Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with browser

Connect Two!

davidmsc — Tue, 22 Dec 2009 16:50:05 -0800

Two computers at work: my desktop, and a DVR-capture computer in another workcenter. I can "ping" the DVR computer from my desktop using the ipconfig command with no problem. Accessing it from my browser, however, does not work. Tried both Firefox and MS IE. Using the same IP address (http://xxx.xxx.x.xxx) in both instances, but no luck connecting via browser. Our internet guy claims that there's no firewall issues. So what's the problem - why can't I connect to the DVR computer from my desktop? Much obliged for any assist, MeFites!

massive Chrome memory leak

drlith — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 05:27:05 -0800

How to correct sudden massive Chrome memory leak? More like a memory hemorrage.

A few days ago, my computer running Windows 64-bit Vista started having serious performance issues. I've tracked this down to the Chrome browser. As soon as I start up Chrome, memory usage starts to climb precipitously, and within 30 seconds approaches 95+% memory usage and the system grinds to a halt.

This occurs when running Chrome version 3.0.195.33. I tried re-downloading and re-installing Chrome without success. I don't recall updating Chrome on the day this started happening, but I also can't guarantee that I didn't. I have not had any problems with Chrome previously. I have no problems when running Firefox or IE.

Testing IIS websites locally over virtual machines

LeiaS — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:29:21 -0800

I'm running IIS on Windows 7 to test a website locally. How can I access my local site through my virtual machines? I'd like to test my website locally across multiple browsers before putting them into our staging environment. I have two virtual XP machines set up on my Windows 7 laptop, with various browser versions on each. I want to be able to see my locally-hosted site on these virtual machines.

For example, I have http://site.leia.dev pointing to my folder of files on my Windows 7 laptop. I can view that URL in my Windows 7 browsers. In my IIS settings for the site, I have the bindings for "all unassigned" IP addresses on port 80 to use site.leia.dev as the host name.

Is there a network setting I'm missing to make my virtual machines recognize IIS as a server? Is there a specific IP address I should use instead of my host name?

Why are browser-based videos so slow on my computer?

dephlogisticated — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:22:11 -0800

Why are browser-based videos so slow on my computer? I can play high-quality video files off of my hard drive without any difficulty. But watching a video a fraction of the size and resolution in my browser (such as a Youtube video) results in constant skipping and stuttering, even after the video has loaded completely. Why is this? Is there anything I can do to fix it, short of a hardware upgrade?

My brower keeps timing out when submitting forms!

ask me please — Tue, 20 Oct 2009 06:20:02 -0800

My laptop browser(s) won't allow me to submit forms any more. I have a MacBook running Boot Camp, and I alternate between the Windows and Mac sides depending on what program I'm using and what I'm working on. About two weeks ago, the Windows side stopped allowing me to submit forms (I first noticed the problem when trying to leave AskMeFi comments - the page simply times out and won't allow me to preview.)

I use Firefox, and have reinstalled that to no avail, as well as trying various other browsers. They all have the same issue. So it's not the browser, but I don't know what it is, and Google hasn't helped me much (too many words to search for, which means that the search returns far too much noise).

On the Mac side, things seem a bit slower than usual (although I could be imagining this) but forms work just fine. I'm submitting this using Firefox on the Mac side.

Any ideas as to what this could be? I'm not particularly tech savvy so forgive me if this turns out to be an easy fix.

I know I could sort it out by doing a reinstall but don't really fancy the idea given that I just did one a few months ago, so I'm saving that as a last resort.

Why-Fi?

Rhaomi — Fri, 02 Oct 2009 13:17:19 -0800

What's killing my wi-fi connection? The last few days I've been having some odd problems with my wireless network. I'll be browsing on my laptop when all of a sudden things get really slow, as if I lost the connection. But instead of being sent to "This page is not available" or "server not found" pages like when there really is no connection, I just get stuck loading forever. So if I open a tab and go to Google, it will sit and load saying "Waiting for www.google.com" in the status bar for a minute or two, then eventually say "Done" -- even though the only thing that has loaded is a completely blank tab (even the source code of the page is empty) with the raw URL in the title bar.

But throughout all this, there's no indication that I've lost my connection. The wifi icon in the system tray doesn't change, and says I'm connected if I hover over it. When I open up the Command Prompt and enter ipconfig /all, it says all my internet connection stats are normal. The subnet mask, DHCP server, DNS, etc. are all there. The IP address doesn't start with 169. It's all okay.

Weirdest of all, despite the fact that I can see that all the connection info is normal, if I enter my router's IP address into the address bar (which usually takes me to the router's settings page), it just does the same thing. Load... load... load... blank tab. I understand not being able to connect to the internet, but if I can see all my connection and router info in Command Prompt, why can't I connect to the same router with my browser?

The only way to fix it, I've found, is to disconnect from the wireless network and reconnect. It'll then work fine for anywhere from one minute to fifteen, at which point the connection drops again. This is only affecting my laptop, by the way -- iPods and other laptops connect fine.

I've tried restarting my computer, restarting the router, and repairing the connection -- nothing works. It seems that getting closer to the router improves things, but I'm not sure since the problem comes and goes randomly. And besides, the router is in the same place as it's always been, so unless it's suddenly lost broadcasting power I don't see what would cause the problem. And in the "View Wireless Networks" window, it says the network has an Excellent signal when I'm not connected (though that decreases a bar or two once I do).

The only incident I can think of is that a power surge recently burnt out the power supply, and I had to buy a universal one with an adapter to get the router up and running again. But this was a week or two before the trouble started, so that's probably not the source.

Is there anything that would cause a wireless router to lose signal strength like that? Is there something I can do to fix it, or should I just spring for a new one?

Details: I have a Dell laptop running Windows XP SP3. I have a Bellsouth Fast Access DSL internet connection. The router is a 2Wire HomePortal 1700HW. The loading problem happens on Firefox, Chrome, and IE7.

One more detail I remembered: For awhile when the problem first started, ipconfig /all was giving me some weird info. For instance, it said that the "lease" for the connection expired one second after it was obtained. But it's not doing that anymore.

I'm not a hippy, but I game like one.

soelo — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 13:37:24 -0800

Is there a browser based Civilization clone that's any good? shmegegge asked it first on the blue, but I'm asking it here =)
I loved Civ2 the most, and I currently play KOL, AdventureQuest and Cities (RPGs, but mentioned to give you an idea of what I like). What I don't like is being forced to duel other players or protect my land from them. I only wanna fight the game!

And it doesn't have the be a civ clone as much as have building and research be a big part of the game play. Facebook games are good, too.

Web Browser Woes

mahoganyslide — Mon, 21 Sep 2009 11:39:23 -0800

What is the best Web Browser for an intel Mac in terms of low CPU and RAM usage? I currently have a Macbook Pro (2009 unibody) with 2GB of RAM. Everything runs fine otherwise, but I'm having trouble with the web browser.

I tend to open and close a lot of tabs in the course of a day (research, recreation, school, etc) and do not regularly restart my browser/computer. After a few days, the activity monitor will show that both Firefox and Safari have 40-50% CPU and 500-600MB of RAM usage. This of course slows my computer down considerably. Once I exit the browser and both the CPU and RAM are freed up, my computer starts to behave once again.

Are there other functional browsers out there that do not strain my computer as much? Or should I simply restart my browser/computer at the end of every day and recover all of my tabs?

Alternative Browsers

bluelight — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 06:59:11 -0800

What superior/alternative web browsers to Firefox do you use? I have been using firefox with NoScript and most cookies disabled. When it gets too annoying to enable scripts and cookies, I switch over to Internet Explorer (non-updated version). I really dislike using IE but lately, Firefox has been crashing a LOT.

I was wondering if you had any good experiences with other web browsers such as Safari, Chrome, etc. I plan on keeping firefox but I'd like to explore other options.

I use a PC running Windows XP.

Thanks!

User problems with the browser cache

davcoo — Tue, 25 Aug 2009 12:12:00 -0800

A commercial Web-based product our university purchased to provide student account summaries and collect tuition payments works well for 98%+ of the users. It only works for the rest, however, if they first clear their browser cache. I've surfed the Web for years, visiting hundreds of commercial sites, and have never had to clear my cache in order to make a site work for me. With this product, users open the first page of the site but sometimes get only a white screen with "Done" at the bottom of the window.

Why is this cache clearing necessary? A flaw in the code/design or a fact of browser life?

Some technical details if they matter: The product is Java-based, running on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and serving jsp pages with Tomcat. Most users use IE (IE8 users are instructed to press IE8's "Compatibility" button). The first page has "no-cache" directives.

Inability to scroll browser screen

NinaLee — Wed, 05 Aug 2009 12:54:04 -0800

I'm using Firefox 3.5.1, and annoyingly often I can't scroll up or down or sideways on a page by using the space bar or the appropriate arrows or even the page up and page down keys. I end up having to use the sliding do-hickey on the right of the screen. It seems to happen more frequently with some sites than others--the NY Times is one of the worst. The Metafilter sites are seldom if ever a problem. This occurred even before I upgraded to 3.5.1. If anyone out there has a convenient fix for this, I'd greatly appreciate learning about it. Thanks.

A mobile browser, but for a laptop

Petrot — Tue, 14 Jul 2009 16:43:11 -0800

I'm looking for a mobile browser (or similar solutions). But there's a catch. I want it for a laptop, not a phone. I'm travelling around a lot at the moment, away from cities and wifi-connected areas. But there's fairly good mobile network coverage, so I bought myself an O2 mobile dongle to connect my laptop to the mobile phone network.

I pay a set amount for a set amount of data for a month, and because I don't want to pay more money than I have to, I don't want to have to go over the data limit.

Also, looking at regular sized websites, with all their fancy stuff, in Firefox is almost dial-up slow, when accessed through my mobile dongle.

So, what I would like is to be able to view webpages to the best of the mobile dongle's ability - much like as if I were browsing the internet via a mobile phone.

Is this viable? Is there a browser that would work on a laptop as it would on a mobile phone? Or an add-on for Firefox? Or can I view webpages online using their mobile web addresses (m.something.com)?

The dongle I'm using (not that it matters, I think) is the Huawei e160, on the O2 network. I'm using Ubuntu 9.04 FWIW.

Thank you!

Chrome clone that isn't made of Chrome?

doublehappy — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 06:35:55 -0800

Are there any browsers that are essentially Chrome clones in function and appearance, but aren't Chrome and don't share any common code? I really like it and find it easy to use, but it kills my computer when I use it (we're talking forcing hard reboots, etc.). So does firefox, incidentally (but less often for some reason).

I tried Iron, but it is the same code, just with the 'send data to google' removed.

Cannot tab out of certain textboxes on the web. Help?

kidbritish — Wed, 08 Jul 2009 22:49:21 -0800

Why is it that certain textboxes on the web (Friendfeed, in this case) cannot be tabbed out of? In both Safari & Firefox on Mac OS X, I can use the Tab key to move the cursor into the textbox on this page, but I cannot use the Tab key to move the cursor out of the textbox.

What's the difference between that textbox and the ones on Google or Metafilter or most other sites? Why can't I tab out of it? Is there a way to fix this problem?

To Popup Or Not To Popup?

chocolatepeanutbuttercup — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 06:48:22 -0800

To Popup or Not to Popup? I have a blog website. It's a serious site with a lot of content. We've been working hard on it and it's beginning to gain a nice little readership.

Currently, I am setting up any links within a post to open in the same window, in other words, without a target attribute set.

However, a few friends have opined that I should set up my anchor tags to launch a new window so that my viewers don't get lured away from my site when they click on a link.

My first reaction to this idea is that I want to avoid opening a popup window but perhaps I'm wrong.
Web designers and blog viewers - what is your current thinking on this? Which do you prefer?

HTPC web browser?

smackfu — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 18:37:27 -0800

Is there a web browser for your home-theater PC that works like Opera on the Wii? Something where I can sit back on the couch and navigate using the remote would be ideal.

Help me help my browser to go back to completing missing URL endings even though my ISP is jerky

Your Time Machine Sucks — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 07:39:57 -0800

My ISP's new "feature" of rerouting incomplete URLs to their own custom (awful) search page is hijacking my normal browser behavior of completing URLs with .com. Anything I can do to reassert normalcy? My ISP is T-Online, which like a few other ISPs has started to hijack malformed URLs and send me to an awful "did you mean...?" page, which coincidentally happens to contain advertisements.

Until this started happening a week ago, if I typed "something" into my Safari 3.2.1 (OS X 10.5.x) location field, Safari would complete the URL as "something.com" and go there, but no longer (at least, I was under the impression that this was a Safari thing and not a DNS thing, since Internet Explorer always manifested the re-route-to-a-search-page behavior).

T-Online claims that it is possible to opt out from their new "Navigationshilfe" ("Navigation Help") program, but when I followed their instructions to opt out, nothing changed. Is there a technical solution for this? My router runs dd-wrt so if there is anything I can do there or on my local machine with DNS or hosts settings, that would be ideal.

T-Online's customer support is pretty dumb, so I will consider calling them if there is no workaround, but it is improbable that they will a) know what I'm talking about, b) know if it is possible to turn it off, c) take the correct steps to turn it off, d) not somehow find a way to increase the cost of my plan in the process, so that is definitely a last resort.

Thanks for any advice!

What add-ons to Firefox do you find useful?

melodykramer — Sat, 09 May 2009 17:39:47 -0800

I just learned about Firefox add-ons and grease monkey scripts (I know, I know....) There are literally thousands of these things and I was wondering which ones you find useful and how you use them. Any recommendations? I'm really open to anything, from easy to complex -- so I'm not going to write how I use the internet -- because I'm interested in varied responses. What streamlines your browsing? What do you have now that makes life simpler or that you find yourself glad you have?

Thank you in advance. :)

Forget-Me-Not

geekyguy — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 10:06:24 -0800

Firefox Forget-Me-Not: My browser no longer seems to remember me. When I launch Firefox 3.0.9 I am no longer automatically logged into the sites I have set to load on open. I usually have 25+ tabs open at a time and have Firefox set to 'Show my windows and tabs from last time'.

When I visit a site, like Metafilter, I am no longer automatically logged in. Instead, when I click the [Login] link, my username and password are already there so I haven't lost my saved passwords, just the automatic passing of that information from one session to another.

Incidentally, my browser crashes fairly regularly, at a rate of 3 crashes in a 2 day period. I figure it is due to the high number of tabs I run with. Yes, it is annoying but as long as the browser remembers me, I have been able to live with it.

The laptop in question is a dual 2ghz 64-bit Windows Vista Home Premium with 4g RAM. The browser in question is Firefox 3.0.9 running the following add-ons:
Delicious Bookmarks
Evernote Web Clipper
Forecastfox
Greasemonkey
Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant
RealPlayer Browser Record Plugin
Skype Extension for Firefox

File Browser with tags

sidr — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 19:19:33 -0800

So I have this growing movie collection. What I want is a file browser that lets me tag each movie (either my own tags, or metadata from the files). Basically something like labels in Gmail or tags in Flickr/Delicious etc. Ubuntu here. I've heard of Gnome Meta-Tracker, is there anything else that will help organize my collection?

How do I find a flash gallery for my website that pulls from my Flickr account?

jnnla — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 17:46:52 -0800

Is there a fully customizable flash image gallery for my website that will pull photos from my Flickr sets? I need something like PictoBrowser but more customizable and without the "pictobrowser" link embedded in there. It is perfect in that it loads from Flickr sets, so I can have one particular set feed my website gallery and just worry about uploading my photos to Flickr and sorting there.

I have looked at dfgallery and it looks very close to what I need, but I am not knowledgeable enough to install it on my site. Also it doesn't look like it supports specific sets - and I need that capability.

I realize there are others that pull from flickr, but they tend to be gimmicky "postcard" galleries. I want the streamlined, simple "main image with thumbnails along the bottom" look.

Is there anything similar to Pictobrowser, free or not...that will pull from Flickr sets and create a Flash gallery that is completely customizable (in terms of colors, links etc)? I know this is a tall order, but any help would be appreciated.

Help me with my internet annoyance.

zardoz — Thu, 26 Mar 2009 15:37:04 -0800

I sometimes have trouble with downloading via torrent: surfing becomes a slow crawl/not an option. I have a broadband DSL connection and I'll often download torrents via Transmission on my iMac.

The problem is with torrents: with either Transmission, or uTorrent I can go for several days, even longer than a week, but then suddenly surfing pages on a browser will slow to a crawl and then stop. Torrent downloading may or may not stop at that point, but eventually it stops too.

When this happens I unplug my DSL modem, plug it back in, wait a minute or two, and then I'm firing on all cylinders, torrent downloading and surfing are good for another week or so.

So how can I avoid this step? Settings in Transmission? Hack the modem?

How to add Google search engine back to Firefox?

rintako — Sat, 21 Mar 2009 13:50:40 -0800

I deleted the Google search engine from my Firefox search engine bar. How do I add it back? You know the bar beside the address bar in Firefox? I removed Google and went to the search-engine page to search for Google."com" since my results were showing up as Google."ca

What happened was there was no Google search engine! Now I'm stuck with yahoo. Please tell me how I can add Google back to the bar. I miss it. Thanks.

how to customize web browser context menu keyboard shortcuts

randomstriker — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 11:01:03 -0800

How to change the keyboard shortcuts in the IE or Firefox context menus? Like many people, I use Firefox at home but am forced to use Internet Explorer at work. For the most part the two amicably co-exist in my universe. The one consistent annoyance, however, is this:

When you right click on a link in IE, the keyboard shortcut to open the link in a new tab is "w".

When you right click on a link in Firefox, the shortcut is "t".

I'm the sort who likes to open links in new tabs all in one go so that they load in the background, and then read them leisurely. How can I change the shortcut in either IE or Firefox so that they're the same in both?

My google-fu is failing me -- all the links I come across are for adding NEW context menu items, not for changing the keyboard shortcut on existing ones.

How to disable the most-visited pages function when opening a new tab in Chrome

skylar — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 06:13:15 -0800

Is it possible to disable the "most visited / recent history" tab in the Google Chrome browser? I can set Chrome so that it loads a blank page on startup, but when opening a tab it displays all my most visited sites. This inspired one very embarrassing moment when a friend unconsciously CTRL-Tabbed and saw a glaring menu of my darkest internet meanderings. Several sites claim to be able to solve this but no instructions I have yet followed have made any difference.