Browsersphere

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.

Opera’s Chief Web Opener, David Storey, has posted an update on CSS support in Kestrel, the forthcoming 9.5 release of the Opera web browser.

Apparently, after having added support for whitespace: pre-line;, Kestrel is getting very close to full support for CSS2.1. In addition, several CSS3 advancements continue to be made. Read David’s post for all the details.

This is the first in a series of posts that will provide a laundry list of links to articles and posts around the browsersphere that you’ll hopefully find interesting and/or useful.

• How to keep up to date with the Mozilla development – Henrik Gemal tells us how he stays up-to-date with the latest happenings in Mozilla development.
• Better animations in Firefox 3 – The Mozilla Labs Blog covers some of the advantages of the Animated PNG format over traditional animated GIFs. The format is already supported in Gran Paradiso, the development version of Firefox 3, in case you’re interested in checking it out.
• Dave Winer’s take on feed reading in Firefox – Myk Melez talks about some takeaways from Dave Winer’s visit to Mozilla Headquarters (of which not everyone was impressed) in terms of future support of RSS in Firefox.
• Opera has bigger market share than Firefox in Russia – Opera Watch reports that Opera has surpassed Firefox’s market share in Russia to become the 2nd most popular browser behind Internet Explorer.
• Opera and CSS3 support compared to the other browsers – Opera Watch discusses how implementation of CSS3 support in Opera compares to the implementation in other browsers.
• I don’t think that you understand! – Firefox3 Vulnerable by Design – Planet-Websecurity argues that Mozilla’s attempts to put an end to XSS attacks in Firefox 3 are fruitless and will only “open a can of worms.”

If you spot any other useful or interesting browser-related links around the web, please feel free to send me a link at browsersphere [at] gmail.com.

From Ars Technica:

The much-anticipated page zoom feature has finally landed in Firefox 3 nightly builds. Firefox 3 will now be able to zoom the entire page, including images as well as text, just like Opera and IE 7.

The page zoom feature request was originally filed in Bugzilla in 1999, but implementation was delayed because it wasn’t considered practical in Gecko 1.8, the current version of Firefox’s HTML rendering engine. Scheduled for inclusion in Firefox 3, the new version of the rendering engine—Gecko 1.9—leverages the open source Cairo vector graphics rendering framework and includes a number of extremely significant improvements to layout and rendering. The page zoom feature was implemented as part of the Gecko overhaul and will now be included in Firefox 3.

Apparently the feature hasn’t been exposed via the browser chrome, yet, but Ars Technica gives an example of how to test it out in the latest build(s).