Everyone knows there is a hidden trex game in Google Chrome browser that shows when there is no internet connection. Try opening any webpage without connected to internet and the game automatically opens up.

Since chrome is based on the open source Chromium project, any browser using chromium under the hood can run the game. This includes browsers like Microsoft Edge, Vivaldi etc. But what about other browsers like Firefox or Opera?

Well the original trex game code can't because it uses certain javascript code specific to chromium. But the team at Skipser has hacked it to work in any browser. Just click the link below and start playing -

Play chrome T-rex game

One good think about it is all text and other items get hidden from the screen when you start playing giving a clean play experience.

There is also a leaderboard showing the top scores of the week.

This story, Play chrome trex game on any browser, was originally published at Skipser.

App quality checks in android play store are on the lower side and it is often the case that some rogue app is slowing your your phone down. And a good way to verify this is to do a safe mode reboot. In safe mode, android doesn't load any apps other than the few bacis ones like the phone dialier, camera etc. No other apps are alowed to run and it more or less makes the phone exactly as you bought it.

Booting an android phone in Safe Mode is fairly simple-

1. When your phone is on, press the power button to bring the shut down menu.
2. Long press on the "Power Off" option.
3. Click ok on the confirmation screen which asks if the phone can boot into Safe Mode.

That's it, your phone will now restart in safe mode and you will find a small watermark on the bottem left indicating the phone is indeed in safe mode.

Now Safe Mode cannot tell you which app behaved wrongly and pulled your phone performance down. But it can defenitely tell you if there were some rougue app(s) problem or not. To find out the exact app, you would have to reboot in normal mode and disable the apps one by one to catch the culprit.

This story, How to Reboot Android In Safe Mode., was originally published at Skipser.

Google introduced personalized search results as an experiment in 2013. It basically used to display relevant information from their other products like Gmail, Google+, Calendar etc in search. The feature was also not enabled by default for all and the criteria for enabling is also not made public.

If you search for keywords like my purchases, my events, my bills, my reservations, my photos etc there is a pretty good chance of google showing it to you. In fact being not evil, Google will first ask you if you would like to enable showing personalized results. And here's what you will see-

How to disable personalized search results.

To disable or turn off private results, visit Search Settings page, scroll down to "Private results" section, select "Do not use private results" and click on Save. This will permanently disable the feature until you choose to turn it back on.

This story, How to Turn Off Google Private Personalized Search Results, was originally published at Skipser.

Push notifications is a feature that lets websites show you notifications even if the site is not really open in a browser. It can be used by websites to show you stuff like new messages, breaking news or new items available for sale etc.

Whenever you open a site supporting push notifications, Firefox will first ask you if you wan to receive them (Starting Firefox 44).

Although the sites to receive notifications is totally under your control, you might want to disable it at various levels-

1. Removing notifications from a site you have already granted permission-

• From Firefox menu, go to Options > Content
• Click "Choose" under "Notifications". This will show up the list of sites enabled for push notifications.
• You can selectively remove any site(s) from here.

2. I don't want to see push notifications from any site!

A lot of people find it disturbing to get pinged from sites and don't want the feature at all. You can permanently disable Firefox push notifications by un-setting a config flag-

• Visit "about:config" page
• Search for "dom.webnotifications.enabled" and set it's value to false.

This will completely disable push notification and Firefox won't ask your permission for enabled sites as well going forward.

How push notifications work.

Now that you know how to disable them, here's some technical details of how push notifications works if you are interested-

1. Sites that want to show push notifications first registers with Firefox.
2. Firefox then starts asking your permission to show push notification when opening that site.
3. When you confirm, firefox starts and maintains a connection b/w your PC and the firefox push server.
4. The website then posts a new message onto the Firefox push server.
5. The message gets delivered to your PC via the connection and you get notified.
6. Mozilla users firefox push server for desktop and the google cloud messaging service on android.

This story, How to Stop Push Notifications From Firefox., was originally published at Skipser.

Our smartphones keep getting smarter every day, but the one thing that is not so smart is their batteries. Smart phones that last more than a day are rare and costly. And to add to that, it takes hours for a full recharge.

Qualcom's upcoming quickcharge version 3.0 was the most promising one till now with 0-80% charging in 30 minutes. But a new tech from Huawei could beat Qualcom big time. Huawei's Watt lab showed off a new variety of 3000mAh lithium-ion battery that can do 0-48% in just 5 minutes. Even though they didn't give out details for full charging time, it could anywhere be between 10-15 minutes. They summarized the technology as -

We bonded heteroatoms to the molecule of graphite in anode, which could be a catalyst for the capture and transmission of lithium through carbon bonds.The heteroatoms increase the charging speed of batteries without decreasing energy density or battery life.

The new technology applies to batteries in a variety of applications like smartphones, wearables and even electric vehicles. Here's a video of the new battery in action-

Details on when the new tech will be hitting the market is not yet revealed. There could be more work in making it really ready for consumer applications. But it would be really interesting to get our phones charged fully over a cup of coffee.

This story, New 3000mAh Huawei Battery Charges to 48% in 5 Minutes., was originally published at Skipser.

Traditionally scroll-bars were designed to work with the mouse cursor. The middle scroll wheel was not that common and majority of the mouse were simple 2 button ones. But now, the scroll wheel has almost become a standard. In fact it is really very difficult to find the old fashioned 2 button mouse nowadays.

But the scroll-bars in browsers have remained unchanged. They are thick and occupy a small but significant portion of screen width.

Chrome's Overlay Scroll-bars

Chrome tries to regain some of the screen's real-estate with their new experimental "Overlay ScrollBar" concept. It is not enabled by default, but you can manually turn it on from this url-

chrome://flags/#overlay-scrollbars

Once enabled, the thick scroll-bars will be replaced by a really thin one increasing the available display width. And the cursor experience is kept in-tact by having the scroll-bar thicken automatically when you hover the curser above it. The expanded scroll-bar actually overlays content in a semi-transparent manner and shrinks away the moment you move your mouse away. Here is the scroll-bar in action-

Regular scroll-bar-

Overlay scroll-bar-

This story, Overlay Scrollbar in Google Chrome - A Better Way To Scroll., was originally published at Skipser.

Microsoft Edge is the default browser in Windows 10. Unlike its predecessor (Internet Explorer), benchmarks report it as faster and more efficient compared to Chrome and Firefox. But still a lot of us have our favorite browsers and would like to stick with them.

Make Chrome, Firefox, Vivaldi or Opera the default browser in windows 10.

Windows doesn't ship with Chrome or Firefox. So you have to install them yourself and all browsers usually give an option to make it the default browser on startup. A single click is usually what it takes.

But let's say you didn't chose this option and later on you want to make Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi or Opera or any other browser as the default. There are 2 ways to do this in Windows 10

Change default browser from "Default App Settings"

1. First type "default app" in the search bar.
2. Select "Default App Settings" at the top of the list.
3. Scroll down to browsers section, tap on the existing "Windows Edge" and choose the alternate browser you want.
4. The selected browser is now your default browser.

Here's a visual demo-

Change default browser from "Default Programs"

1. First type "default programs" in the search bar and select it from top of the list.
2. Click on "Set your default programs".
3. Select your browser in the left pane (Chrome, Firefox, Vivaldi or Opera) and click on "set this program as default".
4. That's it, you have now changed your default browser.

Here's a visual demo-

NOTE: Microsoft might not provide the simple control panel when Windows 10 is released. This is still undecided yet, but we will keep this page updated with the developments.

This story, Change Windows 10 Default Browser to Firefox, Chrome, Vivaldi or Opera, was originally published at Skipser.

Till now, Google was the one who liked poking users with Easter egg surprises on their search pages. Now it's Bing's turn with Microsoft adding some gaming action to search results.

Try searching for "Pong" in Bing, and you would find a game board for "Bing Pong" at the top along with other search results. Similar to the ping-pong game, there is a ball and two players - you and Bing. You can hit the ball by moving your mouse up and down from inside the board.

So here's Bing-Pong in action.

Here's the direct link to bing for "pong" search page. Just click on the link and start playing!
www.bing.com/search?q=bing+pong&qs=n&form=QBLH&pq=bing+pong

This story, Pong - Bings New Easter Egg Game., was originally published at Skipser.