Finally I have the chance to play around with the newest open source browser on the block. Google Chrome that I installed last night has been put to some test by loading up some of my favorite sites and blogs. Since I am still not using this web browser fully in place of my trusty Firefox 3, the test was only to see in terms of speed rather than anything else.

Compared to the Firefox 3 there was a slight speed improvement when the same sites were being loaded on Chrome. On average, sites loaded slightly faster than Firefox 3 and obviously, much faster compared to my IE 7. It was fast but not enough to throw out Firefox completely.

By the way, Mozilla is not done yet as they are going to release Firefox 3.1 by end of the year that comes with JavaScript acceleration technology called TraceMonkey. Firefox enhanced with TraceMonkey has managed to beat Google Chrome Beta as reported on Firefox counters Google’s browser speed test.

In summary, Firefox 3 will remain as my main browser for now. I will have to wait for Google Chrome to be out of beta before deciding to change that. I guess when that happens, I will have to pit Chrome against the Firefox 3.1 that will be having almost the same technology as Chrome if not better. One thing for sure, IE 7 will not be needed anymore.

Here is a screen shot of this blog loaded on Chrome.

There you go! Chrome beta is a simple looking web browser and lighter on the resources but Firefox 3 is still my choice for now. It would be an interesting fight between Firefox and Chrome and may be this time IE would really feel the heat.

I am sure by now many have heard or even downloaded and tried the new open source web browser by Google. The Google Chrome is still in its Beta stage but my hands are itchy as usual to try it out and see what the buzz is all about.

This is my problem. New things excite me and many times I have taken the risks of trying them out without considering the consequences such as would it crash my notebook or would it make my other web browsers inoperable. I guess that it the fun side of it. Adventure is what everyone should be looking for, right?

So, as you can see, I am still downloading the installer and while that is being done, I am writing this post…

The part that interest me about Google Chrome is this:

Under the hood, we were able to build the foundation of a browser that runs today’s complex web applications much better . By keeping each tab in an isolated “sandbox”, we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built V8, a more powerful JavaScript engine, to power the next generation of web applications that aren’t even possible in today’s browsers.

Let see whether Google can walk the talk on this one. Anyway, I’ll post about my first experience with this new browser tomorrow. it would be interesting to see how this blog will look like under this new web browser.

If you are using Firefox, you would be familiar with the real time spell checker that checks your words as you type them. This is one of the reasons why I decided to use Firefox as my main browser instead of IE or any other browsers.

Whenever you misspelled a word, it would be underlined with a dotted red line and all you need to do is right click on that word and you will get a list of words to replace it. Great stuff! However, sometimes you could make a mistake like what I had done where instead of choosing a word, I clicked on the “Add to Dictionary“. Firefox would not ask whether you are sure or not before saving it and there is no undo function either…

I tried all the links on the browser trying to find an option to allow me to remove the misspelled word that I have just added and after a few hours, I gave up. You would not find anything that says something such as, “edit custom dictionary” or anything close to that. You would not want to just leave any misspelled word in your dictionary as the browser would then think that you prefer to misspell the word as it is. You see, Firefox would not argue with you…

Well, do not panic. You are not stuck with it. As usual, when everything else failed, I went to the search engines and looked for the solution and I found one. An easy one, I would add. This is what you need to do.

1. Go to your Windows Start menu and click Run. You normally click an icon on the bottom left of your windows to launch the Start Menu. If you can’t do this, stop and look for somebody who knows how to do that as this is part of the basic knowledge that you should have when running Microsoft Windows.
2. In the Run box, key in %APPDATA%\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles and click OK.
3. That will bring you to a folder called xxxxxxxx.default. Open up the folder.
4. Look for a file called persdict.dat and open it up using a text editor. Notepad will do just fine.
5. Find your misspelled word or words and delete them.
6. Save the file and you are done!

In my case, I found more than one misspelled words there. I must have accidentally added those misspelled words to my dictionary. How about checking what you have in yours?