Around the Browsersphere #15
Posted on January 7th, 2010 | 6 Comments »
We’re covering everything from the difference between Yahoo! Answers and Stack Overflow, to Firefox sabotage against IE8 add-ons, to Taco Bell marketing campaigns in this trip around the browsersphere. Are you ready?
General
- This one is pretty funny, but maybe wouldn’t be as funny if it was true: someone filed a Firefox bug claiming installing Firefox disabled his or her IE8 add-ons.
- WebKit received one of InfoWorld’s 2010 Technology of the Year awards for being a “tool for creating cross-platform smartphone development,” whatever that means.
- Yahoo! Answers, which is one of the most useless sites on the Internet, in my opinion, runs the gamut in attempting to answer the question “which language should I use to create a web browser?“
- Harry Parsonage went to great lengths to write a “forensics” paper on how privacy can be put at risk by various web browsers’ session restore feature.
- If you’re planning on attending MIX10 in March, Paul Scarpa of Spry Hive Industries is hoping to talk about the past, present and future of web browsers. You’ll need to vote, though, to make that happen.
Chrome
- An article at Beet.TV claims that Google Chrome has reached 40 million active users worldwide since it’s initial beta release in September of 2008.
- Jim Lynch of ExtremeTech talks about why he switched from Firefox to Chrome on Mac.
- Dwight Silverman is using Chrome on Mac, too, and got pretty excited when a bookmark manager showed up in his build.
- If you’re a Chrome fan and an Ubuntu fan, you may like some of these Ubuntu themes for Google Chrome.
- Chrome’s Dev Channel was updated to version 4.0.288.1 yesterday across all platforms. TechCrunch points out that the key features are those that showed up for the Mac platform: bookmark syncing, the new “pin tab” feature, and most importantly, extensions.
- Unlike Yahoo! Answers, Stack Overflow provides a platform at which smart people can provide smart answers, such as this explanation of the difference between the browser process, the render processes and plug-ins in Chrome.
Fennec
- In a blog post that announces his transition from working on Fennec back to the desktop version of Firefox, Gavin Sharp also reveals how developing for Fennec was different than developing for Firefox, and introduces us to a few of the other major contributors to the new mobile browser.
Firefox
- John Lilly tweets about a theme/add-on combination that gives “glimpses of [Firefox] 4.0.”
- John Slater, Mozilla’s Creative Director, vows that Firefox marketing won’t go the Taco Bell route.
- Download Squad reports that Firefox 3.7 is showing some progress with its Windows 7 shell integration.
- Initial tests show that forthcoming multi-processor support in Firefox leads to a 3x speedup in JavaScript performance, but even that is still 50% slower than Google Chrome’s performance using the same test.
Internet Explorer
- Microsoft’s announcement that it had submitted a request to join the SVG Working Group sparked commentary from SitePoint and The Industry Standard.
Opera
- As you probably heard, Opera announced a new CEO this week.
- Opera is planning on releasing a browser beta for Windows CE and looking to find other niches after suffering losses of around $2 million during the last quarter.
The Minor Players
- “Digia @Web is a modern, fully finger touch controllable, web browser for mobile. @Web is currently available for S60 5th Edition and Maemo mobile devices free of charge.” Techie Buzz has a review, which includes a screenshot.
- SRWare Iron Browser, which was mentioned here last month, has been reviewed, along with screenshots, over at GadgetMix.
- China is making some big investments in free software which could end up benefiting Maxthon.
- Flock 2.5.6 was released this week, fixing some integration issues with Flickr and Twitter.
- Reports from CES say that Ford has developed its own Web browser, which can be operated only while the car is parked (there’s more on the safety implications of related innovations in The New York Times today). Left Lane reports that Ford’s browser is WebKit-based.
- This review of the Orca browser has plenty of screenshots for anyone who’s curious about the browser.
- Honza Pokorny, who you can follow on Twitter, has created his own browser, appropriately named Honza’s Browser, which you can try out on Linux or Windows. He has also made the source code available.