The battle of the browsers has been with us for some time now and we are no longer stuck with Internet Explorer! There are two great alternatives out there, Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox, but which is the best? Well that can depend a lot upon what you want out of a web browser, both of them have their advantages so let’s see how they compare.

Look and feel - Chrome looks and feels a lot like any of Google’s products, it is simple but very neatly presented. It does away with any unnecessary toolbars and buttons (including the home button by default which is annoying!) and opts for the simple and clean look. What is good about this is that your browser window itself takes up more of the screen since there is more room for it, plus you have fewer distractions when browsing and you can actually focus on the page itself. Even the options menu is straight forward with only the necessary things open for configuration.

Firefox by default is slightly different and has the a few extra buttons and toolbars but still has a nice and easy to use interface. The great thing about Firefox is that there are many themes that allow you to totally customise the look of the interface; although Chrome has a few itself it’s nowhere near the number that the Firefox community offer.

Speed and performance - Chrome is by far the fastest browser I’ve ever used, the program itself loads fast and it loads pages very quick also, two very important things in my opinion. Rendering big JavaScript scripts and larger graphics are faster in Chrome than they are in Firefox. The other advantage with Chrome is the fact that each new tab uses its own processor thread and makes managing them from an operating systems point a view a lot more efficient. It is the one thing you will notice with Firefox; as soon as you start opening quite a few tabs you will see your CPU and memory usage shoot up, Chrome on the other hand is able to handle this a lot better.

Add-ons and customisation - This is where Firefox is the winner hands down. The amount of plug-ins available for Firefox is unbelievable; every single type of plug-in is available for doing just about anything you could ask for from a browser. While Chrome also offers some add-ons they are only a drop in the ocean compare to the amount Firefox has. But not only that, the Firefox add-ons are installable with the click of a button whilst most the Chrome ones require some additional configuring which just looks like a headache most of the time!

Couple that with the huge number of themes and Firefox is by far the most versatile Web Browser ever. This is great for people who love to customise the look and feel of the browser but it does come with a downside. Once you start installing add-ons for Firefox you will soon notice how the performance is affected. At one point I had 5 add-ons installed that did various things and it would take Firefox around 15 seconds to load for the first time – not so good!

Summary – Both are great browsers don’t get me wrong, but Chrome definitely has the edge, mainly for the fact that it is so quick and efficient and speed is of the essence for a web browser. On the other hand if you simple cannot live without lots of add-ons then Firefox might be a safer bet, but be prepared to do a lot more waiting around!

DHCP (Dynamic host control protocol) is a networking protocol that is used to automatically assign an ip address to a host. DHCP allows network admins to allocate address ‘pools’ to networks and allow clients with DHCP enabled to automatically acquire their ip address. This has several benefits:

1. Cuts out manual configuration and therefore saves time (lots of time for a bit network!)
2. Network changes (for example new DNS server addresses) can be configured by DHCP and therefore dont require manually changing by the admin.
3. Allows ‘plug and play’ of new clients into the network.

DHCP can not only assign a client an ip address but also many other networking options, the most common being:

• - Default Gateway
• - Dns Servers
• - WINS Servers
• - Default Domain Name
• - Static Routes

The DHCP Process – When a computer first initializes its network card and connects up, it will send out a DHCP Discovery packet, this packet gets sent out as a broadcast which means it is destined for all nodes on all networks, because after all, the computer doesnt have an ip address so how does it know where the DHCP server is? Because the packet is a broadcast, all machines on the network will receive it, hopefully a DHCP server will be present and will respond to the request.

All being well a valid DHCP server will respond with a potential lease and will include the ip address and configuration options in the reply. It sends it back to the client using the mac address as the destination (since it still doesnt have an ip address at this point!)

Once the client receives the response it will accept the lease configuration providing that the address is not already in use on the network. It then sends an acknowledgement back to the server to indicate that it is using the lease and all is well, at this point the server will make a note of the lease that is now being used so that it doesnt assign it again to another machine.

At this point the client is now online with a valid ip address and hopefully other options (dns servers, gateway etc) This lease can last between a day and infinity, it is all dependent upon the lease time specified at the DHCP server.

DHCP requests to different networks – A lot of the time a DHCP server will not reside on the same network as some clients may, in this case there is a potential problem, after all, a broadcast (like the DHCP discovery packet) will not be sent across networks by default (routers will simply drop the packet). To overcome this problem your router would need to support an ip-helper command (or something similar) that is able to forward a DHCP broadcast packet onto a host on another network. This essentially turns a broadcast packet into a unicast packet.

Note: A unicast transmission is simply where a single host is sent a packet, as opposed to a broadcast which is where all hosts on a network are sent the packet.

So there you have it, an introduction to DHCP and how it works, please feel free to leave comments below.