Firefox Tabs response slow ? Suspend Background Tabs can help

 

When you have too many tabs open in Firefox, its possible that overall browser experience is not smooth. There is a couple of reasons for that of which one is Background tasks. Just to clarify that background tasks are those which takes place at a certain interval of time and not always. So if you are downloading a file, it is not a background process but the email account which polls for new email every few minutes is a background process.

It’s quite possible that you might have one or few such background process that is taking place on one of the tabs and due to which you might not be able to switch tabs at all, or the other tabs are not closing, or just the whole thing is not working. This kind of processs are sometimes taken care by the browser itself by notifying but when it is not, you need an extension named as Suspend Background Tabs.

Features :

Suspend Background Tabs is an experimental extension for Firefox which tries to make Firefox more responsive by suspending such tabs and hence saving CPU Time. SO now any program which uses Javascript or Ajax to pull information, will not work. To test, load Facebook on one of the tabs and switch to another tab. You would notice that you will not see any new notification unless you switch and wait for few seconds.

Now many of you might prefer to have background process working for some of the websites. So for such websites, you can pin them by making a right click over the tab and then choose Option of Pin as App Tab. Then under Extension Option, you can choose to enable background process for such tabs.

What is not suspended :

Tabs which are downloading a file or have videos which you are buffering, remain unaffected by this extension.

Suggestions :

• A white list of websites which the extension can skip automatically.
• Allow user to choose if they want to buffer videos or suspend that too.

Overall my experience using this was pretty smooth. I have loads of tabs open all the time, for which, I prefer using all three browsers but with this at least one can be skipped. However I have to be smart enough to always remember that I dont forget to pin websites which I need the background task to work.

Download

Download the extension from here via TechDows <  GHacks

Textme lets you send Text, Image, Links and Images to any mobile from your browser

Textme lets you send Text, Image, Links and Images to any mobile from your browser

 Sharing the same stuff which you are reading on your desktop to a mobile phone is one of the features that many of us hope becomes an integral part of the browser but until then we have some awesome third part apps which can do it for us. One of the posts we discussed how you can send it using the QR Code but today we have even a better service, Textme which lets you send anything on your browser to a mobile phone via SMS.

 

 

 All you need is visit the website, and install the extension for your browser ( Supported for FireFox, Chrome, Safari, Opera and IE ),  Once installed, you can signup with them with your phone number and then just visit a page, right click and share to a number you want.

So its basically a SMS sending service but has certain advantages. When you share a link of any web page, the user gets to see a mobile optimized website instead of a web page which is made for  desktop. Second you not only send just whatever is on a web page but also a text from your email or a custom message. Lastly, all the messages which is sent using this service is listed on your account and can be accessed via the extension interface.

From the point of view of the user who receives it, the biggest advantage is that he does not receive any kind of spam along with it. Also if he wants to quit getting SMS from Textme i.e. To opt-out of Textme, SMS ‘TEXTME STOP’ to 575758. However this should be told to the users in at least one of the SMS, otherwise he or she has no way to know about it.

Textme also comes with a widget or button which publishers can add it to their websites, so users can share the webpage to anybody on mobile, right from there and without having the extension installed.

Check out TextMe

 

 

Get notified when a place physically changes on Google Maps

If you been tracking places on earth for any physical changes, like construction of building or if the lake is getting dried up using Google Maps, Follow Your World App can let know you when it actually changes. Yes now you need not to spend time checking every few hours a day to find it.

With Follow Your World App you can pin point a location on any place on earth and next time there is an update in the Google Maps satellite and aerial imagery, it will send you can email. You can have multiple points like this which is available under dashboard. Make sure you read the FAQ for complete understanding.

Update :

After almost a year, I got an email back from Follow Your World which notified me that above marked place was changed. Totally awesome. You can see in the image below, how Follow Your World spotted a difference when it saw change in colours. This happened because of recent renovation at the stadium.

You also get a Dashboard which lists down all the places you are tracking with details on when you where notified last, Status one click to unsubscribe from it. The only drawback is there is no way to edit once you have submitted it. So if you want to change, unsubscribe and create new point.