Firefox has long been the champion of alternatives to Internet Explorer. With it’s tabs, plugins and other bells and whistles, it has been worth using, despite so many websites not being optimised to run in Firefox.
Chrome, a new competitor, has been around for long enough that it is time to take a serious look at it’s performance as a true rival to Firefox.

The last year or so, dedicated net users have begun to notice that Firefox isn’t really running the way it used to. Maybe it’s all the extensions and add-ons, but even with these disabled or uninstalled, the smooth fire-up of Firefox seems to be gone. In fact, Chrome has it over Firefox when it comes to starting up. Firefox takes six seconds while Chrome startes in less than one second.

Speed is one thing, but what about stability? Again, anyone using Firefox might have noticed that the browser crashes, hangs and freezes more often than used to. This is particularly noticeable for anyone running Windows 7. Somehow, they just don’t get along. Still, when compared to Chrome for stability, Firefox is the clear winner. Chrome struggles with WordPress and Ajax-based applications, and (the greatest sin) freezes catastrophically. That means that if you are in the middle of an e-commerce transaction and the browser crashes, it won’t save your details or the stage you were at. Firefox, no matter how glitchy it is, ALWAYS saves. Firefox will also cope with a large number of tabs being opened – between 30 and 50 depending on your computer. Chrome starts to freak out with only 20 tabs – annoying for a researcher or any mult-tasker!

The last, but by no means least, element is the purely user-centred design. Google came up with the brilliantly idea of opening a new tab to the right of the parent tab, instead of at the end of a long row of tabs. This was so brilliant in fact, that Firefox adopted the feature. So they perform the same in this way, but kudos goes to Chrome for coming up with it first. Chromes add-ons are also a lot faster than Firefox. So much so that it is often easier to switch to a Chrome-based app for a specific task than it is to fire up a Firefox extension. The downside of Chrome is the lack of customisation: You can’t decide where to have the address bar or drag favourites directly to the browser header.

Overall, Chrome is a faster browser for light net surfers, who don´t need to have more than twenty tabs open at a time. The apps are sleek (although minimal at the moment) and the intuitiveness of the browser action is almost creepy, it is so good. Chrome is worth installing, but Firefox fans probably won’t be making the full switch any time soon. Consider Chrome out of beta, but still in the ‘browser-lite’ stage of development. Rent apartments in Seville with Wi-Fi and stay in touch during your next mini-break.

Weirdly, the answer is yes. Time travel is possible, but don’t pack your bags just yet – no one has built the machine you need. However, the science of time travel holds up under scrutiny, with a bit of fine print!

Thanks to Einstein, we know that space and time are kind of the same thing: Space-time, aptly enough! Creating a way to move through space at a rapid rate means that we can move forward in time. It works like this: If you move at close to the speed of light, time moves for you more slowly than for other people. So if you leave Earth when you are twenty-five, and travel at 99.5 percent of the speed of light, when you return home after five years, you will be thirty years old. Sounds simple so far, right?

The weird thing is that all your twenty-five year-old friends will now be sixty five years old. So this kind of time travel is a little bit more like immortality than true time travel. This also happens with gravitational fields. The higher the gravity, the faster time moves. Rocket scientists have to calculate to allow for this – if you lived on the moon for a year, you would be a day younger than your twin when you returned to Earth.

The part where time travel isn’t really possible is moving backwards in time. The science falls apart when you try to travel backwards to a time before the time machine was invented. The only way we could realistically travel back in time is to build a time machine now and wait for a moment in the future when we could travel back to, er, now.

There are also a number of paradoxes associated with travelling back in time. Let’s say that you invent a time machine, then travel back and kill your parents (you freak!). If you parents weren’t around to have you, how could you have existed to invent the time machine?

There’s also the Person With No Past paradox. Imagine you are in your basement building a time machine out of cans and matches. You’re obviously having no luck with it. Suddenly a machine appears and an older you steps out of it. They give you the low-down on everything that will happen between now and then and you make a fortune winning bets on stuff that you know will happen. What happens if you grow older and decide to go back to you younger self to let them know everything that will happen? When did you invent the machine to do it? Also, what happens if you DON’T go back in time to talk to your younger self? Does your life disappear?

Theoretically, if you built an infinitely long cylinder and spun it at fast enough, a craft near the cylinder would be shot either forward or backward in time, depending on which direction the cylinder rotated. The problem with this theory is that it’s hard to build something that is infinitely long, and we don’t have anything strong enough to build it with. Oh well, back to the drawing board.

Using wormholes to slip through time, space and dimensions is another theory, but this one has too many problems to discuss here. So the next step is to basically fold a corner of time-space, step across the fold, and let the fold spring back. This sounds like science-fiction but is actually one of the methods being developed to travel through time, as well as through the infinite depths of space. Makes a long-haul flight pale in comparison. Take a shorter trip and rent apartments in Seville to feel like time has stood still.

According to three recent studies published by the ‘Journal of Personality and Social Psychology’, it is! Money doesn’t make you happy, but it sure helps a lot. We all know that feeling when we have saved up for months to buy a new computer and you can finally go to the store and buy it. Or the adrenaline rushing through your veins when you find a gorgeous Vera Wang dress in an outlet store – and how confident and pretty you feel when you wear it for the first time. But soon that happy feeling turns into indifference. The dress ends up in the back of your closet. Or your brother proudly announces he has bought a more expensive, faster portable. Suddenly you aren’t so happy with your purchase anymore.

Now we finally know the reason for this: buying life-experiences (such as travelling, taking day-trips or visiting an amusement park) makes you happier than spending your money on material things. Tickets to the theatre for example, satisfy your higher needs for relaxation, amusement, social contact and culture. So someone who has a big plasma TV, a PlayStation 3 and a I-phone, but who spends all his time inside his luxurious and expensive apartment is (statistically) less happy then someone who doesn’t own so many technical gadgets but spends his money on restaurants and travels.

Now I’m a real globetrotter, but I do happen to know someone who doesn’t like going on holiday. The reason why she prefers to stay home is exactly what we were discussing above. She told me that there are so many things you can buy with the money you spend on a two week trip. And when you come back, the money is gone and only the memory lasts. So she prefers a new pair of designer shoes over a trip to Seville for example.

Yet the experts don’t agree with her. After your trip, the memories of the great time you had continue to make you happy. And even if a colleague or friends brags about his/her trip that was far away, in a better hotel, you won’t be jealous. You might be annoyed, but you are happy and you wouldn’t want to change your holiday for theirs.

So we have the proof: buying a plane ticket = buying happiness. What are you waiting for? The culture, food and cheerful people of Seville are waiting for you! Rent the best apartments in Seville and invest some money in a happy future.

Whether it is Facebook, MySpace, Friendster or whatever else there is out there. More and more people are becoming members of social networking sites. Among them Facebook is the most popular. You can add friends, send messages, post photos, join groups, and let the world know what you are doing or thinking. The original purpose of Facebook is to meet people, and it is designed to foster friendships.

However with the growing popularity of Facebook and the seemingly endless possibilities of presenting yourself to the public and getting access to other people’s lives there is the danger of getting caught up in an addiction. How many times do you update your status? Do you always check your friends’ updates, pictures or wall posts before you would pick up the phone to call them? Do you religiously create photo albums documenting every detail of your life?

Let’s go a little further and think about how much it can affect your romantic life. You and your latest crush just became Facebook friends and immediately you go and stalk out his page. What is his/her relationship status? Who are the people in his/her pictures? Who posts on his/her wall? Or have you caught yourself going through the page of your partner looking for evidence that he/she might be cheating on you?

Recently a study was published in the scientific journal Cyberpsychology &Behavior that confirms that Facebook promotes jealousy and snooping around. The study was led by Amy Muise, MSc, Emily Christofides, MSc, and Serge Desmarais, PhD, from the University of Guelph (Ontario, Canada) and their results suggest that a big amount of time spent on Facebook only leads to an addictive cycle of time spent searching for information about their partners. Doesn’t this sound a little sad and pathetic to you?! The purpose of being in a relationship is that you are able to trust one another.

Even though networking sites like Facebook are a great way to stay in touch, especially with friends or relatives that don’t live close, how about turning the computer off to go on a romantic getaway with your partner. For example to Sevilla, the Andalusian capital will give you plenty of opportunities to take photos with your loved one which then can be shown off on Facebook. To top it all off rent Apartments in Sevilla to have the privacy of your own four walls to make sure there is no reason to be jealous.