Switching on DNS over HTTPS on various browsers

A new feature that is hitting all new modern web browsers is the ability to turn on DNS over HTTPS, which in my opinion is a very good idea - to keep the ISP snoopers off your traffic - so they have no idea where you are looking up or searching for. Not all Browsers have this facility at the moment - but I will cover those that do.

This by association is a recommendation for those that do.

Mozilla Firefox:

To turn this feature on in Firefox go to Preferences/Network/Settings and the just select the DNS over HTTPS as shown below.

Google Chrome Chromium:

To turn this feature on in Chrome or Chromium, open a new tab and type chrome://flags and in the search bar type dns and enter. The following will appear and just select enable for DNS over HTTPS

Opera:

As this browser is based on Chromium you have to type opera://flags and then follow the above.

Microsoft Edge:

Again, this browser is based on Chromium, only this time just type edge://flags and then follow the above.

Apple Safari and Microsoft Internet Explorer:

I'm afraid at the time of writing the above two don't support it. Safari may well in the future, but I very much doubt Internet Explorer ever will.

Firefox 3.6 adds performance and some nice new touches

As the battle for functionality rages between Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome and Opera on the Linux desktop, the features list and performance improvements just keep coming. The latest version of the javascript engine in FF 3.6 offers a supposedly 15% increase, and it does indeed seem faster on my Dell XPS 1330 with Ubuntu 9.10 64bit version.

One of the nice new touches you can have with the latest releases of the 3.6 version of Firefox is the tab preview window, see the picture below. Now at the moment there is not an easy way to turn this on, but just follow these simple steps.

1) open a new tab with CTRL-T and type in the address bar about:config

2) Press the "I'll be careful" button

3) Type this into the selection bar - "browser.ctrlTab.previews"

4) Double click on the item when it appears to turn it from false to true - it will enbolden.

5) Re-start Firefox

6) Press CTRL-TAB to see your tab previews.

This is similar to the nice feature in Chromium that you see when you open a new tab, Opera also offers a tab preview by dragging the tab window.

Give the Beta a try and see what you think.


Firefox 3.6 tab preview enabled

Opera 10 release candidate for Linux

I have been been playing with the beta's of this release, and I have been very impressed, and this release candidate is of the same high quality.

It has several new features including turbo mode, faster javascript engine and enhanced tab thumbnail, look at the image above.

Get it here and give it a go, it's available as an RPM/DEB or tar binary package.

Mozilla Labs Weave project is really taking shape

What is it? A bolt on to firefox to store your bookmarks and other browser data in the cloud.

I have used a few of these cloud based bookmark systems in the past, with varying degrees of success, and I have just started testing the Mozilla labs Weave system and it is working very well indeed. I have it talking on three separate systems, including one virtual image and they are syncing perfectly. It means I no longer have to have a different set of bookmarks on different machines, which is not very cloud freindly. The performance is the best I have experienced, and it really happens in the background without you noticing. You can select what parts of your locally stored data you wish to send in to the cloud with a bolt onto the Firefox (3.5 is required) options/preferences window. I like the fact you can encrypt locally and then send the data.



It would be great and extremely useful if it opens its doors eventually to other browsers like Chromium and Opera, and hopefully this will happen. As they are all open source the opportunities are more obvious that with a closed source product like IE.

I think we will start to see a lot more tools and utilities like this moving forward as the cloud becomes the storage system of choice for your information. The data you send to the Mozilla servers is whatever you choose from the list of options, and it is encrypted with a passphrase only you know, so there can't be any data mining without you knowing it. Security is always key in the cloud and can not be ignored, so I think this system works well.

I would definitely recommend giving it a go.

Linux is now very well served by browser apps.

Most users have been happily using Firefox version 3.x which came pre-installed with whichever Linux distro they happen to prefer. This is an extremely well written and capable browser, which has just been given a marvellous speed boost by the latest 3.5 release. Have a look here on my blog for a simple install guide with Linux.

There are however other good browsers now available for Linux, and these include Opera and Chromium. I know the later is still in development, but it is developing extremely quickly and should be out in a beta form shortly. Opera on the other hand , in it's 9.64 release is a very powerful, full featured browser, which can be used as a complete replacement for Firefox if you should like to, and the current stable release is significantly faster than Firefox 3.x, and on a par with Firefox 3.5 in real world usage.

I have also now downloaded and started to use Opera 10 beta, and this has also been given a face lift with more enhancements, like the ability to drag open all your tabs to get at the thumbnails of each page, it's really very useful.



The performance with this latest release appears on the surface to be slightly faster than Firefox 3.5, and not that far of Chromium on.

So the days of just taking the Browser you are given and having to be content are well and truly over, especially when you throw Konqueror and Epiphany into the mix. This is real and tangible evidence that the popularity of Linux on the desktop has never been stronger.

I would love to compare Safari and Internet Explorer on my Linux desktops, but unfortunately the companies behind these products are a little afraid of the competition so are sticking to their legacy systems for now.