While visiting Fox News (www.foxnews.com) tonight the image below kept popping up in Google Chrome:

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?

Since I’ve started doing more web development over the last couple of years, I’ve become much more interested in how web sites appear in different browsers.  This page article is going to show how this web site, at least a small corner of it, appears in a different browsers on several operating systems.  This isn’t an exhaustive review of any of the browsers.  It’s really just to demonstrate the appearance of one web page in various browsers.

Camino

Chrome

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

FireFox

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

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 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

Safari

Conclusion

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

Another entry in the continuing series of identifying applications that want to install free Internet Explorer toolbars.

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

An interesting free disk defragmenting program, SmartDefrag from IOBit, contains this free browser tool bar offer.  It also helpfully offers to change my search engine.

WebRoot has changed their installation dialog a bit.  The “we’re going to install the toolbar unless you say ‘no'” message now appears on the very first screen of the installation dialog.  At least I don’t have to go looking for it; that is an improvement.  Better still would be to assume that I don’t want it installed.

Once again, another application, Winzip, wants to install a free toolbar for Internet Explorer.

I’m probably dense, but I don’t get what the attraction behind loading down Internet Explorer with all of these “free” toolbars is all about.  This is particularly true when it is an application that I would otherwise pay for, like WinZip.