Browsersphere

Apparently because I was downloading versions of Firefox 3 before it was officially released, I’ve been automatically enrolled in the Beta Testers Program.  Because of that, I was notified via a toaster notification tonight that Firefox 3.0.1 beta (build 1) is now available for testing.  I’m posting this from the new version, which identifies itself as follows:

Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.9.0.1) Gecko/2008070208 Firefox/3.0.1

If you aren’t a part of the Beta Testers Program you can download the new beta build, or if you’re just curious what it’s all about, you can head over to the mozilla.announce.prerelease newsgroup or take a look at the MozillaWiki page.  However, I’ve taken a look at both and I’m still not quite sure what the new release is all about.

Tags: Beta, Beta Testers Program, Firefox 3, Releases

Hot on the heels of Firefox 3 potentially being released, I noticed (via Twitter again) that the Flock team has made Flock 2.0 Beta 1, which is based off of the Firefox 3 codebase, available for download.  The key advancements being touted with the beta release are performance, security, the user interface, favorites management and general feature enhancements.

I’ve yet to give Flock a try myself, but this may be the time to do it.  Flock 2.0 Beta 1 is available for download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Tags: Beta, Favorites, Features, Firefox, Firefox 3, Flock, Flock 2, Linux, Mac, Performance, Security, Twitter, User Interface, Windows

There’s some interesting info of which users of IE8 Beta 1 should be aware if they plan on upgrading to Windows XP SP3.  The following comes from an announcement made at IEBlog last week:

If you already have IE8 Beta 1 installed on XPSP2, Windows XP SP3 will not be offered to you via Windows Update. This is because after you update your system to XPSP3, you will no longer be able to uninstall IE8 Beta 1 and the Remove option will be grayed out under the Add/Remove programs in Control Panel.

I heard Windows XP SP3 was out and was curious why it hadn’t been deployed to my home computer yet.  I guess this explains why.  If you want to upgrade to SP3, the solution is to remove IE8 Beta 1 from your computer.  According to IEBlog, you’re free to reinstall it after you’ve made the upgrade.

Tags: Beta, Compatability, IE8, IEBlog, Internet Explorer, Windows XP

I fired up Firefox 3 Beta 5 this morning to find that a new version, version 0.47, of the useful (to me, anyway) Google Reader Notifier extension was available.  As reported in the changelog, it is compatible with the latest Firefox 3 beta.

Tags: Add-ons, Beta, Extensions, Firefox, Google

Nearly two months after the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, several people have had a chance to test the browser out and formulate their first, second and even third impressions.  I’ve listed some of those impressions below, in no particular order:

• Ian Tearle was frustrated by a seemingly unremovable home page.
• Gary James decided after three minutes that IE8 doesn’t suck any less than IE7.
• Rob Hensing reveals that IE8 will likely opt-in to DEP in Vista thanks to Vista SP1 (more on that here as well).
• Matt Hester has put up two screencasts, one of which touches on CSS development and HTML 5 features, and the other of which takes a look at Activities and Webslices.
• IETester is “a free WebBrowser [sic] that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7, IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process” (via milosradovic).
• Here’s an IE8 review from Redmond magazine (consider the source) that says IE8 “shows promise.”
• Edward Mendelson gives a look at “the next browser war,” including an overview of some of the features unique to IE8.
• PctipsBox explains how to speed up Internet Explorer 8 by increasing the connections limit.
• Check out a presentation on some of the garbage collection improvements made in IE8’s handling of JScript (via dzone).
• Tim Kadlec comments on the availability of the W3C Selectors API in IE8.
• A Web User Interface Designer and Architect on LinkedIn asked how important supporting IE6 is in a world in which IE7 and IE8 also exist (and received some pretty good answers).
• Here’s a look at The Future AJAX Wrapper, given IE8’s non-standard XDomainRequest feature.
• Apparently ordered lists aren’t quite ordered in IE8 (via Digg).
• The slightest hint of some sort of Facebook integration in IE8 sent one user running for the hills.
• Marlon Ribunal gives a decent overview of his impressions of IE8, including some screenshots of its developer tools in action.
• IE8 Beta 1 doesn’t quite seem to stack up against Firefox 3 Beta 5 in terms of JavaScript performance (at least according to one particular speed test).
• A post at Softpedia explains why some JavaScript issues in IE8 Beta1 have caused certain fixes to look as if they’ve failed, and also mentions that IE8 Beta 2 is scheduled to drop this summer.

If you’ve had a chance to play around with IE8 Beta 1, what are your impressions?

Tags: Beta, Internet Explorer, Opinion, Reviews, Web Standards

Thanks to Tweet Scan, I can get a semi-real time feel for what’s going on in the browsersphere.  So what are people Tweeting about?

• Trevor Manternach is amused that Firefox 3’s Crash Reporter crashed.
• Sean Marler (naturally) switched photo sharing apps before switching browsers.
• Bob K Mertz doesn’t regret switching from Firefox to Opera.
• Christine Taylor hasn’t had the best of luck with Firefox’s password management.
• timbevil installed a Twitter add-on for Maxthon.
• Jean-Pierre Avakian insists that Twitter sucks with Konqueror.
• Macluvaosx is splitting browser duties between the Blackberry browser and Opera Mini.
• Corvida claims to have uninstalled IE8 10 minutes after upgrading to it.
• Darren Woodley notes that Netflix’s entire site is broken in IE8.
• Nathan Clark is annoyed that Safari keeps losing (eating?) his cookies.

And just as a heads-up, I’m interested in following folks on Twitter that are browserphiles like myself, so drop a comment (or email at browsersphere [at] gmail [dot] com) and let me know who you are on there if you don’t mind being “followed.”  And I’m Bernzilla on there, for anyone who might be interested.

Tags: Beta, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Konqueror, Maxthon, Opera, Opera Mini, Safari, Twitter

Last time around, I didn’t get any feedback on the format of these “Around the Browsersphere” posts, so I’ll give a slightly more organized approach a try and we’ll see how it goes.

Camino

• Camino 1.6, which features a customizable toolbar search field, software update capabilities, a scrolling tab bar, etc., was released on the 17th.

Firefox

• Fuzzbot is a Firefox extention that is “useful for detecting embedded semantic information in web pages and performing actions on that semantic data” (via Microformats).
• Firefox Mastery discusses changing the fonts in Firefox.
• Asa Dotzler attempts to clear up some confusion around add-on installations and required logins.
• Chris Beard gives an update on what’s going on at Mozilla Labs.
• Popular extension Adblock Plus is now compatible with the Firefox 3 betas.
• Deb Richardson gave an excellent overview of bookmarks in Firefox 3 (and did a little damage once her post showed up on Digg).
• Find out how you can help beta test the new Mozilla.com redesign.
• Daniel Glazman figured out how to avoid extension version compatability in Firefox.
• Take a look at the Firefox 3 t-shirt design contest winner.
• Firefox’s market share continues to rise in Europe.
• Paul Kim discusses marketing plans as the release of Firefox 3 nears.
• Robert O’Callahan on the turned-off-by-default ActiveX hosting support in Firefox.
• Firefox was apparently spotted in outer space.

Flock

• Flock is apparently delivering on promises.

Internet Explorer

• IEBlog gives some tips on improving performance in Internet Explorer add-ons.
• Read up on HTML and DOM standards compliance in Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1.

Konqueror

• Some improvements are being made to the error pages in Konqueror.

Maxthon

• Read up on the Maxthon Downloader.
• There’s a new IRC channel for Maxthon enthusiasts.
• Some felt there was perhaps some foul play involved when Maxthon won a Webware 100 award, but the Maxthon Blog certainly didn’t think so.
• One user’s in-depth tale of a switch from Maxthon to Firefox.

Mozilla

• You can download some really old Mozilla versions from the Mozilla Archive.
• Mozilla celebrated its 10th birthday last month (more here and here).

Opera and Opera Mini

• Opera was the first to 106 in the Acid3 test
• A version of Opera Mini has been created to work on Google’s Android platform.
• Indexing and searching in Opera 9.5 explained.
• With Daniel Goldman moving on to bigger and better things, the Opera Watch team is changing.
• David Storey has shed a little more light on Opera Dragonfly.

Safari

• Non-Safari users were none too pleased about some of Apple’s recent software update techniques (more links to evidence at Asa Dotzler’s blog).
• It looks like HTML5’s client-side database storage may be coming to Safari and the iPhone.
• Safari 3 was compared to Firefox 3 (from a Mac user’s perspective) over at Daring Fireball.
• WebKit hackers will be busy in this year’s Summer of Code.
• PayPal says they won’t be blocking Safari users from accessing their site.
• Some Safari-related stats would be better served more carefully worded

SeaMonkey

• Some SeaMonkey contributors recently got together for a Hack’n'Cook.

Minor Players

• There is a whole bunch of minor players (and the major ones, too) listed in “A wealth of browsers.”
• GreenBrowser is “lightest on resources” of the IE clones, according to one forum post.
• Interesting abstract about a tactile web browser for the visually disabled.
• Interested in a little web browser history trivia?

Tags: Add-ons, Beta, Camino, Digg, Extensions, Firefox, Flock, Internet Explorer, iPhone, Konqueror, Mac, Market Share, Maxthon, Microformats, Minor Players, Mozilla, Opera, Opera Mini, Releases, Safari, SeaMonkey, Stats, Web Standards, WebKit

From The Opera Team, via email today:

Hi Folks,

We are pleased to announce the release of Opera 9.5 beta 2. This is a culmination of many hours of engineering and QA work improving the browser and rendering engine.  We have also improved compatibility on many major Web sites through a combination of rendering improvements and developer support work.

Here’s an overview of some of the latest improvements:
- Faster – Our new beta is quicker to start, faster at loading Web pages, and better at running your favorite Web applications.
- Quick Find – Now you can quickly and easily search the text on any site you’ve visited before by typing a few words from the site into the address bar.
- Opera Link ready – Use Opera Link technology <http://link.opera.com>  to connect your Opera Speed Dial, Bookmarks and Personal Bar between Opera 9.5 beta and Opera Mini 4 or 4.1 beta <http://www.operamini.com> — the free browser for your mobile phone.

You can download Opera 9.5 beta 2 at <http://www.opera.com/products/desktop/next/> to try out the above features and other new features in this release.

Regards,

The Opera team

Some of the more technical information about the release is available at the Desktop Team’s blog.

Tags: Beta, Opera, Releases

I’m back!

For those who didn’t catch the news elsewhere already, both Firefox 3 Beta 5 and Opera Mini 4.1 Beta were released yesterday.  There is some more information on the releases here and here, respectively.

Tags: Beta, Firefox, Opera Mini, Releases

I stumbled upon Firefox 3 Memory Usage via Twitter tonight.  The post, from Mozilla software engineer Pavlov, goes into great detail about many of the various memory usage-related changes and fixes that have gone into Firefox 3.  Those changes include, but are not limited to, reduced memory fragmentation, cache tuning, image data storage improvements and memory leak reduction.  Be sure to read the full post if you’re interested in those gory details.

Tags: Beta, Development, Firefox