Combine the lack of Google Toolbar support, along with missing a number of my Firefox extensions I’ve become dependent on and I just couldn’t make the full switch.

My friend said he felt the same way, but forced himself to use it for awhile and see if he could be productive without the extensions. He decided the speed increases in the browser were worth the lack of extensions. He still has Firefox installed on his machine, but it’s not his default browser. He uses Firefox when he needs to use one of his extensions.

I’m not sure I notice a huge speed increase on most sites, but as to be expected, Google sites do load significantly faster in my opinion. What I started to become more curious about was which browser had less of a processor footprint on the machine while running.

I decided to open the same page in each browser and then take a look at the memory and CPU usage for each in Windows Task Manager. Here are the results:

• Firefox 3.0: 04 CPU / 181,020 K Memory
• Internet Explorer 8: 00 CPU / 85,080 K Memory
• Google Chrome: 00 CPU / 27,300 K Memory

The results weren’t really shocking. I expected Firefox to be heavy because of all the extensions I’m using. Chrome would be light because there’s nothing running but the browser itself. IE8 sits in the middle.

I’ll keep playing with Chrome, but I still don’t see it replacing Firefox for me anytime soon.

Post from: EveryJoe

IE8, Firefox 3 and Chrome Processor Overhead

Billeo was developed to be a bill management application. It can track when bills are due, how much has been paid and can take snapshots of pages you are viewing. In addition, on Windows, it can keep track of your web passwords. This includes banking, credit card, email and some of those more risqué sites that you may or may not (but probably do) visit. The downside is the passwords are only stored on your computer and it’s Windows only.

Vidoop has come aboard and has not only created a great cross-browser application but they have a great security mechanism for keeping people out of your account. In order to log in (and install the toolbar/plugin), a user must first type their username, answer a security question and then verify by either telephone or email that they are in fact the user logging in. Finally, each time you want to log in during future sessions from that machine, a user has to pick out the three “types” of pictures that they chose during setup. This could be a computer, a fruit, an animal or almost anything else you can think of.

Finally, Passpack has made great advances in the security area. In addition to being able to access your information from almost anywhere on the internet, user’s information is never stored unencrypted on Passpack’s servers (it’s browser-side encrypted always) and can contain more than simple username and password combinations. This is great for storing other useful info like a bank account number or your hit list (if you’re in to that kind of thing). Tara, one of the founders of Passpack writes a great post of how to replace some of the tools that you may already be using with theirs (such as Google’s Browser Sync).

All-in-all there are some great tools for managing your passwords in your browser. Using these and other tools, you can keep both your information safe and your memory in tact.

Post from: EveryJoe

Smart password management right in your browser