Posted 02/04/10 at 10:00:00 PM by David Murphy

One of Mozilla Firefox's bigger advantages over Google Chrome has just been wiped away and, dare we say, Google Chrome has actually one-upped its rival in terms of overall usability and ease-of-installation. We're referring, of course, to Greasemonkey. You might have heard this name echoed across tech and tweak sites far and wide. As well you should have--the functionality you can achieve by this upgrade to your surfing experience is simply unsurpassed in its depth or scope by any conventional add-on or extension.

It's quite simple, really. You install Greasemonkey to gain access to a gallery of add-ons that benefit your browsing experience just as much as your favorite official "add-ons," if not more. By add-ons, we mean "scripts." In its conventional format, Greasemonkey is a browser add-on that grants you the ability to automatically integrate new Javascript-based modifications to a site whenever you load up the page. You don't have to design these modifications yourself--a huge gallery of scripts (more than 40,000!) have already been written for a wide swath of functions and locations. Consider Greasemonkey scripts to be analogous to extensions for Greasemonkey--itself an extension for your main browser.

Sound good? Because now, Google Chrome users have the ability to tap into Greasemonkey scripts as much as any other browser user. You don't even have to install a separate add-on, since scripts work natively in the browser! 

But here's the catch: not all Greasemonkey scripts work perfectly in Google Chrome. The running estimation is that roughly 20 percent of what's out there is currently broken for Google's browser. That's not great news for a person who's easily frustrated by failure. However, here's where Maximum PC comes into the picture. We've run through a large swath of awesome Google Greasemonkey scripts to achieve two key goals: to see what works and to see which scripts, of the 40,000+ available, are awesome tweaks for your browser. Click the jump for a look at some of the top Greasemonkey scripts you could (or should) be slapping into your Google Chrome browser right now.

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Posted 01/28/10 at 01:00:54 PM by David Murphy

Email encryption is a task that's often misunderstood and frequently confusing. In fact, I can't think of anyone on my list of friends right now--geek or otherwise--who actually encrypts their email. That's not because email encryption is a bad thing. In fact, there are some pretty compelling benefits to being able to conceal the contents of a message. Suppose you have to quickly email a friend or loved one access to your online banking account for some reason. You aren't going to want to just send that information straight into the digital ether. An unhappy coworker or an industrious packet sniffer can pick out the contents of your message and compromise your security in a short amount of time.

You usually have to walk through a ton of hoops to get your hands on powerful email encryption. It's a hodgepodge of certificates, authentications, digital signatures, strings of text exchanged as keys, et cetera. Or, at least, it was. A helpful piece of freeware called Comodo SecureEmail is attempting to simultaneously reduce the headache and maximize the benefit of email encryption. I'm proud to report that it's super-easy to use so long as you know how to work your way around a typical configuration screen. More importantly, it's a great way to set up the encryption handshake between you and new email contacts without rendering you lifeless from all the different options and authentications.

Click the jump to check out Comodo SecureEmail's features!

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Posted 01/25/10 at 02:45:43 PM by David Murphy

It's difficult to envision a life without email. I'm not sure if that's a good or a bad thing. Suffice, digital messaging is just a fact of geek life that we all have to deal with on a daily basis. Whether your inbox gets flooded with messages like the Nile during rainy season, or it's barren as one of those outback wastelands that Bear Grylls likes to visit, you probably aren't using your email client of choice to its fullest potential.

That's ok. Neither was I before undertaking the research for this week's open-source and freeware roundup. But now that I have seen the light, as it were, I would never go back to the ol' vanilla installations of Outlook, Thunderbird, Gmail, or whatever one's particular email utility of choice happens to be.  There are just too many interesting ways to tweak and alter the normal email experience to better enhance your ability to read, organize, and shuffle your messages.

That's kind of "the big point" of the roundup this week--making your email work better for you. Click the jump, and I'll show you five apps and utilities for taking your email processing to the next level!

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Posted 02/04/09 at 10:50:38 AM by Paul Lilly

Finally answering the call first made in 2003 and ultimately "deferred to a future release," Sun Microsystems is giving users a 64-bit plugin integrated into Java 6 Update 12. The new update also includes a 64-bit version of Webstart, a framework which offers end-users the ability to start Java applications over a network or the internet.

The 64-bit plugin is required for 64-bit browsers and comes included as part of the Java Runtime Environment. Users planning to run 32-bit and 64-bit browser interchangeably must install both 32-bit and 64-bit versions of the JRE.

In addition to the 64-bit plugin, Java 6 Update 12 offers official Windows 2008 support, better performance, and no less than 140 bug fixes.

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