photos much faster than the standard mobile web browser.
It achieves these faster speeds by compressing all the images on a web page right on a dedicated Opera server, then sends the optimized pages to your phone. When you first click a link you’ll notice a slight delay while the server is optimizing the images, but then you’ll see the page load onto your screen in a jiffy. [Read more…]
When Microsoft launched Windows 10 a couple of months ago, they also launched their brand new Edge web browser along with it.
I believe Microsoft’s decision to create a brand new browser from scratch instead of simply updating Internet Explorer for the 1,000th time was a good one.
Over the years I.E. had earned a reputation for sluggish performance, buggy code and dangerous insecurity, and I don’t thing the company would have ever been successful at rehabilitating that poor reputation. [Read more…]
I’m often asked how to determine which version of a particular web browser is installed on a computer. In fact, three people have asked me this same question just this week.
Since knowing the current version of your web browser is often useful for troubleshooting Internet-related issues, I thought it might be helpful to write a tip explaining how to determine the version number in all the most popular browsers.
Just follow the steps below for your particular browser. [Read more…]
When Microsoft released Windows 8.1, they released the brand new Internet Explorer 11 along with it. The IE 11 reviews that I have read have been very good overall, and my own testing shows that it’s definitely an improvement over IE 10 (which was already the best version of IE ever).
As of yesterday, if you’re a Windows 7 user who prefers Internet Explorer over the other major web browsers, you can download IE 11 onto your PC as well. Should you? In my opinion, the answer is yes. Every new release of IE seems to get a little faster and more stable than the one before it, and IE 11 continues that trend. [Read more…]