Browsers
Google Chrome to get RSS support soon
Mar 21st
Google chrome popularity has been increasing day by day. There are certain features not yet available, one of the missing features in Google Chrome is the support of RSS Feeds.
According to Chrome development team it will be available as soon as possible, as the developers are close to implementing the support for RSS detection.
Google programmer Finnur Thorarinsson said about the progress on this feature addition:
“The first part of this has been implemented and checked in.”
As we all know that RSS support is there in IE7, Firefox, Safari as well, so Chrome development team is aware of the fact that they will get it fixed soon.
This is however disabled as the developers are working on the second part, which will produce a page that lets people actually subscribe to the feed.
Google launched Chrome web browser last year with hopes to encourage innovations in web browsers.
They have already forced rival browser companies to improve Javascript performance in their products.
Download Internet Explorer 8
Mar 20th
Microsoft has released version 8 of Internet Explorer.
Pratt said that users of Microsoft’s latest operating system, Windows 7, will not be able to use the latest version of Internet Explorer till Microsoft rolls out the next public release of their latest operating system.
IE 8 helps you to access the web faster, easier, more privately and secure than ever before.
Faster: Internet Explorer 8 is more responsive with new pages and tabs, opening up fast and reliably. You can now get to the information you care about most, in fewer steps; one click access to your webmail, favorite news sites or other online services.
Easier: Reduce the steps to accomplish many common tasks, and automate your access to real time information updates. You can keep track of your favorite sports team, news, weather with a single click.
Private: Helps protect your privacy and confidential information where ever you go on the web.
Secure: Helps protect and stop malicious software from reaching your PC, and makes it easier to detect when a website is an imposter.
Before this, Microsoft had already released two betas and one release candidate. Users who are operating with the previous versions of IE8 will get the latest version via Windows Update during the next couple of weeks.
Mozilla, rival of Internet Explorer welcomed this news. Firefox director, Mike Beltzner in respond to this news stated:
We’re happy to see that Microsoft is not standing still. But we’re not standing still either. Browser makers have to keep up [because] people expect more of the Web today.
Get your IE8 explorer download right here Download IE 8.
M5 Development milestone for Weave released
Mar 16th
Mozilla Labs have rolled out a development milestone for Weave Sync as a part of their roadmap towards the 0.3 release of Weave Sync.
Weave Sync is a prototype that encrypts and securely synchronizes the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, so that your desktop, laptop, and mobile phone can all work together. It is part of the Weave project, which aims to integrate services more closely with the browser.
Weave Sync provides a secure experience enabling you to take your Firefox experience with you to all your Firefox browsers — including Mozilla’s mobile browser, codenamed Fennec. It currently supports continuous synchronization of your bookmarks, browsing history, saved passwords and tabs.
Here are a list of a few features that it provides:
- Get exactly same results on the Smart Location on each and every firefox browsers, thus enabling you to reach your favorite sites with just a small number of keystrokes.
- Making it possible for you to open any tab you have opened on any of your Firefox browsers.
- Have an exact copy of all the bookmarks on every single Firefox browsers.
- Conveniently sign in to your favorite and frequently visited sites using your saved passwords.
- All of this can be done in a secured environment since Weave Sync encrypts your user data before uploading it to Mozilla’s servers, thus enabling only you to access your data.
Now coming to part in which we come to know what new features M5 has got for us. The new features are:
- Performance and reliability factors improved quite significantly, particularly on Fennec.
- Added the first pass of a set of user controls to help recover from sync problems: one way sync up/down, force a slow-sync.
- Polished UI on Firefox and Fennec.
Another Bug fix release for Chrome
Mar 14th
The bug fixes release for Google Chrome just keep coming. This time Dev Channel have releaesed 2.0..169.1.The release 2.0.169.1 comprises of a number of fixes on the top of 2.0.169.0 release. To get detailed information about the bug fix release of 2.0.169.0 please click here.
If you are having difficulties in installing Google’s browser, then this release might be the potential solution to your problem. One of the most common and widely seen problem is the one related to installs or updates which happens when a user’s %TMP% directory is pointing to a different partition of the hard disk other than their C drive.
Here is a list of all the changes in this release :
Noteable changes :
- Make the last tab have a right-click menu. Issue 8519
- Bring V8 to version 1.0.3.6 (r1458).
- Stop history search going on beyond the start of history. Issue 8438, and Issue 8456
- Fix black titlebars rendering when toggling DWM when the window is maximized. Issue 8526
- Fix horizontal scrolling to not be reversed on tilt wheel mice and old Thinkpads. Issue 8590
- Fixes crash in ResizeCorner. Issue 8477
- Make Google Chrome windows not hide auto-hide taskbars. Issue 20, and Issue 8410
- Fix installer failure when %TMP% not on C:Issue 8505
Known Issues:
- Issue 8453: Regression: about:network dialog shows up behind current Google Chrome window
- Issue 8399: Bookmarking a page not reflected on history page when open
- Issue 8318: “Exit Full Screen” link does nothing
- Issue 8372: Background paint issues with Task manager in maximized mode.
- Issue 8289: Drag drop of bookmark from IE/FF crashes tab and then loads the page
- Issue 8071: Javascript debugger doesn’t come up for constrained windows
- Issue 8040: Zoom is broken in [New Tab]
- Issue 8345: Browser can crash when removing saved passwords
- Issue 8653: CPU can go to 100% while scrolling a page using Flash
- Issue 8669: Dragging a link/bookmark into tabs may be ignored
Download Firefox 3.1 beta 3
Mar 13th
Mozilla has announced the beta 3 of Firefox 3.1.
According to Mozilla, Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is now available for download. Its main focus is on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3.1.
New features and changes in this beta version that require feedback include:
- Improved the new Private Browsing Mode, including the ability to “Forget This Site” from the History sidebar.
- Improved performance and stability with the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
- Improvements to web worker thread support.
- New native JSON support.
- Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
- Support for new web technologies such as the <video> and <audio> elements, the W3C Geolocation API, JavaScript query selectors, CSS 2.1 and 3 properties, SVG transforms and offline applications.
Mozilla has recommended to read the released notes.
Firefox 3.0.7: Release is available now
Mar 5th
The Web is all about innovation, and Firefox 3 sets the pace with plenty of new features, including the smart location bar, one-click bookmarking and blindingly fast performance.
Mozilla released a security and stability update for Firefox 3.x users on Wednesday, March 4, 2009 at 4:04 pm PT.
As part of the Mozilla Corporation’s ongoing security and stability process, Firefox 3.0.7 is now available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
It is strongly recommended that all Firefox users upgrade to this latest release. If you already have Firefox 3, you will receive an automated update notification within 24 to 48 hours.
This update can also be applied manually by selecting “Check for Updates…” from the Help menu.
For a list of changes and more information, please see the Firefox 3.0.7 release notes.
Important thing to note down is that if you’re still using Firefox 2.0.0.x, this version is no longer supported and contains known security vulnerabilities. Please upgrade to Firefox 3 by downloading Firefox 3.0.7.
Firefox 3.0.7 fixes several issues found in Firefox 3.0.6:
- Fixed several security issues.
- Fixed several stability issues.
- Official releases for the Estonian, Kannada, and Telugu languages are now available.
- Items in the “File” menu show as inactive after using the “Print” item from that menu – switching to a new tab restores them (bug 425844).
- For some users, cookies would appear to go “missing” after a few days (bug 444600).
- Mac users of the Flashblock add-on, experienced an issue where sound from the Flash plug-in would continue to play for a short time after closing a tab or window (bug 474022).
- Fixed several issues related to accessibility features.
Mozilla Labs roll out a developer release for Weave
Mar 4th
Mozilla Labs have rolled out a developer release named Weave M4 Development Milestone for the Weave Client. The current release is targeted solely towards testing.
Weave, launched way back in 2007, is an experiment by Mozilla Labs attempts to identify ways for enhancing Firefox user experience, providing users more control over their personal information. It also focuses on providing developers various options for building innovative online experiences.One important area for exploration is the blending of the desktop and the Web through deeper integration of the browser with online services.
The development uptil now has focused mainly on enabling Weave Sync to encrypt and synchronize the Firefox experience across multiple browsers, between desktop and mobile devices to be specific, in a secured manner.
The M4 development milestone is an developer release of the Weave client released early. The release is on track with the planned development milestones. This development milestone is available only for testing purposes, and to solicit wider testing and feedback from the Mozilla community.
The new features in M4 are :
- Preliminary support for Fennec for all data types, i.e. bookmarks, history, tabs, and saved passwords.
- Redesigned sync protocol and server architecture.
- Client optimization to improve CPU and memory efficiency.
- services.mozilla.com now hosted on a redesigned hardware server cluster.
If you are interested in getting yourself involved with testing and development tasks, register yourself for a Weave account, install the latest development milestone and get your hands dirty.
Chrome uses Distributed Reliability Testing
Feb 27th
Every software developer want their software to be stable. Same is the case with Google Chrome. Google Chrome team wants to ensure that Google Chrome should never crash, no matter which website you browse. This is one of their goal. In order to ensure that they achieve their stability goal, they have employed a tool which they name it “Distributed Reality Testing“.
Being a part of Google, one of the advantages that Google Chrome team gets is their access to large amount of information over the Web, not to forget a huge amount of computers on which to perform testing operations.
Every hour, their distributed test tool takes the latest version of Google Chrome in development and uses it in an automated manner to automatically load a large number of pages, which are most popular according to Google collected statistics. Once done with this testing it produces the result which is something like this
Results for top 500 web sites:
success: 499; crashes: 0; crash dumps: 0; timeout: 1
Results for top 500 web sites without sandbox:
success: 463; crashes: 0; crash dumps: 0; timeout: 2
Results for extended list of web sites:
success: 99768; crashes: 3; crash dumps: 3; timeout: 463
Besides this, the Google Chrome team also performed “fuzz-test” on the user interface, automatically performing random sequence of actions(opening a tab, opening various dialogs, etc). In total there are more than 30 possible actions related to the user interface. These tests are also performed in the distributed testing environment.The result of this interface related test looks something like this
Results for automated UI test:
success: 64643; crashes: 0; crash dumps: 0; timeout: 0
This sort of large-scale testing is advantageous in the sense that it helps in finding crashes that happen only rarely, or that only affect pages that developers wouldn’t have visited as part of their haphazard manual testing. By catching a problem right away even if it’s very rare, it becomes easier for developers to figure out the factors that caused the error and fix it before it ever gets close to showing up in Google Chrome itself.
Google Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer
Feb 25th
Google Toolbar Team has always been focused on improving your web experience. Google recently unveiled Google Quick Search Bar for Mac, which allows you to search links, launch applications and more from anywhere on your Mac. Now the company is letting Windows users get in on the fun with a new beta release of Google Toolbar 6.
Google Toolbar 6 for Internet Explorer, released in beta today, have some new features: the integration with Google Notebook has been removed, the “new tab” page from Google Chrome is displayed when you open a new tab and there’s a completely unrelated application bundled with the toolbar. Quick Search Box is already available for iPhone and Mac and now it’s part of Google Toolbar 6.
The new application can be launched by clicking on the Google logo on the taskbar or you can use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+Space. It combines a program launcher with a search box and it shows suggestions, web addresses and results for simple calculations.
Google explained:
“Sometimes, multi-tasking on the computer can be a maddening process if you have to constantly switch between different programs and files. Try using the Quick Search Box: it lets you easily search both your computer and the Web from a slick-looking search box that comes up only when you need it,”
Quick Search Box is similar to the homonymous feature from Google Desktop, which only shows results from your computer. It borrows the mix of search suggestions and navigation predictions from Chrome’s Omnibox, while opening web pages in your default browser.
Apple releases Beta version for Safari 4
Feb 25th
Yesterday(24th February, 2009), Apple released Beta version for their browser namely “Safari 4″. Apple’s share gaining web browser contains the latest Javascript engine. It supports the latest web standards.
Safari contains an engine dubbed as “Nitro”, which is said to run Javascript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3. According to Apple, this beta version contains 150 features in total.
Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing stated:
Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward. Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications.
In terms of performance, Apple asserts that the latest Beta release executes Javascript 30 times faster than Microsoft Internet Explorer, in comparison to Firefox 3, Safari runs 3 times faster. It loads HTML web pages 3 times faster than Microsoft and Mozilla browsers .
Safari contains a handful of new user interface related features such as:
- Top sites, which display a certain amount of frequently visited web pages, so that user can access their favorite sites with a single click. Moreover this feature also notifies the user if any of their favorite sites were updated since their last visit by displaying a star on the top right corner of that site’s wall preview. This is a feature which you do not find in IE or firefox
- Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks “as fun and as easy as paging through an album art in iTunes.”
- Full History Search, which enables the user to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily access their recently visited sites.
- Smart Address Field, which automatically and dynamically completes web addresses by displaying a list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history.
- Smart Search Field, which enables the user to fine tune their search with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches.
- Full Page Zoom, which enables you to take a closer look at any website without affecting the quality of the site’s appearance.
- Windows like look for Windows version of Safari, and uses standard font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars.
- Built in tools for web developers to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility
