Browsersphere

Nearly two months after the release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, several people have had a chance to test the browser out and formulate their first, second and even third impressions.  I’ve listed some of those impressions below, in no particular order:

• Ian Tearle was frustrated by a seemingly unremovable home page.
• Gary James decided after three minutes that IE8 doesn’t suck any less than IE7.
• Rob Hensing reveals that IE8 will likely opt-in to DEP in Vista thanks to Vista SP1 (more on that here as well).
• Matt Hester has put up two screencasts, one of which touches on CSS development and HTML 5 features, and the other of which takes a look at Activities and Webslices.
• IETester is “a free WebBrowser [sic] that allows you to have the rendering and javascript engines of IE8 beta 1, IE7, IE 6 and IE5.5 on Vista and XP, as well as the installed IE in the same process” (via milosradovic).
• Here’s an IE8 review from Redmond magazine (consider the source) that says IE8 “shows promise.”
• Edward Mendelson gives a look at “the next browser war,” including an overview of some of the features unique to IE8.
• PctipsBox explains how to speed up Internet Explorer 8 by increasing the connections limit.
• Check out a presentation on some of the garbage collection improvements made in IE8’s handling of JScript (via dzone).
• Tim Kadlec comments on the availability of the W3C Selectors API in IE8.
• A Web User Interface Designer and Architect on LinkedIn asked how important supporting IE6 is in a world in which IE7 and IE8 also exist (and received some pretty good answers).
• Here’s a look at The Future AJAX Wrapper, given IE8’s non-standard XDomainRequest feature.
• Apparently ordered lists aren’t quite ordered in IE8 (via Digg).
• The slightest hint of some sort of Facebook integration in IE8 sent one user running for the hills.
• Marlon Ribunal gives a decent overview of his impressions of IE8, including some screenshots of its developer tools in action.
• IE8 Beta 1 doesn’t quite seem to stack up against Firefox 3 Beta 5 in terms of JavaScript performance (at least according to one particular speed test).
• A post at Softpedia explains why some JavaScript issues in IE8 Beta1 have caused certain fixes to look as if they’ve failed, and also mentions that IE8 Beta 2 is scheduled to drop this summer.

If you’ve had a chance to play around with IE8 Beta 1, what are your impressions?

It’s been a few months since we caught up with the popular web browser-related submissions on Digg, so let’s do something about that:

• John’s Blog: Apple Software Update and Safari – People didn’t take too kindly to Apple’s decision to bundle Safari with a recent iTunes update.
• Mozilla CEO says Apple’s Safari auto-update ‘wrong’ – Mozilla’s CEO was among them.
• Three Powerful Safari Features That Few People Use – The features include browsing and search snapback, URL path navigation and Web Inspector.
• Safari 3.1 on Windows: a true competitor arrives (seriously) – The post claims that Safari 3.1 on Windows has improved greatly over the Safari 3 beta that came out last summer.
• Apple Forbids Windows Users from Installing Safari – Some interesting licensing terms were found in the Safari license.
• Mozilla: Final Version of Firefox 3 Will Ship in June – This one speaks for itself.
• WebKit achieves Acid3 100/100 in public build – Announcement regarding WebKit’s race toward Acid3 compliance.
• 100% Organic Software -Your New “Green” Firefox Browser – Worth the read, even if only for the image of the Firefox chomping on the IE logo.
• Opera releases experimental public build that passes Acid3 – Yet more evidence of the race toward Acid3 compliance.
• When in Rome: engineering the Firefox 3 user experience – ars technica discusses some of the usability/visual identity-related changes in Firefox 3 with Alex Faaborg.
• Internet Explorer: A Browser Breaks – Some market share statistics regarding IE and Enterprise.
• Firefox Gains On Internet Explorer In Businesses – Along the same lines as the previous, only with a Firefox slant.
• Firefox 3 Beta 5 (Final beta) released! – News of the release of the latest Firefox 3 beta.
• Samsung Instinct: Browse Web Pages with Tilt Navigation – A look (in video form) at a web browser that lets you navigate using tilt movements.
• Opera Mini 4.1 beta is out – News of the release of the Opera Mini 4.1 beta.
• Firefox 3.0 Beta 5 faster on Mac OS X than Safari 3.1 – When it comes to JavaScript, at least.
• Incredible Firefox Keyboard Shortcuts You May Not Know About
• Latest iPhone Firmware Saves Pictures from Safari – Apparently you can save pictures directly from the iPhone browser as of the 1.2.0 beta firmware.
• Updated Web Browsers: Which One Works Best? – A review from PC World.

My fiancée got a Blackberry Curve for Christmas, and I just went through the process of setting her up with Gmail and Opera Mini since she doesn’t have (or need) the Blackberry data plan.  The process for installing the latter was a bit more difficult than it had been on my RAZR so I figured I’d post the information here in case it proves useful for anyone else.

First off, her Curve was undetected by the Opera Mini site, so I had to manually choose to install the “high-memory” version of the browser.  That wasn’t so bad, though, as it was one of the few links listed on the main landing page.

The hard part was managing to accept the EULA that shows up once you’ve started the browser for the first time.  I remember when going through the process on my RAZR, I could use one of the soft buttons on the phone to accept the agreement and move on to the next steps.  However, there are no soft buttons on a Blackberry, and there wasn’t a link anywhere on the first page, no matter where I scrolled (use the 2 and 8 keys or this will take all day, by the way).  After getting a little frustrated, I finally hit the Blackberry Curve’s hard “menu” button (to the left of the scrollwheel).  Then a little dialog popped up that let me choose “Accept” or “Cancel” (or “Deny” maybe).  I chose “Accept,” obviously, and I was up and running.

So don’t let these roadbumps deter you from trying out Opera Mini on your Blackberry.  Hopefully the Opera Mini team will be addressing these issues soon.

If you’ll recall, I covered Wyzo back in September.  Martin over at gHacks has posted a review of the browser titled “Wyzo an alternative to Bittorrent clients?“  He basically came to the same conclusion that I did in that it might be useful to some, but its feature set is also relatively easily achievable via Firefox add-ons.

We’ll continue to track Wyzo and see if it gains any popularity as its development progresses.

I caught this back in September and it took me until now to post it. Nice.

Anyway, without further ado, Dwight Silverman offers up his take on IE7Pro and how it brings parity with Firefox’s “Restore Session” feature to IE7. He also lists several other advantages to using IE7Pro, including built-in spell checking, an ad blocker, support for mouse gestures and a feature that sounds similar to Greasemonkey support in Firefox.

Peter Butler of Download.com has posted a review of Avant Browser over at ZDNet.

Apparently, Avant Browser gets more downloads from Download.com than many of the other popular web browsers (I’m not sure if this is all that significant, though). Avant is built on top of Internet Explorer’s Trident rendering engine. It features some advanced searching functions, some gesture-like functionality that allows for navigating back-and-forth using mouse button clicks and some settings for avoiding pop-ups, flash, etc. Not much else to brag about, though, and judging by Peter Butler’s complete lack of enthusiasm while covering the browser, it’s probably not something you want to go and download right away.

If for some reason you do, though, you can get the latest version at the Avant Browser website.

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

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.

Opera Mini seems to be dominating the mobile web browser space these days (and even creeping up on some of the major players in the desktop market). Therefore, it seems fitting to dedicate a post to some of the coverage the little browser that could has gotten lately:

• The Opera Mini 4 beta was listed as part of PC Magazine’s “Cheap, Cool Campus Tech” (via Opera Watch).
• Russell Beattie calls the latest beta Opera’s “best yet” and even goes so far as to suggest that companies like MySpace, Facebook, Amazon.com and eBay could benefit from buying Opera outright.
• Phones with Opera Mini pre-installed, distribution partners, and more gives a complete rundown on the operators and carriers, handset manufacturers and distribution partners that have Opera Mini deals in one form or another.
• Opera Mini is now serving up over a billion pages per month.

For all the latest and greatest Opera Mini news, be sure to keep an eye on Opera Watch and the Opera Mini Blog. With all the buzz around the latest beta, you’re sure to get the latest coverage the quickest there, and in the greatest detail.

I came across CyberNotes’ exclusive preview of the upcoming Kestrel Alpha via Slashdot this morning. I’ve embedded their screencast review below:

The features shown off in the video look like they will please a lot of Opera users and maybe even a few non-Opera users. Here’s a high-level overview of some of the major features to expect in the first alpha of Kestrel (Opera 9.5), which is set to be released tomorrow:

• Speed improvements in the rendering engine
• Faster JavaScript engine and an improved HTML table layout algorithm
• The option to open pages in other browsers installed on your computer
• Restore windows (and not just tabs)
• My Opera synchronization, which answers the “what was censored in the screenshot?” question
• Full history search
• Status bar enabled by default

Of all those features, the one that impressed me most was the full history search. At first, I thought it would be similar to Firefox’s history search, where you basically search through page titles to find content. However, Kestrel takes this a step further by allowing you to search through the textual page content of all the sites in your browser’s history, which seems like it would come in very handy from time-to-time.

For the full rundown on all the new features, be sure to read the full review over at CyberNotes.