Archive for: browser
We don’t have any major bones to pick with the iPhone’s in-house Safari browser, though we’re certainly willing to try other options. One such option is Opera Mini 6. Besides pure blinding speed, the newly released Opera Mini 6 adds Retina Display and optimized iPad support, the ability to open pages in the background, social sharing of content (Facebook, Twitter, & “MyOpera”), a refreshed UI, and better pinch-to-zoom and panning capabilities. And if you happen to speak an extra tongue or two — provided they’re Arabic, Chinese, or Vietnamese — you can now do that too.
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It looks like Vista’s mark in history will be much smaller than Windows XP (which we wish would finally die too…). Today, Microsoft confirmed that the next iteration of Internet Explorer, version 10, will not work on anything older than Windows 7. See ya, Vista. Looks like M is finally ready to bury their past.
In the technology world, six years is quite a long time. On the flipside, a typical “hot” product can see 4, 5, or more revisions in said amount of time as technology moves increasingly quicker. Unfortunately for the Flock Social Browser team and its users, time has run out. But it wasn’t necessarily competition or poor performance that did the social browser in — it was acquisition.
Earlier this year social gaming giant, Zynga, acquired key parts of Flock, specifically the technology/engineering team. The problem with that was that the heart and soul of Flock development was ripped away from the actual company, leaving behind the actual service and various managers as well as CEO, Shawn Hardin. With a lack of engineering talent underneath Flock’s roof, nature took it’s course.
While it’s sad that we have one less (good) browser to choose from come April 26th, those looking for a social browser of sorts can still find some familiarity with RockMelt.
Any Flock users feeling the Monday morning blues all over again?
Microsoft just released IE 9 a couple of weeks ago and already it’s old news. Today at the MIX developer conference in Las Vegas, Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch previewed the latest IE 10 preview build which add such features as CSS Gradients and CSS3 Flexible Box Layout. It appears that Microsoft is going to finally break from the old 1-2 year update cycles between major browser revisions and take a more Mozilla/Google approach to things.
Also worth noting — at the same conference, the hardware that was demoing IE 10 preview just so happened to be a netbook powered by an ARM processor. For those not up to par with their processor/OS pairings, such a duo is a very new, exciting thing in the mobile world.
+1 Microsoft.
Need a more important reason to jump onto the Google Chrome bandwagon aside from an already super fast rendering engine, sleek look, and frequent updates? How about malware support? Google announced today via the company’s official blog that Chrome 12 will pack in a new malware protection scheme that will alert users when Chrome suspects that a downloaded .exe is malicious. This new feature will source from the list of publicly known malicious websites according to the Safe Browsing API and is built off of the already in place malware protections that have been employed by Google over the last 5 years.
Interested parties wanting in on the ongoing testing phase can sign up within the Google Chrome development release channel.
In a move that is similar to Google’s newfound controlling nature regarding Android, Mozilla is getting antsy watching their Firefox web browser constantly being brought to its knees because of rouge or just downright slow plugins. Getting the message across to end users and simultaneously protecting them comes in two steps. First, Mozilla will be launching a new initiative in two weeks that will see them slapping a warning on plug-ins that reduce Firefox performance by 25% or more. On top of that, Mozilla is now publishing a list of Firefox’s worst performing plugins that will be updated weekly.
For now, developers will have to wait “a few months” until Mozilla makes their testing tools available to self-test any and all of their work. Furthermore, it’s worth noting that this initial testing by Mozilla is measuring startup time and nothing else. Mozilla says new tests that will incorporate page loading time will come at a later date.
In our testing, Firefox 4 has proven to be Mozilla’s best yet with return to the speed they were once known for. While it hasn’t replaced Chrome as the GS favorite, it is now sitting in a comfortable #2 position. So we ask our readers: Any qualms with Firefox past or present?
Firefox 4 was important not only for the bevy of new features Mozilla baked in, but also for the most dramatic physical change in several years. While not everyone has warmed up to the new look, Mozilla is already hard at work tweaking the UI for Firefox 5. And if you recall, Mozilla has mentioned that moving forward from Firefox 4, updates will come much faster though contain less features and updates. This approach is similar to the one that Google now uses for Chrome — essentially version numbers are less important than they use to be.
If you’re curious about the upcoming changes, point your browser over to Areweprettyyet.com for a diagram complete with explanations on fixed and pending issues.
Like flashy lights and realtime statistics? Point your browser over to http://glow.mozilla.com/ and prepare to be amazed. At said link, a nifty page with a realtime stat counter and blips popping up on screen show the number of downloads and location of said downloads as they happen. Pretty nifty if you ask us. Bonus — roll over the bars at the bottom of the screen and you can see download counts by the minute.
If this doesn’t tap the definition of nerd, I don’t know what does…
The next iteration of Mozilla’s Firefox browser is officially available. Firefox 4 is now live! Originally scheduled for release at the end of 2010, new features, bugs, and ultimately missed deadlines took their toll.
We’ve been using the various FF 4 betas and previous RC. The general consensus is that it is indeed a lot faster than previous 3.x variants as well as looking much better to boot. And of course, adding in new features such as hardware acceleration, built-in syncing, and a increased HTML5/CSS 3, and other native web formats is always a plus.
Will Firefox 4 top Chrome 10 and IE 9 (among others)? Why don’t you find out…?
