Browser Bits in the News - Quickpost

Lots of web-browser bits have been in my RSS feed pile lately.

Here is a sizable collection for your review and bookmarking.

Security Related

• SSLPersonas, making the padlock obvious. - Malwarebytes Unpacked - I like the concept but the graphic was a bit too bold IMHO.
• Are you a robot? Introducing “No CAPTCHA reCAPTCHA” - Google Online Security Blog - GSD has been flooded in the past several months with an update in comment-spam. I seriously debated turning comments off, however there wasn’t a granular way on Blogger to keep the current comments visible and suspend commenting. So, since I do like the discussions and comments from the GSD support base -- and I guess keeping things open so it wastes time for the comment bots and boiler-room comment spam drone workers -- the comments remain open. And I will continue to rely on Blogger’s spam-filters to catch most of them.
• The No CAPTCHA problem - Egor Homakov - and counterpoint analysis
• The New Malwarebytes Anti-Exploit 1.05 - Malwarebytes Unpacked - I really like the promise of Anti-Exploit. Lavie continues to “pilot” it on her Win 8.1 system. However I also run EMET on our systems and AE seems to require some significant tweaking of the EMET rule-set to get Internet Explorer to run “normally” when both are installed at the same time.That said, I hope to one day see where they both can run concurrently without additional tweaking of default rule/behavior sets. Alas, this new version of AE didn’t bring it to me just yet.

Firefox Related

• Firefox 34/34.0.5 Released - Firefox Extension Guru's Blog
• Firefox 34.0.0 vs 34.0.5 - Firefox Extension Guru's Blog - Thanks Guru! Your explanation helped me.
• New Features In Firefox 34 For Desktop And Android - AddictiveTips
• Firefox — Notes (34.0) – Mozilla
• Mozilla to finally bring Firefox to iOS – iMore
• Mozilla moves closer to releasing Firefox for iOS - The Verge

Chrome Related

• The Best Chrome Extensions - MakeUseOf -  I have some of these already and will be looking into a few to see if they will be worth adding.

GPU acceleration in the web browser

• Impact of GPU Acceleration on Browser CPU Usage - Helge Klein -  Awesome post about GPU and impact in browser performance and CPU loading. I went down a rabbit-hole after reading this post!  I’ve disabled GPU acceleration (for now) in my Firefox and Chrome/Chromium builds and generally find faster launch times and performance. YMMV. I’ve made my Chrome/Chromium tweaks via the command line switch method (--disable-gpu) as opposed to changing “flags”. In Firefox I used the check-box in the options.
• List of Chromium Command Line Switches - Peter Beverloo
• The GPU process still runs with --disable-gpu - Google Groups - Worked fine on my systems but had a co-worker that the standard command line method didn’t suppress the GPU feature as seen in his Chrome task manager window.
• A list of useful Google Chrome command line switches - gHacks Tech News
• How to Disable Hardware Acceleration (GPU Rendering) in Mozilla Firefox and Thunderbird to Fix Font Problem? - AskVG
• [Tip] Reduce Mozilla Firefox Loading Time by Disabling Hardware Acceleration Feature - AskVG

Also, in Chrome you can type “chrome://flags/” in the address bar and get a GUI and more fine-grained way to address/disable rendering options in the browser.

F12

• Announcing the redesigned F12 developer tools interface - IEBlog

Cheers,

Claus Valca