Browsersphere

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

Tags: Alpha, CSS, Development, Features, Opera, Reviews, Web Standards

Maxthon 2.0.3 has been released. You can download it here. The biggest feature of the new release seems to be recovering your Favorites using their “online recovery” mechanism. For a list of the features and bug fixes in this release, head on over to the Maxthon Blog.

Tags: Features, Maxthon, Releases

I had the pleasure of being stuck in traffic during my drive home last Thursday, so knowing that the 2nd beta of Opera Mini 4 was available to download, I downloaded it onto my RAZR.

Right off-the-bat, my experience was a positive one. The initial tutorial was very helpful, giving me a quick overview of all the new features and the best ways to navigate around the web pages I would visit. I also noticed I didn’t need to enter a sequence of random characters before using the browser, something I had had to do in the past with older versions of Opera Mini.

Once I had moved beyond the setup, I was at the main landing page, ready to start browsing the web. My first destination would be the Washington State Department of Transportation website, as I needed to figure out what was giving me all this free time in my car to play around with a mobile web browser. Now, I know there’s a version of the site made specifically for small devices, but where’s the fun in that? Afterall, I wanted to get a feel for how the latest beta performs browsing the real web.

There’s good news and bad news when it comes to browsing web pages using Opera Mini 4 Beta 2. The good news is, if you’re browsing web pages with which you’re familiar and at which you spend a lot of time even when you’re not mobile (e.g. when you’re at home browsing in Firefox or Opera), navigating the web will be a piece of cake. When you first land at any page, you’re presented with a high-level, out-of-focus view of the entire page. If you know where you want to go, you simply scroll your cursor to that section of the page and then click to dive down to the content. It doesn’t get a whole lot easier than that.

The bad news, at least from my perspective, is that if you aren’t intimately familiar with the web page you’re viewing, it’s pretty much a crapshoot to figure out where you want to dive down. Take, for instance, the Washington State Department of Transportation website (what a convenient example!). I’ve included a screenshot of what that site looks like in Opera Mini 4 Beta 2:

Because I don’t spend a lot of time at the site’s home page (unfortunately I do spend a lot of time at their map, thanks to Seattle’s traffic woes) and don’t recall the URLs of the specific sections of the site I want to see, I’m forced to literally guess at where on the page the links I’m interested in might sit. As you can guess from the screenshot, this isn’t a straightforward process.

If you combine the aforementioned guessing game with the fact that sometimes the browser seems to hang up a bit (I think this is more likely due to my slow data connection than the browser itself), it can literally take a few minutes to navigate a single page trying to find the content in which you’re interested. That being said, it should be mentioned that other mobile browsers simply toss you to the top of the page and force you to work your way down through all of the page’s content in search of that very same content. Is the Opera Mini 4 Beta 2 release better when this is taken into consideration? Of course. If you have any expertise in browsing the web (and most people do these days), your chances of guessing the spot on the page that contains the content you’re after is probably a lot higher than stumbling upon it within a few clicks in another mobile browser.

Other things to note about the latest beta include the support for landscape mode and the “create search” functionality. My RAZR’s screen is taller than it is wide, so it was interesting to be able to flip web pages on their side and view them in landscape mode. It does take some getting used to, though, as the soft keys end up being “top and bottom” buttons instead of “left and right.” The “create search” functionality sounds promising. I haven’t used it yet, but it sounds like I could take the search box at my personal blog and add it as a custom search option in Opera Mini 4 Beta 2. That way, I could search for something like “Opera Mini” and get a list of all posts I’ve made at my blog about the mobile browser. Pretty cool!

For more on the Beta 2 release of Opera Mini 4, be sure to read the changelog. If you’re interested in how your site or any other site will look in the latest beta release, you can test that out over at the Opera Mini 4 beta simulator. And if you’ve had a chance to play with Opera Mini 4 Beta 2 and have your own feedback, please post a comment. I’d love to hear about it.

Tags: Features, Mobile, Opera Mini, Releases, Reviews

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.

Tags: Camino, Development, Features, Firefox, Mobile, Opera, Opera Mini, Releases

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).

Tags: Development, Features, Firefox, Parity, Unreleased