Thushan Fernando Uncut

As posted and you would have no doubt have heard, Google has entered the bra-ow-sar wars with their own take on how the web should be with Google Chrome. They just released the first beta for Windows XP / Vista today so go on and download a copy.

First impressions : WOW! Its ridiculously fast - taking Digg and PageFlakes as a benchmark - and the memory footprint is quite a lot better (23Mb) than the Firefox (68Mb - Safemode), Opera (41Mb) and Internet Explorer (52Mb) counterparts. As expected, each tab is a new child process to the main Chrome process, so closing a tab instantly releases the resources held by the child process.

Instructions on grabbing the sources - sucking it down the tubes as I write - is available on the Chromium website.

UPDATE: The Register has a humourous look at the Google Comic, good for a lunch-break read.

Developer, Tools / Products, Web / Internets browsers, chrome, google, internet explorer, internets, mozilla, web

I’ve just been reading up on the newly announced Google Chrome browser that will no doubt set a new standard for browsers. Its built on the WebKit engine and includes some really really different train of thoughts on how browsers should act and behave. You can read a very nicely done Comic Strip on the new things we can expect to see, which I think is genius in itself.

Some things that stood out from the usual norm:

• Chrome seperates to a multi-process design system for tabs, this implies that a failure on one tab will not affect the entire browsing experience. This will initially increase the memory usage but over time it should mean leaner footprints thanks to cleaner recycling of resources. (Much like IE8)
• They used WebKit as its leaner and faster than other rendering engines. (Which powers Safari of all things)
• Has its own Javascript VM which is called V8 built from scratch that implements a faster IL for Javascript which provides a far better garbage collection mechanism than what is possible right now. But I wonder what that does for smaller ad-hoc style scripts that devs litter around?
• New tabs will open with a similar style of initial page to Opera - SpeedDial - which they introduced in Opera 9.2, so this will pickout frequently visited sites and display them on a speed browse fashion.
• Privacy mode similar to what IE8 offers in InPrivate ™ mode.
• Popups are confined to their owner tab, this means we have _total_ control over the popups that annoy us.
• Sandboxed tabs, which means any malware you may get are confined or ‘jailed’ not allowing any of your actions to be affected or monitored.
• Plugins themselves are in a seperate process - taken out of the renderer itself - meaning that any flaws or stalls in the plugin wont affect the rest of the session.
• Integration with the Malware API from Google. Which caught the MSY hack leak a few weeks back.

And finally, a slide about the open nature of Google Chrome, notice the little guy with a ball on the top left?

Whilst they are exciting features theres stuff here that have already been done by other companies (Opera and Microsoft) it’ll be interesting to see where Google goes with this. I dont think I’ve been more excited about a browser than today.

Developer, Its My Life, Web / Internets browser, chrome, firefox, googe, internet explorer, web

Yippe Ya Ya yay! Microsoft just released IE8 Beta 2 as posted on the IEBlog:

We’re excited to release IE8 Beta 2 today for public download. You can find it at http://www.microsoft.com/ie8. Please try it out!

You’ll find versions for 32- and 64-bit editions of Windows Vista, Windows XP, Windows Server 2003, and Windows Server 2008. In addition to English, IE8 Beta 2 is available in Japanese, Chinese (Simplified), and German. Additional languages will be available soon.

While Beta 1 was for developers, we think that anyone who browses or works on the web will enjoy IE8 Beta 2. Before the team blogs about our Beta 2 in detail, here’s an overview of what you’ll find in IE8.

We focused our work around three themes: everyday browsing (the things that real people do all the time), safety (the term most people use for what we’ve called ‘trustworthy’ in previous posts), and the platform (the focus of Beta 1, how developers around the world will build the next billion web pages and the next waves of great services).

Go and download a copy and try it out. While your waiting checkout the cool new features in IE8.

.NET / CLR / C#, Developer, Tools / Products, Web / Internets browser, ie, internet, internet explorer, internets, microsoft, web

An interesting bit-o-javascript posted by Mike-On-Ads that exploits an age old trick of leaking out the browsers navigated history. Armed with the info a cunning developer can workout what gender the viewer is.

The blog posting on the site explains the method used and allows you to try it out. Give it a ago and see how accurate it is

Here are my results:

Likelihood of you being FEMALE is 34%
Likelihood of you being MALE is 66%

Damn, I knew I shouldnt be browsing SlashDot that much, atleast it wasnt Cosmopolitan or Womens Weekly (ooops!). Unfortunately, only my current session records the history as I clear my page history when firefox closes. I’ll have to try it again and see if it changes.

Developer, Security, Web / Internets browser, firefox, internet explorer, javascript

Well I’m still living it up in Japan (the fifth extension to my stay here!) but today marks an important day for the release of two very cool applications I’ve learnt to love and never live without.

Firefox 3.0 has finally been released after a long development cycle and with that WINE 1.0, 15 years in the making but as they say, the best Wine matures with age, and WINE certainly has matured! Not to forget, Opera has also released Opera 9.50.

Cheers!

General browser, firefox, firefox 3, internet explorer, japan, opera, wine, wine 1.0