Insomniac Browser

Insomniac Browser 0.6.2. has been released.

Why Update? There are a few good reasons.

Get the Insomniac Update Here

Multi Threading

This version of Insomniac introduces multi-threading. If you don’t know what that is, think of it this way. If you have to move a fleet of 10,000 trucks from the east coast to the west coast, would you rather send them on a one lane highway or a five lane highway? The old Insomniac used a one lane highway, the updated version uses a five lane highway. This will lead to performance and speed enhancements for any users that like to use many tabs at once, for the VWR and for web sites that use Flash.

Lion Compatibility

Mac users, we’ve rebuilt or Mac version and you should now be able to upgrade to Lion without concern. Thanks for your patience. We had to rely on some third parties to update for Lion compatibility before we could do it.

Fewer Crashes

Thanks to all of the people that did the optional upgrade to 0.6.1. Your crash reports helped us identify the causes of the crashes that have been plaguing some of you for so long. We’ve identified these issues and fixed them. In many cases they were easy fixes, but we never would have discovered to problems without your cooperation. So thanks for being so proactive!

Insomniac As Default Browser

You can now make Insomniac your default browser. This is really helpful if you use Outlook, word or any other programs to click through to ticket links. Since Insomniac is not really designed to be a general browsing tool, we recommend you don’t set it as your default browser if you don’t need too or if you use your computer for a lot of other stuff. If it is strictly a ticketing computer, this feature can be helpful. Just click the ‘Settings’ icon in the upper right hand side of the browser to make Insomniac your default.

Remove Annoying TM Popups

Don’t need to see the bizrate pop up ad every time you complete a purchase on TM? We didn’t think so…we’ve suppressed it.

Extra Security

For those of you who prefer tighter security on your machine, we’ve added an SSL warning page for sites that claim to be secure but don’t have a matching security certificate to allow browsers to verify it. If you would like to be warned about such pages, you can select the option to ‘show SSL errors’ from the tools menu in the upper right hand corner.

Printing Fixes

Some users reported issues with printing in which the text would be too small on the printed page. We believe we’ve fixed this for a better printing experience for various local setups.

Get the Insomniac Update Here

There is an exciting new way to make money off Insomniac Browser and we want to invite you to participate. Today, we are opening the doors to our Affiliate Program and you’re invited to participate.

You can earn up to $240 for each person you refer to Insomniac AND get recurring revenue for as long as your referrals maintain their accounts.

Even if you have never participated in an affiliate program, we’ve made it dead simple for you to get involved.

Just sign up here and we will provide you with a special link that you can post on your blog, send to your mailing list, or email to friends that you think might get value out of using Insomniac.

Any new user you invite, will be eligible for a Free Trial, which has always been a great way to increase conversions.

Join today. The early movers will have a better chance to lock in recurring revenue for life!

The latest release of Insomniac has some functionality that is not immediately obvious from just looking at it, so here is a quick demo of the new functionality we released last week. Enjoy!

We have a new release of Insomniac this week. It’s been several months since our last release and in that time we have made some of the biggest infrastructural changes to the browser since launching it.

This release has been in the works for some time and just to clarify, the feedback and feature requests we got in our recent survey were to help us plan for the NEXT release, so you will not see most of them (though we did manage to sneak a few in).

Here is what this week’s release includes:

1. Plugins / Addons – The majority of our work was building in some infrastructure that allows users to OPTIONALLY add or remove certain features. You can now add or remove certain functionality so you can not only streamline your browser visually but also in terms of performance. As new features are added, you will be able to add the ones you want and ignore the others. The system is very similar to the add-on / plug-in systems you see in modern browsers.

2. Customizable Tool Bar – In the new release, you can remove buttons you don’t use or re-arrange the ones you do into your preferred order. If you have ever had issues with accidentally pushing buttons, you can now remove them or get them out of the way so that doesn’t happen. To move them, just hit CTRL and right click the button you want to move. (A screencast demo of this is coming soon).

3. Previous Tab Button and Shortcut – At a user’s request, we have added a ‘previous’ tab button, which has a keyboard shortcut, to go with the next tab button. Now you can easily navigate through tabs going forward or backward.

4. Browser Window Sizing – We’ve fixed some bugs that interfered with proper browser window sizing and prevented the browser from maximizing when it was being used on a second monitor. You should now be able to maximize the browser on second monitors and should not see bugs with sizing the window on any monitor. We’ve tested it on several different set-ups, but if you still can’t maximize it on your second monitor, please let us know so we can make adjustments for your set up in particular.

5. Screen Size Increase – We’ve shrunk the eyeball icon a bit so the page title bar is not as tall. We also decreased the height of the bottom border of the browser. These two changes provide you with a slightly larger space in which to view web pages.

6. Built In Search – We’ve added a search bar next to the URL bar in the browser that uses the same Google powered search, including the ticket industry refinements, that you now see on the browser start page. There is also a sizing slider so if you want a long URL bar and short search box, or vise versa, you can adjust it as you see fit.

7. Start Page URL Flicker Bug – Some users had trouble quickly navigating to a page when first opening the browser because the URL for the start page kept flickering while the page was loading. We’ve fixed this bug so you can type in the URL bar without flickering whether the start page (or any other page) has loaded or not.

8. Pages ‘Hanging’ Bug – Some users reported that when they tried to load some pages, they would ‘hang’ and not finish loading. There can be many causes for this and while most of them are related to the web sites you visit, there are often steps we can take to minimize them. In this case, the examples provided to us by users were related to web sites that use third party applications like stat counters or ad servers. These are in pretty standard use on most web sites these days, but cause problems with page loads because the third party applications might have server issues. We implemented a fix that will streamline page loading when such third party applications load slowly. It should reduce occurrences of the ‘hanging’ issue, but there are many other things that can cause this, so bug reports are appreciated if it happens to you.

9. Proxy Improvement – We’ve added an extra safeguard to prevent browser crashes if your proxy service slows or hangs. This will prevent the browser from crashing if this happens and also help with performance if your proxy slows down.

10. Automatic Crash Reporting – This release was delayed a little bit following our survey because we wanted to immediately address some browser crash issues. We have implemented an automatic crash reporting system that will notify us whenever a browser crashes and help us determine the cause. The information that is sent to us identifies what functions of the browser were being engaged when it crashed and will help us to replicate the errors on our end so we can get them fixed. The report does NOT include information about URLs you were visiting so whatever you were doing remains private. Even with the automated error reports, it helps if you still re-open the browser and send a report (through the envelope icon in the upper right hand corner of the browser) with any relevant information, as many of you have been doing (thanks it is really helpful). In this report, it is helpful, but up to you, if you include a list of sites that were open in your browser when it crashed and what step in the buying process you were at, if applicable. We hope this system meets your expectations in regard to allowing us to address issues with the browser while still protecting your privacy.

11. Duplicate Multiple Pages at Once – Right click on the duplicate tab button and enter the number of tabs you want to open of the current page. They will be opened automatically. There is a 2-3 second delay between opening of tabs so you don’t get errors. You can use this in general daily use, but we also think it might be extremely valuable for VWR situations (obviously we can’t test it in that scenario until we get some VWR sales, but we think this will work).

12. Failed Activation Error Messages – We’ve improved failed activation error messages so if you can’t activate your browser for any reason (usually because of incorrect password or user name, sometimes because an account has expired) you will be notified of the reason. If you are having trouble activating the browser, just read the message.

13. Save Page Bug Fix – We fixed a bug that was causing the ‘save as’ feature to be triggered when certain video and flash content was loaded on certain web pages.

14. Activation Safeguards – Your browser verification relies on making frequent quick connections to our database to ensure you have a valid license and it is only working on one computer. If there is a temporary slow period on our server it sometimes caused browsers to deactivate. We’ve improved this verification system and created a safeguard so that if your activation fails due to an inability to connect to our server, it will check on a second server before deactivating you. This should eliminate random deactivations and keep your browser running even if we have issues with our primary server.

15. Speed Enhancements – We eliminated a couple of bugs, streamlined some of our code and updated some of our third party libraries, and as a result you might notice a little more speed in the browser. Move over Chrome, you’re not the world’s fastest browser anymore.

If you experience any issues with the new release, please let us know right away.

Our next mission is to tackle the browser crash issues as we get reports of them and will releases fixes as fast as possible. In the meantime, we going back over your requests and suggestions to set priorities for the next new features.

Need a better way to search on Insomniac? We’ve just added a search bar to the start page so you can do searches automatically when you fire up the browser.

The search is powered by Google, but refined for ticket brokers. To see how this can save you some real time in finding links you need every day, check out this video:

We’ve done some testing on Lion and have an update for you.

At this point, we recommend that Mac users do NOT upgrade to Lion on computers that you want to use Insomniac on. If you do, you will have trouble loading pages that use Adobe Flash and some other components and in some cases they could cause the browser to crash.

Why is this happening? Well, Insomniac is built on top of a well know platform that handles certain standard browser functionality. On top of that, we have built many customizations that make the browser what it is. When Apple updated Lion, they removed certain integration points that some third party platforms use to render things like Adobe Flash and the platform we use is one of them.

The good news is, because both the platform we use and Lion are major players, we expect the platform updates will happen soon, but the bad news is that we can’t do them, so we have no control over when they will happen.

We know, Lion, looks really cool. We want to update some of our machines as well, but at this point, we just need to wait. We will keep an eye on this and integrate the platform updates as soon as they are available.

Are you able to pull tickets 8 times per minute? (Time yourself, it’s a fun game). If not this video is a must see.

In it, I demonstrate how you can optimize your use of the browser – using keyboard shortcuts and a little Insomniac magic – to get 8 pulls per minute every minute after you make your initial ticket requests. Using the set up I show you in this video, that’s how many I was able to get. And trust me, if I wasn’t so terrible at typing CAPTCHAs, I’d get even more.

What can this mean for you and your ticket inventory?

Well, let’s say you are working 8 tabs and it takes you two minutes to make your initial requests, entering the quantity and password each time. If a normal on sale time lasts 30 minutes, that’s 8 submissions in the first two minutes + 8 submissions every minute for 28 minutes. That’s a total of 232 pulls for the life of a normal on-sale.

You get to see 232 sets of tickets. Your competitors get to see a dozen or two…if they are lucky. To borrow the words of one of our users “If you don’t see the value in this, you don’t know what you are doing.”

My test did not account for the time it takes to actually complete the purchase in tabs that you want to buy in, but the difference between using this method and not using it is exponential. Check it out now. Try the method and see if you can beat the Insomniac! Props to anyone who can get into double digits in one minute.

(Mouseover the video to view the Pop Out feature to watch a larger version).

For questions contact us anytime.

If you are experiencing trouble getting Adobe Flash to work on Insomniac Browser, it could be problematic because many sites use it for features like interactive seating charts. The good news is that there is a simple solution and we’ve outlined it below.

The reason you might have trouble getting Flash to work in one browser but not in Insomniac is that Adobe installs specific settings on your computer depending on which browser you install it through. So to get it to work, you simply need to install Flash THROUGH Insomniac, even if you already have it installed for other browsers.

To get it to work correctly, you can watch the following screencast or follow the written instructions below. Approximate time to get this set up is about 3 minutes.

Written Instructions

1. USING INSOMNIAC, Go to a page that requires Flash. A perfect example of this is a Ticketmaster page that uses interactive seating charts. (Venues that use them are listed on ticketmaster.com/interactiveseatmap.)

2. If the map shows but doesn’t work, uninstall Flash entirely from your computer. Otherwise, you should see a message telling you that you need to install Flash. Click the ‘Get Flash’ button.

3. Still using Insomniac, click the Download button on the next page, save the installer to your desktop, double click the Flash installer icon that was just placed on your Desktop, then follow the instructions to install it.

4. Once the installation is complete go back to Insomniac and reload the page that needs Flash. If it still doesn’t work, just close the browser and re-open it and test it again.

This should get Flash set up properly to work with Insomniac on your machine. If you are still having trouble with it, just contact us.