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?
“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.
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.
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.
To borrow from Pink Floyd, is there anybody out there?
Ironically enough, Browsersphere has been neglecting the browsersphere a little like Microsoft neglected Internet Explorer earlier this decade. After all, my last post was way back in June. However, unlike Microsoft, it isn’t the competition that has jolted this site back to life. On the contrary, sites like Avencius and Twitter accounts like @AltBrowser have actually made me feel a little bit better about the whole ordeal, knowing that at least someone is out there covering the browsersphere in my absence. Truth is, the site went dark out of pure laziness on my part. Well, that and the fact that I’ve been pretty consumed by another project. Nevertheless, I’m back, and after catching up a bit on what’s been going on, my first order of business is to share a little bit about what’s been tweeted in the browsersphere lately. So let’s get to it.
@sphereinabox wants to know what mobile web browsers, other than Safari, support offline storage. If geek.com is to believed, it looks like Fennec does, too.
And finally, @rodhilton loves that Ubuntu lets him use a web browser while the operating system is still installing.
That’s it for Twitter Watch #3. Believe it or not, Twitter Watch #2 was so long ago that I was still using Summize to search for tweets.
Before I end this post, since we’re on the subject of Twitter, I should mention that Browsersphere is now on Twitter as well. Just follow @Browsersphere for real-time updates, links to new site content, etc.
Months after launch, the browser had only captured a minuscule percentage of the market. The goal was to beat Microsoft with open source. Netscape couldn’t do it. And, according to [Asa] Dotzler, “we realized Mozilla couldn’t do it, either.”
While Mozilla 1.0 wasn’t a success, what followed certainly was. Two Mozilla contributors, Ben Goodger and Blake Ross, proposed taking things back to basics. The Mozilla source code was stripped down and rewritten once again, and all of the extraneous features were canned.
In late 2004, a faster, slimmer and easier-to-use browser emerged: Mozilla Firefox.
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.
Despite almost feeling like I was there, thanks to the folks I’m following on Twitter, I was very interested in finding out more about what was discussed at the SXSW panel, Browser Wars III: The Platform Wins, which went down yesterday. Now that I’ve read SXSW: Big Browsers Butt Heads, I think it’s pretty safe to say that no wars actually broke out (despite some people’s wishes). There was some interesting discussion, though, ranging from Google’s choice to go with WebKit for Chrome instead of Gecko, to what web standards have in common with sausage, to how JavaScript performance became such a huge part of the browser wars of late. Definitely give the article a read if you get a chance.
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.
