Is Gmail tied to IE?

Something wierd happened today… I use both IE and FireFox on my laptop. Also, my office WiFi uses a proxy and Home WiFi doesn’t use one. So, everyday when I come home and try to connect to the internet, I have to uncheck the USE PROXY CONFIGURATION options in the network settings in the browsers.

Today I came home and unchecked the proxy option in FireFox and opened gmail and composed a message. So far so good. Then when I tried to attach two files to the mail, It failed. It tried multiple times using the RETRY link and yet nothing worked.

Then out of sheer doubt I opened IE and unchecked the proxy option. Then came back to FireFox and hit the retry link. Guess what? It works now!!

Question:

1. Is firefox using IE settings for file upload?
2. Or is somehow file uploading in Windows closely coupled with IE no matter which browser you use?
3. Or is this something that folks at Google missed or wanted us to ignore?

Is Google Chrome really that great?

Like every other geek in this world, I also downloaded the Chrome on Tuesday and have been using it for almost a week now. Honestly, I liked it. I am not sure whether I would quit using firefox though. The chrome has a long way to go before I would think of making it my default browser. And looking at Google’s past products, I am very skeptical about how better it can get. Look at Gmail or Google Talk or Google Notebook or Google Desktop. When was the last time they updated any of these with new features? I agree that a company needn’t release updates just for the sake of it. But, products like Google Talk lack in many features. They have a long way to go before they reach parity with other similar products in the market. I hope Google doesn’t follow that pattern to their Chrome life cycle also. Firefox and IE are cranking out innovative updates like crazy.

Anyway, there are many things I did like about Chrome. Like their downloads, popups, cool window sborders and those special pages - about:memory, about:stats, about:network, about:internets, about:histograms, about:dns, about:cache, about:crash, about:plugins, about:version. 

And there are stuff that I hate about Chroma – Lack of a decent settings section (Why is it tapping into the IE settings dialog?), lack of support for plugins, lack of a title bar on top of the window (the tabs look very cluttered on the edge of the window. Also the site names get unreadable in tabs and there is no titlebar which shows the title either!!!) and some more…

In the meanwhile, I came across this post today, which is pretty informative! 

Since everyone seems to be determined to cover Google’s newly-launched Chrome browser on every side, I have decided to join in after I’ve been playing with the browser for a few days and reading literally hundreds of posts about it everywhere. This post is intended to demystify Google’s browser a little and show that some of the hype around it is merely about Google actually launching a browser instead of the innovative approaches implemented in the browser itself – no matter how hard Google may try to persuade everyone the browser is full of entirely new ideas not seen anywhere else.

Myth 1: Separate processes for each tab

This seems to be the most hyped feature of Google Chrome – the one everyone seems to be very excited about after having Firefox crashes caused by a process running in one of the tabs. Unfortunately, there is some disappointment here as this approach is far from new and it is even used in Internet Explorer 8 beta – the browser everyone thinks Chrome is intended to compete with. Microsoft named this “tab isolation” and the feature description reads: “If a website or add-on causes a tab to crash in Internet Explorer 8, only that tab is affected. The browser itself remains stable and other tabs remain unaffected, thereby minimizing any disruption to your browsing experience.” Does not it sound familiar after all those reviews of Chrome everyone must have read already?

[ 10 Myths about Google Chrome Browser ]

Gmail redesigned!

Really cool extension. They have only one style so far. But, even that one looks coool!! B) There has been many other extensions in the past that allowed you to apply skins to Gmail and add other cool stuff to Gmail. But, this extension is the only one where I really found the designs like-able and complete. What’s more? This extension also works its magic in GCalendar!!!

Google Redesigned is a Mozilla Firefox extension designed by Globex Designs that aims to fully redesign the look and feel of popular Google services. This is achieved with Cascading StyleSheet (CSS) files which are loaded on the client’s browser. The extension simplifies the use of these styles by providing auto-updates, easy management and notifications of changes. You can also download and use the styles individually by going to their respective pages.

Gmail Inbox

Gmail Login

Google Redesigned originally started as a single CSS file which tried to redesign Google‘s Gmail service. It has since grown to incorporate other various Google services and pages. Previously users of these styles would have to rely on other extensions such as Stylish, Greasemonkey or Web Developer to load these styles onto their browser which caused problems with updates, bug submission and version tracking. The Google Redesigned extension aims to solve all those problems by offering the popular Globex Designs styles in a single, self-updating extension.

Google Redesigned is built for Mozilla based browsers (Firefox, Flock, IceWeasel, and such). Users using other browsers will not be to install the extension. Firefox 3 and Flock 2 are highly recommended as certain styles will not work correctly on older versions of the Gecko engine. As well the Firefox 3 engine provides much faster performance for handling these styles.

This is an open source project, which means we welcome all suggestions, comments and bug reports. You can submit your feedback at the Google Redesigned Forums. The Extension and all the Google Redesigns styles are licensed under the GPL license.

[ Get the extension here ]