Google Chrome - First Impressions

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.

DOWNLOAD Google's Chrome browser from here

Other Tips Users have watched

Written by PCWizKid on September 2nd, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on IE8 and Web Browser and firefox 3 and google chrome and pcwizkid.

12 Reasons to Test Drive Internet Explorer 8

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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Tags:accelerator, ActiveX, Browser, browsing, compatibility, Explorer, Firefox, firefox 3, firefox 3.0, google, ie, ie7, IE8, Internet, internet explorer 8, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, Microsoft, Performance, program, Recovery, reliability

Microsoft Applauds IE8 Beta 2 Performance Boost

Internet Explorer 8 is not the fastest browser in the universe. This, according to IE Program Manager, Christian Stockwell, working on the performance of the browser. However, this is not to say that the Redmond company has not poured a consistent amount of efforts into boosting the performance of IE7’s successor. In fact, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, planned for release by the end of this month, will offer palpable proof of the new horsepower under the browser’s hood.

“When we took a hard look at our goals and considered what we could do to build the best browser, we were presented with a quandary. On the one hand, we could focus very narrowly on scripting performance, trusting that our investment would noticeably improve our users’ browsing experience. Alternatively, we could invest more broadly in realistic scenarios, measuring heavily-used subsystems and investing our optimization effort accordingly. We opted for the latter approach,” Stockwell noted.

Even as early as March 2008, IE GM Dean Hachamovitch indicated that JavaScript performance was up 2.5 times, the Gmail inbox was loading 34% faster, the task of opening a new conversation took 45% less time, while that of opening a thread 25% less. With IE8 Beta 2, Microsoft has tweaked the execution time for the browser, but it has also managed to speed up navigation and user interaction.

In the end, Microsoft went well beyond JavaScript when it comes down to increasing the performance of the browser. In this context, improvements were introduced to scripting, memory management, networking, the rendering engine, and beyond.

“As part of our broader effort to improve performance in IE8, we did make large investments in JScript performance to make pages faster and to help developers be more productive. The JScript engine included with IE8 speeds up many common user scenarios. We have made huge improvements to widely-used JScript functionality including faster string, array, and lookup operations. We have also made changes to our core architecture to drastically reduce the cost of functions calls, object creation, and lookup patterns for variables scoped to the window or this objects,” Stockwell stated.

According to Microsoft, JavaScript performance in IE8 is with as much as 400% up from IE7. This percentage, while indeed impressive, pales next to the 700% JScript performance boost touted by compared with Mozilla for Firefox 3.1version 3.0.

The full code can be found in the TraceMonkey mercurial repository (the commit to merge TraceMonkey into Mozilla core is massive, clocking in at about 4MB).

If you want to try running your own copy of TraceMonkey on the command-line, just follow these steps:

hg clone http://hg.mozilla.org/tracemonkey/ cd tracemonkey/js/src make -f Makefile.ref BUILD_OPT=1 Darwin_OPT.OBJ/js -j

(The above assumes that you already have Mercurial installed, and are trying to compile on OS X. Your milage may vary. The -j option is what enables jit-ing on the command-line.)

“The second area in which we are invested heavily in IE8 is in improvements to our memory usage. To date, we have fixed just under 400 separate memory leaks in Internet Explorer. We have also worked hard to improve our heap fragmentation and memory usage on AJAX pages. For users, these changes reduce the amount of memory consumed by IE, improve our startup times, speed up navigating between pages, and help IE remain stable for longer periods of time. Besides these great benefits to end users, our work in this area should take a significant burden off of developers,” Stockwell revealed.

At the same time, IE8 will be tailored to high speed bandwidth connections, being capable of handling more than its precursor. In this regard, Internet Explorer 8 will support a larger number of parallel connections compared with IE7, and will benefit from an advanced system designed to manage downloads accompanied by external scripts. But, in the end, Microsoft has also hammered away at the underlying rendering engine of the browser.

“By our upcoming Beta 2 we expect our standards mode engine to be at parity with our previous implementation for many sites. Going forward we will continue to invest in this area with the goal that when IE ships, developers do not have to make any difficult decisions: developing for our new engine will produce sites that work better across browsers and as an added bonus they will be faster too,” Stockwell promised.

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 is available For Vista x86 here. or For Windows XP SP2 x86 here

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Tags:approach, Browser, Firefox, gmail, ie, ie7, IE8, Internet, internet explorer 8, Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2, javascript, JScript, memory, memory leak, memory management, memory usage, Microsoft, Mozilla, optimization, pc, Performance, program, TraceMonkey

Customize IE8 Beta 2 to fit your needs

In Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 - users get some added customization benefits to the Internet Explorer layout I think folks will enjoy. To many folks, being able to customize the browser controls is very important. So I've got some customization tips for Read More......(read more)

Written by Windows Vista Team Blog on August 29th, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Customization and Featured News and IE8 and Windows Vista and internet explorer 8.

Customize IE8 Beta 2 to fit your needs

In Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2 - users get some added customization benefits to the Internet Explorer layout I think folks will enjoy. To many folks, being able to customize the browser controls is very important. So I've got some customization tips for IE8 Beta 2 I'd like to share with you.

If you right-click on the IE8 toolbar area, you can uncheck the "Lock the Toolbars" option. This allows you to use your mouse to move the Command Bar and Favorites Bar. There are a variety of places you can move these around in the IE8 toolbar area.

In the top screenshot, you can see that I moved the Command Bar to be on the same level as the Favorites Bar. I can customize how much space either the Command Bar or the Favorites Bar use on that level. I can give the Favorites Bar more room or give it less for the Command Bar. In the middle screenshot, I was able to move the Favorites Bar onto the level shared by IE8's Tabs. Essentially this is switching the Favorites Bar and Command Bar from the default configuration. And in the third screenshot, I was able to hide the Favorites Bar and "make IE8 look like IE7". You can also hide the Command Bar as well if you wish. And for those who like having the Menu Bar (File, Edit, etc) you can right click on the IE8 toolbar area and choose "Menu Bar" to have that appear.

I was also able to move the Favorites button down to the Tabs level - separating it from the Favorites Bar. This is neat because it gives some added room for additions to the Favorites Bar if needed.

Another new customization option for IE8 is the ability to choose to have the Stop and Refresh buttons appear before the Smart Address Bar instead of after.

Have you ever wanted to quickly close a 3rd party toolbar you have installed in Internet Explorer? IE8 provides an excellent way of quickly closing those toolbars. When you activate a toolbar (you can activate a installed toolbar by right-clicking on the toolbar area and choosing the toolbar you wish to have appear) you'll notice a new "x" icon appear next to it on the left. When you click this "x" it turns off that toolbar (by turning it off - it disappears from the toolbar area in IE8).

I recently installed the Microsoft Live Labs Listas Toolbar. When I no longer wanted the Listas Toolbar to show up in IE8, I just clicked the "x" and it disappeared. I can choose to activate it again later when I need it. My personal preference is to keep my browser clean of toolbars. However I know many people who enjoy the added benefit to their browsing experience that many toolbars offer - a good example is the Windows Live Toolbar. I have toolbars installed just not configured to show up all the time. I activate them when I want to use then and deactivate them when I'm done.

And my last little tip for customizing IE8 may or may not be of any value to you.

When you put your mouse in the area *between* the inline search box and the Smart Address Bar - you'll notice you can increase or decrease the amount of space the search box has. Here is my search box before:

Here it is after:

I decided I wanted a little more room for my search box.

I hope these customization tips help you customize IE8 to be the way you want it to be. I guess I'm boring though - I personally keep things as they are by default in IE ;-)

Written by Brandon LeBlanc on August 29th, 2008 with comments disabled.
Read more articles on Customization and Featured News and IE8 and Windows Vista and internet explorer 8.