Testing For The Brave Browser

How Can We Test For Brave?

By Strictly-Software

The problem with detecting the Brave browser which I use most of the time is that it hides as Chrome and doesn't have its own user agent. It used to, and the hope is that in the future it will again but at the moment it just shows a Chrome user-agent. 

For example, my latest Brave user-agent is:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/97.0.4692.99 Safari/537.36

It also apparently used to have a property on the windows object window.Brave which is no longer there anymore. I have read many articles on StackOverflow about detecting Brave and all the various methods that apparently used to work don't anymore due to objects and properties such as window.google and window.googletag no longer exists on the windows object.

As these posts were not written that long ago it seems that there have been a lot of changes on the window object by Chrome / Google / Brave etc. So when writing your own function as I did it is worth outputting all the keys on the window object first to see what is there and what isn't e.g.

const keys = Object.keys(window);
console.log(keys);

This just outputs all the keys such as events, other objects like document and navigator, and properties as well into the developer tools console area that all modern browsers have.

As Brave, Edge, Opera and Chrome are all based on the same Chromium browser they are basically the same standard-compliant browsers.

Remember we should always use feature detection rather than user-agent parsing to choose whether or not to do something in JavaScript but it is amazing when using a user-agent switcher how many modern-day sites break when I change a standards-compliant browsers agent string to IE 6 for example.

If the coder wrote their code properly it wouldn't matter if I changed the latest version of Chromes user-agent to IE 6 or even IE 4 or Netscape Navigator 4, all sites should work perfectly as instead of doing old school tests like

isIe = document.all;
isNet = document.layers;

And then branching off those two as we did in the old days of scripting which led to browsers like Opera which no one catered for, having to support both IE and Netscape event handlers and pretending to not exist. However, they did eventually add the Opera property to the window object so if you really wanted to find it you could just test for:

if(window.opera){
  alert("This is Opera");
}

However, this no longer exists and Opera uses the same WebKit Chromium base as all the other modern browsers apart from Firefox.

Also, remember that the issue with JavaScript is that every object can be overwritten or modified, that is why we have user-agent switchers in the first place because they can, and do overwrite and change the window.navigator object.

Therefore if you are really pedantic there is NO real way to test if anything is real in JavaScript as a plugin or injected script could have added properties to the Window object such as changing the user-agent or adding a property another browser uses to the window so that tests for window.chrome fail in FireFox because you have created a window.chrome property FireFox detects.

There are loads of ifs and buts and we can discuss the best approach all day due to injected code and extensions overwriting objects or accidental setting of objects by forgetting to do == and accidentally setting a variable or object with a single = by mistake, but let's answer the question,

I have read a lot about people trying to detect Brave and a lot of old objects on the Chrome browser like window.google and window.googletag that no longer exist or even window.Brave which apparently existed on the window object at one stage. 

Why might you want to even detect Brave if it is a standards-compliant Browser and you are doing feature detection and not user-agent sniffing anyway you might ask? 

Well good question, if you are writing your code properly you shouldn't ever need to know what Browser the code is running in as it will work whatever the user is running your web page in due to proper use of feature detection. 

However, you may have a site that wants to direct people to the right extension depository or download the correct add-on. Therefore to make the user comfortable in their decision you might want to show that you know what browser the user has so that they are happy downloading the add-on. 

Or there might be a myriad of other reasons such as asking users to update their browser due to an exploit that has been discovered or to ask old people still using IE6 to upgrade to a modern browser. Also if you want them to use one that removes cookies, trackers, and adverts, and is security conscious, you may want to direct non-Brave users to the Brave download page.

Therefore the function I have come up with tries to future proof by hoping Brave does put its name into the user-agent at some point, and it checks for the existence of properties in objects such as the window or navigator object.

You can put all your complaints and ideas for improving this function for detecting Brave in the comments section and maybe we can come up with a better solution.

// pass or don't pass in a user-agent if none is passed in it will get the current navigator agent
function IsBrave(ua){
	
	var isBrave = false;
	ua = (ua === null || ua === undefined) ? ua = window.navigator.userAgent : ua;

	ua = ua.toLowerCase();

	// make sure it's not Mozilla
	if("mozInnerScreenX" in window){		
		return isBrave;
	}else{
		// everything in JavaScript is over writable we could do this to pass the next test 
		// but then where would we stop as every object even window/navigator can be overwritten or changed...?
		// window.chrome="mozilla";
		// window.webkitStorageInfo = "mozilla";

		// make sure its chrome and webkit
		if("chrome" in window && "webkitStorageInfo" in window){
			// it looks like Chrome and has webkit
			if("brave" in navigator && "isBrave" in navigator.brave){
				isBrave = true;
			// test for Brave another way the way the framwwork Prototype checks for it
			}else if(Object.prototype.toString.call(navigator.brave) == '[object Brave]'){
				isBrave = true;			
			// have they put brave back in window object like they used to
			}else if("Brave" in window){
				isBrave = true;			
			// hope one day they put brave into the user-agent
			}else if(ua.indexOf("brave") > -1){
				isBrave = true;
			// make sure there is no mention of Opera or Edge in UA
			}else if(/chrome|crios/.test(ua) && /edge?|opera|opr\//.test(ua) && !navigator.brave){
				isBrave = false;			
			}
		}

		return isBrave;
	}
}

Of course if you really didn't want all these fallback tests and hope that Brave will sort their own user-agent out in the future or re-add a property to the window object as they apparently used to then you could just do something like this:

var w=window,n=w.navigator; // shorten key objects
let isBrave = !("mozInnerScreenX" in w) && ("chrome" in w && "webkitStorageInfo" in w && "brave" in n && "isBrave" in n.brave) ? true : false;

Just to show you that it works here is the "Browser" test page I keep on all my Browser's bookmark bars, written using just JavaScript with some AJAX calls and my own functions which lets me see the following info:

• My Current IPv4 address by calling a URL that only returns IPv4.
• My Current IPv6 address by calling a URL that will return one if I am using one, otherwise it converts the IPv4 into an IPv6 address format. Obviously, this is not my real IPv6 address as if I had one it would be returned it is just the IPv4 address converted into IPv6 format.
• The UserAgent that the browser is showing me, this may be spoofed if a user-agent switcher is being used.
• The real User-Agent if a spoofed user-agent is being used by a user-agent switcher extension/add-on.
• The spoofed Browser Name.
• The real Browser name.
• Whether a user-agent switcher was detected. I have my own which does both the Request Header as well as overwriting the window.navigator object with different agents details. It creates a copy of the original navigator object so I can output it as well as the spoofed version.
• An output of the current window.navigator object, if a user-agent switcher was used it will show the overwritten navigator object.
• An output of the original window.navigator object if my own user-agent switcher was used then I create a copy of the same navigator string displayed for the current navigator object so both the spoofed and real navigator objects are outputted.
• A script that loads in info about my location based on my IP address e.g: Town, County, Country, ISP, Hostname, Longitude, and Latitude.

Example Browser Test Output

If you look at this image, double click to open bigger if you need to, although it won't show you all the ISP & Location info at the bottom, it will show you the user-agents, both spoofed and real, as well as the spoofed browser and the real browser, which my custom function detects from either just a user-agent string or with the IsBrave() function I outputted above.

You can see here that although the user-agent strings are exactly the same my code that detects the browser has correctly recognised the real browser as Brave by using the function this article is about and for the spoofed Browser name it shows Chrome, which is the browser Brave tries to mask itself as.

This handy little script is on all my browsers bookmark bars for easy access and I find it very helpful for quickly seeing if a user-agent switcher is enabled and what if any, my browser it is pretending to be, as well as my current GEO-IP location in case I am using a global VPN, TOR, Opera or a proxy.

Let me know what you think of this function tested in Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Edge and of course Brave.

By Strictly-Software

Running JavaScript Before Any Other Scripts On A Page

Injecting A Script At The Top Of Your HTML Page

By Strictly-Software

If you are developing an extension for either Firefox, Opera or Chrome, Brave, Edge, and Chromium, then you might come across the need to be able to inject some code into the top of your HTML page so that it runs before any other code.

When developing extensions for Chromium based browsers such as Chrome, Brave and Edge, you will most likely do this from your content.js file which is one of the main files that holds code to be run at certain stages of a pages lifetime.

As the Chrome Knowledge Base says the property values for the "run_at" property include;

document_idle, the preferred setting where scripts are guaranteed to run after the DOM is complete and after the window.onload event has loaded all resources which can include other scripts.

document_end, content.js scripts are injected immediately after the DOM is complete, but before subresources like images and frames have loaded. So after the DOM is loaded but before window.onload has finished loading external resources.

document_start, ensures scripts are injected after any CSS files are loaded but before any other DOM is constructed or any other script is run.  

There is of course the "run_at" property in the manifest.json file, which can be set to "document_start", to enable the codes running before other code does. This is especially useful if you need to change header values before a web page loads so that modified values such as the Referer or User-Agent can be modified. However, there may also be a need for you to set up an object or variable that is inserted into the DOM for code within the HTML page to access.

For example in a User-Agent switcher where you need to both overwrite the Navigator object in JavaScript and the Request header, you may want to create an object or variable that holds the original REAL navigator object or its user-agent so that any page you may create yourself or offer to your users the ability to see the REAL user-agent, browser, language, and other properties if they wanted to.

For example, I have my own page that I use to show me the current user-agent and list the navigator properties. 

However, if they have been modified by my own user-agent switcher extension I also offer up a variable holding the original REAL user-agent so that it can be shown and compared with the spoofed version to see what has changed. I also have a variable that holds the original navigator object in case I want to look at the properties.

Therefore my HTML page may want to inspect this object if it exists with some code on the page.

// check to see if I can access the original Navigator object and the user agent string
if(typeof(origNavigator) !== 'undefined' && origUserAgent !== null)
{
	// get the real Browser name with my Detect Browser function using the original Navigator user-agent
	let realBrowser = Browser.DetectBrowser(origUserAgent);

	// output on the page in a DIV I have
	G("#RealBrowser").innerHTML = "<b>Real Browser: " + realBrowser "</b>";
}

This code just uses a generic Browser detection function for taking a user-agent and finding the Browser name. It even detects Brave by ruling out other browsers and if it is Chrome at the end I check for the Brave properties or mention of the word in the string, which they used to have but newer versions have removed it. 

However there is hope in the community that they will create a unique user-agent with the word Brave in as at the moment people are having to do object detection which is the better method, and as Brave tries to hide, there are plenty of query strings and other API calls which can be made to find out whether the result indicates Brave rather than Chrome.

However, at the moment, I am just using a simple detection on the window.navigator object that if TRUE indicates that it is actually Brave NOT Chrome. 

A later article shows a longer function I developed with fallbacks in case the objects do not exist anymore as there used to be a brave object on the window e.g window.brave that no longer exists, so did many objects for Chrome such as window.google and window.googletag that no longer exist. However, this article explains all that.

This is just the one line test you can do, it ensures it is not FireFox with a test for a Mozilla only object window.mozInnerScreenX and then checks that it is a Chromium browser with tests for window.chrome and that it's also webkit with a test for window.webkitStorageInfo before some tests for navigator.brave and navigator.brave.isBrave to ensure it's Brave not Chrome e.g:

// ensure that a Chrome user-agent is not actually Brave by checking some properties that seem to work to identify the browser at the moment anyway...
let isBrave = !("mozInnerScreenX" in window) && ("chrome" in window && "webkitStorageInfo" in window && "brave" in navigator && "isBrave" in navigator.brave) ? true : false

However, this article is more about injecting a script into the HEAD of your HTML so that code on the page can access any properties within it.

As my extension offers an Original Navigator object and a string holding the original/real user-agent before I overwrite it, then I want this code to be the first piece of JavaScript on the page.

This doesn't have to be limited to extensions and you may have code you want to inject in the HEAD when the DOMLoads before any other code.

This is a function I wrote that attempts to place a string holding your JavaScript into a new Script block I create on the fly and then insert before any other SCRIPT in the document.head.

However, if the page is malformed, or has no defined head area it falls back to just appending the script to the document.documentElement object.

If you pass false in for the 2nd parameter which tells the function whether or not to remove the script after inserting it then if you view the generated source code for the page you will see the injected script code in the DOM.

The code looks within the HEAD for another script block and if found it inserts it before the first one using insertBefore() however if there is NO script block in the HEAD then the function will just insert the script into the HEAD anyway using the appendChild() method.

An example of the function in action with a simple bit of JavaScript that stores the original navigator object and user-agent is below. You might find multiple uses for such code in your own work.

// store the JavaScript in a string
var code = 'var origNavigator = window.navigator; var origUserAgent = origNavigator.userAgent;";

// now call my function that will append the script in the head before any other and then remove it if required. For testing you may want to not remove it so you can view it in the generated DOM.
appendScript(code,true);

// function to append a script first in the DOM in the HEAD, with a true/false parameter that determines whether to remove it after sppending it.
function appendScript(s,r=true){

	// build script element up
	var script = document.createElement('script');
	script.type = 'text/javascript';
	script.textContent = s;
	
	// we want our script to run 1st incase the page contains another script e.g we want our code that stores the orig navigator to run before we overwrite it

	// check page has a head as it might be old badly written HTML
	if(typeof(document.head) !== 'undefined' && document.head !== null)
	{	
		// get a reference to the document.head and also to any first script in the head
		let head = document.head;
		let scriptone = document.head.getElementsByTagName('script')[0];

		// if a script exists then insert it before 1st one so we dont have code referencing navigator before we can overwrite it		
		if(typeof(scriptone) !== 'undefined' && scriptone !== null){	
			// add our script before the first script
			head.insertBefore(script, scriptone);
		// if no script exists then we insert it at the end of the head
		}else{
			// no script so just append to the HEAD object
			document.head.appendChild(script);
		}
	// no HEAD so fall back to appending the code to the document.documentElement
	}else{
		// fallback for old HTML just append at end of document and hope no navigator reference is made before this runs
		document.documentElement.appendChild(script);
	}
	// do we remove the script from the DOM
	if(r){
		// if so remove the script from the DOM
		script.remove();
	}
}

I find this function very useful for both writing extensions and also when I need to inject code on the fly and ensure it runs before any other scripts by using a onDOMLoad method.

Let me know of any uses you find for it.

Useful Resource: Content Scripts for Chrome Extension Development. 

By Strictly-Software

Make Your First "Hello World" Brave / Chrome / Edge Extension

Making your 1st Chrome / Brave Extension....

By Strictly-Software

This article is about how to go ahead and make your first extension for  Brave, Chrome, or Edge. As I no longer use Chrome but use Brave instead which like Microsoft Edge is based on the core Chromium Open Source standards-compliant browser, any mention of Brave in this article can be applied to Chrome or Edge as well.

The good thing about choosing to write your first extension for a Chromium-based browser is that once you have done it, it can be applied to 3 major browsers, Chrome, Brave, and Microsoft's replacement for Internet Explorer, Edge. So if you want to maximize your efforts choosing to develop an extension for Chromium gives you much more scope to apply it to other major browsers unlike Mozilla for Firefox. 

Not only do I like Brave for paying me not any site owner, to watch adverts in cryptocurrency (BAT), it is more secure, with an easy way to allow or prevent tracking cookies, 3rd party cookies, scripts, adverts, popups, and more from following you around the web.

It does this by stripping out all the tracking codes by default before rendering the page.

By doing this it also saves bandwidth and therefore time. It also uses TOR as it's an incognito window so you are more secure when trying to avoid people by going through the onion to access many pages that Brave will sometimes automatically redirect you to.

You can download the Brave Browser from this link and start to strip trackers and earn cryptocurrency for ignoring tiny little adverts that are shown to you in the corner of the screen right now.

Setting Up Your Extension

1. Create a folder somewhere on your machine where all the files for the extension will be located. I just created a folder in documents called "Extensions" and then within it for this test a "HelloWorld" sub folder.

2. Create a manifest.json file with basic info about your extension. The manifest.json file tells Chrome important information about your extension, like its name and which permissions it needs.

The manifest version should always be 2, because version 1 is unsupported as of January 2014. So far our extension does absolutely nothing, but let’s load it into Chrome / Brave anyway.

Let's add some info into it which describes the extension.

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "description": "Hello World Extension",
  "name": "Strictly-Software Hello World Extension",
  "version": "0.1.1"
}

3. Create a content script which is "a JavaScript file that runs in the context of web pages." This means that a content script can interact with web pages that the browser visits.

So open a text file and make the script, as we are doing a hello world all we need to do is something simple such as showing an alert box whenever we go to a new URL that shows a message e.g:

// content.js
alert("Hello from Strictly-Softwares Brave/Chrome extension!");

Save the file in the same folder as all of your other files as content.js. 

As we want the alert box to show on every URL we access we need to add a bit of script in the manifest file which tells it to act on <all_urls> you can see this in the below example as we also tell the manifest.json file about our JavaScript that needs to run on all the URLS we access.

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "description": "Hello World Extension",
  "name": "Strictly-Software Hello World Extension",
  "version": "0.1.2022"
  "content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": [
        "<all_urls>"
      ],
      "js": ["content.js"]
    }
  ]
}

If we wanted the extension code to only run on certain pages then we can use regular expression like syntax which you can explore later to define the URLS that our code acts on.

Also if we were loading multiple JS files into our manifest file, we would use commas within the square brackets to denote them e.g to add jQuery go and get the version of the plugin you want e.g from https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/3.3.1/jquery.min.js and save a local copy into your extension folder. 

There is no point loading it from a remote site each time as it takes time to load, plus they have stopped using the "latest" version in their filename which you used to be able to reference to get the most up to date version from Google's or jQuery's CDN, however they stopped it due to the amount of requests they were getting which was almost on an unintentional DOS scale.

For framework files you should always get a version that you know works, and save it locally or on a CDN, so that it can be cached and not loaded from a remote site each time. Also there is no need to keep updating it to the next version when one comes out. If it works for the project you are working on then leave the script reference alone. 

This is something many developers didn't understand by always loading in the latest version remotely, this took network calls, time to load, and it often introduced new bugs into their code. It is far better to store all your code locally so it can be cached and so that you know it works. So to add jQuery into the extension we would do this.

"js": ["jquery-3.3.1.js", "content.js"]

The manifest would look like this if you did add extra files in e.g:

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "description": "Hello World Extension",
  "name": "Strictly-Software UserAgent Extension",
  "version": "0.1.2022",
  "content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": [
        "<all_urls>"
      ],
      "js": ["jquery-3.3.1.js", "lightbox.js", "scripts.js", "content.js"]
    }
  ]
}

4. Add a logo for your extension at the size of 24x24 this will appear in your toolbar when you pin it so you can use the extension. At the same time make some more icons that will be used on the brave://extensions/ page when loading up your extension, for example when you click on it to see the details (Name, description, version etc), and elsewhere.

You can use this page to convert an image, screenshot, logo into the sizes you need > https://icoconvert.com/.

The icon for the toolbar should be called just icon.png which you can put in the same folder as the other images which you should name with the size on to not get confused. 

At the same time make .png logos of the sizes 16x16, 48x48 and 128x128. These are put at the top level in the manifest as you can see below as they are used in different places. The toolbar icon is down at the bottom as you can see.

So the final manifest file will look like this.

{
  "manifest_version": 2,
  "description": "Hello World Extension",
  "name": "Strictly-Software UserAgent Extension",
  "version": "0.1.2022",
  "icons": {
    "16": "icon16.png",
    "48": "icon48.png",
    "128": "icon128.png"
  },
  "content_scripts": [
    {
      "matches": [
        "<all_urls>"
      ],
      "js": ["content.js"]
    }
  ],
  "browser_action": {
    "default_icon": "icon.png"
  }
}

5. Now in Brave/Chrome go to extensions and open it up. 

In Brave it will be a URL like brave://extensions/ and Chrome chrome://extensions/. In the top right corner turn developer mode on. Then in the top left corner hit the "Load Unpacked" button and select your folder containing all your files and images.

You will see your extension appear in the list of already loaded extensions with one of your logos showing e.g:

5. Clicking on "Details" will show the information from your manifest and a different size logo e.g:

6. Now select the extension icon in the toolbar to get up your drop down menu of extensions and select the pin so it's pinned to your toolbar e.g:

7. Now try going to any URL and you should get an alert box pop up straight away with the message you put in the content.js file. Even before other JavaScript loaded content fires from a DOM or Window onload event, this alert should fire straight away e.g:

8. And there you go, your first Chrome/Brave extension. Obviously, this just a Hello World test showing you how you can create a basic extension and if you are going to make an extension you will need to read up more on all the different features and actions possible.

However, this is a good guide for someone wondering about how to make an extension or insert code that fires before the page is loaded. 

I have an idea for what I need to use this for such as overwriting JavaScript objects and putting my own properties into them so that they load when the page does before any other JavaScript code as well as being accessible to any local code that tries to access them. You can read a bit about this in a later article, injecting a script at the top of your HTML page.

If you want more information about what you can do just head to the main Chrome extensions page for developers at https://developer.chrome.com/docs/extensions.

Have fun...

By Strictly-Software

Removing Chrome Has Sped Up My PC

How Removing Google Products Can Speed Up Your Laptop

By Strictly-Software

If you read my other recent pieces on speeding up my PC you might be interested in the fact that the other day I removed Google Chrome and now my PC is fast as road runner.

If you ever look at the task manager when you have 5+ tabs open in Chrome then you will see 5+ Google Chrome processes running. Their idea was that each tab of Google Chrome would run in it's own process so as not to interfere with the running of other tabs that maybe open.

Not only does that not seem to be the case in my situation, a slow tab will cause high memory, high CPU and DISK usage which then effects the other tabs, therefore I removed Google Chrome altogether and now just use Firefox, Opera and TOR Browser.

Just look at my task manager processes now that I have removed Chrome. Whilst I was suffering 100% DISK Usage, and high CPU and memory I am now showing only low numbers.

Currently as I write this article with 7 tabs open in Firefox including Facebook a heavy hitting site due to all the Ajax it uses and Betfair which updates constantly I am still only using 4% CPU, 54% Memory, 9% Disk Usage.

Not only has removing Google Chrome from my laptop has sped it up but if anyone has been paying attention, Google is an evil company (they had to remove that it didn't do evil from their motto), that is hooked into nearly every smart phone measuring when you sleep, walk, drive, the current temperature as well as listening to everything you say just in case it wants to be helpful.

I cannot count the number of times that I have been watching a football match streamed from my phone to my TV and then Google pops up to ask "What would you like to know about Liverpool" or some other nonsensical question I didn't want it to help me with in the first place.

This obviously means it is listening to you ALL THE TIME, otherwise it would not know when to offer help.

If you read the Terms and Conditions on your smart phone then you will see under privacy, a mile down the long winded notes, a section about how they are allowed to listen to you and send off to "unspecified 3rd parties" content that "may" help improve their service.

These unspecified parties maybe Google AdSense to show more relevant adverts by listening to the surrounding sound around the phone and then translating that to adverts you will see online. Or it maybe listening for more illicit speech that it can send local police enforcement or even the numerous 3 letter agencies in the UK and USA.

Will Binney from the NSA who was arrested for going public about the Prism program he had written and Edward Snowden had stolen to expose, told us about how he had designed it for spying on the Soviets in communist USSR. However once the cold war was over they flipped the script and used it to spy on US citizens illegally instead. 

If you read up on the web tech companies that were first involved in the unknowing spying on users, then they were Microsoft, Yahoo, AOL, Facebook, Google, Apple, PalTalk, YouTube, and Skype.

The UK was used as a test bed due to our lack of a real bill of rights or constitution and therefore we here in UK are rats roaming a maze designed by the NSA all so they can catch the right words and tell the correct authorities if need be.

The main problem is that you cannot remove Google products from Android phones and trying to do so will probably break your phone. Google is ingrained into most smart phones and almost impossible to remove totally. If you want an app you go to Google Play Store and trying to remove that from your phone would be a huge hassle.

Therefore I have done the logical thing due to the slowness of my PC and removed Google Chrome from it. Not only has it sped up my laptop but it means Google searches are no longer logged and kept for years as I now use DuckDuckGo or TOR Browser to surf the net. 

Even the browser Opera has a mini "VPN" built into it which goes through a proxy computer before the site you wanted to visit, hiding your real IP address, and making you look like you are in Germany or Bulgaria. 

Just try Opera and then go to this site https://manytools.org/http-html-text/http-request-headers/ and see what headers and IP address you are showing to websites and servers.

In another tab either type in the search box "Where am I now geo-IP" or just go to this link and you will see information like the results below when I just tested it with a new instance of Opera. My real IP is 86.164.1.XXX by the way.

However viewing my IP address on Opera with that search term or a header search reveals my location to be elsewhere from South East England. In fact they show me to be in the Scandinavian region of Europe with an IP address of 77.111.247.188.

Their Geo-IP location data is complied from 3 sources, IP2Location, ipinfo.io and www.db-ip.com they all use my Opera proxy IP of 77.111.247.188, and put my location in either Norway or Sweden, in either Oslo or Östergötland.

If you want more details on why Google is evil and Youtube is broken then read and watch the video on this blog. 

However if you don't care about Google working with the NSA and GCHQ and listening to you all the time through your phone and just want a faster PC, try removing Google Chrome from your machine and using another browser instead.

Remember to keep your task manager open to see if the DISK, CPU and Memory levels drop after a restart and a clearing of your registry and unused objects with CCleaner.

By Strictly-Software

© 2019 Strictly-Software

Browser Slow Down May Have a Windows Cause

By Strictly-Software

Yesterday if you read my blog article about Firefox and Chrome slowing me down as if I was being dragged through mud by a 3 legged donkey, then you will know that I was blaming the browsers and their settings for the slow down.

However when I could take no more, of browser windows hanging and then seemingly Windows applications not opening when I clicked the desktop icon which I have never had before I thought it must be a virus or some sort of app slowing me down however virus scans with Windows Defender and MalwareBytes AntiMalware showed nothing at all.

I was trying to open applications like Open Office only to see the process in the task manager running as a background process. It was not up the top under Apps, but just sat there forever under background processes.

I also had 100% Disk usage with no singular app or process looking like it was causing it. I also had high memory and CPU usage. So I thought what I had done lately. I went to Programs and Features to see which applications had been updates or loaded recently. Skype was there, like it is today, and I removed it as I can no longer use it with Windows 8.1r.

There was also Spotify which I hardly ever use so I uninstalled that as well. However it was after this I started getting the problems.

So I went to System Restore Points and noticed a Critical Windows Update had been carried out on the 11th of this month. I ticked the box to show all restore points and chose the Automatic Restore Point before the update.

I did a system restore to that date which was 2 days before the Windows Update and after an hour I had my PC back and working. It was much faster and the browsers were fast as well, both Chrome and Firefox.

However I will not take away the points I made yesterday about over complicating the options and issues for privacy and security which seem far too over the top for the average user to understand.

So when I was finished with what I was doing I went to shut the laptop off and did the Windows Update again. This time it seems to not have slowed everything down. The Critical Update has been done and I have a much faster laptop. For example just look at the Task Manager, which for the same apps, with the same tabs open was showing 100% DISK usage and high Memory and CPU usage, with programs running in the background not as open Apps.

However I am not holding my breath as it seems that all these browsers and other apps like Rapport (banking crud software), seems to be slowing the laptop down.

I think it is time I do a proper search of the computer, remove apps I don't use, run Chkdsk -f (from the command prompt), and see if a particular browser is causing me issues.

At the moment I have 5% CPU, 40% Memory 3% Disk usage (Not the 100% I was seeing all the time).

I have no ideas what the Windows Update did to screw this up and when I look at programs recently installed I only see Google Chrome as having updated itself today. Firefox is set to auto update so I will wait to see what happens when the latest version comes in as I am currently on version 70, and yesterday I was on version 71. Since Chrome updated however the CPU and Disk Usage also started to spike again.


I have decided to uninstall Chrome and just use Firefox and since doing so my disk usage is running at 1%. I have no idea what Chrome could be doing to cause these memory leaks and disk usage. I did notice in their settings under advanced the other day an option to look for "malware" that could be slowing your computer down. I reckon it is more to do with all the holes that let PUPs and other files that keep popping up after a scan in the Chrome Roaming folder that they are looking for.

However it in not uncommon for people to have issues after Windows Updates. User Profiles going missing causing you to think you have lost all your apps and other weird things. Having to do restore points seems drastic but at the moment I am happy as my apps are all running and the task manager is showing good stats. However I still think Firefox's security and privacy options are too much for the average user and some of them even confused me as their was no explanation. So read that article if you can.
I think these auto updates behind the scenes can cause major slowdowns and they should all be optional. If I have a version of Chrome that is running fast, not causing major CPU, Memory or Disk usage then I should be able to keep it. I don't want some new buggy install being rolled out and then a fix for that buggy version rolled out later.

As I said earlier IE only brings a new version of IE out once every couple of years. I cannot really see the need for 70+ versions of Chrome or Firefox unless they contain bugs and future version are to fix them.

By Strictly-Software

© 2019 Strictly-Software

Chome and FireFox really getting on my tits....

Chome and FireFox really getting on my tits....

By Strictly-Software.com

Chome and FireFox really getting on my tits....

Chrome was by browser of choice, due to being light weight and fast.

FireFox was in 2nd place due to the range of plugins available.

I had relegated IE into usage only to test code for cross browser compatibility issues.

However I am finding that I am actually using Internet Explorer more and more due to constant issues with both of the latest versions of these browsers.

I am running Chrome: 50.0.2661.75 (64-bit) And FireFox 46.0 buld no: 20160421124000 (64 bit) on all 3 of my machines (Win7 & Win 8.1)

There was a stage when both these honey's were humming like a bees. I even put up some articles on how to improve the speed on both browsers:

Speeding Up Chrome Can Kill It
Speeding up Google Chrome with DNS Pre-Fetching
Performance Tuning FireFox

I also put up a general PC and Browser tune up article with free tools, command line prompts and some basic things to try if you had a slow computer: Speeding up your PC and Internet connection.

However I have even found myself using IE 11 more and more due to constant hanging, pages not loading at all with the "processing request" message in the footer, or waiting for some 3rd party non asynchronous loaded in script, to download and run that blocks the site or page from running.

I think there is a far too much "API JIZZ" in the community at the moment.

What this means is that developers, due to their nature to impress and gold plate code, even when the spec doesn't call for it, are now using so many 3rd party and remotely hosted plugins like jQuery, Google Graphs, tracker code, plus loads of funky looking CPU consuming widgets to make their pages look good.

You only have go into Facebook or G+ and try and write a message. Not only will Google Plus's new post box move around the page before you can start writing, but both websites are constantly analysing your keystrokes to find out if the previous string matches a contact, community or page, in your contact book for them to link to.

The more people and pages you have stored the slower this process becomes. Yes is might be handy but why not just require a symbol like + in Google+ to be put before the person name so that the code only checks that word for a relation.

Imagine having a list of thousands of pages, liked communities/pages and contacts to be constantly checked on every keydown press with AJAX requests. That is overkill. It slows down systems .

I still have two windows from Chrome spinning away for (Google Blogger blogs) at the moment. There is not much 3rd party code on these pages but they are having trouble and showing common "Waiting for Cache" and "Processing Request" messages in the status bar.

This is the same sort of thing I get in FireFox. Although in this browser, what kills me is just the slowness of getting from page to page. On many sites I have to refresh it multiple times before the code all loads and this goes for online banking to online betting sites. Just trying to watch a race on their Flash screens is a nightmare.

I had a bet on a horse the other day on Bet365.com just so I could watch the big race with an unbeaten in 11 straight wins, Douvan, running. However Bet365.com video didn't start and in SkyBet it was stuttery and kept losing picture and sound. I missed the end of one race where a horse I had backed jumped the last fence into the lead but when the picture came back it had finished 3rd!

They keep telling me to clear the cache, reboot the router and do speed tests. Things I have done many times. I have 54Mbps download speed at work and 28Mbps at home. I can stream 4k UHD TV to multiple screens so download speed is not the issue something else is.

Speedof.me is the best online speed testing site I have found as it as it uses no extra files and is ran in pure HTML5 with no Flash, Java or ActiveX type objects requiring to be loaded for it to run.

What is causing the problem I have no idea as my broadband speed seems okay. I suspect it's the large number of reverse proxies being used and the download of shared 3rd party scripts and widgets that can hang due to a large number of HTTP requests.

I tried deleting my userdata file for Google by searching for it in the address bar of Windows Explore with this line: %USERPROFILE%\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data 

I have also tried disabling Flash as so many times I see the "An object has crashed" bar in the header that is related to the Flash Container object failing. Sometimes a reload works other times it doesn't.

However so many sites STILL use Flash it is hard to live without it really. For example the WHOLE of Bet365.com is made in Flash which makes it very user unfriendly and hard to use with sticky scrollbars and issues with selection of items.

If anyone has similar issues or ideas on resolving them let me know, as I never thought I would be going back to IE to use as my main browser!

By Strictly-Software.com

©2016 Strictly-Software.com

Speeding up Chrome can KILL IT!

Speeding up Chrome can kill it!

By Strictly-Software

Lately I have been really disappointed with the performance of my preferred browser Chrome.

I moved from FireFox to Chrome when the amount of plugins on FireFox made it too slow to work with however this was when Chrome was a clean, fast browser. Now it has just as many plugins available to install as FireFox and the performance has deteriorated constantly over the past few versions.

I am a developer so having 20+ tabs open in my browser is not unusual however when they are all hanging for no reason with "resolving host" messages in the status bar something is wrong.

I have even removed all my plugins that I had installed and decided to leave that to FireFox if I need to test different agents, hacking and so on. However even with a simple install the performance has been crap lately!

Therefore looked up on the web for tips on speeding up Chrome and found this article:

http://digiwonk.wonderhowto.com/how-to/10-speed-hacks-thatll-make-google-chrome-blazing-fast-your-computer-0155989/

It basically tells you some tricks to speed up Chrome by modifying some settings by going to chrome://flags/ in your address bar.

There is a warning at the top of the page that says:

WARNING These experimental features may change, break or disappear at any time. We make absolutely no guarantees about what may happen if you turn one of these experiments on, and your browser may even spontaneously combust. Jokes aside, your browser may delete all your data or your security and privacy could be compromised in unexpected ways. Any experiments that you enable will be enabled for all users of this browser. Please proceed with caution. Interested in cool new Chrome features? Try our beta channel at chrome.com/beta.

So these are all "experimental" features and from the sounds of it they could even make it's security and performance worse not better. Even a few of the tweaks suggested by the article had already disappeared from the settings page.

I did what was still available and a few more tweaks after careful consideration and what happened?

Well at first some pages seemed to load quicker but then I found that:

• Some sites without a www. sub domain wouldn't load.
• Some pages wouldn't load at all.
• When I came into work today even though a Chrome process was running with 0 CPU usage nothing was displayed.

I had to re-boot, and try 3 times to open Chrome before getting back to the chrome://flags/  page and restoring all the defaults. Since then everything has been okay.

So if your going to tweak be careful - it could take down your whole browser!

The best way to speed it up is to remove all the plugins and add-ons and leave that to FireFox. Turn off 3rd party cookies and any 3rd party services that involve constant lookups and try to keep it clean and simple.

It seems that with the over usage of AJAX and sites like Facebook/LinkedIn/Google+ where as you type it constantly looks up the word to see if it matches a name or contact that this "API JIZZ" as I call it has really slowed down the web.

Just by having Google+, Facebook and LinkedIn open at the same time can eat up your memory and I'm on a quad core 64 bit machine.

In my opinion there should be settings to enable you to turn off the API JIZZ and flashy features that rely on lots of JavaScript and AJAX.

It slows down your computer and is not needed most of the time. Having big database lookups on each keystroke is obviously going to use up lots of memory so it should be an option you can disable.

Anyway that's down to the developers of all these social sites who seem to love AJAX for everything. A simple submit button would do in a lot of cases!

HackBar Not Showing in Firefox

How to display the HackBar in Firefox

My preferred browser for the Internet is Google Chrome. I moved to Chrome because of it's speed and simplicity as well as the fact that like most people, when I got disillusioned with IE and moved to FireFox I installed so many plugins that it became so slow to load and has gone through periods of hanging and high CPU and memory usage.

Therefore I have decided to use FireFox for certain development and debugging when I want to use plugins. Plugins such as the Colour Picker ColorZilla, the Web Developer Toolbar, the Modify Header plugin or any number of others I have installed. I then keep Chrome plugin free to keep it fast for browsing.

I did try Chrome out with plugins when they first started supporting them but I soon decided I didn't want to turn Chrome into another FireFox by overloading it with plugin checking at start up which has happened with FireFox.

So Chrome is plugin free and fast, FireFox is useful and handy, full of plugins and tools and good for development and although IE 9 is fast and probably just as good nowadays I am guessing most developers won't go back to it after Microsoft taking numerous versions to just standardise their code and CSS after years of complaining from the masses.

One of the plugins I use on FireFox a lot is the HackBar.

Not only is it useful for loading up long URL's, quickly Base64 decoding or encoding strings as well as URL Encoding and Decoding but it has numerous other features if you want to test your site out for XSS or SQL injection vulnerabilities.

However I usually find I use it mostly for quickly encoding and decoding strings and sometimes I find myself having to put really long ones in the box and extending it so much the viewport becomes unusable. I then find myself disabling the add-on.

However on more than a few occasions now when I come to re-enable the HackBar by right clicking in the menu bar and ticking the option for HackBar OR using the "View > HackBar" menu option. I then find that it doesn't display as expected and hunting around for it is of no use at all.

You can try disabling it in the Add-ons section or even un-installing and re-installing it but even then it might not appear.

However I have found that a quick hit of the F9 key will make it show. Simples!

So if you are ever having issues trying to make toolbars or plugins show that you have de-activated try the F9 key first before anything else.

Forgotten your SSH Password?

How to quickly recover your SSH password

If you are like me your memory sometimes fails you and like today I tried to login with SSH into my server with Putty and couldn't remember my password. After about five attempts of all the ones I could remember I decided to give up incase I blocked myself.

Luckily I had added my IP into AllowHosts so I wouldn't be blocked by the DenyHosts settings which contain a long long list of IP addresses who have tried hacking my server but it was obviously doing my head in.

I then thought of a quick way of recovering it.

I could access WebMin in Chrome easily as my password was auto-filled stored but in Firefox it wasn't which had the web developer toolbar. Therefore as copying passwords doesn't work I couldn't use the web developer toolbar to show the password with a single button click.

Therefore in Chrome with the auto-filled password for my https://domain.com:10000 login page I did the following.

• Hit F12 - this opens the developers console
• Choose the Console tab
• In the console write the necessary code to change the type of the input from "password" to "text"
• If the password doesn't have an ID like VirtualMin then you can just access the first password in the form e.g:

document.forms[0].pass.type = 'text';

And if my magic your password field will change into a text input and you can retrieve your password.

And if your in any doubt about why you should leave your computers locked when you are away from your desk then this should be a reminder to you!

Problem with Google Chrome and Twitter

Google Chrome 16.0 and Twitter Direct Message Problem

First, I can't believe my version of Chrome is now on 16.0.912.75. It seems like only yesterday I had Chrome version 1 and it didn't change for a good while.

Unlike Internet Explorer which refuses to force automatic updates on their browser users which mean developers still have to cater for IE 6 and non standard compliant code due to IE 9 not being available on Win Vista or XP. I do appreciate that they automatically upgrade the browser when required.

However it does seem like FireFox (version 9.0.1 I am currently on now) and Chrome are in some kind of race to see who can get to version 100 first. I haven't exactly noticed many differences between all these nightly version changes so it must be bug fixing as if it isn't I have no idea what it is apart from security hole patches.

Anyway, I recently got a new laptop for work (a DELL, 64bit, quad core i5 Win7) which is good APART from the horrible, horrible flat mouse pad which seems to go into sticky scroll mode a lot. You know when suddenly the mouse cursor turns from a pointer into cross-hairs and as you move the cursor the whole page scrolls with it.

Tonight I noticed an issue with this and Twitter's new format for Direct Messages which open in a draggable DIV popup.

I went to write a Direct Message and the cursor went into sticky mode. I couldn't remove the mouse cursor from the pop div as wherever it went so did the popup box. Very annoying.

What was interesting was that as soon as this issue occurred my CPU and Memory for the Google Chrome.exe *32 process went shooting through the roof and my laptop turned into a helicopter. I honestly thought the machine was going to take off it was that loud from the hard-drive spinning away.

The only solution was to move the cursor off the webpage to the toolbar and kill the page totally and as I did the CPU and Memory dropped like a stone from a cliff.

This is obviously an issue with DELL's mousepad but it reminded me of an issue I had with my own HTML WYSIWYG editor which was a pop DIV you could drag about the screen.

The editor had a couple of listboxes on it for selecting fonts and sizes etc but because I had a a drag event attached to a mousedown and mousemove event it meant that you could never actually open the list and scroll it down to the bottom as if you did all that happened was the Editor moved around the screen.

It was a simple drag n drop solution which was fired by a mouse down event setting a flag so that when set any mouse move event moved the referenced DIV until a mouse up event set the flag off.

I got round the problem at first by just making the top and bottom sections of the DIV container for the editor draggable which did fix the issue but in the end I settled for what is getting more common as a solution for the old pop up window, the lightbox.

I don't know why Twitter need to make their new message pop div's draggable as they change the backgrounds opactity like a lightbox anyway so I don't see the point in the draggable effect at all.

I know it would certainly help with my DELL's sticky mousepad problem!

Would you switch back to IE9 now that they have finally made a good browser?

Now that IE9 is standards compliant and actually good will you switch back to using it?

A few months ago I wrote an article about why I hated debugging in IE8 which revolved around their single threaded event model (window.event) and the delay it took before debug messages were outputted to the console.

A member of the Microsoft team commented that he had run the test case I had created in IE9 and that it had run perfectly. No high CPU, no frozen console, no high memory usage or other performance problems at all.

As you cannot install IE9 on WinXP, which is what I use on my home laptop (due to Vista being shite), I haven't had the pleasure of using Internet Explorer 9 a lot until I installed Windows 7 on my work PC.

I have to say that Windows 7 is actually a great operating system and I especially love the way it has incorporated many of the features of clean up and performance tuning tools like Tune Up Utilities and CCleaner into the main OS.

I also have to say that Internet Explorer 9 is the first IE browser I actually like.

Not only is it blindingly fast they have finally listened to their customers who have been complaining for years and made their JavaScript engine standards compliant.

Obviously this makes the Browser / Document mode spaghetti even harder to detect and I haven't been able to find a way as of yet to detect IE 9 browser mode running as IE 8 or 7 on 32 bit machines but that is not a major issue at all.

What I am wondering though is that now that IE9 is actually a good browser, with a good inbuilt development console and element inspection tools, how many developers will actually return to using it either as their browser of choice for surfing the web or for their primary development.

My browser development survey which I held before IE9 was released showed that developers would rather use Chrome or Firefox for surfing and would also always choose the development tools that those browsers bring than use IE 7 or 8.

I know that I changed from using IE to Firefox as my browser of choice some eons back and I changed from Firefox to Chrome for both surfing (speed is key) and developing (no need for Firebug or any other plugin) the other year when Firefox started to suffer major performance problems.

These performance problems are always either to do with having far too many plugins installed. Setting the browser up to check for new versions and any installed plugins on start up which cause long load times, Firebug issues and errors in the Chrome source. This is on top of all the constant problems that Flash seems to bring to any browser.

I use Chrome for surfing due to it's speed but if I leave a few tabs open all night that contain pages running Flash videos then by morning my CPU has flat-lined and memory has leaked like the Titanic.

This is more a problem with Flash than Chrome and I try to keep this browser for surfing as clean and as fast as possible by not installing plugins. Then if I need to hack around or do some hardcore web development I will use Firefox and all the great plugins when I need to.

I don't think I could really get hacking with Chrome alone as when I am really getting stuck into a site I need my key plugins e.g the web developer toolbar, hackbar, header modifier, Request and Response inspectors e.g HTTP Fox, Firebug, ColorZilla, YSlow and all the Proxy plugins that are available.

However for basic development, piping out messages to the console, inspecting the DOM and checking loaded elements and their responses then Chrome has everything Firebug has without all the JavaScript errors.

In fact it's surprising how many developers don't even realise how much is possible with Chrome's inbuilt developer tools, speed tests, header inspectors, element inspectors and DOM modifiers and other great debugging tools that used to be the preserve of Firebug alone.

Which leads me back to IE9.

Yes it's fast and it's developer tools are okay with options to clear cookies, disable JavaScript, inspect the DOM and view the styles but it's no Chrome or Firebug yet;

Therefore what I want to know is how many people (and by that I mean developers) will switch back to using Internet Explorer 9 for pure web surfing?

For sure it's fast, supports the latest CSS standards and all the great HTML 5 features that we have all seen with floating fish tanks and the like. But is this enough for another browser switch?

I have all the major browsers installed at work on Win7 including IE9, Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, SeaMonkey and a number of others I cannot even remember the names of they are that obscure.

Before upgrading I even had Lynx and Netscape Navigator 4 installed as I used to be so anal that any code such as floating DIV's had to work in the earliest browsers possible. However I only use these browsers for testing and I stick to Chrome (for surfing) and Firefox (for hacking) which leaves little room for IE9 at the moment.

I know it's a good browser. It's standards compliant and it no longer crashes when I try to output anything to the console so why shouldn't I try it again.

Maybe one of my readers can help me decide on the browser of choice for surfing and development and how IE9 fits into that toolset.

Maybe I am missing some really cool features that I would use all the time but to be honest I am not into throwing sheep at randoms or constantly voting sites up and down and writing comments on them. Therefore for me to switch back from Chrome to another browser such as IE9 there has to be a really good reason for me to do so.

So does anyone have any reason why I should re-consider using IE9 at work for my web surfing or development?

Add-On Support for Chrome

Google Chrome Plugins

Google Chrome has been my favourite browser for plain old web surfing since it came out but one of the few downsides to this fast loading and stable browser is the lack of support for add-ons. This is one of the reasons FireFox has claimed such a major stake in the browser market because there are literally hundreds if not thousands of add-ons available to extend the browsers functionality.

Now Chrome has finally caught up and if you are subscribing to Googles dev channel you will be pleased to know that there are already a hundred or so add-ons waiting to be installed on your favorite browser. I have already installed Flashblock and Adblock and they seem to be working well. There does exist a web developer toolbar but its functionality is so cut down and basic at the moment its probably not worth getting.

Now if you are like me and have been working around the lack of plugins for Chrome by using bookmarklets then you will be pleased with this news. However if you are still interested in using bookmarklets which will work cross browser then here is another good one. It allows you to download Flash videos from YouTube at a click of a button so that you can watch them later on.

All you need to do is right click on the bookmarks bar (which should always be made visible) and then click "Add". Then in the Name you should put "YouTube Flash Downloader" or something similar and then for the URL you should paste in the following code:

javascript:window.location.href = 'http://youtube.com/get_video?video_id=' + yt.getConfig("SWF_ARGS")['video_id'] + "&sk=" + yt.getConfig("SWF_ARGS")['sk'] + '&t=' + yt.getConfig("SWF_ARGS")['t'];

This code has been updated to work with the recent changes in YouTubes API so don't worry as I know there is an old version of this bookmarklet floating around the web that doesn't work since November this year.

Now when you are on YouTube and a video starts playing you can just click on that bookmark link and the video should start downloading to your computer.

If you don't have a Flash player installed on your computer and want to play the FLV files in Windows Media Player then you can download an extension from the following location:

www.playflv.com

If you are interested in other cool bookmarklets then check out my previous article which contained one for viewing the generated source code of a page and one for dynamic DOM inspection.

Remember the cool thing about bookmarklets as apposed to add-ons is that they should work in all modern browsers as they are pure JavaScript. That even means IE 6!!

Also before everyone gets carried away installing lots of add-ons for Chrome just take a step back and remember why you're using Chrome in the first place. For me its because FireFox, which I use for all my web development, has so many add-ons installed that its become very slow to load and many of the add-ons can cause slow page loads e.g Firebug or errors. Therefore if you're like me and use many browsers keep the add-ons to a minimum and keep your web browsing fast.

I will shortly be writing an article about increasing speed and performance for all the major browsers but as a teaser I would give these pointers to quicker browsing.

• Remove all add-ons that you never use anymore and disable those you rarely use.
• Add-ons that will make your web surfing quicker such as FlashBlock, AdBlockPlus and NoScript are all good. Only enable those Flash movies and adverts if you really need to.
• Turn off inbuilt RSS readers and use a special app if you require it.
• Turn off all 3rd party cookies but keep Session cookies enabled.
• Trawl through those preference settings and disable anything you do not use.
• Disable link pre-fetching.
• Regularly clear your cache, history and auto-complete data.

Those are some very simple tips for increasing speed. I will go into more detail about the user preferences, http.pipelining, max-connections and TCP/IP settings another day.

Google Chrome Unresponsive

Googles Chrome Browser Raising Page Unresponsive Errors

Today I have just come across an intermittent problem with the latest version of Google Chrome 3.0.195.27 which has meant that the browser opens correctly but then freezes when trying to load any page including the homepage.

I first had this problem this morning and thought it was down to a slow connection but all my other browsers worked fine. After a while of spinning around Chrome pops up a little pop up box saying that a page (unnamed) has become unresponsive and you can either close it or wait. Choosing either option does nothing at all.

I have scanned my system with multiple virus checkers and all seems fine.

I have also re-installed Chrome three times now. The first time I re-installed the program run okay up until I rebooted later on then the same problem came back. Now I am just getting the unresponsive messages on starting up the browser.

I don't know what the problem is and I also haven't got a solution yet so if anyone has similar issues please let me know. I can still access the web with FireFox, IE, Opera and Safari but I tend to use Chrome for all my pure web surfing so I would really like this browser back working well as I have really got to love using it over the last year.