New Browser Comparisons IE8 Vs Firefox 3 Vs Chrome 

I’ve read several reports recently that most people surfing the Internet do not utilize extensions on their browsers. This surprised me a bit, because I rely on so many extensions that the thought of not using them is shuddering. Maybe it is because I spend so much time on the Internet with my work, and maybe it is because I’m basically lazy, but not having extensions to lessen my workload, and improve my overall performance, to me, is like buying a car with no extras (like a stereo, or tires). 

For this set of articles however, I was asked to look at the “stock” performance of these three browsers, like I was a “normal” Internet surfer. 

Tabs

To start this set of comparison articles, I’m going to focus first on the Tabbing functions of the browsers. 

All three of the browsers (IE8, Firefox, Chrome) are tab browsers now. This is not a surprise, because tabs are simply a requirement these days. The actions of the tabs are a bit different with Chrome. In IE 8 and Firefox, when you hold the CRTL key down and click on a link, a new tab is opened at the end of your tab list. In Chrome, a new tab is opened just after the tab you opened the link from. 

This opening sequence is kind of nice once you realize what is happening, because it helps group topic sequences together by default. 

When opening new tabs, IE begins to slow down. IE is fairly fast with one or two tabs open, but when you reach 5 or 10 tabs, the whole computer begins to see a large drain on resources. 

With tabs open to some web sites, Firefox begins to slow down as well, and can even begin to error out, or do some rather confusing things until the browser is closed and restarted. It will even crash at times. 

I have not gotten Chrome to slow down or crash with opening tabs yet, and don’t think I haven’t tried. 

Basic Speed

Since we are not looking at the use of extensions or add-ons with these three browsers, speed definitely goes to Chrome, a hands down winner in both loading time, and the use of temporary caching on your computer so that coming back to a web page only loads what is new, and not every file a second time. 

The draw backs to Chrome are usability. The interface is sparse, incredibly sparse, and it is difficult at first glance to see what to do, or where to do it. 

IE is much sparser than it use to be, and more user friendly. I would guess that most users are familiar with the interface today anyway, but looking at it with “new eyes” I would guess that a new user could figure out how to get to a web site, or a search engine after a short study. 

Firefox is much better than both of these for user interface, maintaining a more familer menu layout, and ease of use format, which anyone familiar with any computer program will become comfortable with after only a few seconds. 

Page Loading

IE still has problems loading many web pages in the “intended” manner of the creator. This is due to a continued lack of keeping with Internet standards. This is a long story, and most professional web designers today simply make a version for IE and a version for the rest of the known world. However, you may come across a web site or two which doesn’t seem to look right in your IE browser. Unless you compare the web site using another browser, you will probably never realize the oddities. 

Both Firefox and Chrome use the Internet Standards, and I have not had any problems with Flash or other multimedia content with either of them. 

Crashing

Perhaps it is because I hammer on browsers all day long, visiting an average of 60+ new web sites a day, that I notice Firefox crashing more than I’m use to. It could also be running Firefox on Vista, but really that doesn’t make much difference at the time of the crash. 

IE crashes just as often as I’m use to. After about an hour of hard surfing, I normally restart the browser before it crashes, expecting it to freeze up on me soon. Not the best review for them, but I personally don’t like loosing work, so a quick restart is better than trying to find something I just lost. 

So far, I haven’t gotten Chrome to crash. Again, its not because I haven’t tried. However, because of the sparse interface and lack of any real tools, I am still not excited about Chrome at this time. 

Bookmarking

This is an area Chrome falls flat on its face, so does IE. Firefox allows you to “Save All Open Tabs” into a Bookmark folder with the click of a button. Chrome has a Star up by the address bar that allows quick bookmarking, if you know what that star is, but otherwise, bookmarking doesn’t even look like an option. 

IE is the same old slow, clumsy bookmarking it has always been, and again, with its tendency to slow down the computer when more than five or six tabs are open at one time, I guess it doesn’t matter much.

How to fix various Micorsoft Outlook Errors

There are a few Outlook Errors which tend to be more common than others. This article will hopefully help your fix errors with Outlook and troubleshoot various known issues.

Outlook Error Message “0×80004005″ Operation Failed

This message may appear in Outlook 2000, 2002 or 2003.

When you try to send or receive emails with Outlook you may get an error similar to “Sending and receiving reported error “0×80004005″ : The operation failed.” That error code could also be “0×800ccc0d” or “0×800ccc0e”. This could possibly be due to your security software which is blocking access to scripts. Do you ahve Norton AntiVirus installed? This particular application has a “Script Blocking” feature which you may have enabled.

Outlook Error Message “0×800ccc0f”

When sending and receiving emails you may see this error or a similar error such as 0×800ccc15, 0×80042108, 0×800ccc0e, 0×8004210b, 0×800ccc0b, 0×800ccc79, 0×800ccc67, 0×80040900, 0×800ccc81.

Specific error messages may include:

“No connection could be made because the target machine actively refused it.”

“The server could not be found. (Account:account name, POPserver:’mail’, Error Number: 0×800ccc0d)”

“Task ‘server name - Sending and Receiving’ reported error (0×800ccc0f): ‘The connection to the server was interrupted. If this problem continues, contact the server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP). The server responded: ? K’”

“Your server has unexpectedly terminated the connection. Possible causes of this include server problems, network problems, or a long period of inactivity. Account. account name, Server: ‘server name‘, Protocol: POP3, Server Response: ‘+OK’, Port: 110, Secure(SSL): No, Error Number: 0×800ccc0f”

“Task ‘SMTP server name - Sending and Receiving’ reported error (0×80042109): ‘Outlook is unable to connect to your outgoing (SMTP) e-mail server. If you continue to receive this message, contact the server administrator or Internet service provider (ISP).’”

“The operation timed out waiting for a response from the receiving (POP) server 0×8004210a”

“A time-out occurred while communicating with the server 0×800ccc19″

These errors are commonly associated with the fact that Outlook cannot make a connection to your email account. Make sure you check that your PC has an active Internet Connection, The email account settings in Outlook are correct such as mail server, user name and password and also check that your Anti-virus or Firewall is not preventing Outlook connecting to the mail server.

Outlook Error Message “0×800ccc0e” - Socket error: 10061

When trying to send or receive email you may experience this error in Outlook if the port which the email client is trying to connect to is blocked. Port 25 is used for sending and port 110 for retrieving emails.

Outlook Error Message “0×800CCC92″ or “0×800CCCD2″

It’s likely you are trying to connect to a POP3 Server  and your username and password are incorrect. Check all of your POP3 setting are correct and consult your ISP as to which sepcific settings in Outlook you should have enabled.

Outlook Error Message “0×800ccc19″

A time-out occurred while communicating with the server 0×800ccc19 OR The operation timed out waiting for a response from the receiving (POP) server 0×8004210a

If you are experiencing either of the above errors it is recommended that you check the configuration of your security software such as Norton AntiVirus or McAfee software.

There are many solutions for burning out high quality DVDs, and with the new High Definition players on the market some new tricks to be learned. The two software packages which can burn HD-DVD — that I know — are Sony’s Vegas w/ DVD Architect and the Ulead Video Studio 10+. I recently got a chance to work with the Sony Vegas tool kit and found it an amazing package for editing DVD quality video as well as a nuts-and-bolts solution for putting together professional quality DVD’s (standard and high-def).

There are cheaper and even free packages out there in the open-source world which will edit video, but nothing I’ve found which is currently up-to-par with the software on the market side. For years I used Adobe’s Premier and found it lacking in many ways, but it was the best thing out there, and so you did what you could. Then Ulead VideoStudio came along and that is a good package; not quite what I was looking for but the price was right, and it was better than the more expensive Premier. Now that I have the Sony Vegas system however, all bets are off. The price was a bit high, but the hours it has saved, and the quality of the product it can create paid for itself in three projects time.

When you are capturing HDV with Sony Vegas, it comes in as M2T format, which is a highly compressed variant of the MPEG-2 format, and native HDV cameras. The quality at this point is virtually unchanged and the data rate is no higher than that of regular DV so capture isn’t an issue. Sony Vegas allows you to edit at this quality, but really there aren’t readily available computers with enough processing power to edit the M2T files effectively. The solution is to use an intermediate file, perform your edits and adjustments and then swap out the intermediate for the original footage. All of your edits, adjustments and processing such as color correction etc. are transferred to the original footage for final render. It really is an amazing package.

Even with the intermediary code, you are probably going to want a machine with at least a 2.6 Ghz or faster processor, and 1gig of RAM.Once we are done with our editing, and have our finished product, we want to burn a SD DVD. Vegas comes with a very good MainConcept MPEG encoder which will do the down-conversation for us before we bring the files into DVD Architect. For SD DVD we are going to be converting down to SD 720×480. There are some advantages to smart rendering HDV, but for our purposes we are going for an SD DVD so these don’t come into play right now.

To render the video we are going to use the template “DVD Architect NTSC Widescreen video stream”. Set the bitrate based on the length of the video, like with any SD Mpeg render. In the custom tab, under project, set the Video Rendering Quality to “Best”. This is unrelated to the Mpeg bitrate setting, and instead effects what method Vegas uses when rescaling the video. When you are changing the image size (which we are down to 720×480) it is important to select “Best” for this option.

For the Audio, we want to use the AC3 format, rather than wave or MP3.Make sure the timeline for the project set to 1080i HDV, for the best quality, if you have it set to NTSC Widescreen, instead of HDV 1080i you will get very soft images. Another trick for crisping up the images is to add a very mild Unsharp Mask filter to your timeline.

The last thing we want to make sure of is that we set, in the Project Properties, the deinterlace method to “Blend Fields”. While you are not deinterlacing when downconverting like this, if that setting is set to “none” the output looks rather hideous.

Now, we set the rendering process, and when we bring our files into DVD Architect it won’t have to re-render those files before burning and we will have the best quality we can get out of a SD DVD burn.

Intermediary Codec:

I may have lost you back there when I just glossed over this concept. At some point you just have to push on through and clean up later, so let’s go over a few items before we get to editing and burning our next movie.

The HDV transport stream coming in from your HDV camera is much to heavy to process, so we use what is called an Intermediary codec so we can edit files with computer own by mere mortals. It is a translation or an “in-between” codec. Connect HD (for Sony Vegas) Aspect HD (for Adobe Premiere) and Lumiere (for Final Cut Pro) are all intermediary codecs. You capture in either native MPEG from the HDV camera, and the video is converted to the intermediary either in real time after capture, or during capture. When you render to print to tape, if you wish to print to your HDV camera, the intermediary will re-convert the intermediate stream to the MPEG format once again, providing you with a great image. Now you might be thinking that you are going to loose some quality during this process, but the fact is that if you don’t use an intermediary codec and edit the raw MPEG transport stream directly, you could loose a significant amount of quality in the process.

The audio format for HDV is MPEG 1 Audio layer II, which has a bitrate of 384 kbps and can be very good quality, but not if we want to edit the tracks. So again, it is best to send this to the intermediary as well (which is done automatically for you with the video). Something that might surprise you is that he sound tracks in HDV are not at the same level as CD standards. DV camcorders record audio in PCM format, which is basically as good as a .wav file. HDV’s audio spec is more in line with a very high bitrate MP3 audio. When you use the Cineform intermediary, audio is converted to a 48K/16 bit format, so you won’t need to worry about the audio quality in editing.

 The Sony Vegas package really does give you everything you need to create and produce professional quality video files and DVDs. Again the price can seem rather daunting, but for the ease of use, and quality of the tools, it is well worth the price tag, and the short learning curve.