AVG - Yahoo

I was surprised to note that when I installed AVG on the new Win-64 system that the toolbar was present in Internet Explorer any way.  I thought, initially, that it was some quirk of the installer on a 64-bit system to ignore the flag.  However, closer inspection of the dialog revealed my mistake.

This particular dialog contains two check boxes.  One is below the image in the usual place and one is above the image.  The one below (and the one I clicked to clear without looking at the rest of the dialog) controls whether or not Yahoo! is installed as the default search provider.  I don’t want programs changing my IE search provider either.

Sneaky, very sneaky.

Chrome Offers To Translate

The only problem with the offer to help is that the web site isn’t actually in German.

Actual Web Site

IrFanView and the Google Toolbar

IrFanView did it make it really easy to run a batch resize of the scans.  It just wanted to default to installing a pesky tool bar in explorer.

Java and the Bing Toolbar

Obviously one of the things that I do is make screenshots of these various applications that want to install these superfluous toolbars.  When Java Update first notified me of its desire to install this toolbar during the latest update, I did the normal ALT-PRTSCN to capture just the current window.  As soon as I did that and important part of the installation progress dialog went away.

Installer Hides Bing Option

You can see that the Java installer still wants to install the Bing Toolbar.  The installer lost the option to just say “No.”  It is kind of surprising to see part of the dialog disappear when a screenshot.  What’s so “secret” about making a screenshot of something that really shouldn’t be defaulted to “install” in the first place.

The only solution  was to cancel out of the update and start over.  The problems is that the Java Update application goes away and hides until it is ready to ask you about installing the latest Java update again.  It took a few rounds with this Java update to learn what was happening and to get the screenshot to make this post.

Fox News Responds

I guess something is better than nothing even after the problem seemed to have resolved it self.

Google Gears Warning

Obviously, I appreciate Chrome asking me whether or not to allow the web site to store information on my computer.  Questions, obviously, remain:

• What does Fox News want to store on my computer with Google Gears?
• Why does Fox News think that this is necessary?
• Is it one of Fox News “carefully selected partners”?  If it is, why does Fox News allow their partners to “store information” on my computer?

Without more information about what Fox News is attempting to do I’m always going to say “Deny” to these sorts of things.

This is new behavior.  It isn’t something I’ve ever seen from Fox News.  I haven’t seen any other web site attempt to use Google Gears to “store information” on my computers.  Running a Google search for the phrase “The website wants to store information on your computer using Gears”  doesn’t yield any useful information.  Either the issue happens infrequently or no one except me cares when websites want “to store information” on my computer.

Update

Based on Matt’s comments below I did a little digging.   Loomia is a “content recommendation engine”  (company, Wikipedia article).  It’s certainly a reasonable theory as to the source of the Gears popup.  I’ll still probably continue denying the request to store information without further details as to what is being stored.

The interesting thing now is that other browsers like Internet Explorer and Firefox are not showing a similar warning.  Is there some code behind the Loomia widget that behaves differently when Chrome is detected as the browser?

Camino

Camino (Mac OS X)

Chrome

Chrome (Mac OS X)

Chrome (Windows XP)

Chrome on Mac OS X is still a beta, so it isn’t quite as robust as its Windows counterpart.

FireFox

FireFox (Mac OS X)

FireFox (Windows XP)

I’ve been finding lately that the latest version of FireFox (3.5) on Windows takes a long time to load.  So long, in fact, that I often end up starting additional instance because I think that I somehow missed clicking on the icon.  Regardless of the slow load, it is hard to beat the Firebug plugin for buidling web sites.

Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer (Windows XP)

I know that Internet Explorer 8 is supposed to bring all sorts of useful and cool enhancements, but I haven’t been able to figure out what they are or how they could make my web browsing exerience more satisfying.  The only thing that I’ve seen that is different is that IE8 locks up more frequently than IE7.  As always, IE 8 remains the favorite (read as: only) target for third-party application browser application toolbars.

Maxthon

Maxthon (Windows XP)

Maxthon is a browser that I recently learned about.  My understanding is that it is quite popular in Asia, particularly China.  I don’t really like this browser.  You can’t really see if from this small screenshot, but the UI is, in my opinion, very busy.  If I’m going to work on web sites that could run in any browser, it is worthwhile to work with this one.

Opera

Opera (Windows XP)

Safari

Safari (Mac OS X)

Safari (iPhone)

Safari (Windows XP)

Conclusion

I find that my personal preference is trending towards Google Chrome on Windows (XP and Vista) and Mozilla Camino on Mac OS X.

Java and Yahoo

There is an interesting pattern that is beginning to develop with Sun and Java updates.  More about that in a later post.