Next to dedicated trading platforms, web browsers are the most important software programs used by most traders.  They are a vital link to the information upon which our trading decisions are based.  At the same time, they are unreliable.  Every trader has had to reboot because a crashed browser is wreaking havoc with the rest of the system.  As Murphy's Law would have it, these crashes usually occur at the worst possible moment — when we are in the middle of a big trade.

I have been loyal to Firefox for a long time, and love many of its plugins.  However, it was never all that reliable, and has become less so over the past two years.  I have tried everything, from adding memory to removing Google Gears.  Some of these tips helped, but none made Firefox truly stable on any of my systems.

Internet Explorer 8 was supposed to be more stable and secure than prior versions.  In my limited test, it didn't crash much but was cumbersome. 

When I learned that password manager lastpass was available as an extension for Google Chrome (this lifehacker article describes the details), I was eager to make the jump.  

Google Chrome has been responsive on both my laptop (Win 7 Pro 64, Core2 Duo, 4GB) and my aged desktop (Win XP Pro, Core2 Duo, 1.5GB).  To be fair, I have yet to fully put it through its paces, but it has not crashed or frozen my system.  While faster, it uses more memory when many tabs are open.  That's ok — memory is cheap but crashing during a big trade can be very expensive.

Besides its stability, Google Chrome has one feature that is particularly attractive for traders.   Chrome combines the URL bar and the search bar that you see in Firefox and IE into a single box Google calls an "omnibar."  By default you can either type in a URL in the omnibar and pull up a website, or type a search term and pull up Google results.  But you can add your own searches and other web services to the omnibar.  I have mine set up so I can easily pull up heavily used trading-related web services. For example, if I type yf uxg, I will pull up the Yahoo! Finance page for U.S. Gold (Amex:UXG).  "insider uxg" will pull up insider trading for UXG from J3SG.com.  "bc uxg" will pull up U.S. Gold's stock chart on BigCharts, and so on.  

To begin, right-click on the omnibar and select "edit search engines."  You will be asked to provide the name, keyword, and modified URL for a search.  The keyword is what you will type into the omnibar along with the "search term" to pull up a given result.  Keep these descriptive enough so you can remember them, but short enough to save keystrokes. The URL field is similar to the search result URL, but the search term must be stripped out and replaced with %s.

Like making sausage, you can ignore the ugly details if you prefer and simply copy these shortcuts in as additions to your omnibar.  You have to do it one at a time.

Yahoo! Finance

yf

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=%s

Google Finance

gf

http://www.google.com/finance?q=%s

BigCharts

bc

http://bigcharts.marketwatch.com/quickchart/quickchart.asp?symb=%s

J3SG Insider Trading

insider

http://j3sg.com/Reports/Stock-Insider/Generate.php?DV=yes&tickerLookUp=%s&Submit232=GO

Yahoo! news

yn

http://search.news.yahoo.com/news/search?p=%s&ei=UTF-8

Google news

gn

http://news.google.com/news/search?aq=f&pz=1&cf=all&ned=us&hl=en&q=%s

EDGAR filings (SEC)

edgar

http://sec.gov/cgi-bin/browse-edgar?company=%s&match=&CIK=&filenum=&State=&Country=&SIC=&owner=exclude&Find=Find+Companies&action=get

FinancialBlogSearch (Google CSE for financial blogs)

blogs

http://www.google.com/cse?cx=003769670076142430872%3Ajskdo-el3lu&q=%s&sa=Search

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