Google Serves Notice... Upgrade Your Browser

In order to push the agenda on HTML5 and cloud computing, Google has decided that it will no longer support older versions of your favourite browser, what ever that may be. In a statement on The Official gmail blog Venkat Panchapakesan, Vice President of Engineering at Google, said yesterday that "...Google Apps will only support modern browsers. Beginning August 1st, we’ll support the current and prior major release of Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari on a rolling basis."

This, in my opinion, is a good thing. Hopefully it will encourage internet users to stay up to date with their software updates and provide developers with a stable road map upon which to plan the development and support of their applications. Of course it also pushes the Google agenda but I've seen far to many users out there still running IE 6!

RockMelt - Everyones Favorite Social Browser Goes Mobile

The social web browser RockMelt, which is based on Google's Chromium engine, is extending it's reach with a real-time synced browser for the iPhone/iPad. TechCrunch's Eric Schonfeld speaks with RockMelt's Co-founder and CTO Tim Howes in the following video, explaining the features and benefits of the mobile app. 

Hey Tim... android please! 

RockMelt, The Browser With Social In Mind

Okay, so I've stepped into line for the RockMelt Beta Test which formally opened yesterday. I'm not quite sure what to expect, I've already got 5 browsers installed on pc. So why do I need RockMelt? Well, for one thing I'm a software tester now and I'd better see how it plays with our service, though I'm almost certain that's not what RockMelt is all about. Seems as if this browser is mostly focused on being Social, which also intrigues me, and as such it is getting a fair amount of press this morning. I'll give it a go as soon as I get my e-mail invite and let you know what I think but in the mean while check out this promo video:

Firefox 4 Beta Released To The Wild

Mozilla has released Firefox 4 Beta 1 into the wild with an apparent emphasis on speed and support for new and emerging web standards. New features as pointed out by Wired's Web Monkey are:

• Support for WebM video
• More support for emerging web standards like CSS 3, Canvas and Web Sockets
• Better page rendering performance, including a new HTML5 parser
• Crash protection that prevents bad plugins from blowing up the whole browser
• New add-ons manager
• Recently updated Jetpack SDK for new-style lightweight add-ons

Sounds great, but remember this is Beta release 1 so things are bound to be broken or at least a little unstable.

Personally, I'm a longtime Firefox user who recently made the switch to Chrome for all of my personal browsing. Speed was definitely a deciding factor. I am not so far down the Google path that Mozilla can't entice me back but I'll need to see some compelling reasons to do so. I'll give it a download and let you know my thoughts.

Also, as a teaser, tomorrow marks one month of using the iPad for me and I hope to put together my thoughts in a post later this week, so stay tuned. 

More Reasons To Love Chrome

The latest beta version of the Chrome web browser, Google Chrome 5.0.375.29, is breaking speed records according to Google and it's testing. The performance has improved by 30 to 35% and the browser will support HTML 5 features such as geolocation APIs and drag-and-drop. The beta version is available for Linux, Mac and Windows and has integrated Flash support.

Source: computer world

A Faster More Stable Chrome

Google has taken the wraps off of a new version of their Chrome browser, fixing some 300 bugs and making the rendering of javascript intensive pages up to 30% faster. A few new features have been added such as the ability to remove thumbnails of your most visited sites and auto-fill for forms. Guess it's time to give Chrome another try...

20 Years Since Web Invisioned By Berners-Lee

20 years ago today Tim Berners-Lee published his "Information Management: A proposal" and the rest is history. Here is an interesting snip from his modest conclusions:

"We should work toward a universal linked information system, in which generality and portability are more important than fancy graphics techniques and complex extra facilities."

"The aim would be to allow a place to be found for any information or reference which one felt was important, and a way of finding it afterwards. The result should be sufficiently attractive to use that it the information contained would grow past a critical threshold, so that the usefulness the scheme would in turn encourage its increased use."

I think he's more than achieved his goal!

Get Your Chrome Now

As noted in yesterday's post Google has announced the release of it's new browser dubbed Chrome. This morning the Official Google blog is indicating that the beta version is available for download. At the moment Google Chrome Beta is available for Windows XP and Vista users. My First impression is that it is sleek looking with a simple google-esq interface and renders pages quickly. The install was fast and provided the option to import my Firefox bookmarks and prompted for the preferred search engine, it recognized that Google was my default but asked if I wanted to choose another anyway. I'm an avid Firefox fan but will be giving Chrome a chance. Click here to go to the download page! Send us your comments!

Introducing Google's "Chrome" Web Browser

The Official Google Blog is reporting the release of a Google browser named Chrome. The Google team has decided to start from scratch and create an open source browser that is "...is clean and fast." According to the blog post "By keeping each tab in an isolated "sandbox", we were able to prevent one tab from crashing another and provide improved protection from rogue sites. We improved speed and responsiveness across the board. We also built a more powerful JavaScript engine, V8, to power the next generation of web applications that aren't even possible in today's browsers." The desire for these isolated tabs was apparently the work of the Google Gears team who complained that current browsers were "...inherently single-threaded." To explain their thinking and describe the features of the Chrome browser, Google has created a comic book which does a great job I might add! Keep an eye out here for a download link, at the time of this post Chrome was not available to try but the Google guys are promising it's availability shortly.

Firefox Goes For The Record

With the release of Firefox 3, Firefox is attempting to set a world record for most downloads in a day. As I type the Spread Firefox site is registering 7,303,823 downloads with a few more hours to go, pretty impressive considering the target was 5 million! CNET news is reporting "Firefox 3 is spreading fast, claiming more than 4 percent of the share of Web browser usage less than 24 hours after its release." Being the curious sort that I am, I wondered what the current record was and to my glee Firefox has had the foresight to guess that I might ask... "This is the first record attempt of its kind so there is no set number. We'd really like to outdo the number of Firefox 2 downloads on its launch day, which was 1.6 million. Let's shoot for 5 million--the sky is the limit!" So when will we know if the record is set? "This will take approximately a week after our attempt date. Our judges and Guinness World Records™ need to review our download logs and validate our record attempt."

Firefox Plugin Infects Vietnamese Users Machines

Mozilla is increasing it's efforts to scrutinize user submitted plugins after it had discovered that a Vietnamese language pack on its official add-on page had been infected for months with rogue code. In mid-February the user submitted add-on passed Mozilla's scrutiny because the virus's signature was unknown at the time of testing. According to Wired's Threat Level blog "On Tuesday, a user named Hai-Nam Nguyen reported that anti-virus programs detected the Xorer Trojan inside the add-on. Firefox admins quickly confirmed the presence of the Trojan's code and removed the file the same day." It is unknown how many users actually installed the plugin but Mozilla says 16,667 people had downloaded the add-on since November 2007. The organization now intends to scan all of the user submitted add-ons each time virus definitions are updated, that seems a bit more proactive...

Paypal Will Block "Unsafe Browsers"

Paypal is vowing to block users from it's service who are using "unsafe browsers", customers will first be warned but will be blocked from the service if they continue to use the unsafe technology. Paypal says "an alarming fact that there is a significant set of users who use very old and vulnerable browsers such as Internet Explorer 4". In fact they claim that some users are still employing Internet Explorer 3 which is more than 10 years old! The company also said "In our view letting users view the PayPal site on [an unsafe] browser is equal to a car manufacturer allowing drivers to buy one of their vehicles without seatbelts." BBC story here.

Stealthy Windows Virus Looks For Bank Info

The BBC Is reporting that security experts are worried about a particularly stealthy new virus that seems to be after bank account info. The Mebroot virus as it has been dubbed is a rootkit virus that hides itself deep in the Master Boot Record and later downloads other malicious programs such as key loggers in an attempt to hijack banking information. It is suspected that a Russian hacking group is behind the virus which was detected on about 5,000 machines in December, mostly in Europe. The virus installs itself via booby-trapped websites that use vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer. Yet again another reason to use Firefox!

Netscape Navigator comes to an end

The BBC News is reporting that AOL will cease support of Netscape Navigator as of February 1, 2008. The browser once owned 90% of the web market, but numbers have dropped to just 0.6% in recent polls. "While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft's Internet Explorer," said Tom Drapeau on the company's blog. It was certainly my choice of browser when I first found my way onto the net, but I abandoned it for Internet Explorer myself, only to abandon IE for Firefox.

Safari for Windows users

Yesterday I attempted to post via our new psp, today I'm using the beta release of Apple's Safari 3 browser on my Windows PC! I abandoned the notion of using Internet Explorer a long while ago and have been a very satisfied Firefox user ever since, but when I read of the release of Safari on Windows my curiosity got the better of me. My experience with Safari has been limited to only a few moments so far and this is by no means an extensive review of the software but I do have a couple of observations. Firstly, the download (8MB) was quick and the install painless. The interface strikes me as sleek but simple, it's humble greys highlight the web page being viewed rather than screaming for attention, nice! Apple claims that Safari is quicker to launch, renders html more quickly and executes javascript faster, and while I have not performed any bench marks, it feels at least as snappy as Firefox. Alas my first bug, the "Save Now" button in blogger does not appear to be activated upon clicking on it! I'll give Safari another try but I guess it's back to Firefox to finish this post.

gbg on psp

I was hoping to create this post using our latest gadget acquisition, but it turns out that I don't have much patience for typing on the Playstation Portable. I am impressed by the little device none the less! The picture is very sharp, the sound better than anticipated, and set up was relatively painless. I was connected to our wireless network within minutes and surfing the web soon after, though figuring out the browser controls was a little bit of a challenge. I recommend you save yourself the frustration and read the manual no matter how much of a geek you are... though what's the fun in that? Web surfing is better than you'll get on your cell phone but the experience is much the same, only with a larger, crisper screen. I expect the PSP will get plenty of use, especially the gaming, and while the Internet experience is not ideal the PSP weighs much less than a laptop! A great little device that will be easily slung in a backpack and invaluable on trips.

SpaceTime beta .9 - 3D web browser

SpaceTime is a new 3D web browser with some interesting visual appeal. The browser displays web pages in "3D visual stacks" that look like pages floating above one another in space, it's very pretty but my attempt to give the beta a try was less than impressive. Despite having slightly better than the recommended minimum hardware profile on the machine that I installed TimeSpace on, the program brought the PC to a crawl. I can see merits in features like the 3D e-bay search reported on the SpaceTime website but you'd better have plenty of horses under the hood to take advantage of this browser. I think I'll stick with Firefox for now.