Web browsers are the primary application used to browse the Internet by all users. Hence, it’s attacked the most from various forms of malicious threats. The most common example that we can see is when computer systems are getting infected without user’s knowledge during web browsing.

Even though most security systems are capable of blocking this attacks but, isn’t it a better idea to prevent the infection from the browser itself? BitDefender TrafficLight warns users about malicious websites and filters malicious web traffic.

Although, almost every major antivirus company offers similar solution today, but BitDefender TrafficLight has one key advantage over them: it’s available on all five major browsers: Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari.

Another deferential feature of BitDefender TrafficLight is that, the program installs itself as a service in Windows. This service than carefully monitors and analyzes the web traffic before the web browser even executes the codes. TrafficLight displays only a small slide-out grab tab that you can click to display its analysis of the current page. When malicious activity is detected, TrafficLight will spring into action and prevent the offending code from executing.

On performance cause, it does need 20 to 30 MB of RAM to run, which anyone can spare when security is concerned and memory comes cheap.

List of protections covered by TrafficLight:

• Each search result from Google, Yahoo! or Bing is labeled to show the safe and risky links. TrafficLight leverages the intelligence from BitDefender Cloud services to flag the search results appropriately.
• Each click on the links from Facebook or Twitter is scanned and the link could be blocked in real-time if the link appears to be malicious.
• Link shortening tools that works with Saf.li is included to make sure only safe links are shortened.
• Detect and block links pointing to malware or phishing sites.
• Ad-blocker (To be available in future)

To install TrafficLight in your browser, visit the BitDefender site. After installing it, you’ll have an unobtrusive malware protection hiding just below your browser’s toolbar. Here’s the direct link to the installer: WebInstaller.exe

Facebook is the most popular social networking site today. It’s interface is evolving everyday and is one of the most easy to use one. If you like doing everything using the keyboard and seldom use the mouse or if you want to experience Facebook faster, then you should try the keyboard shortcuts that Facebook provides for keyboard-only users. All these shortcuts are available in the Facebook Help Centre > Accessibility and Assistive Technology help page. (source)

Below is the excerpt of the keyboard shortcuts available, simply replace the # with the numeric digit shown in the Map section for the surfing the desired page in Facebook. So suppose if you want to return to the Facebook Home page and you are using Internet Explorer 7, simply press Alt + 0. Firefox for Windows users should press Shift + Alt + 0. Firefox and Safari for Mac users on the other hand should press Ctrl + 0.

The shortcuts are browser-specific, so please refer below for your specific browser:

Internet Explorer 7 for PC:
Alt + #, then Enter

Firefox 3 for PC:
Shift + Alt + #

Safari 3 for Mac:
Ctrl + #

Firefox 3 for Mac:
Ctrl + #

Map:
0 – Help
1 – Home
2 – Profile
3 – Friends
4 – Inbox
5 — Notifications
6 — Account Settings
7 – Privacy
8 – About
9 – Terms

If you experience any problems with the feature, you can email Facebook’s accessibility team here.

Xmarks is a bookmark sync browser add-on that lets you synchronize all your bookmarks, passwords and other data over several computers, across almost all popular browsers. I am a Xmarks user myself and use it to sync my bookmarks across all the browsers that I use. Sadly, this awesome bookmark sync service will be shutting down service on January 10, 2011.

According to the blog post update on the official Xmarks blog, from today Xmarks will start sending notifications to its users (I still haven’t received one) that the service will be shut down in 90 days. The reasons for the shutdown are explained in detail in the blog post. It can be understood that the main reasons behind shutting down Xmarks are funds running out and Xmarks being unable to find a viable business model or a buyer.

Xmarks (founded in 2006 under the original name Foxmarks) started out as a Firefox plug-in that lets users sync their bookmarks on several computers. Later, Foxmarks rechristened as Xmarks, as it extended support for other browsers and added more functionality, such as browsing recommendations and password syncing.

Xmarks claims it serves around 2 million users across 5 million desktops, and still adding nearly 3,000 new accounts per day (their registration page is still online). You may be wondering, then why Xmarks is seeing the end of the road?

Well, when big players like Google, Opera and Mozilla starts providing sync service and with most of the features that Xmarks offers, free, it becomes really difficult for startups like Xmarks to survive.

A quote from Xmarks CTO and Co-founder Todd Agulnick:

“For four years we have offered the synchronization service for no charge, predicated on the hypothesis that a business model would emerge to support the free service. With that investment thesis thwarted, there is no way to pay expenses, primarily salary and hosting costs. Without the resources to keep the service going, we must shut it down.”

Its not like the Xmarks developers never tried. They tried various ways to make a profit out of its business, including a “smarter search” idea based on data gleaned from its anonymized collection of 100 million bookmarks. “If you were looking for the Web sites in a particular category, the results were shockingly complete and entirely spam-free,” Agulnick said. They also launched a 99-cent iPhone app to extend sync to Apple’s devices and had begun work on an equivalent for phones using Google’s Android OS. Though the iPhone app will continue to work with bookmarks cached on the phone, but the Android app will never be released.

It is really sad to say good-bye to such a good service. You can easily understand this even if you are not a Xmarks user, when you see comments by users willing to pay for the service, at the official announcement blog post.

Xmarks Alternatives

If you are presently a Xmarks user, you should check Xmarks’ guide to alternatives for advice on the best way to keep your data.

Browser Sync Alternatives

While you may have to give up cross-browser sync when Xmarks goes away, there are a lot of good browser-specific sync options available:

In that page we found two suggestions by Xmarks as its alternative for users who wants more than bookmark sync: Evernote and SugarSync. Xmarks seems to have tied up with the two to offer some exclusive plans for its users. SugarSync is offering free 2 GB storage space for all Xmarks users who signup through the link available here.

Google Scribe is a new Google Labs project that helps you speed up text typing. Google Scribe basically provides text completion service. Using information from what you have already typed in a text field, Google Scribe provides related word or phrase completion suggestions. In addition to saving keystrokes, Google Scribe’s suggestions indicate correct or popular phrases to use.

You can use Google Scribe on any active text field in a webpage. For example, you can now type faster in Twitter to send updates faster, fill comment form of a blog, compose email, be it GMail, Yahoo Mail, Hotmail, or any other email, etc. With the handy keyboard shortcuts and mouse gestures you can now fasten up text typing while also cut typing errors.

If you are using Google Chrome, then you can enable Google Scribe using the official Google Scribe (Labs) Chrome Extension. If you are using any other browser like Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera or Apple Safari, then you can use the Google Scribe Bookmarklet to enable Google Scribe.

Handy Google Scribe keyboard shortcuts:

If you use a Mac, you can use the shortcuts below by replacing Ctrl with Command/Meta key.

More detailed help on using Google Scribe can be found here.

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.

AVG LinkScanner has two key features to protect you:

• Surf-Shield scans the page behind any link you click on or any web address you type into your browser. If the page is infected, it stops you from opening it. (This happens so quickly that you don’t even notice it). AVG LinkScanner works in real-time and checks for active threats before you land on a page.
• Search-Shield scans search results and places a safety rating next to each link so you know where it’s safe to click. This applies when searching with Google, Yahoo! or Bing.

Like AVG’s extremely popular free LinkScanner for Windows offering which has more than 95 million users, LinkScanner for Mac allows users to surf, search, email, shop and use social network programs online with the confidence that the pages they visit are safe and the places they choose to visit online are safe to enter personal and private information. LinkScanner updates continuously with data garnered by AVG’s industry-leading research team and user community, checking each web page a user visits in real-time before it opens on the Mac, warning users to refrain from opening them if LinkScanner detects threats.

AVG’s Free LinkScanner for Mac product protects users against the ever-increasing online web-threats by dynamically scanning the web pages before they open in your Mac to see if they are genuine sites. If it detects something suspicious, LinkScanner notifies the user that the web site is malicious. LinkScanner for Mac is available for free and included as part of all AVG anti-virus and Internet security products for Windows.

It can be downloaded for free here: http://linkscanner.avg.com/Mac

I always use a number of browsers for surfing. The main reason is the features that I like in one but is not present in the other. One more reason is I test My Technology Guide by loading it into different browsers. This helps me to make My Technology Guide appear and work as flawlessly as possible in different browsers. Once before, I covered a nice small portable application called “Browser Chooser” which helps me dynamically assign default browser. Which is very handy for anyone who is having a number of browsers installed.

Today, I will share with you a few keyboard shortcuts that are common to all the common browsers, viz. Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Google Chrome, Safari. Just remember these keyboard shortcuts and use them in any of your favorite mentioned browsers. After all using keyboard shortcuts is always faster than with the mouse!

If you know any more shortcuts other than the above don’t forget to share them with us!