Browsersphere

In case you didn’t catch it already, the first beta release of Firefox 3 is now available to download.  Head on over to the beta releases page to get your copy, but remember that even beta builds aren’t recommended for those with weak stomachs

A couple of articles were written recently discussing the relative silence from the Internet Explorer team regarding the next version of the web browser, Internet Explorer 8.

Internet Explorer 8 Buried and Asphyxiated in Microsoft Utero takes the approach that Internet Explorer is losing ground to Mozilla’s Firefox 3.0, and that being silent about the future of IE8 isn’t helping things.

A Seattle P.I. article on the subject focuses entirely on the Internet Explorer team and how their silence has started to alienate web developers dependent on development-related news to make sure their websites will continue to work in Internet Explorer with the next release, whenever it may happen.

I’m a little surprised to see that the Internet Explorer team isn’t a little more sensitive to the whole going AWOL thing, given that they all but vanished from the face of the earth for several years before finally deciding to work on Internet Explorer 7.

It’s also a shame that they haven’t really made an effort to become more transparent now that IE7 is out in the wild and getting so much feedback from the web development community.  The Seattle P.I article says “it’s not like an open-source project, where features are determined in a largely transparent process.”  But why not?  I remember before IE7 was released, the Internet Explorer team was soliciting feedback from everybody about the types of CSS support they would be adding and what major bugs they’d be fixing.  Even if they can’t reveal the big features in an open forum at this juncture, it seems like they could throw a bone or two in developers’ direction by discussing things like CSS support that are well-known, well documented, and waiting to be implemented by anyone and any team that so chooses to implement them.

Anyway, given that the Internet Explorer team has decided to remain tight-lipped about its next browser release, we can put IE8 in the “vaporware” category, somewhere in between Duke Nukem Forever and the Phantom.

I stumbled upon CSS Contents and Browser Compatibility today via etc..  It has a side-by-side comparison of web browser support of CSS features broken down by selectors, pseudo-classes, declarations and experimental declarations.  The web browsers compared are IE 5.5, IE 6, IE 7, Firefox 2.0, Safari 3.0 (Windows), Opera 9.5 Beta, iCab 3.0 and Konqueror 3.5.7.

It’s not surprising to see that as you scroll down the page semi-quickly, a majority of the red shows up in the Internet Explorer and iCab columns.  Beyond that, it looks like Firefox and Opera deserve some props for having only one red box each for the features in the first three categories.  Konqueror’s not far behind with about two-and-a-half, depending on how you count the “Incorrect” implementation for background-attachment.

What stands out, though, is the support for experimental features.  Konqueror leads in that category with support for three features, Safari’s next with support for two-and-a-half, and then Firefox and Opera with two each.  The other browsers fail to even register in this area (again, not surprisingly).

See anything else interesting in the stats?  Post a comment.

This “minor player” is very minor, and I suppose you could say it’s hot off the shelf.  It’s called Lightbrowser, and according to its developer, version 1.0 was just finished yesterday:

I have entitled it Lightbrowser. Lightbrowser is, as the name implies, a very light web browser. It very fast and renders web pages faster than Safari or Firefox. I developed it using leoaprd [sic]. The rendering engine is WebKit. Bookmark capability will be added shortly.

The developer’s home page can be found at Xiotios Software, and you can download his browser to play around with on your Mac from here.

According to the Opera Desktop Team, a new alpha build of Opera 9.5 was made available on Friday.  Among the new features and fixes:

• Fixed an ordered list bug
•  Users can now select an external View Source editor
• APNG 1.0 support added for use in web pages and skins
• Notification improvements
• Stability and rendering engine fixes
• Fixed Internet Explorer bookmark import

The new build is available to download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

Firefox 3: Preview of the User Interface is almost two months old at this point, but it covers some of the upcoming UI changes in Firefox 3, otherwise known as “Gran Paradiso.”

Discontinuous selections allow you to select text from various parts on a page without respect for continuity, all at the same time. Private browsing allows you to put the browser into a state where none of the details of your browsing activities are stored locally on your computer. The bookmark overhaul will allow things like tagging, extended meta data search, synchronization and export into various formats. Furthermore, microformat detection will bring Operator-like functionality to the base browser.

For the full list along with some screenshots, be sure to head on over to Firefox 3: Preview of the User Interface.

I think I saw this once before, but I just caught it again via Digg and figured I’d post a link here.

An SVG document detailing a timeline of web browser development since 1991.

Pretty cool stuff!

Feedback on the recently released Opera 9.5 alpha has started to roll in now that more people have had a chance to play with it. I have to admit, I haven’t played around with it yet, so I’ll tell you what some other people are saying…

Download Junkie says:

• We tested this early preview and it’s already looking superb. The performance is the best of any browser we’ve used, it was very stable and the Mac OS X version ships with a much-improved user interface that looks like a proper OS X interface.

Vorlath says:

• I really have to plug Opera 9.5 right now. It looks the same. Or at least, I made it look the same again (skins, rss feeds, plugins and such). But it feels like I have a new computer.
• Personally, everything about how Opera 9.5 renders pages rocks.
• The renderer in Opera 9.5 isn’t just fast. It’s lightning fast. Moving things on screen, scrolling, refresh, everything just flows extremely fast.

Ars Technica says:

• The new alpha does feel slightly “snappier” than its predecessor.
• While still not as full-featured as a standalone BitTorrent client, being able to download torrents with a single click on a web page is an extremely useful feature and is one that I use all the time.
• When you start typing in a URL or search term, Opera will not only auto-fill a dropdown list of previously visited pages starting with the letters you have typed, but it also searches the contents of web pages in your history and displays those matching results as well. So you can just type, say, “apple” in the URL and it will pick up not only www.apple.com but any recently visited web pages mentioning that particular fruit.

Asa Dotzler says:

• My initial use suggests some mild performance improvements on a few of the heavier pages I visit. There are quite a few rendering glitches but that’s to be expected this early in the development cycle.
• There are just too many sites that still block Opera completely. Not being able to use Google office apps and other top 1000 sites is just a deal-breaker for so many people.
• Opera today looks and feels a lot more like Firefox and IE than it did just a couple of years ago and their dev team deserves praise for those moves.

Digg users say:

• Been using for least than 5 minutes, and I already love it. most of the site specific anoyances that broke my opera 9.23 are now fixed.
• Opera once again demonstrates its prowess in innovation with the new feature list - such as the full history search.
• OMG it is fantastic! I think it is really faster on Mac now and works better with many websites, such as Plaxo and Google Calendar! Sweet.

You know there’d be at least one “OMG” in that last set

And just in case you’re looking for some testing grounds where you can put some of the alpha build’s new features to the test, you can either head on over to David Storey’s list of demos or to CSS3 . Info, which has a section dedicated to CSS3.

Oh, and Browsersphere is still kind of a comment virgin, so if you’ve had a chance to look at the Opera 9.5 alpha and have your own thoughts on it, please leave a comment

In a lengthy post on the future (or lack thereof) of Internet Explorer, Alex Russell compares and contrasts the transparency of the major web browser development teams:

The features planned for Firefox 3 are impressive and the work is being done in the open, meaning it’s easy to have confidence that not only will Mozilla ship what they say they will, it’ll be here when they say it will. Same goes for the excellent work the Safari team has been doing. Even Opera keeps its community on fire by shipping regular updates, showing tech previews at conferences, and blogging about the progress being made on many fronts. If the IE team is holed up working on something stonkingly [sic] good, they certainly aren’t doing themselves any favors by not telling us about it. The result of their radio silence isn’t mystery, it’s distrust. Deep, divisive, troubling distrust of the kind you can only get when folks who break up stop talking altogether.

You can read Alex’s thoughts in their entirety over at +1.5 Years: Where Are We Now?

Every now and then I’ll be posting updates on the latest web browser releases. This time around, four web browsers show up on the radar.

Camino 1.5.1, a maintenance release of that browser, was released on August 17th.

Opera is most certainly in release mode at the moment. A new beta version of Opera Mini 4 will be released later today (August 30th) and the first alpha build of Kestrel will be released next week on September 4th.

Finally, the latest release of the forthcoming Firefox 3 is Gran Paradiso Alpha 7. Either that build or the next (which is available via nightly builds) contains a new plugin manager and a new tab animation for overflow tabs. The Mozilla folks are definitely interested in feedback, so if you’re a Firefox user and interested in getting a taste of the latest and greatest developments of that browser, you should give Gran Paradiso Alpha 7 a try.