The second Alpha development snapshot of Opera 11.10 codenamed Barracuda offers a glimpse of the evolution of Speed Dial, one of the trademark features of the browser.
Opera 11.10 Barracuda Alpha Build 2014 is now available for download to testers, and is intended to introduce what Opera Software calls just the first of additional modifications planned for Speed Dial in the Barracuda release.
Speed Dial simplifies common browsing tasks by easing access to a collection of sites that users tend to visit and revisit by placing a set of links on any new opened tab in Opera.
“Opera's Speed Dial was first introduced in an Opera 9.20 snapshot on Feb 28th 2007. The idea came about as we observed that people kept typing the same addresses for a few of their favourite websites again and again,” revealed Cezary Kułakowski, from the Opera Desktop team.
“Getting to their top web sites could mean hundreds or thousands of clicks on the keyboard in a single day. The solution we came up with was very simple, but very powerful. And today it's still one of the most loved, and copied, features in Opera.”
According to the Norway-based browser maker, codenamed Barracuda offers an excellent opportunity for Speed Dial to be kicked up a notch.
Kułakowski notes that with the advent of Opera 11.10, users will be able to take advantage of an evolved Speed Dial.
“We are going to make Speed Dial more fluid, dynamic and easier to use! What is included in this snapshot is the new flow layout. Please remember this is just a first peek at the changes we are making. Many very smart and innovative solutions are on the way,” he stated.
Since Opera packs a range of additional excellent features in addition to Speed Dial, the browser maker is also introducing changes designed to make them more discoverable.
“Don't worry; there won't be any pop-up bubbles or constant nagging. Instead we are going to have subtle animations and messages to remind you of features you can use in Opera,” Kułakowski promised.
Opera 11.10 codenamed Barracuda Alpha for Windows is available for download here.
Google Chrome 9 has now been pushed to the stable channel, marking the official release of the latest version of the popular browser. After a slight delay during the winter holidays, the team is back on schedule, releasing a stable release every six weeks. With such a short release schedule, new versions are nothing major, but Chrome 9 comes with plenty of things to enjoy.
WebGL the upcoming web 3D graphics standard is now built in and enabled by default.
Also new is Chrome Instant, the browser implementation of the Google Chrome concept. Finally, the Web Store is now fully supported in the stable channel.
"Today, we’re excited to bring several new features from Chrome’s beta channel to the stable build, including WebGL, Chrome Instant, and the Chrome Web Store," Erik Kay and Aaron Boodman, Software Engineers at Google, announced.
WebGL went from idea to de facto standard in less than two years. The technology is supported by many major browser makers, Apple, Mozilla and, of course, Google.
It enables developers to leverage the GPU capabilities of most modern computers for immersive games or lavish website graphics inside the browser.
Chrome Instant implements the concept behind Google Instant in the browser. It's not enabled by default, but if activated it allows users to simply start typing in the Omnibox while the page they are looking for, the search results start loading in the background.
"The Chrome Web Store is now open to all Chrome users in the United States. As part of this, we’ve now added a link to the Chrome Web Store on the New Tab page, along with two sample apps. (If you don’t use these sample apps, they will automatically disappear after some time)," Google explained.
Google Chrome for Windows is available for download here. Google Chrome for Linux is available for download here. Google Chrome for Mac is available for download here.
Users who feel overwhelmed by the amount of emails they get will be thrilled to find that Google has just announced Priority Inbox support for Gmail mobile. The new feature helps users save time by automatically identifying important incoming messages.
According to Google, Gmail uses multiple ways to prioritize incoming messages, including keeping track of the contacts the user emailed and chatted with the most, as well as which keywords appear most frequently in the messages users open.
Until now, Priority Inbox was only available on desktops and Android devices, but as of today it will be available for most mobile browsers that support HTML5, such as devices running iOS 3+.
Although, the feature may work well on mobile browsers such as Dolphin, which lacks HTML5 support for the moment, Priority Inbox may not be accessible on other mobile browsers with no HTML5 support.
Priority Inbox has several customization options that help users prioritize specific emails, which are accessible from the Settings link in the upper-right corner of the Gmail interface.
Users can make changes in any of the available sections: Default inbox, Priority Inbox sections, Filtered mail, Importance markers and Show Priority Inbox.
In addition, users are strongly advised to mark each email that has been mistakenly tagged as important or not important, by selecting the message in question, and clicking the “mark as important” or “mark as not important” button.
These buttons are easily recognizable as they have a plus or a minus icon and are placed just to the left of the Move to and Labels drop-down menus.
As soon as a message is marked as not important, it will be moved out of the “Important” section. Over time, the Priority Inbox feature will learn what’s important and incorporate user feedback into its algorithm.
Mozilla was considering making Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 available to testers either today or tomorrow at the latest, but it appears that the open source browser vendor finally decided to deliver the bits on February 8.
“QA has signed off on Firefox 4 beta 11. We intend to push it to mirrors tonight / tomorrow morning PST and release to the beta audience tomorrow, 2011-02-08,” revealed Christian Legnitto, Firefox release manager for Mozilla.
At the time of this article, Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 was not available for download, however, make sure to keep your eyes on this space and I’ll provide an update as soon as the Build goes live.
Mozilla only recently offered early adopters Firefox 4.0 Beta 10 for testing, and is now in the final stages of the development process.
According to the plans made public so far, Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 will be followed by Beta 12. Mozilla intends to ship a total of a dozen Beta releases for the next iteration of its open source browser, but at the same time, nothing is set in stone, and yet another Beta could follow, although chances of this actually happening are extremely slim.
“Firefox 4 beta 12 [has] no hard schedule. We're trying to get all betaN hardblockers done by this Friday, which would put us in position to build beta 12 at the start of next week.
“There are 17 betaN hardblockers with patches, which means there are only ~2 that don't have patches.
“We still reserve the right to have another beta if needed, but are driving to have beta 12 be the last. Again, highly dependent on remaining work, new items found during beta 11, etc.,” Legnitto added.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 for Windows is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 for Linux is available for download here.
Firefox 4.0 Beta 11 for Mac is available for download here.
Microsoft recently updated its free Windows XP and Windows Vista downloads making fresh releases available as a part of a continued effort (more than a couple of years now) to make it easier for website developers to test drive their projects against multiple versions of Internet Explorer.
Devs that create websites need to make sure that users will have the same experience when running different browsers, as well as when leveraging different flavors of IE for example.
Early adopters currently running Internet Explorer 9 are bond to have come across the emulation functionality that the browser offers, covering a number of older IE document modes, including IE8, IE7 and IE7.
Sometime however, emulations are not 100% accurate in depicting the user experiences associated with the actual browsers.
This is why Microsoft not only recommends, but also provides a variety of resources for developers to test their projects against IE versions still supported.
“One way to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer on one PC is to run the older version(s) of Internet Explorer using Windows XP Mode on a Windows PC running Windows 7 Professional, Enterprise, or Ultimate edition,” revealed Ted Johnson, Lead Program Manager, Internet Explorer.
Windows XP Mode is essentially a free copy of Windows XP SP3 that the software giant made available to Windows 7 customers requiring easy and cost free virtualization solutions for application incompatibility issues.
“Interested in trying this? This linked document provides detailed instructions for setting up a Windows XP Mode virtual machine and then copying it to create two additional XP Mode virtual machines and configuring them to run IE7 and IE8,” Johnson stated.
Of course, devs can also download the “Windows Virtual PC virtual machine hard drive images (VHDs) for testing websites with different Internet Explorer versions. These images were recently updated and now expire on May 18, 2011,” he added.
Windows 7 RTM Enterprise 90-Day Evaluation is available for download here.
The Internet Explorer Application Compatibility VPC Images are available for download here.
It's been a long road, but Firefox 4 is now very close to completion. Firefox 4 Beta 9 has been released, one of the last stages before the final build is launched. While most new betas come with plenty of improvements, many features are now coming together in Firefox 4 Beta 9.
With only one more beta and then the release candidate planned, Firefox 4 is fairly close to its final form. But after several months of betas and even more earlier development, it's easy to forget all of the new features and improvements coming in Firefox 4.
Mozilla's director of Firefox, Christopher Blizzard, has created a complete run-down of new features in Firefox 4, from a developer's perspective, and, as you can expect, it's quite a long list.
From the brand new JavaScript engine to hardware acceleration, speed was a huge focus in Firefox 4. It's the fastest Firefox release yet, by a big margin, and promises not only better JavaScript performance but also a snappier UI.
"[JaegerMonkey] is the world’s first third-generation JavaScript engine, using Baseline JIT technology similar to engines found in other browsers and kicked up a level with the Tracing engine found in Firefox 3.6," Blizzard explains.
The new JavaScript engine should make Firefox 4 competitive, though the competition hasn't exactly stood back and watched during Firefox 4's development.
Another very competitive area is hardware acceleration. Browser makers are racing to offset as much of the load to the GPU and be the first to offer a complete solution.
As it stands though, hardware acceleration is not what you might call complete in any stable browser available now.
"Firefox 4 supports full hardware acceleration on Windows 7 and Windows Vista via a combination of D2D, DX9 and DX10. This allows us to accelerate everything from Canvas drawing to video rendering," Mozilla explained.
"Windows XP users will also enjoy hardware acceleration for many operations because we’re using our new Layers infrastructure along with DX9. And, of course, OSX users have excellent OpenGL support, so we’ve got that covered as well," it added.
One interesting feature that has landed in Firefox 4 Beta 9 is support for Compartments, as Mozilla calls them, a method of separating the memory used by websites and various Firefox elements, for better performance and security.
Another major new technology in Firefox 4 is WebGL which is very close to being standardized. WebGL enables web developers to access the GPUs 3D rendering capabilities using standard technologies.
You can check out Blizzard's blog post for a comprehensive look at the technical aspects of Firefox 4, including support for HTML5, the newly introduced IndexedDB and many others.
One of Firefox's biggest innovations were browser add-ons. Its add-on platform enabled third-party developers to build new functionality for the browser and cater to any user need out there. Mozilla is now celebrating a major milestone, the first browser add-on to pass the 100 million downloads mark, AdBlock Plus.
"Today we’re very happy to celebrate a huge milestone: Adblock Plus became the first browser add-on to be downloaded 100 million times!," Mozilla announced.
"Customization has always been one of the best features of Firefox, and 100 million downloads of a single add-on combined with 2.2 billion add-on downloads overall shows just how important that extensibility is to our users," it added.
"Many developers dream of creating software that has worldwide impact and affects millions of people, so it’s thrilling for us to provide a platform where this kind of success is possible," Mozilla said.
"Congratulations to Wladimir Palant and the Adblock Plus community!," the blog post concluded.
Firefox was the first to implement an add-on platform. It enabled developers to change the way Firefox functioned, looked and behaved. This lead to a huge number of interesting add-ons created for Firefox.
Since then, every major browser has built support for add-ons and extensions, with Opera the last to join the party, yet Firefox's implementation has remained the most popular, thanks in part to the size of its user base and the fact that it's the oldest.
Yet, despite the big number of add-ons available, one in particular has always been the most popular, AdBlock Plus. The add-on blocks any type of ads from websites ensuring a clean, distraction free experience.
The popularity of this add-on shows how many people are frustrated by the assault of annoying, in-your-face ads the web keeps sending their way.
While there is a number of people who would block these ads regardless how inconspicuous they are, most people wouldn't mind ads that would let them get to the content they want.
Still, regardless of the reasons, the milestone celebrates the success Mozilla has had with its add-on platform.
