Firefox 3.1 codename Shiretoko Alpha 2 Release Candidate is faster than Google Browser (Chrome), according to Brendan Eich, chief architect, Mozilla. The fact of the matter is that the comparison involves only the two browsers’ respective JavaScript rendering engines, namely TraceMonkey for Firefox and V8 for Chrome. In the first tests Eich ran with the two JavaScript engines on SunSpider, Shiretoko Alpha 2 RC managed to come on top of Google Chrome Beta.
“We win by 1.28x and 1.19x, respectively. Maybe we should rename TraceMonkey “V10.” OK, it’s only SunSpider, one popular yet arguably non-representative benchmark suite. We are not about to be braggy. “Don’t be braggy” is our motto here at Mozilla,” Eich stated.
Google Chrome comes with the V8 virtual machine, which is essentially an open source JavaScript engine built at the Google office in Aarhus, Denmark. According to Google, the V8 JavaScript engine has been designed with nothing but performance in mind, especially when it comes down to the way it handles web-based applications.
“The cornerstones of the V8 design are: compilation of JavaScript source code directly into native machine code; an efficient memory management system resulting in fast object allocation and small garbage collection pauses; and an introduction of hidden classes and inline caches that speed up property access and function calls,” revealed Lars Bak, software engineer, Google.
Eich praised the work Google has poured into Chrome, and especially V8. According to Mozilla’s Chief Architect, there is even more room for JavaScript performance improvements in Google Browser. But this does not change the fact that, for the time being, TraceMonkey is faster than V8.
“TraceMonkey is only a few months old, (…) which we’ve built on and enhanced with x86-64 support and other fixes. We’ve developed TraceMonkey in the open the whole way. And we’re as fast as V8 on SunSpider,” Eich added.
Firefox 3.1 Alpha 1 is available for download here.
Google Browser Chrome is available for download via this link.
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Written by Jason on September 5th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Google has released its own web browser named "Chrome". Google claims their new browser combines a minimal design with sophisticated technology to make the web faster, safer, and easier. Though its only out in beta for Windows XP/Vista users , Linux and Mac folks will have to wait a little longer.
Well, lets take a look and see what its all about shall we...
As seen in my video walk through the installation was quick. It did ask to import my Firefox bookmarks which It didn't allow initially since I had Firefox running at the same time.
My impression on its performance and speed
Opening the browser was quick, then again I had no bookmarks and hadn't used it yet. However as I visited more and more pages the initial response to opening them was always faster than what I am used to in any other web browser. In other words there was little lag overall. Every tab you're using is run independently in the browser, so if one app crashes it won't take anything else down. You also have the ability to end the process and kill off individual items such as a flash video player using a built in google task manager.
My impression on GUI (Graphic User Interface)
The interface is indeed streamlined. Keeping with the minimalistic view and menu options I scrambled to find all the options and icons that I was used to seeing in IE and Firefox. One thing for sure the default theme is the only theme, you cant change it. To access your bookmarks you need to go to the far right and click "Other bookmarks" which is different.
The browser buttons given are BACK, FORWARD, RELOAD and BOOKMARK. I whent into the options to add the HOME icon and that was it. If your wanting a STOP, HISTORY or PRINT button they arent there. You will have to access the History using the alternative methods such as CTRL+H and print a web page using CTRL+P. I did like the default open full screen look that gave me more viewing area.
Along the top the familiar tabs are of fixed width and can be easily added or removed, dragged and dropped. These dynamic tabs allow you to gather multiple tabs into one window or arrange your tabs however you wish. When you open a new tab it shows your most visited websites, recently visited bookmarks, and recently-closed tabs and full history. One thing I didnt find along the top was the search box like in Firefox. Instead the URL field is used as the search, keeping with minimizing options and clutter.
My impression on features
For web developers I was delighted to see that in the view the page source option Google shows it in multiple colors with line numbers and if you use the "inspect element" it displays the code used on a page in great detail.
Like "InPrivate" browsing, a feature in IE8 beta 2, Chrome's "Incognito" browsing feature allows you to surf the Web without leaving any history behind. This feature is also referred to as the "porn mode" for browsing.
The download bar doesn't indicate progress, it just shows a megabyte number.
Without any add-ons for it Google Chrome warns you if you're about to visit a suspected phishing, malware or otherwise unsafe website. Overall this browser is a good start for google.
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Written by PCWizKid on September 2nd, 2008 with comments disabled.
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While rival browser makers Mozilla and Opera have launched the latest iterations of their products, Firefox 3.0 and respectively Opera 9.5, as early as June 2008, Microsoft is still in the development phase of Internet Explorer 8, the successor of IE7. August 27 marked the delivery of IE8 Beta 2, a deadline absurdly safeguarded by Microsoft, with the company only managing to confirm a release by the end of this month, and taking its due time when it came down to making available the bits for the browser second development milestone. Internet Explorer 8 is still far from the finish line, reportedly planned for November 2008, but Beta 2 feels more like a browser version ready for wrap-up than Beta 1.
The reason for this is the fact that, in comparison with the March 2008 release of IE8, the second Beta is packed with features and functionality aimed at the home and business users, on top of what has already been available to IT professionals and web content developers and designers. In this regard, IE8 Beta 1 was more of a skeleton on which Microsoft built Beta 2. Now, although Microsoft is not touting IE8 Beta 2 as a feature-complete version, it is clear that the Redmond company will move further only with the process of fine-tuning the browser got with Release to Web (RTW).
However, in no way is IE8 Beta 2 more than a Beta. The browser continues to have issues related to memory leaks, especially on websites containing Adobe Flash content. At the same time, tabs can become inaccessible following a crash recovery, but also unresponsive, failing to allow end users to close them. Beta 2 is not yet ready for production environments, but by all means, test driving the browser is an entirely different matter altogether. And there are plenty of reasons to do so, even for the most hardcore Firefox and Opera fans.
12 Reasons to Test Drive IE8 Beta 2
1. New UI – Microsoft is a loyal adept of continuity. In this regard, the redesign of IE8 Beta 2’s graphical user interface is rather subtle and keeping within the same line as IE7’s UX. However, the biggest plus in terms of user interface is the customization options offered by Beta 2.
“IE8 brings some changes that allow much more customization that I think users will be happy with. You can unlock the toolbars and drag the IE menu bar to a variety of places in IE8. You can also right click in IE8’s menu and choose Customize where you can have the refresh and stop buttons moved to the front of the Address Bar. Those who also prefer not to have the Favorites Bar showing will be pleased to know you can turn it off (although I don’t know why you would want to!),” revealed Microsoft’s Brandon LeBlanc.
2. Smart Address Bar – well, Opera 9.5 has it, and Firefox 3.0 has it, and Internet Explorer 8 does not fall behind in this category. The Smart Address bar is nothing short of a breath of fresh air when it comes down to navigation enhancements. This means that all that end users have to remember about an Internet location that they visited once is a keyword, or part of the name. No more digging through the browser’s history for websites. The Smart Address bar does all the heavy lifting for the users, searching across Favorites, History, and even RSS feeds.
“Based on our observations of IE7 and IE8 Beta 1 usage, we learned that roughly 80% of the time people’s destination on the web is a previously visited site. In the past, people would use their Favorites or History, or they’d just go through all the steps to navigate to the website again. The Smart Address Bar enables you to find Favorites and sites in your history by just typing a few letters. That’s much fewer steps than using the Favorites and History center. We also added the capability to search the title, web address and even folders for those who have organized their favorites,” explained IE Lead Program Manager Paul Cutsinger.
3. Tabbed Browsing Evolution – speaking of navigation, in IE8 Beta 2, tabbed browsing has evolved to a new level. In this context, not only does the browser group all tabs opened from the same location into groups, assigning a particular color to them, but New Tabs now offers a range of comprehensive options instead of a useless pseudo-blank page. Users are now able to navigate back to closed tabs, to relaunch the last browser session, to start InPrivate browsing, or to execute an Accelerator.
4. New Search/Find Experience – IE8 Beta 2 sports an entirely revamped search/find experience, and one that was long overdue for that matter. With this development release, Find On Page behaves as a toolbar that performs result counting and highlighting. “We’d heard from many, many users that the Find dialog in IE6 and IE7 was always getting in the way, making it hard to actually find content on the page. So, we’ve added a Find bar at the top of the page (finally!) that lets you more easily find content on the page,” Cutsinger added.
5. Web Slices – not new to Beta 2, since they were initially made available with IE8 Beta 1 as early as March of this year, Web Slices resides in the Favorites Bar and allows users to subscribe only to a certain portion of a website. With this feature, IE8 is capable of providing visual notifications to users in accordance with the updates introduced to the webpage area where they subscribed.
6. Accelerators (formerly Activities) - “Copy-navigate-paste is old. Accelerators are services that you access directly from the webpage in the context of what you’re doing, letting you bookmark, define, email, map and more with a simple selection. Even your search providers are available as Accelerators. Some Accelerators provide previews so that you can view the result without having to leave the current webpage. Clicking on an Accelerator opens a new tab with the full result,” explained Jane Kim – IE Program Manager.
7. Suggestions – there are two types of suggestions that IE8 Beta 2 offers. The Search Box Suggestions is designed as an enhancement to the search field, which is integrated by default into the UI of Internet Explorer 8. Users can now receive real time suggestion for their queries from their favorite search provider. In addition, IE8 Beta 2 can also go as far as to serve Suggested Sites.
“In IE8 we make it easier to find sites you might like. Once you turn on Suggested Sites, IE looks at what sites you visit and then offers recommendations of other similar or related sites, right from the Favorites Bar. If you don’t have Suggested Sites on already, try it out by going to the Favorites Center and clicking on the ‘Turn on Suggested Sites’ button at the bottom of the menu,” Kim said.
8. Reliability – with Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft is validating the proverbial “better late than never” approach, and is finally making it possible for users to recover tabs and browser sessions. The lack of recovery capabilities was one of the critical shortcomings in Internet Explorer versions so far but, with IE8, it is now a thing of the past. Also, a big plus for IE8 is automatic recovery for crashed tabs, browser instances and sessions, providing a great continuity and workflow experience for users.
“The reliability improvements in IE8 Beta 2 are big. Crash recovery is nice, but not crashing is even better. Because in IE8 Loosely-Coupled IE (LCIE) separates the frame (the address bar, back button, etc.) from the tabs, and the tabs (mostly) from each other, crashes are more contained and affect fewer tabs than before. We think users will also appreciate having close boxes on all their toolbars so that disabling ones they don’t want – while leaving the ones they do – is easier,” stated IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch.
9. Performance – while IE8 is not applauded as the apex of performance compared with rival browsers, Microsoft did indeed go deep under the hood of the product in order to deliver optimizations designed to make it fly. IE Program Manager Christian Stockwell explained that performance enhancements span from the underlining rendering engine, to JavaScript, JSON, networking, CSS, memory management, and scripting.
10. Security – when it comes down to security, IE8 kicks it up a notch compared with IE7. In the next iteration of Internet Explorer, Microsoft included features and capabilities such as: the SmartScreen filter, the Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) filter, Data execution prevention (DEP) (only on Vista SP1), Cross-document messaging, Cross-domain requests, Domain highlighting, Per-site ActiveX and Per-user ActiveX – all designed to bulletproof the browser as much as possible.
11. Privacy – Microsoft is without a doubt well ahead of the game in regard to user privacy, while Google is at the opposite pole. With Internet Explorer 8, the Redmond company introduced a range of enhancements set up to put users firmly in control of their information. The features available or expanded with this release include InPrivate Browsing, Delete Browsing History, InPrivate Blocking, and InPrivate Subscriptions.
12. Compatibility - “IE8 is more interoperable with other web browsers and web standards. The contribution of CSS 2.1 test cases to the W3C is an important in order to really establish a standard way to assess standards support. We think that CSS 2.1 remains the most important place to deliver excellent interoperability between browsers. We think developers will enjoy the improvements to the built-in tools, as well as the other opportunities to integrate their sites in the user’s daily life with Accelerators and Web Slices,” stated Microsoft ISV Architect Evangelist Bruce Kyle.
At the same time, IE8 Beta 2 sports the new Compatibility View feature. While IE8’s rendering engine has been configured by default to support modern web standards, the Redmond company is fighting to avoid breaking compatibility with legacy web content tailored exclusively for IE7 or IE6. This is where Compatibility View comes into play.
Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 is available for download via this link.
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Written by Jason on September 1st, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on ActiveX and Browser and Compatibility and Explorer and Firefox and IE7 and IE8 and Internet and Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 and Performance and Recovery and accelerator and browsing and firefox 3 and firefox 3.0 and google and ie and internet explorer 8 and microsoft and program and reliability.
1. Speed up your Firefox 3.0.1 - Part1
2. DirectX 9.c and 10.1 Download (August 2008)
3. Speed up your Firefox 3.0.1 - Part2
4. Black Screen of Death for XP SP3 and Vista SP1
5. How to Secure is Your PC?
6. Mozilla Introduces Firefox Snowl
7. How to convert video to Apple’s iPhone
8. DirectX 10.1 Downloads for Vista SP1 and XP SP3
9. Speed Launch for Vista and XP
10. Mixed Vista/XP network to work properly
and other top tips
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Written by Jason on September 1st, 2008 with comments disabled.
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The Carnegie-Mellon University (CMU) made available a Firefox extension developed at their School of Computer Science and College of Engineering that improves security in Firefox by protecting against man-in-the-middle attacks. The extension, named Perspectives, is available only for Firefox 3 and works on Windows, Linux (32-bit) and OS X (Intel), with support for Linux (64-bit) and Open Solaris being in the experimental stage of development.
A man-in-the-middle attack is performed by intercepting the traffic between a user and a resource that he is trying to access. This can be achieved by exploiting several vulnerabilities, like the latest DNS cache poisoning or GMail accounts hacking incidents show.
When accessing a server resource using secure protocols like SSL or SSH, a correct identification of the server is required. This is achieved through digitally signed certificates. Due to the fact that certificates issued by trusted authorities like VeriSign are expensive, it became common practice for small businesses and websites to use self-signed certificates.
When the browser encounters such a certificate for the first time, it prompts a warning saying it cannot verify the certificate and leaves the final decision to the user. Because of this, users developed a habit of accepting such certificates without paying too much attention. However, this also makes it possible for an attacker intercepting the requests to trick the users into sending sensitive information by serving them fake self-signed certificates. The Perspectives Firefox extension overrides the default browser warning, which is often ignored by the users, and implements its own additional verification methods to determine the validity of a certificate.
It achieves this by querying “network notary servers”. These are servers that automatically contact websites and record changes in their certificate keys over longer periods of times. When encountering a self-signed certificate, the Perspectives extension downloads a list of recorded certificate key changes from the notary servers and uses this information to determine if the certificate belongs to the server the user is trying to access. A preference allows the user to increase or decrease the security level of the extension, thus affecting the way validity of the certificates is established.
Based on the information it receives from the notary servers, like the last recorded key, the presence of that key in multiple notary servers or previous key changes, the extension either automatically accepts the certificate or it provides the user with more pertinent information regarding a possible man-in-the-middle attack. The user can then make informed decisions based on this additional information gathered from the notaries.
The extension protects users’ privacy by allowing them to opt for being asked each time a notary server needs to be contacted. In addition, the notary servers do not keep any IP record of the queries. The code is open source and people are encouraged to contribute with ideas, patches, bug submissions, GUI designs or by offering to host notary servers. More technically-oriented users can also read the paper published by the authors which describes the extension and its concepts in greater detail.
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Written by Jason on August 27th, 2008 with comments disabled.
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Will IE 8 be a FireFox 3 killer? With Beta 2 of IE8 being release late August it makes you wonder if Microsoft has learned their lesson and added the basic features that makes other web browsers like Opera and Firefox more attractive.
Currently in Beta 2, IE 8 is said to be noticeably faster, leaner and more intuitive to use. However you can probably count on it being the interface for Microsoft's Silverlight application, which competes against Adobe’s Flash.
First look of the latest Beta of IE 8 shows:
- The address bar now highlights just the domain in the URL decreasing your risk from domain phishing attacks by accidentally clicking links which are fake and malicious.
- The search box now sports the ability to display an icon for the search provider you have currently selected.
- The Bookmarking interface has been improved as well as access to all your other bookmarks are available from the “Favorites” button.
For one, IE 8 is allegedly to have the following features by the time its released (lets hope so) :
- WC3 standards adherence and compatibility
UPDATE
“IE8 has been significantly enhanced, and was designed with great support for current Internet standards. This is evidenced by the fact that even in its first beta, IE8 correctly renders the popular test known as ‘Acid2,’ which was created by the Web community to promote real-world interoperability,” said Ray Ozzie, Microsoft chief software architect. “Our initial plan had been to use IE7-compatible behavior as the default setting for IE8, to minimize potential impact on the world’s existing Web sites. We have now decided to make our most current standards-based mode the default in IE8. - Automatic Crash Recovery
- Built-in spell checker
- Undo close tab
- Saving and restoring sessions
- Activities
- WebSlices
- Favorites Bar
- Automatic Crash Recovery
- Improved Phishing Filter
Most anticipated new features
The most obvious new features are Activities and WebSlices. These give you context sensitive options for looking up data (maps, search and so on), or doing stuff with it (emailing it, sharing on Facebook), rather like IE6's abandoned Smart Tags, and the latter are Sidebar Gadget-style clippings that let you view web content without actually visiting the website.
WebSlices sounds like Safari's Web Clip feature, but it's a different approach: where Apple's method is user-driven, WebSlices is site-driven; it's up to the site owner to define what, if anything, you can slice.
Performance and Standards
IE8 beta so far is faster. Microsoft says key systems including the HTML parser, CSS processing, JavaScript parsing and memory management are speedier than before, but it's still tweaking performance.
The Phishing Filter is back, but this time it's supplemented with Domain Highlighting – a Firefox-style feature that makes it clear whether the site you're visiting is the site you think you're visiting. The second beta will use SmartScreen filtering, a replacement for the Phishing Filter that offers a better interface, quicker performance and better analysis of unknown websites. It will also check servers to see if they're areas to avoid, so if you click on a potentially unsafe link in a chat window IE8 will pop up a warning message telling you about it.
Safety
In addition to these changes, IE8 will make ActiveX controls site specific, they will include protection against cross domain and cross site exploits and its Data Execution Prevention system will stop certain kinds of code from writing data to the system memory. When IE8 crashes you should be able to resume your last session when you restart the browser just like Firefox 3 does today.
Last but definitely not least, IE8 will be CSS 2.1 compliant and run in standards mode by default. There's also an Emulate IE7 option for when you encounter sites designed specifically for IE7, and a Quirks mode for IE5 emulation. Developers also get a Developer Toolbar for easy HTML, CSS and JavaScript debugging.
Details on these initial features from Microsoft IE8 feature list are here
Interested in Seeing what Firefox 3 has to offer? Watch my review
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