From Opera to Firefox

A few days ago I found out that Opera 10.0 Beta 2 came out and as I still love Opera ( though I don't use it anymore) I decided to give it a try for old time's sake.

The interface is a little changed, nothing major but better overall. They seem to have resolved the stability issues, the program didn't crash, and they also seem to have resolved the rendering issues. I actually couldn't find any rendering faults this time , which is a big plus. And of course Opera passes the Acid 3 test with 100%. There's a new feature called Turbo, which is designed for the one person in the world that still uses dial-up. When turned on, your pages appear much faster because of a lossy algorithm that makes your pictures look like shit, but hey you see pages a lot faster. It's actually a useful feature for that ONE person out there.

Unfortunately no plug-ins work. I mean nothing besides Flash Player. Quicktime didn't work, Reader didn't work, and Windows Movie Crap didn't work. Plus the program now uses more memory that IE and Firefox. What's up with that? I would have added screenshots but I deleted it immediately and went back to Firefox and crying. Hopefully by the time they have the finished product ( which if I'm not mistaking should be Q1 of of 2010 as if it's a major release) they'll have worked out all of these problems. Cheers.

PS: It kinda seems we're going in circles here with the same subjects coming up over and over Browsers->windows-Apple-browsers-windows-etc and I'm getting sick of it. My next post will be about ..hmm ..muppets. Yeap that's right MUPPETS.

Opera Unite

While waiting for the OS3 for the iPhone, V recommended I do a little research on a new project from Opera, Unite. If you've been reading this blog you know I'm quite a fan of Opera though lately they have been disappointing me.

What is Opera Unite?

Unite is a new concept. Actually, it's a question for an older concept.. " aren't we missing something? shouldn't this be different? " where this refers to the internet.
The internet may be viewed as " a series of tubes" but that's somewhat misleading. Fortunately the way the internet works is quite easy to understand and if you're reading this blog you already know how it works. The whole idea behind Unite is that why should we depend on servers who somebody else manages? why should we depend on 3rd parties when it comes to file sharing and other such interactions?

This idea in itself is worth pondering. And the people at opera say they have a solution, but I believe it to be flawed from the beginning. Their ideea is that each computer on the web should be it's own web-server, and interactions should be ..well .. directly peer-to-peer. And somehow Unite is said to deliver that. But my honest opinion is that Unite is an upgraded tunelling , VPN app. Something like next-gen Hamachi, over which you can now send files and stream media. But that's crap. The whole ideea with posting on the web is "it's there even if you're not". Social services are meant to be hosted by 3rd parties. Instant messaging is already well established with it's own apps. Same goes for browsing, games and everything else. Why would you want to downgrade all of the great apps and services out there and stick them all up in another new app? it just doesn't really make sense.

And let's say you do that, let's say it works out fine, but in the end ..YOU ARE STILL DEPENDANT ON 3RD PARTY SERVERS, opera's in this case.

SO let's try and forget for a second about utopic web-spaces and let's focus on rolling out the useful software..YOU HEAR ME APPLE??? useless people....

Browsers

I'm really pissed right now, for half an hour I've been trying to get to different sites and I have to use all possible browsers that exist each for a particular thing.  And i'm sick of it .

A good simple, good design and ergonomic browser is just something that doesn't exist and never will !!!!! Firefox looks like shit, I personally hate it + I can't even download it right now cause it doesn't f-ing work! Opera works like shit! Internet Explorer IS shit! And Chrome still needs some work put into it for my liking. Safari doesn't even count. I prefer text browsers rather than Safari. I prefer trying to get to a site via Command Prompt rather than Safari. I prefer physically going to the server and printing out a carbon copy of the page's source code rather than using Safari.

So I guess I'll just have to revisit THE LIST of less popular browsers and one out of there..

God damn it!

Microsoft Websites

Don't you just LOVE Microsoft websites?

The title on each page is : YOUR BROWSER OR OPERATING SYSTEM IS NOT SUPPORTED.

Note: I'm running Windows Vista Ultimate Edition

Update on Chrome

       

     Chrome by Google! Came out , had a run with it, wasn't too impressed. The Tab Manager is a nice feature though but the browser uses up quite a lot of memory. Here's a printscreen from a test I did earlier. I ran IE , Opera, Firefox and Chrome, each had 10 tabs , 5 tabs main site of wikipedia, another 5 running a flash powered game. By the way if you still want to download Chrome they changed the link so you can find it HERE. Cheers

Chrome by Google

   

     After wining over the Internet it was only natural for Google to start thinking about their own personal browser, and sure enough they came up with Chrome. The news was leaked 2 days early in Europe, and on the 1st of September the very famous comic strips came out on blogs. You can find them here. ( you need a pdf reader plug-in to view this)

    So what is Chrome?

   Chrome is Google's take on a modern web browser. It's an open source project and it was developed using the WebKit rendering engine. Today the beta came out, but curiously enough it's nowhere to be seen. All "official" Google download links either give an error or redirect you to Google.com . And there's no mention of the browser on their main page, only this blog post.

    Features

   At first glance Chrome is a very simple, very direct browser with a no-bullshit attitude, much like the google search page. It has most features that any modern browser has, such as tabbed browsing ( and they do it similar to Opera making tabs a primary feature), and plug-in support for such plugins as Incognito ( that allows deletes history and cookies when a session ends).               Another thing to be said about the tabs, is that each tab will be an individual process. Yes it is true that this will most likely use up a lot of memory but it will also make the browser more stable and if one tab crashes you won't lose the whole session. And because this is somewhat multitasking the browser will also have an integrated process manager that will allow you to control each process individually. 

     One more feature that's worth mentioning is the new Java Script engine V8, designed by Google so as to offer support to the next generation of webapps that will come. 

     Last thing to mention is about security. Each tab is sandboxed meaning it can't access anything on the local computer, this is a common safety feature and a very useful one. But it's still not very secure because plug-ins such as Flash Player aren't sandboxed ( though i remember certain browsers did this) and you are still somewhat vulnerable until the plug-ins are updated to work with Chrome's security features.

   Ok so here's a screenshot of Chrome, and by the way the official download page once it becomes available again can be found HERE. Cheers

 

Mozilla Firefox 3.0 ( .1)

    So the new Firefox 3.0 has been out now for a few days and I just updated to 3.0.1. It fixes a few bugs encountered in the original 3.0 version.

( WHY the hell does Opera have to open the Help page on the same tab you are on!! It's the 3rd time i lose this article and i start rewriting it!)

   As you know Mozilla Firefox is one of the leading browsers out there coming close with Internet Explorer and as usually they have delivered a great product. The new release fixes tons of bugs, improves compatibility with 3rd party add-ons, has what I believe to be a very nice improved user interface, and greater performance than ever. The only thing I still don't really like about Firefox is how tabs seem to be somewhat of a secondary feature, but that's maybe because I'm so used to Opera.

   And speaking of other browsers, a few months ago I had anounced that the first batch of betas had been released almost simultaneously. I was refeering to the Firefox 3.0 , Opera 9.0 and IE 8 betas. Well after being released so close to one another, Opera took the lead and had their final release version some time ago. Since then they have reached version 9.51 fixing bugs along the way. Unfortunately the 9.x versions don't seem to be as good as promised. Mozilla came round and got out their 3.0 version which is great, and 3.0.1 latest that will probably be browser of the year. And while all of this is going on ..guess what the people at Microsoft are doing? Brandon LeBlanc from MS said that Beta 2 of IE 8 will be coming out shortly. And you simply know it's not going to be anywhere nearly as good as the other browsers. 

PicLens

Now I might be just getting excited over something most of know may have known about for a really long time, but still I'm glad I found it now. I'm talking about PicLens, which is a multi browser add-on that completely transforms your interface, into something that closely resembles ( in my opinion) Vista's Media Center.

The add-on is very small, a few megabytes , and it can be installed on Mozilla Firefox, Internet Explorer and Safari. Now if you're wondering which of these to choose have a look at my Browsers article and that should give you a clue.

Many popular sites have been optimized for the use of PicLens including YouTube, Google photo search, Yahoo photo search, Photobucket, MySpace, Flickr, Facebook and many more. You can view these sites either as a 3d image base, or as a slideshow. And the add-on already incorporates different popular subjects and sites such as News, Sports, Technology, and Movies that it will automatically search for an update on your screen.

Now the part that is really cool, is that you can optimize your own website for PicLens by using their tools, or adding a little html coding. And if you have a blog on Wordpress that you'd like to optimize for this , you simply download the Wordpress add-on. And the best part, is that even people who don't have PicLens installed or who use a browser that doesn't support it ( ie ME) can still view a nice interface using the PicLens Lite that runs directly off the net. I've added a few pictures so you get the ideea.

Cheers, Geeky.

This is the full PicLens on Mozilla Firefox while looking on an Wordpress blog.

And this is the same blog in Opera while running PicLens Lite.

Browsers 2.0

    Hello to everyone. First let me apologize, I know I said I would write the article the second day but the past week has been absolutely hectic for me with exams, and different projects. Right now I’ll start working on a very short movie with a friend and that will give me a chance to experiment with the Avid Xpress Pro software. I might just write a review about that.

    Anyway back to browsers. Last week I took a look at only the 5 most popular browsers : Internet Explorer from Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape Navigator , and Safari from Apple, and from those Opera ranked number 1. This time I wanted to take a look at the not so popular browsers. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to find as many as I had hoped for, but I still found a few that are interesting.


      Maxthon

    This is the first browser I’ll start with and I have to be frank, it’s not really so unpopular. From what I’ve seen a lot of people have started to use this browser, especially in China and they are actually right to do so. In fact this browser was first developed by a Chinese person who simply wanted to customize his Internet Explorer browser, hence the original names MyIE/MyIE2. The browser was then further developed and it got the name Maxthon in 2003.
Some time ago there was a rumor that Google had started investing in it but it was quickly laid to rest, though the possibility of a future collaboration was never excluded.

    The latest release is 2.0.7 and here are some of it’s features: 1) the usual standard features for any modern browser, such as tabbed browsing, bookmarks managing, integrated flash and RSS/Atom feeds. 2) it also has a recovery for lost tabs in case of it crashing or accidental closing. 3) Java applet and ActiveX blocker just as IE. 4) External utility bar – this is a toolbar that let’s you open third party apps. 4) Supports most of IE’s plug-ins not to mention all the ones built especially for it. 5) It also supports mouse gestures. 6) It supports most Java technologies except DOM ( Document Object Model) 2 and 3. It does not support however PDF natively ( as most browsers don’t) but that can very easily be taken care of with an Adobe plug-in. 7) It uses the Trident layout engine but it can also use Gecko; It does not pass the Acid2 Rendering Test.
 
Performance 7/10
Features 8/10
Looks  7/10

    And a few final notes on it: it only works on Windows, it uses a lot fewer resources than the original IE ( comes to about the same level as Opera), it has good 3rd party compatibility, has no major security flaws ( actually I believe it’s even safer than IE ), is very fast, has a familiar environment, and is simply a very good alternative to any other browser.


      Avant Browser
 
    Avant is a popular freeware brower, also based on the Trident engine. But unlike IE, it’s designed to be more feature orientated, flexible and ergonomic. It runs natively on all versions of Windows.
It was originally inspired by Opera, which was the first browser to have a multiple document interface. The idea was to use basic IE shell but just make it a lot faster, and ergonomic, but not to encounter the rendering problems Opera faced in the beginning. It’s original name was actually “IEopera” but it quickly changed. Avant then concentrated on adding use-requested features, and it was one of the first browsers to have pop-up blocking.

    Ok enough history, here are the features: 1) tabbed browsing and all the rest. 2) Built in search named AvantFind that uses Yahoo Search but can be changed to Google or many other search engines. 3) Undo menu for the last 25 closed tabs. 4) All pages open in a single process, thus reducing resource demands ( this is part of the secret ). 5) Also compatible with most IE toolbars and plug-ins, including the Google toolbar. 6) Built in RSS feed reader ( also supports Atom). 7) Has a very nice feature that allows you to save bookmarks and other info ( such as passwords) directly online. 8) Can directly be run from a flash card or other data storage device. ( these last two features make it possible to stop browsing and a computer, move to another an resume from where you left off). 9) Great security features, it can clear browsing traces automatically, and it can also use the XP SP2 security extensions.10) You need to have IE 6 or 7 already installed in order to run it; does NOT pass the Acid2 Test, even though it fully supports the most used formats on the web.

 Performance 8.50/10
 Features 9/10
 Looks 9/10

    Last Word: Really really nice browser ( this was my favorite from this lot). Even faster and more ergonomic than Opera, secure, and with a very nice feel overall. I truly recommend it at least for a look if not for your new fulltime browser.


      SeaMonkey

    SeaMonkey is a free, open source, and cross-platform Internet suite that is the continuation of the former Mozilla Application Suite. It consists of a Navigator which is a descendant of the Netscape family; a Mail and Newsgroups client program, and an HTML editor, or Composer program. Being a descendent of Mozilla it uses the Gecko engine.

    The current stable version is 1.1.7 and here are the features:
1)Tabbed browsing ( even though not so nicely integrated) and all the rest. 2) Cross platform so it’s supported by all popular Oss ( unofficial versions exists for Solaris). 3) It basically supports every web standard that Firefox does. 4) It does NOT support RSS/Atom feeds. 5) It also supports exactly the same Java techs that Firefox does. 6) Unlike Firefox it does have an E-mail client and it does support NNTP (Network News Transfer Protocol) and IRC. 7) It is safe and fast, with low resource usage.
 
  Performance 8.50/10
  Features 7/10
  Looks 6/10

    Last Word: This is a nice browser, but it looses points for the general aspect. In the end it’s just a rundown version of Firefox and since it has no special features I can’t really see the logic in choosing this over any of the before mentioned browsers.


      K-Meleon

    K-Meleon ( don’t know why but I keep reading k-melon) is a browser designed for Windows and it uses the Gecko rendering engine ( yes the Mozilla Firefox one). It also uses the native Windows API to create the user interface thus it’s tightly integrated into the look and feel of the desktop. The change from the K-Meleon 0.9.x series to 1.0.x was a major modification. The most notable change was the main K-Meleon code being updated to accommodate the Gecko 1.8.0.x rendering engine. The change of layout not only brought the browser up-to-date on the level of security, but on web page layout as well.

    The current release version of K-Meleon is 1.1.3 and these are some of the features: 1) K-Meleon has a very flexible interface. All the menus and buttons can be customized using its configuration files. 2) Modified versions of the program can be found which allow you to run it directly, without any installation making it a portable browser. You can find some of them including Pocket K-Meleon and KMV ( K-meleon on the move) here! 3) Tabbed browsing, bookmark management, spell checking and pop-up blocking are all present. It does not have a download manager! 4) Supports mouse-gestures. 5) Basically supports most common web stuff including RSS/Atom. 6) Supports all Java technologies except DOM3. 7) Does NOT support natively pdf, mng and 2d canvas formats. 7) Not what you’d probably expect but it has limited compatibility with Firefox plug-ins and themes but it often integrates improvements to the scripts and codes ( especially security related ones).

 Performance 10/10
 Features 9/10
 Looks 9/10

    Last Word: Extremely nice browser, extremely fast, good security and compatibility, and a very nice feel overall. This is , alongside Avant, a browser that I really recommend.


      Other Browsers

    These are just a few other browsers that I find are worth mentioned because they have some important/cool ideas/aspects.

      X-smiles

    X-smiles is actually an experiment in progress right now. It is a browser completely scripted in Java language. At present it sucks. Sorry, a little to direct. At present it is very slow, it uses up an insane amount of resources, it has very limited compatibility with anything and it often times has problems with rendering quite simple pages. That being said I still find it very interesting. Because once it is perfected and be made into a decent browser, the compatibilities and possibilities of a java based browser will be absolutely countless. Ok enough said. We’ll wait and see what happens in the future.

      Torpark/xB Browser

    xB Browser, previously called Torpark is a portable browser originally forked from Portable Firefox web browser with Tor access built into it. This is the browser you want to use to be absolutely sure your IP won’t be traced.
    xB Browser works by routing Internet traffic through several "onion" servers, obscuring the originating address. This does not naturally provide anonymity for other Internet programs, only the xB Browser. However, other applications data such as Pidgin can be routed through the Tor network via xB Browser by directing the applications traffic to a SOCKS proxy at localhost, port 9050. This port can be changed via Xconfig, an INI generator for xB Browser located in its App/ directory.
    Now the only issue with this browser is that it is somewhat slow. The free version that is. Because there are also two version for which you can pay, that work at normal/fast speeds. But I guess that’s the price you might have to pay to be completely secure while browsing.
    Easter Egg

    There is an Easter egg in version 1.5.0.7 and 2.0.0.2 of Torpark. The Easter egg is revealed by launching the executable from CMD with the switch /DEADBEEF enabled, an allusion to 0xDEADBEEF, eg. C:\Torpark\torpark.exe /DEADBEEF. A black cross with Cult of the Dead Cow symbols appears while playing a chiptune song in the background.

      Text Browsers

    Last time I told a few people that I would look into text browsers. And I did. But text browsers are more than useless for normal pc-users that simply wish to browse the web and to check their e-mail . The only practicality of text browsers of when you are creating custom networks and you wish to check different protocols and assignments. And since I don’t have the time or resources to do that ( and to be frank I don’t really have the knowledge either) I just let them be. Of course this was my personal view on them, if any of you believe otherwise feel free to correct me with a comment.

    Finally I ended this article. I have been stressing over it for to many hours now. Well I hope it’s not too bad and that it might just be useful to someone. For suggestions or questions feel free to leave a comment.
    
    Cheers, Geeky

Browsers

    First of all I want to say sorry for the long absence but the holidays were quite busy for me, I was away most of the time and quite focused on trying not to use the PC because I really needed a break. Secondly, I just want to wish everyone a Happy New Year. I hope you all had great holidays.
    Now, as you've seen in the title I've actually commited to the impossible and started to write this article on browsers. Why am I writing this ? Well mainly because there are 5 major internet browsers out there, and I myself was really curios which was the best and why, and just maybe this will also point out to which browser works best for you. Ok so the major 5 browsers which I will refer to are : Internet Explorer, Opera, Mozilla Firefox, Netscape and Safari. All of them created for browsing the net, but which is the best?

    Internet Explorer

    This browser first appeared in 1995 with the Plus! release of MS Windows 95. It is probably the most known browser out there even though it's usually not the best one. In the beginning IE struggled for a long time to try and catch up with Netscape Navigator , the first public browser . In 1996 both browsers were at the same level offering brand new and exciting support for Java Script and CSS. But due to the fact that IE was free ( unlike Netscape) and that it continued to evolve backed up by Microsoft, it won the battle. By 1998 IE had majority of the market shares, and Netscape's future was unclear. With the passing of time Microsoft kept developing the program increasing security and support for third party features, but also adding their own new features that kept this browser at a very competitive level.
    In 2001 MS released Internet Explorer 6 alongside Windows XP, which was now very focused on security and reliability. And now in 2007 the latest release came out with Vista and that is Internet Explorer 7. IE 7 is the best version of IE of course, and it brings new features such as tabbed browsing ( IE was the last browser to adopt tabbed browsing), better support and a friendlier relationship with the user regarding RSS feeds, advanced printing and other such features. Now the dowside of the browser, while it is true that it now supports almost all third party add-ons for any kind of media, and it is true that it is one of the most secure out there, it has come to lack in speed and to consume a lot of resources. IE7 is probably the second slowest browser ( the first being Safari ) that there is and the fact that it's free is not a good excuse anymore as all the above mentioned browsers have become freeware. There are no other special features that I find worth mentioning. It has all the common features that every browser now has.

    Mozilla Firefox

    As I mentioned in 1998 the future of Netscape was unsure. So they decided their browser would be free from then on and also that it would be an open source project. 4 years later ( yes quite a long time) the first version of the Mozilla came out which was then named Pheonix. The first official Mozilla Firefox came in November 04 with their 1.0 release. It included advanced security , and new features such as RSS/Atom feed support.
    The second full official release came 2 years later in October 2006 when Firefox 2.0 was released, which added certain features such as session restoration after a browser crash, search using Google and Yahoo, an add-on manager and more importantly anti-phishing protection. It also included support for JavaScript 1.7. One year later version 2.0.11 was released that fixed a few problems that had arisen. This is the latest stable release of Firefox. Now you may say there is nothing special about this browser, but it's speed, stability, performance,high security ( still some debate if it is the safest ) and excellent compatibility with 3rd party add-ons make it one of the best browsers around and this shows as it's popularity is quite rapidly growing. It now owns about 17% of the market share.
    Work has already begun on version 3.0 but no public beta has been put out. While we wait , this is still one of the best browsers.
Note: Firefox 2.0.11 ( the latest stable release) does NOT pass the Acid2 standards-compliance test. But neither does IE7 nor Netscape. For more info on this, search on Wikipedia for Acid2 test.

     Netscape Navigator 

     I have to be sincere and say that this is probably the browser that surprised me the most. Why? Well because I actually hadn't heard/used Netscape ever since windows 95. I didn't even know this browser still existed, and yes that's ignorance on my part. Well I am very glad I found it once again. Popularity with it seems to be at an all time low ( that's the reason I didn't know it was still out there) but performance of the latest version which is Netscape Navigator 9 is above average. And I actually think it's even a little faster than Firefox.
    But unfortunately that's where the better part of it stops. While it does have compatibility for most common web technologies used now, it still lacks certain popular features ( right now it does not support e-mail and other such features). It is because of this and other reasons why it seems to be destined to always remain somewhere in the shadows, nothing more than " a backup browser". Plus on December 28, 2007, Netscape developers announced that AOL will discontinue their web browser on February 1, 2008.Petitions have been made in an attempt to stop this, but I can't really say how successful they've been.

    Safari

    Safari is Apple's official internet browser and the first (1.0) version was released in 2003 alongside Mac OSX. Windows support didn't exist until June of last year. The latest version (3.0.4 ) works on both Xp and Vista.
    As with everything else Apple, Safari has a cool look and cute features, but it doesn't really take you all the way. It does have all the popular features such as tabbed browsing, pop-up blocking, incremental finding, ad filtering, the oh so marketed page zooming that ie7 has. It does support almost anything you can think of that other browsers support, it actually passed the Acid2 test that most other browsers didn't. It even has complete text-to-speech support. Great security features. So why isn't it number one? Well mainly because it is slow. Certain people said that is quite fast and a great browser but comparing it to all the other browsers it seems to me that it's the slowest. Second I personally wasn't able to find any 3rd party add-ons to go along with it. On Mac Leopard it works great, being part of the OS and taking advantage of all the built in features of Leopard but on Windows it seems to be somehow out of place. I can't comment any further on it. As I said great browser but somehow it just stops dead in it's tracks.

    Opera

    Ok I have saved the best for last. Yes I do believe Opera is the best browser out there at this moment. Opera's first public realease was in 1996 and back then it only worked on Windows. Even though it's been around for such a long time it hasn't really caught on until now. The latest release stable release came on the 19th of December 07. The early versions had a lot of issues and that's why this browser was never very popular, not to mention the adds that were included in the browser some previous versions.
    Right now it is clear, fast, extremly economic on resources, and supports more features than any other browser. It does pass the Acid2 test and it has almost everything you can think of. I believe Opera is the browser that invented tabs ( but I am not sure of this so don't yell if it happens to be false). Anyway it does support tabs, mouse gestures, voice commands, email, adress book, bookmark management, almost any type of web standard imaginable, it even supports BitTorrent. It even supports Web Forms 2.0 that no other browser supports. It is a jewel. And if not the fastest it is definitely in top 3. What can I say ..I am more satisfied with this browser than any other and the only fault I have found for it is that most tracker sites will not allow you to use Opera's built in BitTorrent but that is a mild incovenience considering that using IE for just one link isn't that bad.

If you wish to look for a specific piece of information on support for any of the above browsers that I have not mentioned you can look here, a great source of info.

Well that's it. I've done it, I've written it though not in as much technical detail as I would have wanted. Disclaimer thingy : I have used both professional reviews and personal experiences in the descriptions above. Also all the support information or/and the technical specs were taken from OFFICIAL or trustworthy sites ( such as Wikipedia). If any of the provided information is false and you have proof of this please adress me in any form you want and let me know. The last thing I want is to post false info.

Anyway that's it. Hope this was worth it. I will definitely come back on this subject and the next article will also be on Browsers but the ones that aren't so popular such as Maxthon, Camino and everything else I can get my hands on.
Enjoy, Geeky.