Today’s release of Firefox 13 brings with it more imposed functionality changes to the only version of the browser that we can use, because it is is the only one kept current with security updates*.

This time, it is a brand new, Google Chrome-style ’New Tab’ page. I’m sure it is great for lots of people, but personally, I prefer a blank home page and a blank page when I open a new tab.

To restore the old behaviour, and have a blank new tab, browse to about:config. Accept the warning, then search for newtab. Do not change newtabpage.enabled.

Instead, double-click browser.newtab.url and set it to about:blank.

There, that’s how I prefer it again!

* UPDATE: A slight correction — there is a version of Firefox 10.x called Firefox ESR (Extended Support Release) that is kept up-to-date, so that is also an option!

UPDATE 2010-06-30: At the time of writing, the Mac version of Iron is not up-to-date and is probably insecure. I have stopped using it for now. Hopefully it can be kept up-to-date and patched to a schedule close to the normal Chromium releases in the future.

Google has come a long way since its humble beginnings in 1997 and now offer a huge array of online services. One of the criticisms often aimed at the company is centred around privacy. From searches you make on the search engine, to the contents of your email if you are a Gmail user — they have the ability to build up quite a detailed picture of what you do online.

Apparently, the Google Chrome browser itself also does various things which may impact privacy. The browser creates a unique client ID which is sent to Google when you do things such as type terms into the combined address and search bar, for example, and if the browser crashes, the technical information relating to that crash is sent to Google.

If you are someone concerned by the implications of this and maybe don’t trust Google very much, you may want to give SRWare Iron a try.

Iron is a browser based on the open source Chromium project which also powers Google Chrome, but with many of the potentially unwanted features that may impact privacy disabled.

This is a great example of open source code working well — it allows you to enjoy the benefits of the Chrome browser (the speed, interface and unique tab-as-process architectre) while side-stepping things you don’t want.

Personally, I am not enormously bothered by the privacy issues and at the moment I’m pretty happy with a Safari/Firefox combination for my browsers of choice, but if you are looking for Google Chrome, without so much Google, this is worth a try.

You can download the browser from the SRWare website.

UPDATE: The Mac version can be downloaded from this forum post on the SRWare site.

I just downloaded the new Google Chrome for Mac beta. I like to clear out my cookies after each time I quit the browser, so tracking information and so on doesn’t hang around any longer than it needs to.

On Google Chrome for Mac, there is no built-in setting to force all cookies to be session cookies, but you can use this hack to achieve the same thing. After launching Chrome at least once, then quit it and run the following commands in Terminal:

rm "~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Cookies"
ln -s /dev/null "~/Library/Application Support/Google/Chrome/Default/Cookies"

The first command deletes the cookies file and the second command creates a symbolic link, so that anything dropped in the cookies file goes to /dev/null (i.e. the cookies gets deleted and not stored once you quit!)

UPDATE 2010-01-29: JeanVal reports in the comments that this process works on Chrome for Linux too. The Cookies file is stored at the path ~/.config/chromium, so just adjust the commands above to fit that path.

There has been a considerable traffic spike here, since Google announced their new web browser, Google Chrome.

Not because I’ve spoken about it until now, but because it sparked interest in my thoughts on Gecko vs WebKit.

Google Chrome is considerably ‘buzz’-y at the moment, so I thought I would fire up an internet-connected Windows machine and give it a try.

While from a technical point of view much of the browser seems very interesting – and a very good idea (separating each tab into its own individual process, the new V8 JavaScript engine), at the moment I can’t see it offers much unique user-visible functionality.

Regardless of whether something is technically awesome or not, you won’t get the masses to use it unless they can see a killer feature – something that is visible to them and benefits them.

There are some unique elements to Chrome’s interface – specifically the single address/search bar (Omnibar), but I can’t help feeling underwhelmed at the lack of ‘killer-ness’ about the browser at the current time.

It is early days, though – and Chrome does show some promise.