Orbit Grab Pro cripples IE

Orbit is a famous download manager which I have been using for a few months now. One of the best features of this is it allows us to download videos and music from youtube, imeem and other similar sites. A great time saver for we don't have to wait for that Rihanna's song to load everytime we long to hear.

Orbit has an internal tool called Grab++ which detects different media and allows to grab them for download. But recently I tried to download from Imeem using every browser I had got but it did not work, so I decided to try another new tool from Orbit called Grab Pro. This tool is also a part of Orbit but attaches itself to IE like a plugin/toolbar.

Enabling this caused my Internet Explorer 7 to stop displaying websites. I cannot visit any site with this plugin enabled, the only way out is to disable this plugin. Orbit says its Grab Pro breaks imeem's anti-leeching technology, but so far I had no luck with it.

Meanwhile, I'm still searching other ways to grab music from Imeem. Anyone out there have a good way to do this?

Google 10^100 project offers $10 million dollars

Google has introduced a new world changing project called 10 to the 100th (10^100) in conjunction with their 10th birthday. In plain maths, 10^100 is 1 followed by 100 zeros which is also called a Googol. The name Google comes from this Googol number which reflects their mission to organize a seemingly infinite amount of information on the web.

According to Google, this project is a call for ideas to change the world by helping as many people as possible. In other words, helping helps everybody, helper and helped alike.

The ideas can be submitted under the following categories:
Community: How can we help connect people, build communities and protect unique cultures?
Opportunity: How can we help people better provide for themselves and their families?
Energy: How can we help move the world toward safe, clean, inexpensive energy?
Environment: How can we help promote a cleaner and more sustainable global ecosystem?
Health: How can we help individuals lead longer, healthier lives?
Education: How can we help more people get more access to better education?
Shelter: How can we help ensure that everyone has a safe place to live?
Everything else: Sometimes the best ideas don't fit into any category at all.

Google will choose what it feels are the 100 best ideas and then allow its users to vote on which of them should be funded. The users will narrow the results to 20 finalists, and a panel of judges will choose up to five ideas that will receive the $10 million dollars funding.

The last day for submitting your ideas is October 20th, 2008. Voting begins on January 27th, 2009.
For submitting your ideas and more information visit www.project10tothe100.com

Chrome beats Opera in Browser market share

It's been just 4 days since Chrome was launched and it has already overtaken Opera in browser market share. I wrote a small review of it in my post yesterday, check it out here.

The numbers are still changing and I don't think we can say the exact share at this moment. But many reports suggest that it has overtaken Opera. Firefox, Safari are also seeing a drop in their market shares but it seems Internet Explorer is still not affected.

According to one report by GetClicky which provides statistics of browser share of its visitors, Chrome's market share stands at 2.28% and Opera stands at 1.98%. With IE, Firefox and Safari are leading in that order.

I found a nice picture of the Chrome effect courtesy of NYTimes. Looks like Safari will be poped out soon.

Chrome - Simple and Fast Browser

Google's Chrome is a simple and sleek tabbed browser released this week, the main highlight of it is that each tab is a separate process, and if one tab crashes it does not affect the other tabs. And hence it has got its own task manager which shows the resources used by each tab including process, memory and network properties.

A stats for nerds link is seen in the screenshot below, clicking on it takes you to the about:memory page and shows detailed memory usage of any browser running be it Firefox or IE.

Some Cool features of Chrome:

• Chrome has the ability to drag tabs to new windows and move tabs across windows, this is the best feature which I liked so far in terms of user interface.

• The default home tab shows 9 most visited pages, sites you search on most, recently bookmarked and recently closed tabs for that session.

• The navbar is called ombibox which provides suggestions as you type.

• A new feature called Incognito is a privacy feature in which you can browse sites without saving any trace of having visited that site in the PC.

• Pop-ups cannot be forced in chrome.

• A security feature called Sandboxing protects users from malware and phishing.

Chrome is still a new browser and security flaws are already being discovered. My chrome has just been updated to version 0.2.149.29 from 0.2.149.27 today.
Anyone who would like to share some unknown feature or function of Chrome are welcome. Waiting for some hidden easter eggs to be discovered :).

Google Comics Chrome Browser Series

Google's new open-source browser Chrome has been launched this week with a long comic explaining the new browser's technology and features.

The comic can be found here, it explains everything from how the new browser works, all its features and how it is different from other browsers. The comics contain nice diagrams and pictures and runs upto 38 pages long.

Also note the logo of the new browser above which looks very cool with a colorful 3D sphere, kind of a mozilla firefox killer?

More details about Chrome coming up soon.
Source: Google's official blog

Alexa Site Ranking Widget

Alexa.com is a site which provides traffic details and ranks websites all over the internet. The ranking is based on various sources which the site collects, with the main source being the visiting trend of users of Alexa toolbar.

You can check your site's Alexa ranking at the website for free. The site also provides a widget for site owners and bloggers like me, there are three kinds of widgets available:

1. Alexa Traffic graph - Shows a graph with selectable site stats in a time period with an option to compare to two other sites. Unfortunately it works only for the top 100,000 sites as seen below my site is not in the top 100,000.

2. Alexa Site Stats button - Shows the site rank and the number of links coming in. Available in three display formats - button, vertical banner and horizontal banner. I like the button version the best since its small, the other two banners are a waste of space. I found that the links-in figure is incorrect, it shows the same for all blogspot bloggers.

3. Alexa Traffic Rank button - This shows a simple button with rank and the date it was last updated. I find this the best and it comes in three versions - small, regular and horizontal banner

As you can see above my alexa ranking is 12,948,622 as of 4 September 2008. It was somewhere in the middle of 13,000,000 last month.
If your site is new it will take some time for it to be ranked. And also if you are adding Alexa's widget it will help to increase your rank since Alexa will know your visitor traffic through this widget.