Microsoft announced earlier this month that they would be accelerating Internet Explorer 9 adoption by automatically pushing it through Windows Update. A lot of users might not be happy with this decision since there are websites and web applications that are still being optimized for the browser. Not everyone want’s Internet Explorer 9 automatically installed, so this guide will show you how to stop IE9 from installing automatically through Windows Update.

Microsoft’s Announcement about IE9 installing through Windows Update:

Since its availability on March 14th, IE9 has been available for manual download and we are pleased by the early and continued enthusiasm for IE9. We are seeing not only strong customer and business demand, but some of the highest web and application compatibility rates in IE history, not to mention all the sites that are taking advantage of HTML5 and IE9’s Windows 7 integration. On March 28^th, we began to upgrade existing IE9 Beta and RC users through Windows Update.

How to Prevent Internet Explorer 9 From Automatically Installing

Click Start, type: windows update.

Hit Enter on your keyboard.

Click the link to view important updates are available.

In the list of Important right click Windows Internet Explorer 9 for Windows 7, right click it and click Hide Update.

That’s it! Internet Explorer 9 will not install itself automatically.

When you are ready to install Internet Explorer 9, just go back to Windows Update, and under Control Panel Home click ‘Restore Hidden Updates’.

If Internet Explorer 9 was installed automatically, you can uninstall it manually, and your previous version of Internet Explorer will be restored. For more information, check out our guide on to how to uninstall Internet Explorer 9.

How to Prevent Internet Explorer 9 from Automatically Installing Through Windows Update is a post by Andre from Notebooks.com.

New versions of the popular Google Chrome browser will take additional steps to prevent users from the dark side of the Internet by blocking, or warning users of, malicious windows installer files. Most often, these types of websites promise free screensavers or tools, but only deliver a headache in the form of viruses and other nasty programs.

When users try to download a file that Google knows to be suspicious, the warning above will be displayed. The warning is slightly different from the standard Chrome warning when you download a program from the internet, but we think it could be a bit more in your face as users have been trained to just click save or Yes too often.

The new feature has been rolled out to the development build of Chrome for testing, but is expected to arrive in the next stable release of Chrome that will be pushed out to Chrome users.

Once the new protections are built into Chrome, we’d suggest switching your parents and other users that need a little help keeping malware and viruses off their computer, or as the we like to say – “Meet your dad’s new browser”.

The new system will make use of the existing Safe Browsing API which currently protects users of Chrome, Firefox and Safari when they try to visit a website suspected of containing malware. The new extension of the Safe Browsing API takes things further, looking for files that appear to be legit, but actually compromise security.

These websites have not been blocked in the past because they weren’t trying to automatically download malicious files, but rather depending on users to willingly download the software. The software can display spam, launch popups, perform click fraud and steal passwords and other personal information.

While other browsers use the Safe Browsing API, it’s not clear if, or when, Firefox and Safari might add this new feature to protect users from themselves.

Chrome will Block Malicious Windows Installers – Your Dad’s New Browser is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Another busy week is wrapping up and we’ve pulled together the biggest notebook, tablet and smart phone news of the week, including our Best of CTIA winners, to help you get caught up on what’s going on in technology.

The biggest news of the week was arguably the CTIA Wireless 2011 show in Orlando which was the showcase for a collection of cool phones, tablets, apps and accessories. We were on the show floor to go hands on with the hottest devices which will be arriving at carriers like Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile and Verizon as soon as April.

You can see our Best of CTIA Winners at Notebooks with videos, or click the individual links to see our individual coverage.

Best Smartphone of CTIA 2011: HTC EVO 3D

Best Tablet of CTIA 2011: HTC EVO View 4G

Best Simultasking and Multitasking Smartphone of CTIA 2011: Kyocera Echo

Best Gaming Smartphone of CTIA 2011: Sony Xperia Play

Best Affordable Smartphone of CTIA 2011: Nokia Astound

What we love about CTIA is that the devices are actually coming to market soon, instead of taunting us for months on end.

Notebook News For the Week of March 25th:

Over at Notebooks we have reviewed the new Lenovo ThinkPad x220, and covered a collection of announcements about new consumer notebooks which means that you can actually start buying some Sandy Bridge notebooks!

New Notebooks for March 2011:

• iBUYPOWER Releases a Trio of Sandy Bridge Gaming Systems
• Gigabyte’s Powerful P2532 Notebook May be Thinnest Sandy Bridge Machine
• New Alienware M11x R3 Specs Leak, 2nd Gen Core CPU
• Gateway NV51B05u and NV51B02u Arrive With AMD Fusion, Start at $399
• Sony VAIO with Thunderbolt and External GPU in the works
• Toshiba Portege R800 Notebooks Get Priced, Worth the Wait

Notebook News:

• The Right Price for Core i7 Notebooks Revealed [Buying Advice]
• Japan Quake To Disrupt Consumer Notebook Supply During Back to School Rush
• Apple MacBook Pro 2011 Users Reporting Issues
• Chrome 11 Beta Available with Speech Input, GPU Acceleration and New Icon

Tablet and SmartPhone News for the Week of March 18th:

• 4 Ways to Protect the Back of the iPad 2
• HTC ThunderBolt Gets An Easy Root Method
• Top 5 Reasons to Jailbreak on iOS–Should You Do It to Your iPhone, iPad?
• Amazon Appstore for Android Coming March 22?
• Rumor: iPhone 5 launching in Q3 with 4-inch display, metal chassis
• Wife Makes Husband Return iPad 2, Apple Sends Him Free Replacement
• Nook Color to Get App Store, Flash and Angry Birds As Early as April

Notebook and Accessory Reviews:

• Twelve South BookArc Stand Review: High Quality MacBook Stands
• OnLive Gaming Review: The Future of Gaming
• Lenovo ThinkPad X220 Review
• Review: Kanex iAdapt HDMI Adapter for MacBooks
• iPad 2 App QuickShot Uploads Photos to DropBox Instantly

Popular How To Articles for the Week of March 18th:

• Listen to Music and Your Surroundings w/ Audio Monitor Pass Thru on Mac
• How to Fix Bad Group Photos with Photo Fuse [Fix a Face]
• How to Enable Pinch to Zoom and Twist Gestures in Firefox 4
• How to Sync files between 2 computers with Windows Live Mesh.
• Internet Explorer 9: 9 Tips For Getting Started & Getting More from IE9
• How To Upgrade to a Fast Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid Notebook Hard Drive (Review)
• How to Setup Time Machine on Your Mac [Mac OS X]

Weekly Wrap Up: Notebook, Tablet and Smart Phone News for March 25th is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

If you have a multi touch mousepad and have already downloaded Firefox 4, you can enable mulitouch gestures by changing a few settings. This will allow you to pinch to zoom in Firefox 4 and enable the use of a twist gesture to switch tabs.

To enable pinch to zoom, you need to head over to the configuration for Firefox 4 which isn’t under the menu, but rather typed into your address bar. The functionality is already in there, we just need to turn it on.

About:Config Settings in Firefox 4

Type about:config in your address bar.

Warning that you should only change what you know.

Click I’ll be careful, I proimise!

Enabling multitouch gestures in Firefox 4

In the filter box type “browser.gesture” without the quotes and you will see the list of options.

Turning Pinch to Zoom in Firefox 4

For the Pinch to Zoom double click on each of the following entries and past in the cmd portion.

  browser.gesture.pinch.in         cmd_fullZoomReduce

  browser.gesture.pinch.in.shift   cmd_fullZoomReset

  browser.gesture.pinch.out        cmd_fullZoomEnlarge

  browser.gesture.pinch.out.shift  cmd_fullZoomReset

To enable twist gestures, change these entries

  browser.gesture.twist.left       Browser:PrevTab

  browser.gesture.twist.right      Browser:NextTab

If you end up messing something up, you can go back in and change the entries back to the original blank to disable them.

Firefox 4 offers a new interface, speed improvements and features. To find out more, check out our Firefox 4 overview.

How to Enable Pinch to Zoom and Twist Gestures in Firefox 4 is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Internet Explorer 9 has been released, this IE 9 Review will let you know what’s new and how Internet Explorer 9 compares to Chrome and Firefox.

Last August Internet Explorer celebrated its 10th anniversary making it one of the oldest surviving web browsers on the market to date. Its interesting when you look back to the late 90’s, it was a time of heated competition in the web browser market specifically between Microsoft and Netscape Communications.

Of course, we know how that story ended with Microsoft dominating the market for a few years, until the resurrection of Netscape technologies in an open source format called Mozilla later morphed into the Mozilla Firefox Web Browser which debuted in 2004. Since 2003, the web browser competition has been heating up again and interesting enough, Microsoft which lagged for years because of complacency and fiasco’s surrounding the Windows Longhorn project which almost subsumed everything surrounding it is once again competing at a fast pace. Since 2007, Microsoft has released two new versions of its browser, Internet Explorer 7 and 8.

It’s a different landscape though, specifically the new challengers, Google Chrome (known best for its popular search engine), Apple Safari, Opera Software and Mozilla Firefox along with a few niche brands are all in the race to be the most popular web browser.

So what is Internet Explorer 9 is all about?

A number of things happened along the way to Internet Explorer 9, including the release of Google’s Chrome in particular which launched in the fall of 2008 and changed things tremendously.

Instead of primarily focusing on compatibility with websites which was atrocious in its early stages, Google focused on simplicity, usability and security. When you launch the new Internet Explorer 9 for the first time, you will immediately experience some of those same philosophies that have inspired Google.

What I particularly love about Internet Explorer 9 is how sleek and inviting it is to use, but dig deeper and you start appreciating a browser that is both simple in design yet powerful in its capabilities especially when it comes to integration with the Windows desktop. It is probably one of the key advantages that bring down the competition a notch.

Internet Explorer 9 is also the most standards compliant version of the browser to date, it includes a wide array of support for technologies such as CSS3 and SVG and a new JavaScript engine called Chakra, HTML5 audio, video, canvas tags, WOFF, CSS3 2D transforms and HTML5 semantic tags. All of these additions and improvements should help Web Developers create better cross platform experiences while not abandoning Microsoft for more friendly alternatives that have innovated ahead of IE over the past few years. Before I go any further, let’s start with some of the fundamentals.

Installation

I installed Internet Explorer 9 on my main computer running Windows 7 Ultimate 64 bit with Service Pack 1 installed. Installation was a breeze and took approximately 1 minute without even requiring a restart. I have noticed something ever since Microsoft launched its Windows Live Essentials 2011 suite of digital tools, it’s the focus on simplicity, when you hark back to the days of programs basically taking over your desktop and requiring that you do this and that before you even attempt to execute setup. Internet Explorer 9 is a breath of fresh air with its simple, yet elegant installer.

Simple, elegant Setup experience in Internet Explorer 9

Internet Explorer 9 is also supported on Windows Vista Service Pack 2, Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Windows Vista users will miss out on some of the desktop integration, but apart of from that, functionality wise, it’s identical to running it on Windows 7. Windows XP users, no IE9 for you, and it’s for obvious reasons, it’s not some artificial lock off on Microsoft’s part to get you to upgrade.

As Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch puts it “Building a modern browser requires a modern operating system.”

Microsoft said that the reason for dropping Windows XP are based on technical reasons, such as lack of support for Direct2D and DirectWrite DirectX APIs (applications programming interfaces) in Windows XP. These API’s in addition to security technologies are built into Windows Vista and Windows 7 just cannot be back ported Windows XP.

Windows XP is a 9 year old operating system, the extra burden to support 3 separate versions of Windows (XP, Vista, 7 in addition to various editions and Server releases is probably a bit too much even for a company with the resources of Microsoft). Its time people move on to Windows 7, if you want to experience the benefits of Internet Explorer 9, upgrade to Windows 7 or at least a minimum of Windows Vista SP2 (preferably Windows 7).

Internet Explorer 9 is a modern browser, that requires a modern operating system (Windows Vista or Windows 7) with modern technologies built in with support for Direct3D which adds hardware acceleration to the list of powerful features built into the browser. So, Windows XP users, if you want what IE 9 has to offer, you will just have upgrade or stick with Internet Explorer 8 or one of the third party alternatives.

Launch Internet Explorer 9 for the First Time:

The interface in Internet Explorer 9 has been streamlined to focus on the content of the web page removing some of the overbearing qualities of past versions. It’s a philosophy itself first spoken about with the introduction of the Windows AERO User Experience. The idea of making the content of the window be the star.

With Internet Explorer 9, the web page is front and center more than ever. The toolbar area has been exquisitely designed, Microsoft has dropped the number of toolbars down to just one. The Navigation buttons (back and forward), Address Bar and Tabs have been fused together along with a few toolbar controls (Home, Favorites and Tools). This might come across as controversial and I personally am still in the adjustment stags

. What I love though is the simplicity of it all, there is not this heap of features presented, just the essentials that a user needs especially since the idea of web pages are more app centric in this release. Having a litter of tabs in one window is not necessarily the best idea, you can read on further to understand why.

I notice when I launched the browser for the first time, I was greeted by a small notification strip at the bottom of the window recommending I Speed up startup and browsing by disabling add-ons.

Clicking the ‘Disable add-ons button, leads to a dialog which will display a list of add ons that might be affecting web browser performance. Talk about intuitive, this gives users better insight about how they can improve the performance of their web browsing experience.

As you can see in the above screenshot, add ons with red bar indicate how much time they are taking to load. Those with gray bars are minimal and can be left alone. This is a really great feature!

Internet Explorer 8 Bar

Internet Explorer 9 Bar

Internet Explorer User Experience

Website’s are probably not something users pay much attention to in the sense that, a lot of the details invested in application development and user experience that are often applied to desktop programs. With Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft hopes to change that thinking, the aim is to make website’s more app centric. In fact one of the cool things you can do with Internet Explorer 9 optimized website’s on Windows 7 is pin them to your Taskbar just like any other application such as Word or Photoshop.

A number of high profile web developers have focused on revamping their websites just for IE 9, these include Ebay, CNN, Redbull, Amazon.com and IMDB, to name a few. During the beta, Microsoft announced 70 partners who had all optimized their sites for the beta, hundreds more have done so since and you should see a lot of interesting websites build great experiences around Internet Explorer. The intention really is to blur platforms a bit, to make the web as much a part of the desktop as possible.

It’s an interesting approach, what I believe this will do is create better brand consciousness among web developers to focus more on the quality of the website, such as how easy it is navigate, the use of colors and layout, even down to the most minute details such as the Webicon.

Pinning a Website to the Windows 7 Taskbar with IE9

When you pin a webicon to your Taskbar, you will notice familiar Windows 7 functionality, such as the ability to right click the icon and access Jump List. This is great for my favorite sites that I open first thing everyday, such as Twitter, Facebook, CNET News, ZDNET and many others. There could be more intuitiveness about how you pin a webicon to the Taskbar, I thought you did it by right clicking a Tab, but later discovered this is done by holding down on the website’s webicon in the Address Bar, then drag it to the Taskbar. Although drag and drop is a natural action over the years, a quicker method would be to have a right click the webicon menu in the Address bar with a pop menu displaying option to pin to the Taskbar.

Co-branded identity

Here is an interesting branding idea I noticed is a part of Internet Explorer 9. Web developers can now customize IE 9 to reflect the core identity of their site. An example of this is through elements such as the Back and Forward Navigation buttons with colors specific to that website. Similar color coordinated colors for applications on the Taskbar, such as a blue button representing Microsoft Word. It’s a more engaging way for sites to embrace the desktop and a bit of personality along with clear identification to a user.

Chrome and Firefox have a lot of catching up to do with features like this.

This is just a tip of the iceberg though, the key integration is when you check out the Jump List features. Not all sites support it at the moment, but I am sure they will over time. Two examples are Twitter and Facebook. When you pin either social network to the Taskbar, you will see unique Jump List Tasks such as @Mentions, Direct Messages, New Message, Search and Favorites. Facebook offers its own unique task such as News, Messages, Events and Friends. This immediately blows Chrome and Firefox out of the water. The idea of opening up the browser and typing in a URL or click a favorite link to your site then navigating to a specific location is unnecessary. Jump List integration is just spectacular!

More Windows 7 Integration

The integration doesn’t end there either, Internet Explorer 9 also takes advantage of other Aero functionality such as Snap. One of the cool effects in Windows 7 is Aero Snaps which allows you to snap to windows to the side of the screen which automatically fills the half of the screen. This is great for doing reference or comparison activities. With Internet Explorer 9, it’s a breeze.

Here is an example, I have two tabs open in my Twitter window (my Twitter Home Page and my @Mentions page), suppose I want to compare the two at the same time. With IE 8 or Firefox, I could do a Tear off tab action then use then use the Aero Snaps feature to compare both windows. But why bother going through all that process?

What I will do is simply drag the window with my Twitter Home page to the left of the screen. Now check out the next option.

Here you can see I am simply dragging off the tab for my @Mentions window to right.

There I go, as easy as that. Now I can do whatever comparison or reference I want with both windows on screen. When I decide that I am finished, all I need to do is simply drag it back into the original window! How amazing is that?

It’s synergies like these that show the level of sophistication and thought that has gone into the user experience for this release of Internet Explorer 9. It’s another example of why Internet Explorer 9 was not possible on Windows XP.

Security and InPrivate Browsing

Tracking Protection or “Do Not Track” formerly called InPrivate Filtering, is a consumer focused security feature that helps to protect your online privacy. What IE 9 will allow you to do is prevent sites from tracking your online movements. Do Not Track is opt-in technology that requires users to find, download, and install tracking lists that will block certain websites from following users online. It is expected that third party providers will help to construct tracking lists support this feature.

Another great security improvement in IE 9 is ActiveX Filtering, with this technology, users can have more control over what gets loaded on a webpage. So, you can have certain ActiveX controls or none at all loaded on a particular web page if you wish. With ActiveX Filtering, you can turn off ActiveX controls for all Web sites and then turn them back on selectively as you see fit.

With ActiveX Filtering, you choose which sites are allowed to use your ActiveX controls, while all other Web sites cannot use them. ActiveX Filtering helps limit the impact that ActiveX controls have on your browsing experience since the controls can run only on specific sites. ActiveX Filtering also prevents Web pages from showing potentially unwanted content that relies on ActiveX controls.

Internet Explorer 9 Performance

Performance is probably the most critical area of the Internet Explorer 9 experience. Microsoft has made some critical improvements. I noted earlier such as the Disable Add on feature, but this is only a minor aspect. Internet Explorer 9 is going at the deepest level meaning the entire computer contributes to the browsers speed, these include processor, memory and in particular Video Graphics or Graphics Processing Unit (GPU).

Microsoft calls this Accelerated Graphics. This provides are more dynamic web experience by utilizing the power of the GPU to handle the rendering and processing of video and images to speed up presentation and load time of pages.

For example, watching HD Videos in IE 9 is much smoother compared to Firefox and Chrome, this is not a biased assumption, you can try it yourself and see the difference especially with CPU usage, IE is less taxing on the system compared to Firefox. This is based on low level improvements introduced in Windows 7 and Vista through Direct2D.

I decided to try out 15 of my favorite websites I tried last year in my Internet Explorer 8 review, along with two other browsers, Firefox 3.5.9 and Google Chrome 9.

I did these tests on a 8 MB  Cable Connection. They are unscientific, since I timed the loads using a stop watch, but do show evidence of speed gains.

Cool Internet Explorer 9 Features

I want dive more into changes to user interface. As you can see the interface is major update, its refreshing, inviting and attractive. It makes you want to use it and benefit from it more. Internet Explorer 8 included some well needed improvements to the Address Bar such as auto complete suggestions for sites that you might want to go to, suggestions are based on your history of websites you like to visit, your personal web browsing history and feeds that you have subscribed to.

Typing in a URL offers some address bar tricks, if you click the arrow below the URL in the middle, it will reveal a number of commands:

• Go to – Enter
• Navigate to – Ctrl + Enter
• Open in a new tab – Alt + Enter
• Open in a background tab – Alt + Shift + Enter

Autocomplete suggestions in IE 8 as noted are based on your sites visited, browser history. In Internet Explorer 9, you can now get real time feedback based on Bing results. This is turned off by default and you will have to manually turn it on (privacy reasons). The most dramatic improvement is the fusion of search into the Address, just like Google Chrome with its Smart Bar feature. So, you not only can enter URLs, you can do web searches right there too.

No suggestions for CNN.com in Internet Explorer 8

Suggestions from Bing, I can even choose other services such as Google – Internet Explorer 9

The new Tab window button is so much faster than Internet Explorer 8. I am sure many of us know how molasses slow it was, not anymore! It opens instantly and displays a list of your most recently visited websites. It looks like Tab Gallery has been incorporated into the new New Tab page.

The use of colors in these changes are very interesting. Users will notice that a display of the sites that you visit most often are shown, along with a color coordinated bar below each, indicating how actively you visit the site. The length of the bar is an indication of frequency.

From here you can perform tasks including reopening closed tabs along with your last browser session. You can also hide sites you don’t see or reveal or even start an InPrivate Browsing session. It would have been nice to have non-adjacent selection support here to quickly close a batch of sites on the fly.

The three buttons at the top right don’t reveal anything new, the Home button does as it suggest, takes you to your home page. The Star reveals all your Favorites, History and Feeds. The Bolt (Tools menu) list all common Options and Settings for the browser. I am disappointed that Internet Explorer 9 does not introduce a new Internet Options window. I personally think its cluttered and need to be revamped with a similar look and feel to the one in Microsoft Office 2007/2010. It would be nice if the IE Team added a File menu tab similar to the one in Office 2010 apps, with a Backstage like interface.

Internet Explorer 9 Wishes Come True

Last year I asked for some things I would have liked to see in Internet Explorer 8, let’s see if these features made it into Internet Explorer 9.

Download Manager – Trust me, Internet Explorer needs this feature, I find options like Pause/Resume and Manage very handy in FireFox and Safari.

Result: Yes, finally! Microsoft has introduced an interesting approach for downloading and running an executable in Internet Explorer 9. The old download dialog has now been phased out and replaced by a notification strip at the bottom when you click a download link, you have the option of running it, saving it or click cancel. You can click the View Button which will reveal the all new Download Manager. The Internet Explorer 9 Download Manager allows you manage downloads, pause, resume and even scan your downloads for malicious code.

The all new Internet Explorer 9 Download Manager

You can quickly access the Download Manager by pressing CTRL + J or click the Tools menu and click View Downloads.

Better Text Selection: Non-adjacent Selection of text on web pages.

Result: Didn’t make it. Maybe for IE 10.

Customizable toolbar: I personally wouldn’t mind if buttons such as Home, Feeds, Print, Page, Tools and Help were on a another toolbar group such as the Address bar group, I need more real estate for Tabs that’s much cleaner. The new Favorites Bar in particular eats up a lot of space.

Result: Nope, and for obvious reasons, the new layout is more focused on putting emphasis on the web page instead of the browser window.

List View layout for Options: Similar to Office 2007 Options dialog. Also make the Advance settings a part of the list view Options, this includes: Accessibility, Browsing, International, Multimedia.

Result: No, but we can hope for IE 10 on this one also.

Print Preview Tab: Make Print Preview utilize a Tab instead of opening a separate window.

Result: Nope, but what I notice is that Printer Preview took a long time to compose a window of the preview.

One Installer: One unified 32-bit and one unified 64-bit installer.

Result: No, you must download for Windows 7 64 bit, Windows 7 32 bit, Windows Vista 64 bit and Windows Vista 32 bit. Microsoft, would love if Microsoft could have simplified this.

Conclusion

It’s safe to say Microsoft is once again in the browser game. Internet Explorer 9 is a polished, well designed, elegant browser, which keeps up with the competition while at the same innovating with new experiences that you can surely expect rivals will have a hard time copying and pasting into their next updates.

The key things that set Internet Explorer 9 apart from previous releases is the focus on standards compliance, performance, Windows 7 integration and user experience.

When it comes to standards compliance, the Internet Explorer Team understands that this is a different game and web developers will simply go where they are acknowledged and respected.

Performance, it’s no lie that Internet Explorer has lagged for years, both in web page performance and the browsers functionality, actions like opening a tab was atrociously slow in IE 7 and 8, IE 9 fixes that and adds new capabilities end users will appreciate.

The integration with the operating system and hardware technologies such as accelerated graphics support will help to further prove just how powerful and worthy an upgrade IE 9 is.

Finally, user experience, Internet Explorer 9 is sexy, its sleek design, tight integration with the Windows 7 desktop with features such as pinned websites will provide users with a more intimate web experience while opening up a whole new way for web developers to communicate with their audience. Kudos to the IE Team on a job well done!

Internet Explorer 9 Review is a post by Andre from Notebooks.com.

Mozilla has finally graduated its Firefox 4 browser out of beta and the Mac, Windows, and Linux edition of the popular Internet browser is now available as a release candidate in over 70 languages. The browser brings a new look and additional features, chief of which is faster speeds. With a new Javascript engine, Firefox 4 RC is faster than the beta editions and is up to 3 times faster when benchmarked with Sunspider. According to Mozilla, “From faster start up times and graphics rendering to improved page load speed, you’ll notice the difference instantly.”

Firefox 4 retains support for third-party add-ons and Mozilla says that about 70% of the add-ons from Firefox 3 are compatible with the new browser. Additionally, there are security improvements and broader support for HTML5 on the Internet, including compatibility with HD videos and Google’s WebM format.

You can visit Mozilla to download Firefox 4 for your system.

Mozilla Firefox 4 Exits Beta as Release Candidate Version is a post by Chuong Nguyen from Notebooks.com.

The Motorola Atrix 4G Android smart phone caught our attention at CES 2011 thanks to the ability to connect it to a dock, like the Motorola Webtop laptop accessory and use the phone as the brains of a laptop. This laptop mode allows you to work in a Firefox browser and to use your apps at the same time. The Webtop is a handy accessory, but at $499, you’d be better off purchasing a HP dm1z or a Lenovo X120e netbook to use when you need a “desktop” experience.

Thankfully, if you want to use the laptop mode on your Motorola Atrix 4G without spending a fortune on the Webtop or the official dock you’re in luck. Fenny, a developer at the xda-developers forum, posted a set of files you can install to turn on the laptop mode on your Atrix 4G without the Webtop. This means that you can plug in any display to the HDMI connection on the Atrix 4G and use the smartphone as you would a notebook.

Once you install the files, which can be done without rooting your phone, you only need a HDMI cable to get started. This may not be as handy as a Webtop, but if you want to connect to a monitor or HDTV in a hotel, you can now use the desktop like experience without paying for an expensive dock.

If you want to make the most of this setup, we suggest getting a Bluetooth keyboard and a Bluetooth mouse to connect to your Atrix 4G so that you don’t need to rely on the on screen keyboard.

Here is a Hands On Video of the Motorola Atrix 4G which gives you a closer look at the device:

Here is a closer look at the Webtop experience:

One more look at Webtop applications:

How To Use the Motorola Atrix as a Laptop without the Dock [hack] is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

Mozilla has released a new beta version of Firefox 4, the company’s next iteration of the popular Firefox browser. The latest beta version of Firefox 4 includes improvements to startup speed, bookmarking and animation smoothing as well as delivering many new features that you won’t find in the existing Firefox 3 versions.

In the Firefox 4 beta the tabs have a new location, shifted above the search bar like we see in Chrome and in addition tot he movement, you can also switch to an open tab when you search for something in the search bar. For example, if you have a Wikipedia tab open and begin to type in Wikipedia you have the option of switching to your open tab instead of cluttering your tabs bar.

Also cleaning up the user experience is the introduction of App Tabs. App Tabs allow you to keep frequently used programs always open and somewhat minimized so that you don’t accidentally close them and so they don’t take up a bunch of room on your tab bar.

Another new feature in the Firefox 4 Beta is syncing which allows you to keep your tabs, history, bookmarks and passwords in sync across computers and other mobile devices with Firefox. Here’s a video of how to set up Firefox Sync.

The latest version of Firefox is still in beta which means it is for testing and shouldn’t be used in critical situations involving your day-to-day work. While the word “beta” has lost it’s edge and many times the “beta” versions are safe to use as your primary tool we recommend installing the Firefox 4 beta alongside your existing browser.

If you want to install Firefox 4 alongside your existing Firefox 3 installation simply choose custom install and pick a new location for your Firefox 4 beta installation.

Mozilla Firefox 4 Beta Arrives with Sync, App Tabs and More is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

With the latest testing on the MacBook Air showing that simply having Flash installed when surfing the web can cut your battery life by 33% — just by serving the ads that appear on many webpages.

If you are going to be mobile and want to extend the battery life of your notebook you may want to disable Flash, but thankfully you don’t need to un-install it to achieve the same benefits by using a Flash Blocking plugin for Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer.

Flash Blocking Plugins for Popular Broswers:

• FireFox – Flashblock
• Chrome – FlashBlock
• Safari – ClickToFlash
• Internet Explorer – Built-In (How to Black Flash in IE

These plugins allow you to toggle between Flash and no Flash in, well, a flash.

How to Disable Flash in Chrome, Safari, Firefox and Internet Explorer is a post by Josh Smith from Notebooks.com.

If you are like many of us and have more than one Gmail account maybe a regular Gmail account and a Google Apps Gmail account then you might be struggling with having to switch between the accounts.

Google doesn’t make it easy to log into one Gmail account and then into another because it stores a cookie on your hard drive telling your system that you have already logged into the account. You will have to click once to log out, type in the new log in information and then click the button to log in or hit return. Minor problem, but if you multiply the extra clicking and typing by the number of times you switch accounts in a given day it can quickly add up.

The magic starts with using the Google Chrome Browser. It is a great browser with a fast rendering engine. It is very stable and has just about every kind of extension that Firefox has and is faster than Internet Explorer.

Once Chrome is installed you need to find the Swap My Cookies extension. What it does is quickly switch between two sets of cookies, one for most of your browsing needs and another for that second Gmail account. It will install a button on the toolbar that shows a drop down list of Cookie Profiles, which you set up.

Now that you have the extension installed, you will have to set up the Profiles. Log into your first Gmail account. Now click on the Swap My Cookies button and choose the settings icon. It looks like a wrench. The options screen will fill the browser window. At the bottom are the names of the Profiles. Click on the pencil icon and edit the name.

Choose a name that will help you remember which account it is. Now click on the New button or if there is already a second Profile click on the pencil icon again. Give it another name to differentiate it from the first. Check the other options and change any of them you like and close that tab.

Now switch to the other cookie by clicking on the Swap My Cookies button and choosing the second profile. The next time you go to the Gmail site, it will not remember your first login because under this second profile you have not yet logged in. Log in to your second account.

To switch back to the first account, again click on the Swap My Cookies button and choose the first account profile. If you have Gmail loaded in the browser window it will automatically switch accounts.

Remember, this is for Chrome. To do the same thing on Firefox, you can try the Firefox Extensions Multifox. Lifehacker has a good article explaining it.

How To Switch Between Two Gmail Accounts Using Chrome Browser is a post by Kevin Purcell from Notebooks.com.