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When you type keywords into your Firefox address bar and hit enter it usually goes off and searches a particular search engine for you. e.g. Google (as the default) but sometimes other applications you install override this behaviour and replace a Google search with their own search.

In my case I accidently chose to install the Ask toolbar along with another piece of software I actually wanted on my machine. Ok I thought, that was a mistake so I’ll just go and uninstall the Ask toolbar and everything will be fine, right? Wrong! Removing the Ask toolbar alone will not reset the default options in Firefox that were overwritten when the toolbar initially installed.

Thankfully though this is something that’s pretty easy to fix, even if it might look complicated. Here’s how you do it:

1. Type about:config into the firefox address bar (the place where you’d normally type a web address) to open up the firefox config options
2. In the filter box enter: keyword.URL
3. Double click the value column to change the the default url used for keyword searches
4. Enter the search url you actually want to use e.g: http://www.google.com/cse?cx=partner-pub-6458081723116676:1i1tbs-63yw&ie=ISO-8859-1&sa=Search&q=

It’s that easy!

Also you’ll probably find other search options have been overwritten. The others I found that needed changing back were anything in the browser.search group. i.e. if you filter the config options by browser.search as above, you’ll see various options that have the value Ask (in my case) All of these need to be changed back to say Google or Google.co.uk or whatever is appropriate.

This is an interesting article from the Google operating system blog about plugin support in the Google Chrome Browser:

http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2008/12/on-google-chromes-future-support-for.html

With this approach however I have to ask myself, will Chrome ever exceed the abilities of Firefox?

It'd be nice if it did, but it seems like Chrome will always be in a lagging position, unless Google can really add something noticeably ground breaking...

Google chrome is a new lightweight browser released by Google, which is meant to be faster, safer, etc. and optimised for web apps such as Google provides (and I use).

I judge a browser by it's speed when I'm using it on the train (into and out of work), via my mobile broadband and what I can actually do with it in terms of functionality, and unfortunately I'm not impressed.

I don't like bloated software, but I don't like software that's so minimal I can't really use it.

So, though seemingly very fast on a standard internet connection, google chrome has been very slow on my mobile broadband, noticeably slower than firefox but not as slow as internet explorer. Gmail is comparativly slow as are other google apps such as igoogle.

Features wise it's not much better -  so far, it's so minimalistic it's almost unusable. Don't get me wrong, it has a few nice things in it but it's missing all the things I need and use every day.

So what's the answer?

Well I may be able to spped up the browser by turning off the usage statistics reporting (though this is on in firefox without issue), so I'll give that a try soon.

And if google produce a plugin API for chrome and developers actually code for it that'd be great. But saying that, what would be better (for me at least) is an interface that allows you to use native chrome plugins if they exist but, also import firefox plugins where possible.

As it stands, unfortunately, I'm quite underwhelmed with the usefulness of chrome and kinda wish it'd been released with a bit more usefulness than it currently has, at the very least it could have google toolbar options built in...

Lets hope they build on it quickly or else it'll just become another niche product for die hard googlephiles.

OK....

Let's make history.....

LOL.....

Oh Well...