Firefox for mobiles was called Firefox Mobile and was Mozilla was working on version 2. However recently Mozilla decided to synchronize their desktop and mobile offerings with the same name and version number, since they are based on the same technology. Now Mozilla has made the first beta version of this upcoming browser available.
Showing posts with label Browser. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Browser. Show all posts
Tuesday, October 12, 2010
Saturday, March 6, 2010
Opera 10.50 released
Opera 10.50 is right now only available for Windows, and the Linux and Mac OS X versions are still in the beta stage. Opera 10.50 also features a revamped UI which makes full use of Aero effects available in Windows Vista and 7. It also supports Windows 7 jump lists, and tab previews.
Saturday, February 13, 2010
Opera Mini for iPhone!
Opera Mini, possibly the best browser for Java based mobile phones has been announced by Opera for the iPhone. While the browser is still not available for public use, it is surprising that it is there for the iPhone OS at all.
Since a while Apple has allowed for developers to create browsers for the iPhone under the condition that they use WebKit as the browser engine. Does this mean that Opera has adapted the iPhone version of the browser to use WebKit instead of their own Presto? This is also the reason that the Mozilla Firefox browser is not available on the iPhone yet, although it will be making its way to Android soon.
Since a while Apple has allowed for developers to create browsers for the iPhone under the condition that they use WebKit as the browser engine. Does this mean that Opera has adapted the iPhone version of the browser to use WebKit instead of their own Presto? This is also the reason that the Mozilla Firefox browser is not available on the iPhone yet, although it will be making its way to Android soon.
Monday, December 21, 2009
Keyboard and mouse shortcuts on Google Chrome Browser for windows
| Ctrl+N | Opens a new window. |
| Ctrl+T | Opens a new tab. |
| Ctrl+Shift+N | Opens a new window in incognito mode. |
| Press Ctrl+O, then select file. | Opens a file from your computer in Google Chrome. |
| Press Ctrl and click a link. Or click a link with your middle mouse button (or mousewheel). | Opens the link in a new tab in the background . |
| Press Ctrl+Shift and click a link. Or press Shift and click a link with your middle mouse button (or mousewheel). | Opens the link in a new tab and switches to the newly opened tab. |
| Press Shift and click a link. | Opens the link in a new window. |
| Ctrl+Shift+T | Reopens the last tab you've closed. Google Chrome remembers the last 10 tabs you've closed. |
| Drag a link to a tab. | Opens the link in the tab. |
| Drag a link to a blank area on the tab strip. | Opens the link in a new tab. |
| Drag a tab out of the tab strip. | Opens the tab in a new window. |
| Drag a tab out of the tab strip and into an existing window. | Opens the tab in the existing window. |
| Press Esc while dragging a tab. | Returns the tab to its orginal position. |
| Ctrl+1 through Ctrl+8 | Switches to the tab at the specified position number on the tab strip. |
| Ctrl+9 | Switches to the last tab. |
| Ctrl+Tab or Ctrl+PgDown | Switches to the next tab. |
| Ctrl+Shift+Tab or Ctrl+PgUp | Switches to the previous tab. |
| Alt+F4 | Closes the current window. |
| Ctrl+W or Ctrl+F4 | Closes the current tab or pop-up. |
| Click a tab with your middle mouse button (or mousewheel). | Closes the tab you clicked. |
| Right-click, or click and hold either the Back or Forward arrow in the browser toolbar. | Displays your browsing history in the tab. |
| Press Backspace, or Alt and the left arrow together. | Goes to the previous page in your browsing history for the tab. |
| Press Shift+Backspace, or Alt and the right arrow together. | Goes to the next page in your browsing history for the tab. |
| Press Ctrl and click either the Back arrow, Forward arrow, or Go button in the toolbar. Or click either button with your middle mouse button (or mousewheel). | Opens the button destination in a new tab in the background. |
| Double-click the blank area on the tab strip. | Maximizes the window. |
| Alt+Home | Opens your homepage in your current window. |
Thursday, August 27, 2009
Firefox 3.6 alpha impresses with spiffy, speedy performance
The Mozilla Foundation has released an update to its popular Firefox browser, Firefox 3.6 alpha 1. Codenamed ‘Namoroka’, derived from a national park on Madagascar, Mozailla was quick to note that this version is “intended for developers and testers only”, as it is unstable and could contain many bugs.
The purpose of this update is supposed to be an improvement in “end-user perceived performance”, for which Firefox has thrown in a faster JavaScript engine, improved start-up speed and other small tweaks.
The interface has obviously gone through a lot of work, as our first experience showed a remarkable difference in the current FF 3.5 we are running and the 3.6 alpha. The start-up from a cold boot has gotten much faster – still not as fast as IE or Google Chrome, but it is no longer a noticeable delay.
Page loading speeds for a lot of sites have improved while scrolling through the site seems to have become smoother. A quick look at the developer notes says that there has been an update made to mouse scroll speed.
There is some more eye-candy in the form of preview panes in the default Ctrl+Tab scrolling. A small preview pane, much like what you would get with Alt+Tab in Windows, shows up with all your tabs in it. Quite handy, but not a feature that wowed us given that other extensions were already doing this.
Still, overall, Firefox 3.6 alpha 1 feels spiffy. Chrome and Safari might still be faster, but all statistics aside, Mozilla’s new venture ‘feels’ faster than its predecessors – an important achievement for the browser, which has always suffered a bit in terms of clunkiness
Saturday, August 1, 2009
Firefox Is Faster, but Not as Fast as Google Chrome
When Mozilla released a new version of Firefox a couple of weeks ago, its developers promised a faster browser, and Firefox 3.5 delivers, racing past IE and Safari in our latest set of page-loading speed tests. But its page load times are still about two-tenths of a second slower than Google Chrome.
Google Chrome showed the fastest page load time in five of the eight sites we tested it against, with an average page loading time of 1.699 seconds. However, Firefox 3.5 also put on a strong showing, coming in a close second with an average page-loading time of 1.762 seconds. For the most part, the difference between Chrome's page-loading times and those of Firefox is approximately two-tenths of a second. In our previous testing, Firefox 3.0.7 came in fourth in a four-browser field.
Internet Explorer 8 and Safari 4 both did a decent job loading pages, but fell behind Chrome and Firefox with average page-loading times of 1.833 and 1.964 seconds, respectively. Opera 10 Beta came in last, roughly a half second behind its nearest competitor.
By far the most inconsistent results involved loading PC World's Twitter feed page. We saw load times ranging from about 1 second to over 20 seconds. Since Twitter has a history of server issues, we think this has less to do with the browsers themselves, and more to do with Twitter, although we were surprised by the wildly inconsistent results. For this reason, even though we list the loading times for the Twitter page in our results chart (click on the thumbnail image above), these loading times are not taken into account for the overall average loading time.
Some browser vendors, such as Apple and Mozilla, have touted big improvements in JavaScript performance. That has made some browsers shine in benchmark results. For example, Safari 4 earned the highest scores in both the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark and the Peacekeeper browser benchmark. But Apple's browser was at the back of the pack in our real-world page- loading tests. Browser benchmarks typically take elements that impact page-loading speed out of context, so while they'll give you a feel for how well a browser handles JavaScript or HTML rendering, for example, they won't tell you how fast a browser feels when you're clicking around from site to site. By comparison, our tests use real, popular sites to get a better idea of what you'll experience with any one of these browsers.
Google Chrome showed the fastest page load time in five of the eight sites we tested it against, with an average page loading time of 1.699 seconds. However, Firefox 3.5 also put on a strong showing, coming in a close second with an average page-loading time of 1.762 seconds. For the most part, the difference between Chrome's page-loading times and those of Firefox is approximately two-tenths of a second. In our previous testing, Firefox 3.0.7 came in fourth in a four-browser field.
Internet Explorer 8 and Safari 4 both did a decent job loading pages, but fell behind Chrome and Firefox with average page-loading times of 1.833 and 1.964 seconds, respectively. Opera 10 Beta came in last, roughly a half second behind its nearest competitor.
By far the most inconsistent results involved loading PC World's Twitter feed page. We saw load times ranging from about 1 second to over 20 seconds. Since Twitter has a history of server issues, we think this has less to do with the browsers themselves, and more to do with Twitter, although we were surprised by the wildly inconsistent results. For this reason, even though we list the loading times for the Twitter page in our results chart (click on the thumbnail image above), these loading times are not taken into account for the overall average loading time.
Some browser vendors, such as Apple and Mozilla, have touted big improvements in JavaScript performance. That has made some browsers shine in benchmark results. For example, Safari 4 earned the highest scores in both the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark and the Peacekeeper browser benchmark. But Apple's browser was at the back of the pack in our real-world page- loading tests. Browser benchmarks typically take elements that impact page-loading speed out of context, so while they'll give you a feel for how well a browser handles JavaScript or HTML rendering, for example, they won't tell you how fast a browser feels when you're clicking around from site to site. By comparison, our tests use real, popular sites to get a better idea of what you'll experience with any one of these browsers.
Sunday, June 21, 2009
Safari 4
Safari won't change the browser game the way the iPhone has changed mobile phones. This year's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference billed it as "the fastest and most innovative browser." While it is both fast (with the Nitro JavaScript engine) and innovative (thanks to some UI enhancements), I don't buy the superlatives. Google Chrome is still the speed leader on my tests, and Safari 4 lacks innovations, like the WebSlices and Accelerators in Internet Explorer and the extreme customizability of Firefox. Nevertheless, Safari (on both Mac and Windows) is definitely a fine performer in terms of speed and usability.
Setup and the New Look
I had no problem installing Safari 4 on my Vista system, and the browser was up and running in short order. At 27MB, the download is bulkier than that of the smallest browser, Chrome, which is a mere half megabyte. Then again, Safari offers more features. Mac users should note that the installer requires OS 10.5.6—10.5.5 won't do. When you first run Safari 4, you'll see a new animated splash screen featuring the Apple logo, complete with inspirational music.
For the final release, Safari backtracked on one of the beta's distinguishing interface features, the Chrome-like "Tabs on Top," which placed page tabs above the address bar. Another change from the beta is the return of the page-load progress bar: It's in a different form now, in the right-hand side of the address bar.
The released version of Safari 4 does retain the most eye-catching trait of the Safari 4 beta, Top Sites, which shows your most-accessed Web pages in a glorious 3D view. In this and elsewhere, Safari 4 brings the added elegance and clever interface ideas we've come to expect from Apple. One example is the incorporation of Cover Flow in the browser's history list. Sure, it's mostly eye candy, but it's at the same time stylish and useful.
When you open a tab, you see the new Top Sites page, a curved, 3D grid of images of your most frequently visited Web sites. An Edit button lets you remove any of these thumbnails, and you can drag any mini-page to a spot of your choice and "pin" it to that spot. If a site in your Top Sites group has new content, a blue dog-ear with a star shows up in the page's top right corner. In some ways, I prefer Opera's approach, which adds only sites you specify to the speed-dial thumbnails. Still, I can see Chrome and Safari's rationale, that people are more likely to use the feature if it's automatically populated.
Unlike the bare-bones Chrome, Safari includes a handy sidebar, which you can show by clicking the book icon at the top left of the window. The sidebar has a variety of functions: You can choose from among History, Bookmarks, Bonjour networking, and a basic RSS reader. Any of these sidebar choices takes advantage of the scrolling Cover Flow view in the top half of the main center panel, while the bottom half offers a simple list of the links. You can scroll back and forth through the Cover Flow images via mouse wheel, or you can use a slider beneath the images.
Safari's bookmark management is adequate, but I was unable to import more than one IE bookmark at a time. Chrome has the same problem, whereas Firefox let me import a whole folder at once. Safari also lacks Firefox's ability to show recently bookmarked items and its tagging capability.
Also new for Version 4 is a native Windows look for the browser, in Classic, XP, and Vista flavors. This means that window borders (nonexistent in previous versions of Safari for Windows) now look like those of other apps. The Mac version, of course, maintains the border-free look. Windows users also now receive the standard Windows fonts they're used to seeing, instead of Apple's more minimalist standard fonts. And in the Windows version, you get the same two toolbar icons you get in Chrome, for page and general settings—possibly showing the browsers' similar WebKit roots.
You can customize the buttons you want on your toolbar, such as New Tab and Home, but Safari still comes nowhere near Firefox in customizability. The Mozilla browser not only avails itself of thousands of extensions that alter both appearance and function, but even offers "Fashion My Firefox" and Personas to help users with the sea of available customizations.Safari won't change the browser game the way the iPhone has changed mobile phones. This year's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference billed it as "the fastest and most innovative browser." While it is both fast (with the Nitro JavaScript engine) and innovative (thanks to some UI enhancements), I don't buy the superlatives. Google Chrome is still the speed leader on my tests, and Safari 4 lacks innovations, like the WebSlices and Accelerators in Internet Explorer and the extreme customizability of Firefox. Nevertheless, Safari (on both Mac and Windows) is definitely a fine performer in terms of speed and usability.
Setup and the New Look
I had no problem installing Safari 4 on my Vista system, and the browser was up and running in short order. At 27MB, the download is bulkier than that of the smallest browser, Chrome, which is a mere half megabyte. Then again, Safari offers more features. Mac users should note that the installer requires OS 10.5.6—10.5.5 won't do. When you first run Safari 4, you'll see a new animated splash screen featuring the Apple logo, complete with inspirational music.
For the final release, Safari backtracked on one of the beta's distinguishing interface features, the Chrome-like "Tabs on Top," which placed page tabs above the address bar. Another change from the beta is the return of the page-load progress bar: It's in a different form now, in the right-hand side of the address bar.
The released version of Safari 4 does retain the most eye-catching trait of the Safari 4 beta, Top Sites, which shows your most-accessed Web pages in a glorious 3D view. In this and elsewhere, Safari 4 brings the added elegance and clever interface ideas we've come to expect from Apple. One example is the incorporation of Cover Flow in the browser's history list. Sure, it's mostly eye candy, but it's at the same time stylish and useful.
When you open a tab, you see the new Top Sites page, a curved, 3D grid of images of your most frequently visited Web sites. An Edit button lets you remove any of these thumbnails, and you can drag any mini-page to a spot of your choice and "pin" it to that spot. If a site in your Top Sites group has new content, a blue dog-ear with a star shows up in the page's top right corner. In some ways, I prefer Opera's approach, which adds only sites you specify to the speed-dial thumbnails. Still, I can see Chrome and Safari's rationale, that people are more likely to use the feature if it's automatically populated.
Unlike the bare-bones Chrome, Safari includes a handy sidebar, which you can show by clicking the book icon at the top left of the window. The sidebar has a variety of functions: You can choose from among History, Bookmarks, Bonjour networking, and a basic RSS reader. Any of these sidebar choices takes advantage of the scrolling Cover Flow view in the top half of the main center panel, while the bottom half offers a simple list of the links. You can scroll back and forth through the Cover Flow images via mouse wheel, or you can use a slider beneath the images.
Safari's bookmark management is adequate, but I was unable to import more than one IE bookmark at a time. Chrome has the same problem, whereas Firefox let me import a whole folder at once. Safari also lacks Firefox's ability to show recently bookmarked items and its tagging capability.
Also new for Version 4 is a native Windows look for the browser, in Classic, XP, and Vista flavors. This means that window borders (nonexistent in previous versions of Safari for Windows) now look like those of other apps. The Mac version, of course, maintains the border-free look. Windows users also now receive the standard Windows fonts they're used to seeing, instead of Apple's more minimalist standard fonts. And in the Windows version, you get the same two toolbar icons you get in Chrome, for page and general settings—possibly showing the browsers' similar WebKit roots.
You can customize the buttons you want on your toolbar, such as New Tab and Home, but Safari still comes nowhere near Firefox in customizability. The Mozilla browser not only avails itself of thousands of extensions that alter both appearance and function, but even offers "Fashion My Firefox" and Personas to help users with the sea of available customizations.
Tabs
Safari does an excellent job of implementing tabs, though I'm a bit disappointed that its designers abandoned the beta's bold, Chrome-like design concept of moving the tabs to the very top of the application's window. Media critics lambasted the feature, so Apple retreated, and now Safari looks pretty much like any tabbed browser. The plus sign for adding a new tab is way off to the right now, and is easily missed—I prefer Opera's clearer tab addition system. I also am disappointed that Safari's tabs don't show site icons for a nice visual clue, as they do in all the other major browsers, even Chrome.
Some of the problems with Safari beta's late, lamented (by me, at least) Tabs on Top, however, have gone away too. You won't minimize (in Mac OS) by double-clicking a tab now, and the lined handle needed to move the tab around is gone. You can move the tabs back and forth on the bar, and even out onto the desktop to create a new window. A neat little thumbnail of the page represents the page, and this zooms up to full size when you release it. I could also drag a tab from one browser window into another. Hover the mouse over any tab and the "X" for closing it appears. This is better than in IE, which shows the X only for the active window—sometimes you want to kill a background tab.
Smart Address Field and Smart Search Field
Unlike Chrome, which thinks you should use the same text entry box for both Web addresses and searches—something I'm still not really comfortable with—Safari 4 keeps addresses and search entries separate. Both have been enhanced in this version, too. The address bar, officially called the Smart Address Field, adds functionality that has become de rigueur in today's browser: predictions of what page you want from the moment you start typing. This showed up first in Firefox 3 (where insiders dubbed it the "awesome bar"), and subsequent releases of Internet Explorer, Opera, and Chrome have all followed suit. It's a good addition, but Apple's really just playing catch-up, here.
Still, Safari's version of the predictive address bar is clever; it seems to offer fewer, more targeted suggestions, and its Top Pick suggestion is highlighted. What this means is that you don't have to hit the Down Arrow to navigate to the Top Pick—hitting Enter gets you there. This may seem trivial, but anything that saves you from hunting and pecking a keystroke streamlines browsing considerably over time. The predictions come not only from page titles and URLs in your history, as they do in Firefox, but also from the complete text of Web pages. So even if you remember only a topic discussed on a page, rather than the site name, you'll see it suggested.
The Smart Search Field does one of those "why didn't anyone think of this before?" things: It combines Web search and on-page search. The option for the latter appears at the bottom of the suggestion drop-down box. When you do search for text on the page, all but your found terms will be dimmed. I do wish Web search in the bar would offer more choices than just Google or Yahoo—Bing and Ask.com fans are out of luck.
Performance and Compatibility
Though Safari was considerably faster at JavaScript rendering than IE 8, Chrome is still the leader—but just barely. I tested using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on my 2-GHz Athlon dual-core test system with 2MB of RAM, running Vista Safari 4, which returned a score of 1,707 milliseconds—a remarkable improvement over the beta's 3,757 ms (lower numbers indicate quicker rendering times). This trounces Internet Explorer 8's awful 10,108 ms and puts Safari within spitting distance of Google Chrome's 1,656 ms. Firefox 3 holds the middle ground, taking 6,371 ms, though the soon-to-be-released version 3.5 aims to change this, with its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Once distinguished for speed, Opera is now middling, at 7,884 ms.
In the real world, browsing demanding pages with Version 4 usually felt snappy. In general, I felt that Safari was about tied with Chrome, though that browser loaded the demanding Stickam.com noticeably faster. In start-up time, Safari was comparable with the current generation of browsers, taking less than 2 seconds on my test system.
Firefox is still the leader in one respect, however: memory use. When I opened the same set of ten tabs filled with media-intensive sites in each browser, Safari 4 took up 434MB of RAM, whereas Firefox 3 used up only 121MB of RAM. Chrome used 213MB, and Opera 259MB, while Internet Explorer trailed all, at 484MB. Safari is close to the bottom, here. And, unlike tabs in Chrome and Internet Explorer 8, Safari's aren't run in separate processes, a technique that can limit the severity of site crashes.
In compatibility, I didn't run across any sites displaying "Browser not supported" pages, nor did I find instances of misrendered pages. In one "official" measure of standards compliance, Safari 4 joins only Opera 10 beta in passing the Acid3 browser compatibility test. Though it's not a definitive measure of correct site rendering, Acid3 gives an indication of support for features that Web developers hope to use in the future. In this vein, Safari 4 supports HTML 5 features such as the video and audio tags, as well as has the ability to run Web applications off-line. It also can render CSS3 effects, like gradients and reflections.
Version 4 doesn't add new security and privacy features, but updates to Version 3 already added pretty much everything you'd expect in that area: private browsing, antiphishing and anti-malware tools, and support for Extended Validation (EV) Certificates. The private browsing feature, unlike that in Internet Explorer, Firefox 3.5, and Chrome, doesn't have any icon indicating you're in the mode, and on my tests it did indeed keep private browsing session URLs out of history and Smart Address bar's autosuggestions.
Safari 4 adds some welcome innovations, while catching up with the competition in some features. Its fast page rendering and stylish 3D interface features, like Cover Flow, will appeal to many. It's a bit of a memory hog, however, and fans of Firefox's extensions won't be tempted to switch, as Safari doesn't offer anywhere near that browser's level of customization. While most Mac users are likely to avail themselves of the new browser's advances, Windows users who like alternatives to Internet Explorer will probably get more out of Firefox or Chrome.
Setup and the New Look
I had no problem installing Safari 4 on my Vista system, and the browser was up and running in short order. At 27MB, the download is bulkier than that of the smallest browser, Chrome, which is a mere half megabyte. Then again, Safari offers more features. Mac users should note that the installer requires OS 10.5.6—10.5.5 won't do. When you first run Safari 4, you'll see a new animated splash screen featuring the Apple logo, complete with inspirational music.
For the final release, Safari backtracked on one of the beta's distinguishing interface features, the Chrome-like "Tabs on Top," which placed page tabs above the address bar. Another change from the beta is the return of the page-load progress bar: It's in a different form now, in the right-hand side of the address bar.
The released version of Safari 4 does retain the most eye-catching trait of the Safari 4 beta, Top Sites, which shows your most-accessed Web pages in a glorious 3D view. In this and elsewhere, Safari 4 brings the added elegance and clever interface ideas we've come to expect from Apple. One example is the incorporation of Cover Flow in the browser's history list. Sure, it's mostly eye candy, but it's at the same time stylish and useful.
When you open a tab, you see the new Top Sites page, a curved, 3D grid of images of your most frequently visited Web sites. An Edit button lets you remove any of these thumbnails, and you can drag any mini-page to a spot of your choice and "pin" it to that spot. If a site in your Top Sites group has new content, a blue dog-ear with a star shows up in the page's top right corner. In some ways, I prefer Opera's approach, which adds only sites you specify to the speed-dial thumbnails. Still, I can see Chrome and Safari's rationale, that people are more likely to use the feature if it's automatically populated.
Unlike the bare-bones Chrome, Safari includes a handy sidebar, which you can show by clicking the book icon at the top left of the window. The sidebar has a variety of functions: You can choose from among History, Bookmarks, Bonjour networking, and a basic RSS reader. Any of these sidebar choices takes advantage of the scrolling Cover Flow view in the top half of the main center panel, while the bottom half offers a simple list of the links. You can scroll back and forth through the Cover Flow images via mouse wheel, or you can use a slider beneath the images.
Safari's bookmark management is adequate, but I was unable to import more than one IE bookmark at a time. Chrome has the same problem, whereas Firefox let me import a whole folder at once. Safari also lacks Firefox's ability to show recently bookmarked items and its tagging capability.
Also new for Version 4 is a native Windows look for the browser, in Classic, XP, and Vista flavors. This means that window borders (nonexistent in previous versions of Safari for Windows) now look like those of other apps. The Mac version, of course, maintains the border-free look. Windows users also now receive the standard Windows fonts they're used to seeing, instead of Apple's more minimalist standard fonts. And in the Windows version, you get the same two toolbar icons you get in Chrome, for page and general settings—possibly showing the browsers' similar WebKit roots.
You can customize the buttons you want on your toolbar, such as New Tab and Home, but Safari still comes nowhere near Firefox in customizability. The Mozilla browser not only avails itself of thousands of extensions that alter both appearance and function, but even offers "Fashion My Firefox" and Personas to help users with the sea of available customizations.Safari won't change the browser game the way the iPhone has changed mobile phones. This year's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference billed it as "the fastest and most innovative browser." While it is both fast (with the Nitro JavaScript engine) and innovative (thanks to some UI enhancements), I don't buy the superlatives. Google Chrome is still the speed leader on my tests, and Safari 4 lacks innovations, like the WebSlices and Accelerators in Internet Explorer and the extreme customizability of Firefox. Nevertheless, Safari (on both Mac and Windows) is definitely a fine performer in terms of speed and usability.
Setup and the New Look
I had no problem installing Safari 4 on my Vista system, and the browser was up and running in short order. At 27MB, the download is bulkier than that of the smallest browser, Chrome, which is a mere half megabyte. Then again, Safari offers more features. Mac users should note that the installer requires OS 10.5.6—10.5.5 won't do. When you first run Safari 4, you'll see a new animated splash screen featuring the Apple logo, complete with inspirational music.
For the final release, Safari backtracked on one of the beta's distinguishing interface features, the Chrome-like "Tabs on Top," which placed page tabs above the address bar. Another change from the beta is the return of the page-load progress bar: It's in a different form now, in the right-hand side of the address bar.
The released version of Safari 4 does retain the most eye-catching trait of the Safari 4 beta, Top Sites, which shows your most-accessed Web pages in a glorious 3D view. In this and elsewhere, Safari 4 brings the added elegance and clever interface ideas we've come to expect from Apple. One example is the incorporation of Cover Flow in the browser's history list. Sure, it's mostly eye candy, but it's at the same time stylish and useful.
When you open a tab, you see the new Top Sites page, a curved, 3D grid of images of your most frequently visited Web sites. An Edit button lets you remove any of these thumbnails, and you can drag any mini-page to a spot of your choice and "pin" it to that spot. If a site in your Top Sites group has new content, a blue dog-ear with a star shows up in the page's top right corner. In some ways, I prefer Opera's approach, which adds only sites you specify to the speed-dial thumbnails. Still, I can see Chrome and Safari's rationale, that people are more likely to use the feature if it's automatically populated.
Unlike the bare-bones Chrome, Safari includes a handy sidebar, which you can show by clicking the book icon at the top left of the window. The sidebar has a variety of functions: You can choose from among History, Bookmarks, Bonjour networking, and a basic RSS reader. Any of these sidebar choices takes advantage of the scrolling Cover Flow view in the top half of the main center panel, while the bottom half offers a simple list of the links. You can scroll back and forth through the Cover Flow images via mouse wheel, or you can use a slider beneath the images.
Safari's bookmark management is adequate, but I was unable to import more than one IE bookmark at a time. Chrome has the same problem, whereas Firefox let me import a whole folder at once. Safari also lacks Firefox's ability to show recently bookmarked items and its tagging capability.
Also new for Version 4 is a native Windows look for the browser, in Classic, XP, and Vista flavors. This means that window borders (nonexistent in previous versions of Safari for Windows) now look like those of other apps. The Mac version, of course, maintains the border-free look. Windows users also now receive the standard Windows fonts they're used to seeing, instead of Apple's more minimalist standard fonts. And in the Windows version, you get the same two toolbar icons you get in Chrome, for page and general settings—possibly showing the browsers' similar WebKit roots.
You can customize the buttons you want on your toolbar, such as New Tab and Home, but Safari still comes nowhere near Firefox in customizability. The Mozilla browser not only avails itself of thousands of extensions that alter both appearance and function, but even offers "Fashion My Firefox" and Personas to help users with the sea of available customizations.
Tabs
Safari does an excellent job of implementing tabs, though I'm a bit disappointed that its designers abandoned the beta's bold, Chrome-like design concept of moving the tabs to the very top of the application's window. Media critics lambasted the feature, so Apple retreated, and now Safari looks pretty much like any tabbed browser. The plus sign for adding a new tab is way off to the right now, and is easily missed—I prefer Opera's clearer tab addition system. I also am disappointed that Safari's tabs don't show site icons for a nice visual clue, as they do in all the other major browsers, even Chrome.
Some of the problems with Safari beta's late, lamented (by me, at least) Tabs on Top, however, have gone away too. You won't minimize (in Mac OS) by double-clicking a tab now, and the lined handle needed to move the tab around is gone. You can move the tabs back and forth on the bar, and even out onto the desktop to create a new window. A neat little thumbnail of the page represents the page, and this zooms up to full size when you release it. I could also drag a tab from one browser window into another. Hover the mouse over any tab and the "X" for closing it appears. This is better than in IE, which shows the X only for the active window—sometimes you want to kill a background tab.
Smart Address Field and Smart Search Field
Unlike Chrome, which thinks you should use the same text entry box for both Web addresses and searches—something I'm still not really comfortable with—Safari 4 keeps addresses and search entries separate. Both have been enhanced in this version, too. The address bar, officially called the Smart Address Field, adds functionality that has become de rigueur in today's browser: predictions of what page you want from the moment you start typing. This showed up first in Firefox 3 (where insiders dubbed it the "awesome bar"), and subsequent releases of Internet Explorer, Opera, and Chrome have all followed suit. It's a good addition, but Apple's really just playing catch-up, here.
Still, Safari's version of the predictive address bar is clever; it seems to offer fewer, more targeted suggestions, and its Top Pick suggestion is highlighted. What this means is that you don't have to hit the Down Arrow to navigate to the Top Pick—hitting Enter gets you there. This may seem trivial, but anything that saves you from hunting and pecking a keystroke streamlines browsing considerably over time. The predictions come not only from page titles and URLs in your history, as they do in Firefox, but also from the complete text of Web pages. So even if you remember only a topic discussed on a page, rather than the site name, you'll see it suggested.
The Smart Search Field does one of those "why didn't anyone think of this before?" things: It combines Web search and on-page search. The option for the latter appears at the bottom of the suggestion drop-down box. When you do search for text on the page, all but your found terms will be dimmed. I do wish Web search in the bar would offer more choices than just Google or Yahoo—Bing and Ask.com fans are out of luck.
Performance and Compatibility
Though Safari was considerably faster at JavaScript rendering than IE 8, Chrome is still the leader—but just barely. I tested using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on my 2-GHz Athlon dual-core test system with 2MB of RAM, running Vista Safari 4, which returned a score of 1,707 milliseconds—a remarkable improvement over the beta's 3,757 ms (lower numbers indicate quicker rendering times). This trounces Internet Explorer 8's awful 10,108 ms and puts Safari within spitting distance of Google Chrome's 1,656 ms. Firefox 3 holds the middle ground, taking 6,371 ms, though the soon-to-be-released version 3.5 aims to change this, with its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Once distinguished for speed, Opera is now middling, at 7,884 ms.
In the real world, browsing demanding pages with Version 4 usually felt snappy. In general, I felt that Safari was about tied with Chrome, though that browser loaded the demanding Stickam.com noticeably faster. In start-up time, Safari was comparable with the current generation of browsers, taking less than 2 seconds on my test system.
Firefox is still the leader in one respect, however: memory use. When I opened the same set of ten tabs filled with media-intensive sites in each browser, Safari 4 took up 434MB of RAM, whereas Firefox 3 used up only 121MB of RAM. Chrome used 213MB, and Opera 259MB, while Internet Explorer trailed all, at 484MB. Safari is close to the bottom, here. And, unlike tabs in Chrome and Internet Explorer 8, Safari's aren't run in separate processes, a technique that can limit the severity of site crashes.
In compatibility, I didn't run across any sites displaying "Browser not supported" pages, nor did I find instances of misrendered pages. In one "official" measure of standards compliance, Safari 4 joins only Opera 10 beta in passing the Acid3 browser compatibility test. Though it's not a definitive measure of correct site rendering, Acid3 gives an indication of support for features that Web developers hope to use in the future. In this vein, Safari 4 supports HTML 5 features such as the video and audio tags, as well as has the ability to run Web applications off-line. It also can render CSS3 effects, like gradients and reflections.
Version 4 doesn't add new security and privacy features, but updates to Version 3 already added pretty much everything you'd expect in that area: private browsing, antiphishing and anti-malware tools, and support for Extended Validation (EV) Certificates. The private browsing feature, unlike that in Internet Explorer, Firefox 3.5, and Chrome, doesn't have any icon indicating you're in the mode, and on my tests it did indeed keep private browsing session URLs out of history and Smart Address bar's autosuggestions.
Safari 4 adds some welcome innovations, while catching up with the competition in some features. Its fast page rendering and stylish 3D interface features, like Cover Flow, will appeal to many. It's a bit of a memory hog, however, and fans of Firefox's extensions won't be tempted to switch, as Safari doesn't offer anywhere near that browser's level of customization. While most Mac users are likely to avail themselves of the new browser's advances, Windows users who like alternatives to Internet Explorer will probably get more out of Firefox or Chrome.
Wednesday, June 10, 2009
Safari 4 Launches, Snow Leopard Coming in Sept
Apple on Monday launched its next-generation browser,Safari, and gave details on the Snow Leopard OS X update.
Apple said during its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that the operating system would be available in September. Apple presenters took the time to denigrate Windows 7 as merely a version of the much-derided Vista. Windows 7 will launch on October 22, according to Microsoft. Snow Leopard will only run on Intel-based Macs, so older IBM PowerPC based Mac PCs are out in the cold with Snow Leopard.
Snow Leopard, aka OS X 10.6, will cost just $29 to current Leopard users and will naturally ship with all new Macs. But it doesn't offer much in the way of new features for end users.
Its inner plumbing takes advantage of new trends in PC hardware, such as 64-bit and multicore CPUs, along with faster graphics processing hardware. The most noticeable feature for end users will be its built-in support for Microsoft Exchange mail, contacts, and calendars, and a new version of QuickTime called QuickTime X. Installation will be 45 percent faster and opening JPEF image files and PDF documents will be 2 and 1.5 times as fast, respectively.
"We've built on the success of Leopard and created an even better experience for our users from installation to shutdown," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering. "Apple engineers have made hundreds of improvements so with Snow Leopard your system is going to feel faster, more responsive and even more reliable than before."
The Safari 4 browser is available today as a download for Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger) and Windows. It's notable for an iTunes-like Cover Flow interface for viewing history, and Top Sites view that shows your most visited sites in a 3D grid view.
Apple said during its Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) that the operating system would be available in September. Apple presenters took the time to denigrate Windows 7 as merely a version of the much-derided Vista. Windows 7 will launch on October 22, according to Microsoft. Snow Leopard will only run on Intel-based Macs, so older IBM PowerPC based Mac PCs are out in the cold with Snow Leopard.
Snow Leopard, aka OS X 10.6, will cost just $29 to current Leopard users and will naturally ship with all new Macs. But it doesn't offer much in the way of new features for end users.
Its inner plumbing takes advantage of new trends in PC hardware, such as 64-bit and multicore CPUs, along with faster graphics processing hardware. The most noticeable feature for end users will be its built-in support for Microsoft Exchange mail, contacts, and calendars, and a new version of QuickTime called QuickTime X. Installation will be 45 percent faster and opening JPEF image files and PDF documents will be 2 and 1.5 times as fast, respectively.
"We've built on the success of Leopard and created an even better experience for our users from installation to shutdown," said Bertrand Serlet, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering. "Apple engineers have made hundreds of improvements so with Snow Leopard your system is going to feel faster, more responsive and even more reliable than before."
The Safari 4 browser is available today as a download for Mac OS X (Leopard and Tiger) and Windows. It's notable for an iTunes-like Cover Flow interface for viewing history, and Top Sites view that shows your most visited sites in a 3D grid view.
Sunday, June 7, 2009
Opera 10 Beta Released
Opera Software has made the first beta of its latest web browser, Opera 10, publicly available.
Opera says the new browser features Opera Turbo technology to deliver web content up to 40 percent faster than its previous browser Opera 9.5. The function will also automatically switch on if a slow connection speed is detected.
The web browser also features a resizable tab bar, which when pulled down reveals thumbnails of every open tab in your browser window.
Opera 10 allows you to see thumbnails of all open tabs
Opera also expanded the inline spell-checker to support 51 languages and revamped the user interface, with a new design from Jon Hicks.
"Initially, we were just going to clean-up some elements and focus on the interface for new features. But, over time, the new user interface elements became so different that we decided to update everything," said Jon Hicks.
"We think Opera 10 will redefine how you can enjoy the web. We have more surprises on the way, but when you try the features, enjoy the acclerated performance and get a glimpse at our shiny new wrapping, I think Opera 10 beta will excite both long-time users and those new to Opera," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software.
Opera 10 can be downloaded from Opera's website for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Opera says the new browser features Opera Turbo technology to deliver web content up to 40 percent faster than its previous browser Opera 9.5. The function will also automatically switch on if a slow connection speed is detected.
The web browser also features a resizable tab bar, which when pulled down reveals thumbnails of every open tab in your browser window.
Opera 10 allows you to see thumbnails of all open tabs
Opera also expanded the inline spell-checker to support 51 languages and revamped the user interface, with a new design from Jon Hicks.
"Initially, we were just going to clean-up some elements and focus on the interface for new features. But, over time, the new user interface elements became so different that we decided to update everything," said Jon Hicks.
"We think Opera 10 will redefine how you can enjoy the web. We have more surprises on the way, but when you try the features, enjoy the acclerated performance and get a glimpse at our shiny new wrapping, I think Opera 10 beta will excite both long-time users and those new to Opera," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera Software.
Opera 10 can be downloaded from Opera's website for Windows, Mac and Linux.
Saturday, May 30, 2009
Firefox 3.5: An Early Look
There was a time when Firefox was the Web browser for the cool kids who knew their tech. Most would still agree that it's better than Internet Explorer, but that's damning it with faint praise. Over the last year or so, Firefox has become better known in tech savvy circles for its relatively poor performance and mediocre memory management. Chrome's insane speed and Internet Explorer 8's overall improvement have also dinged Firefox's reputation. But now, Firefox 3.5 is almost ready to go. Does it have what it takes?
I downloaded the latest beta, Firefox 3.5 beta 4, to find out for myself. I used it on two different PCs. The first was my workhouse Windows XP SP3 system, and the other was my Fedora 10 computer. The XP box was a Dell Inspiron 530S with a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor, 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator). For Fedora, I used a Gateway GT5622 desktop with a 1.8GHz Intel Pentium E2160 dual-core CPU, 3GBs of RAM, a 400GB SATA drive, and an Intel 950 GMA.
On both systems, installing the browser took no more than five minutes. Once installed, I found that my two must-have Firefox extensions the Google Toolbar and XMarks were both working.
However, on Windows, I found that two other extensions were DOA. These were the AVG Safe Search 8.5 malware detector and the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0. I wasn't too surprised by either one. TheAVG program has had issues with other versions of Firefox and the .NET Framework program has always been a pain.
I should also note that, unlike Google Chrome, Firefox has a mature family of extensions. I really like Chrome a lot, but it's still taking baby steps when it comes to using extensions for added functionality.
Where Chrome still zooms by Firefox is when it comes to rendering speed. That's especially true when it comes to JavaScript-heavy pages. Firefox 3.5's TraceMonkey JavaScript rendering engine is much faster than what you'll find in the Firefox 3.0 series and Internet Explorer doesn't belong in the performance conversation.
Still Chrome 2.0's V8 JavaScript engine beats TraceMonkey handily. Using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on the XP system, Firefox 3.5 was almost twice as slow as Chrome 2.0 at the benchmark with a recorded time of 1,225.6-millisecond to Chrome 2.0's 704.0. If speed is what matters the most to you, Chrome is the browser for you.
On the other hand, after running Firefox for days and with multiple windows and tabs, I found that on both Windows and Linux, Firefox is finally not hogging memory. Even with the debugging code that must be in a beta, I found that Firefox is no longer leaking memory. That's good for both the browser's stability and its security.
I also noticed that Firefox has borrowed several nice improvements from Chrome. For example, it uses DNS (Domain Name System) pre-fetching so that when you click on a link you'll get to its page a bit faster.
The new Firefox also has some nice features of its own. It now supports embedded Ogg and WAV video and audio format without the need for a helper program. It also far better privacy settings so you can use your own, or any other, computer without leaving any traces behind of what you've been doing.
All-in-all, I found this beta to be a real step up from Firefox 3.0.x. Still, I find myself wishing that I could have a Firefox with Chrome's speed or Chrome that works on multiple operating systems and with Firefox's abundance of extensions. If you're already a confirmed Firefox user though you'll want to switch over to Firefox 3.5 as soon as the final version comes out. Look for it sometime in mid to late June.
I downloaded the latest beta, Firefox 3.5 beta 4, to find out for myself. I used it on two different PCs. The first was my workhouse Windows XP SP3 system, and the other was my Fedora 10 computer. The XP box was a Dell Inspiron 530S with a 2.2-GHz Intel Pentium E2200 dual-core processor, 4GBs of RAM, a 500GB SATA drive and an Integrated Intel 3100 GMA (Graphics Media Accelerator). For Fedora, I used a Gateway GT5622 desktop with a 1.8GHz Intel Pentium E2160 dual-core CPU, 3GBs of RAM, a 400GB SATA drive, and an Intel 950 GMA.
On both systems, installing the browser took no more than five minutes. Once installed, I found that my two must-have Firefox extensions the Google Toolbar and XMarks were both working.
However, on Windows, I found that two other extensions were DOA. These were the AVG Safe Search 8.5 malware detector and the Microsoft .NET Framework Assistant 1.0. I wasn't too surprised by either one. TheAVG program has had issues with other versions of Firefox and the .NET Framework program has always been a pain.
I should also note that, unlike Google Chrome, Firefox has a mature family of extensions. I really like Chrome a lot, but it's still taking baby steps when it comes to using extensions for added functionality.
Where Chrome still zooms by Firefox is when it comes to rendering speed. That's especially true when it comes to JavaScript-heavy pages. Firefox 3.5's TraceMonkey JavaScript rendering engine is much faster than what you'll find in the Firefox 3.0 series and Internet Explorer doesn't belong in the performance conversation.
Still Chrome 2.0's V8 JavaScript engine beats TraceMonkey handily. Using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on the XP system, Firefox 3.5 was almost twice as slow as Chrome 2.0 at the benchmark with a recorded time of 1,225.6-millisecond to Chrome 2.0's 704.0. If speed is what matters the most to you, Chrome is the browser for you.
On the other hand, after running Firefox for days and with multiple windows and tabs, I found that on both Windows and Linux, Firefox is finally not hogging memory. Even with the debugging code that must be in a beta, I found that Firefox is no longer leaking memory. That's good for both the browser's stability and its security.
I also noticed that Firefox has borrowed several nice improvements from Chrome. For example, it uses DNS (Domain Name System) pre-fetching so that when you click on a link you'll get to its page a bit faster.
The new Firefox also has some nice features of its own. It now supports embedded Ogg and WAV video and audio format without the need for a helper program. It also far better privacy settings so you can use your own, or any other, computer without leaving any traces behind of what you've been doing.
All-in-all, I found this beta to be a real step up from Firefox 3.0.x. Still, I find myself wishing that I could have a Firefox with Chrome's speed or Chrome that works on multiple operating systems and with Firefox's abundance of extensions. If you're already a confirmed Firefox user though you'll want to switch over to Firefox 3.5 as soon as the final version comes out. Look for it sometime in mid to late June.
Monday, May 18, 2009
Firefox Update Expected in Early June
After months of problems that delayed the last two betas of Firefox 3.5, Mozilla Corp. is now on track to deliver the first release candidate early next month.
If Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate (RC) is declared suitable for final release, Mozilla may still make its self-set deadline -- before the end of the first half of the year.
Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, was optimistic in anote published on the site last Thursday. "We're setting an aggressive code freeze target of next Wednesday, May 20 for Firefox 3.5 RC," he wrote.
"Code freeze" is a term Mozilla uses to describe a development stage when it blocks changes in anticipation of handing off the build to internal testers.
"We'll check back against schedule on Tuesday [May 19], but (it) looks like the finish line is very much in sight!" said Beltzner. Assuming Firefox 3.5 RC's code is frozen on Wednesday, Beltzner said that the preview would ship the "first week of June."
Three weeks ago, Mozilla released the fourth, and final, beta of the browser. At the time, the company was still citing a final release before the end of June.
Last year, when Mozilla was making its final push on Firefox 3.0, it used a pair of release candidates, the last of which was issued June 4. It launched the final version two weeks later, on June 17.
If Mozilla sticks to just a single release candidate for Firefox 3.5, it could still ship the completed browser next month. As of Sunday, Mozilla's bug-tracking database showed that developers have 54 "blocking bugs" -- problems that would stymie the final release -- to address.
It's possible, however, that Mozilla will need multiple release candidates to shake out all of Firefox 3.5's bugs, a fact the company acknowledged earlier this month. "While we will aim to make RC1 perfect, previous Firefox releases have needed up to 3 RCs before we're ship-ready," said Mozilla in notes posted on its site from a May 5 meeting.
Firefox 3.5, which at one point early in development was planned to ship in late 2008 or early 2009, has been delayed several times as Mozilla added more test builds to deal with troublesome bugs, and to integrate TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine, as well as other new features.
According to U.S.-based Web measurement company Net Applications, Firefox owned 22.5% of the browser market last month.
For its part, Mozilla said last week that Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is being used by about 650,000 users, a statistic it tracks as Active Daily Users (ADU) and obtains by counting the number of update requests the browser makes each day to the company's servers.
The current test version, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 63 different languages from Mozilla's site.
If Firefox 3.5 Release Candidate (RC) is declared suitable for final release, Mozilla may still make its self-set deadline -- before the end of the first half of the year.
Mike Beltzner, the director of Firefox, was optimistic in anote published on the site last Thursday. "We're setting an aggressive code freeze target of next Wednesday, May 20 for Firefox 3.5 RC," he wrote.
"Code freeze" is a term Mozilla uses to describe a development stage when it blocks changes in anticipation of handing off the build to internal testers.
"We'll check back against schedule on Tuesday [May 19], but (it) looks like the finish line is very much in sight!" said Beltzner. Assuming Firefox 3.5 RC's code is frozen on Wednesday, Beltzner said that the preview would ship the "first week of June."
Three weeks ago, Mozilla released the fourth, and final, beta of the browser. At the time, the company was still citing a final release before the end of June.
Last year, when Mozilla was making its final push on Firefox 3.0, it used a pair of release candidates, the last of which was issued June 4. It launched the final version two weeks later, on June 17.
If Mozilla sticks to just a single release candidate for Firefox 3.5, it could still ship the completed browser next month. As of Sunday, Mozilla's bug-tracking database showed that developers have 54 "blocking bugs" -- problems that would stymie the final release -- to address.
It's possible, however, that Mozilla will need multiple release candidates to shake out all of Firefox 3.5's bugs, a fact the company acknowledged earlier this month. "While we will aim to make RC1 perfect, previous Firefox releases have needed up to 3 RCs before we're ship-ready," said Mozilla in notes posted on its site from a May 5 meeting.
Firefox 3.5, which at one point early in development was planned to ship in late 2008 or early 2009, has been delayed several times as Mozilla added more test builds to deal with troublesome bugs, and to integrate TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine, as well as other new features.
According to U.S.-based Web measurement company Net Applications, Firefox owned 22.5% of the browser market last month.
For its part, Mozilla said last week that Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 is being used by about 650,000 users, a statistic it tracks as Active Daily Users (ADU) and obtains by counting the number of update requests the browser makes each day to the company's servers.
The current test version, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4, can be downloaded for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in 63 different languages from Mozilla's site.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
AMD Launches Fusion Media Explorer Browser
AMD has released a beta of a new 3D browser, which is designed to let users easily share multimedia files stored on their PCs with their social networks.
The browser, called Fusion Media Explorer, allows users to browse music and video albums stored on a PC, and share those files with social networks, said Casey Gotcher, director of product marketing at AMD, in a blog entry.
The software is available for download from AMD's website, but only works on PCs with an AMD processor.
AMD has integrated social-networking sites like Facebook and YouTube into the software to easily upload and share multimedia files, Gotcher wrote. Users can simply select video or music files while browsing albums in a rotating 3D interface and drag and drop to upload those directly to Facebook or YouTube.
The software works with Microsoft's Windows Vista and upcoming Windows 7 operating systems. It is not compatible with Windows XP or Linux, according to AMD.
The browser, called Fusion Media Explorer, allows users to browse music and video albums stored on a PC, and share those files with social networks, said Casey Gotcher, director of product marketing at AMD, in a blog entry.
The software is available for download from AMD's website, but only works on PCs with an AMD processor.
AMD has integrated social-networking sites like Facebook and YouTube into the software to easily upload and share multimedia files, Gotcher wrote. Users can simply select video or music files while browsing albums in a rotating 3D interface and drag and drop to upload those directly to Facebook or YouTube.
The software works with Microsoft's Windows Vista and upcoming Windows 7 operating systems. It is not compatible with Windows XP or Linux, according to AMD.
Sunday, April 12, 2009
Opera Mini 4.2
With their 2-inch screens and microscopic keyboards, cell phones aren't exactly ideal for Web surfing. But even worse are the slow, clunky browsers that come preloaded on many models. That's what makes the free Opera Mini such a terrific upgrade. We've reviewed it several times in the past, the most recent being version 4.1 about a year ago. But now that the iPhone and the T-Mobile G1, along with the Bolt and Skyfirebrowsers, have raised the bar for mobile browsing, a look at the latest version of Opera Mini is in order.
Opera Mini 4.2 offers several important upgrades. Opera Software switched on a new U.S.-based server park in an effort to render pages faster for its U.S. and Asia-Pacific users. Opera Mini 4.2 also synchronizes notes from the Opera Desktop browser using Opera Link. Users can also personalize Opera Mini 4.2 with new skins (actually a feature added and then removed back in Opera Mini 3).
First, some caveats on hardware requirements: Opera Mini will work on any handset that can run Java apps natively. That includes all recent BlackBerrys and most feature phones. Infuriatingly, T-Mobile blocks third-party applications from accessing the Internet with some devices, and Opera Mini doesn't work at all on Verizon (BREW) feature phones. Also, Windows Mobile and Palm OS smartphones require that you run a separate Java virtual machine before loading Opera Mini each time. And some carriers will hit you with persistent nag screens every time you fire up Opera Mini on certain handsets—an annoyance, though at least you can still run the app.
To install Opera Mini, head over to mini.opera.com using your cell phone's current Web browser, and then follow the instructions to download and install the app on your handset. Most likely, you'll see a new icon in the Applications folder of your handset, where other third-party apps are stored (if it's not part of the top level). For this review, I tested Opera Mini 4.2 on a BlackBerry Curve 8330 running over Verizon Wireless's EV-DO data network, and it required a reboot once the installation was completed.
Opera Mini 4.2 offers several important upgrades. Opera Software switched on a new U.S.-based server park in an effort to render pages faster for its U.S. and Asia-Pacific users. Opera Mini 4.2 also synchronizes notes from the Opera Desktop browser using Opera Link. Users can also personalize Opera Mini 4.2 with new skins (actually a feature added and then removed back in Opera Mini 3).
First, some caveats on hardware requirements: Opera Mini will work on any handset that can run Java apps natively. That includes all recent BlackBerrys and most feature phones. Infuriatingly, T-Mobile blocks third-party applications from accessing the Internet with some devices, and Opera Mini doesn't work at all on Verizon (BREW) feature phones. Also, Windows Mobile and Palm OS smartphones require that you run a separate Java virtual machine before loading Opera Mini each time. And some carriers will hit you with persistent nag screens every time you fire up Opera Mini on certain handsets—an annoyance, though at least you can still run the app.
To install Opera Mini, head over to mini.opera.com using your cell phone's current Web browser, and then follow the instructions to download and install the app on your handset. Most likely, you'll see a new icon in the Applications folder of your handset, where other third-party apps are stored (if it's not part of the top level). For this review, I tested Opera Mini 4.2 on a BlackBerry Curve 8330 running over Verizon Wireless's EV-DO data network, and it required a reboot once the installation was completed.
Saturday, April 4, 2009
Internet Explorer Slips in the Polls
Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer, which four years ago was running on nearly nine out of 10 computers,has fallen on hard times. Last month, just two out of every three users surfed the Web with IE, a Web metrics company said Wednesday.
IE lost 0.7 of a percentage point to end March with a 66.8% share of the browser market, the lowest number since Net Applications Inc. began tracking browsers in 2005. The launch of IE8 two weeks ago didn't stop or even slow Microsoft's slide; the browser's March drop was slightly larger than the average loss during the previous 12 months.
Earlier data from NetApp indicated that in IE8's first full week of availability, users of rival browsers weren't persuaded to switch. The Microsoft browser was instead downloaded and installed by people who had been running IE7.
In the past year, IE's share has slipped 8 percentage points. If the current rate of decline continues, Microsoft's share will fall below 60% in January 2010, the company's publicly stated delivery date for the Windows 7 operating system.
As has generally been the pattern, IE's March losses were countered by rival browsers' gains. Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox increased its share by the largest amount, 0.3 percentage points, while Apple Inc.'s Safari and Google Inc.'s Chrome grew by 0.2 and 0.08 percentage points, respectively.
Firefox, which as of March had six consecutive months of growth, ended March with 22% of the browser market, a record for the open-source browser. The beta of Firefox 3.5 -- numbered 3.1 until a recent name change by Mozilla -- accounted for about 6% of all Firefox browsers in use last month, more than double the percentage of IE users running the now-finished IE8.
Safari, meanwhile, returned to the black in March afterlosing share the month before. And with 8.2% of the total market, it has nearly returned to its January 2009 record of 8.3%.
Google's Chrome picked up some users as well, ending the month at 1.2%, but Opera Software ASA's flagship browser remained stuck at 0.7%, where it has languished for nearly a year.
NetApp measures browser usage by tracking the machines that visit the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients. Its current browser share data is available online.
IE lost 0.7 of a percentage point to end March with a 66.8% share of the browser market, the lowest number since Net Applications Inc. began tracking browsers in 2005. The launch of IE8 two weeks ago didn't stop or even slow Microsoft's slide; the browser's March drop was slightly larger than the average loss during the previous 12 months.
Earlier data from NetApp indicated that in IE8's first full week of availability, users of rival browsers weren't persuaded to switch. The Microsoft browser was instead downloaded and installed by people who had been running IE7.
In the past year, IE's share has slipped 8 percentage points. If the current rate of decline continues, Microsoft's share will fall below 60% in January 2010, the company's publicly stated delivery date for the Windows 7 operating system.
As has generally been the pattern, IE's March losses were countered by rival browsers' gains. Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox increased its share by the largest amount, 0.3 percentage points, while Apple Inc.'s Safari and Google Inc.'s Chrome grew by 0.2 and 0.08 percentage points, respectively.
Firefox, which as of March had six consecutive months of growth, ended March with 22% of the browser market, a record for the open-source browser. The beta of Firefox 3.5 -- numbered 3.1 until a recent name change by Mozilla -- accounted for about 6% of all Firefox browsers in use last month, more than double the percentage of IE users running the now-finished IE8.
Safari, meanwhile, returned to the black in March afterlosing share the month before. And with 8.2% of the total market, it has nearly returned to its January 2009 record of 8.3%.
Google's Chrome picked up some users as well, ending the month at 1.2%, but Opera Software ASA's flagship browser remained stuck at 0.7%, where it has languished for nearly a year.
NetApp measures browser usage by tracking the machines that visit the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients. Its current browser share data is available online.
Monday, December 22, 2008
Internet Explorer 8 Incompatible with Yahoo Mail And Gmail, The newly released browser has compatibility issues with the two web services
Internet Explorer 8
Gmail
Gmail, Google's mail service available for free for anyone interested in it, supports multiple browsers as the Mountain View-based company mentions in the Help Center. Gmail works with Firefox 2.0 (Windows, Mac and Linux) and Internet Explorer 7 for Windows but you may also use it with other browsers, although it wouldn't be fully functional, such as IE 5.5 , Safari 1.3 , Netscape 1.4 and others. Moreover, for IE 4.0 , Netscape 4.07 and Opera 6.03 , you'll only get the basic HTML view of Gmail.
Now let's see what happens when trying to access Gmail with Internet Explorer 8. First of all, the default version of the browser, without the emulation of IE7; as you can see, I managed to log in into my Gmail account but it's all messed up and it looks like... Moreover, clicking on any link inside it, no matter if we're talking about settings or an inbox message, takes approximately 5 seconds until it's opened.
Internet Explorer 8 with IE7 emulation: the service works fine but the left menu which allows you to browse among the Gmail folders looks different and occupies more space on your screen.
Yahoo Mail
The new Yahoo Mail states that it supports IE 6.0 and newer, Firefox 1.0 and newer and Safari 2.0 and newer, on Windows 200, XP, Vista or later and Mac OSX or later. Since it says that IE 6.0 and newer is supported, this would obviously mean that later releases, including IE 8, are also compatible. Well, they're not. When trying to access Yahoo Mail with Internet Explorer, I got the well-known error: "Hmm... your browser is not officially support. The all-new Yahoo Mail hasn't been tested on your browser. You can choose to continue, or simply go to Yahoo Mail Classic."
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