Chrome Privacy Extensions

Reloading my personal machine post clean install of Windows 10. Wanting to secure Chrome (as best as possible). I haven't surveyed browser privacy and security extensions in awhile so I took the opportunity to look around again briefly. Here's what I came up (in no special order):

lastpass
adblock plus
disconnect
do not track me (now "blur")
https everywhere
ghostery
scriptsafe
flashcontrol

Tightening down browser settings and enabling the entire list broke Facebook profoundly (beyond what whitelisting could fix). In the end it was Scriptsafe that I had to really convince to loosen up, but eventually everybody was co-existing, Safe browsing (no, such a thing is not actually possible silly).

Fix the Zune Software

…“In IE, navigate to Tools, Internet Options, and then the Connection tab. Click the LAN settings button and then uncheck "Automatically detect settings."…

http://community.winsupersite.com/blogs/paul/archive/2009/10/20/tip-of-the-week-speed-up-zune-marketplace-searches.aspx

This is amazing! Searches of the online Zune content from the Zune software are instantly fixed. And what an amazing difference. I’m surprised I never thought of this because I have seen this setting fix other similar problems.

If you have any cases where there is a initial hesitation by some piece of software that connects to the internet somehow, then try unchecking this setting. The reason is that because IE is the browser that comes with Windows, and the IE proxy settings are exposed via several APIs, they have become the de-facto global proxy settings, and many Windows applications check them before any internet communications. And this particuar setting says “go look around on your local filesystem and network to see if anybody has ever put one of the standard proxy config files in". There’s some long default timeout that will hurt you every time this is examined.

So even if you don’t run Zune software, and don’t use Internet Explorer, you should still go turn this off right now. Very cool!

Free “Age of Empire”-type games

I recently came across:

Evony ( http://www.evony.com )

and

Heroes of Wesnoth ( http://www.wesnoth.org )

Evony is browser-based (Flash), while Wesnoth is a open-source pc game with stand-alone and multi-player online modes. If any one has experience with either one please comment.

Internet Explorer for Mac and Linux

This for testing web development against IE, from Mac or Linux machines...

http://www.tatanka.com.br/ies4linux/page/Main_Page
http://www.kronenberg.org/ies4osx/

Seen here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/Webworkerdaily/~3/189386647/