emoko is a web browser just like FireFox or Internet Explorer, with one big difference - emoko is built using video game technology.
The browser apparently renders pages in a “3D world,” and users’ avatars in that 3D world can interact (via text and voice chat, or drawing on the page) with one another, as long as they are visiting the same web page. The version at the time of writing is version 0.9.6225, and it is the second major update according to the browser’s website.
The following video demonstrates emoko’s vision of how the browser works:
Now that we’ve seen the video, I have to admit that I’ve actually installed and played around with emoko a bit. Unfortunately, my experience wasn’t anything like what you see in the video. The browser felt more like a Java app to me than it did a video game. Even on my fairly powerful computer, things felt a bit slow and jittery. If it’s possible to tilt web pages, create avatars and find other users in emoko, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. The best I could do is get a feel for the interface, which in itself is a bit different than what is offered up in the video:
Don’t let me be the judge, though. If you’re into trying new things, give emoko a spin yourself and definitely let me know if you have a different experience than I did. Regardless, it’s good to see people thinking outside of the box with web browser development. This one may just be a little too far out of the box for my liking.
I’ve been doing my best to keep my finger on the pulse of the browsersphere over on Twitter, but you know you’re not getting the real deal until we go “around the browsersphere.”
At a WebKit hackfest recently, some improvements were made to context menu handling, including the ability to hold the CTRL key while right-clicking to see the default context menu instead of any custom context menu provided by the current website. Additionally, some include- and linking-related improvements were made to decrease the overall WebCore build time, which should come as good news to those 80 active WebKit committers.
Some videos from Add-on-Con feature representatives for Chrome, Firefox and Safari and delve into topics such as browser security and mobile add-ons (via Dan Moore).
In a LinuxCrunch review of the Linux version of Chrome (via Slashdot), it is touted as being “stable and fast,” but downsides such as lacking extension and RSS support are mentioned as well. Additionally, there’s an interesting note about a KDE-related bug that Google has opted not to fix.
Firefox
An article at TG Daily (via Digg) calls Firefox “clunky-looking” and says that the news Firefox 4 may not ship until 2011 “comes as some embarrassment for Mozilla.” It goes even further to claim that Microsoft will now have a “clear advantage” over Mozilla and “bit-players” Chrome and Safari.
Even though I think it’s a cool feature (which admittedly takes some getting used to), FavBrowser.com lends a hand to those who want to turn off Opera 10.5’s tab thumbnails in Windows 7 (I’m sure this approach works for Safari as well).
In Carakan Revisited, improvements made to the Carakan JavaScript engine over the previous Furthark engine are discussed, mainly focusing on garbage collection and caching. The post also touches on some of the plans for future improvements.
I originally covered Wyzo back in September of 2007 when it was still an alpha release. Believe it or not, Wyzo has now grown up and is known as Wyzo 3. It is billed as “The Media Browser,” and “will accelerate your web downloads, let you download torrents with a single click, discover media in your browser and much more.”
Rather than review the browser again, now that it’s matured quite a bit, I’ll do one better and share this YouTube video with you, which does a good job of showing off the UI, some of the important features, etc.:
If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what the Wyzo folks are up to, you can follow them on Twitter: @wyzo. I’ve also added them to @Browsersphere’s list of web browsers.
I learned via Twitter last Thursday that Google Chrome 2 had shipped, though you’d never know it from visiting the Chrome website. As noted on the Google Chrome Blog on the day of release, “we’re referring to this as Chrome 2, but that’s mainly a metric to help us keep track of changes internally. We don’t give too much weight to version numbers and will continue to roll out useful updates as often as possible.”
However, with version changes come lofty expectations, and the release of Chrome 2 left at least one reviewer underwhelmed. The good news is, hot on the heels of the release of version 2 to the general public, it was announced earlier today (hat-tip to Ryan Parman) that Chrome 3 has been made available to Chrome users on the “Dev channel” (which I’ve covered here previously). However, with version changes come lofty expectations, and even users who are supposed to understand that “Dev channel” releases could potentially set your CPU on fire have been complaining about the audacity of Google to unleash a build with known issues on the “masses.”
I guess the Google Chrome team can’t win. Regardless, if you’re like me and you like getting your hands on new web browsers that inherently seem to showcase improvements both under the hood and on the surface, you should be happy to learn that versions 2 and 3, if your stomach can handle it, are now available for public consumption.
A post at Tombuntu uncovers the fact, for me anyway, that there is a pre-alpha version of Chromium already available for use on Linux. The following is an excerpt of the author’s review:
Chromium for Linux is pre-alpha software, but farther along in development than I expected. The GTK-based Linux interface looks and works just like Windows interface. The browser rendered sites I tested it with just fine, and I haven’t been able to crash the it yet. Lots of features, such as bookmarks, the options window, and even the about window, are simply…not implemented yet.
The review goes on to say that the tab bar is also missing, making it difficult to do anything with tabbed web pages, but that, like on the Google Chrome Windows counterpart, each tab runs in its own process.
Apparently getting the pre-alpha build is as simple as issuing the following from the command line:
sudo apt-get install chromium-browser
You can read much more about the Chromium build(s) in question over at Chromium on Ubuntu.
I accidentally stumbled upon the fact that Apple released Safari 4 Beta today. According to some of the early feedback I’m seeing, along with a post from ITworld, it sounds like the beta is reminding a lot of people of Chrome. I’ve yet to download it and try it out, but I wanted to pass along the word that it’s out there, in case you want to give it a try. I’ll be posting more on the new browser release when I’m back from vacation and have some more time to form my own opinions about it.
It’s that time again. Since the last update, major versions of both Opera and Firefox have been released. Only one of the two has been dominating in terms of Digg presence, though.
Why Firefox 3 matters – Speed, memory use, phishing and malware protection and bookmark management are among the new features of Firefox 3 that make the browser “matter,” according to the target article.
Midori is another browser billed as “lightweight” and it utilizes WebKit under the hood. There’s a pretty good review of the browser and its potential over at Associated Content.
A post at Tombuntu