My Technology Guide: Windows, Mac, Linux, Internet, Software, Review

At the Google Chrome Help Forum, Google employee Blair has posted a list of software identified to crash Google Chrome web browser. In the list users will also find some popular software such as WinMount, NVIDIA NTune, SpeedBit Video Accelerator, etc listed along with others that causes instability in Google Chrome.

Blair suggests to temporarily disable the marked softwares and see if it resolved Chrome crashes. Blair also listed some softwares, for which you can simply disable some of its functions without disabling the software completely to solve crash issues.

Opera web browser fans should rejoice as Opera has released Opera 10.60, "faster than the fastest browser" recently. Opera 10.60 is based on the new version of Presto 2.6.30 rendering engine. It now includes support for several new HTML5 features, such as GeoLocation, Web Workers and Offline applications. It has also notably improved Javascript and DOM performance. The latest version also have thousands of bugs fixed since 10.54. Opera 10.60 is the first web browser that supports for the high quality video format WebM.

Mozilla has just released Firefox 3.6.6, less than a week after the release of the long-awaited Firefox 3.6.4 version. Firefox 3.6.6 fixes a stability issue in the web browser. This update addressed issues with the new plugin handler causing issues with the immensely popular Facebook game Farmville. See bug 574905 for full details.

Firefox 3.6.6 modifies the crash protection feature to increase the amount of time that plugins are allowed to be non-responsive before being terminated.

The developers have increased the time that plugins are allowed to be non-responsive before they are terminated by the browser. The timeout was set to 10 seconds initially and now has been increased to 45 seconds in this new release.

Mozilla has finally released Firefox 3.6.4, the latest security and stability release for Firefox. This release provides crash protection for Windows and Linux users by isolating third-party plugins when they crash. The feature is like that in Google Chrome as it runs plugins in their own process to increase browser stability and security.

Out-of-process plugins are enabled by default and make sure that a crashing plugin will not crash the browser itself as well. Firefox can now prevents Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight crashes from bringing down your entire browser on Windows and Linux computers just like Google Chrome does. Read the Crash Protection FAQ for more detailed information about this new feature.

AVG Technologies has unveiled AVG LinkScanner for the Mac operating system. AVG LinkScanner for Mac is the first free AVG product designed for Mac OS X Leopard or Snow Leopard and supports Internet browsers Safari 3.x, Safari 4.x, Safari 5.x and Mozilla Firefox 3.x and higher.

According to AVG research, 99 percent of all malicious threats are delivered through the web and cannot be stopped with traditional antivirus software. These threats can come and go within hours and can live on familiar, big-name sites and even on third-party applications on popular social networking sites, without users even noticing. And with the growing popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and others, the bad guys are using these sites as their main vehicle for spreading malware.

Majority of browser toolbars gets installed in your system accidentally when you install some software which bundles the toolbar with it. And the software installs the toolbar without giving proper notification about the install or without giving any opt-out option. Now, browser toolbars can really be a nuisance and hamper your normal browsing environment.

Most of the time they are not useful at all and clutter up your browser window. These toolbars also sometime hijack your default search engine, changes the browser homepage, etc and doesn't restores back the old settings when removed from the system. Some of these toolbars do not offer any standard uninstall method at all and is problematic to remove them completely from your system. When you remove these toolbars, they often leave behind traces, thus not getting entirely uninstalled from your system.

Users of 64-bit operating system who always wanted to use a 64-bit edition of the popular web browser Firefox were previously restricted to using only the builds provided by their operating systems or, the ones available through the Mozilla-x86-64 project. Mozilla Firefox 64-bit builds for Linux, Mac and Windows is now available on the official Firefox Nightly FTP server. Mozilla plans to distribute the final version of Firefox 64-bit editions with the release of Firefox 4 later this year.

If you install the experimental version of Firefox 64-bit you will notice that most of the browser plugins are not compatible and only Java and a non-final Flash version are being supported.