Thushan Fernando Uncut

Well finally Google has released Chrome 4.0 and with it extensions support amongst the many other features which finally brings some much needed juice to the browser. I’ve been running Firefox and Chrome simultaneously (Chrome for gmail & google apps, firefox for daily browsing) but I have a feeling I may change to using Chrome full time now.

Some cool extensions to try (most are from Firefox)

• Xmarks Bookmarks Sync – I’ve been using FoxXmarks to sync my bookmarks for a while now, so its only natural I install this for Chrome. You can also stick with the standard Bookmark sync via Google which you’ll need a Google account for.
• Google Mail Checker / Google Alerter – there’s also the One Number extension that brings more than just checking gmail.
• AdBlock – probably the number one reason most people wanted extensions in Chrome!
• Forecastfox Weather – My weather extension I use in Firefox.
• FlashBlock – Can’t stand videos playing automatically when you load a gazillion tabs and wonder WHO THE EFF is talking?
• Goo.gl URL Shortner – none others required.
• Firebug Lite – Not as feature packed as Firebug, but then why would they call it Lite?
• IETab – Sometimes you gotta.

Chromed. There’s lots more if you’re into Facebook, Twitter and all the other fancy things these days, even one for uTorrent! Download the latest build and give things a go!

PS. You don’t need to restart Chrome to install extensions either!

Had a nasty issue with jQuery + jSON + IEx just now – still at work because of it!

This bit of code works perfectly fine on Firefox and Chrome:

function onUnitsModified() {
            $.getJSON("<%=Url.Action("GetTotalUnitCount", "ProjectReaper")%>", null, function(result) {
                if(result > 0)
                  // Do stuffs here
                }
            });
            return true;
}

But in IE we’ve come to realise that the first hit is successful, future json requests ones are not hitting the ASP.NET MVC actions (I put a breakpoint). You could append a time stamp to get rid of this annoying caching bug, but alternatively you can use the ajaxSetup options to disable caching.

function onUnitsModified() {
            $.ajaxSetup ({ cache: false});
            $.getJSON("<%=Url.Action("GetTotalUnitCount", "ProjectReaper")%>", null, function(result) {
                if(result > 0)
                  // Do stuffs here
                }
            });
            return true;
}

Darnit! Hope someone else doesn’t waste their time trying to fix this now

Today marks the release of Opera 10.

Amongst the highlights:

- Revamped user interface
- Boosted speed from the new Opera Presto 2.2 engine, giving it a 40% increase from the previous version when running web applications (such as Gmail)
- Opera Mail has seen various improvements
- Opera Turbo, designed to increase browsing speed for those on slower Internet connections
- An inline spell checker, to help catch mistakes when typing in entry forms
- Thumbnail tabs which are resizable
- Speed Dial has been given personalization features

Download a copy or read up on the new features in this release, the site’s being hammered right now by the looks of it? I still remember starting out with Opera 5 back in 2001, a close friend designated Opera as his ‘porn browser’, purely because of the tabbing and speed (not to mention lightweightness ) of the browser.

The moment we’ve all been waiting for, Mozilla has released the final version of Firefox 3.5 (which was originally slated to be 3.1). Amongst the highlights include the new Gecko 1.9.1 rendering engine and (from their release notes):

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

For the developers, the Mozilla developer centre details the changes in this release. But the most exciting is the support for <video> and <audio> elements from the HTML 5 draft and the inclusion of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.

Download it now!

A few weeks ago saw the launch of Wolfram Research Alpha, a natural search engine which could do some funky things. Now Microsoft have stepped up from their previous attempts – Ms Dewey (Janina Gavankar, who’s quite a hottie! reminds me of Tiffany) and now we have the final release of Bing (aka codenamed Kumo) which is going to be a behemoth search engine.

Learn all about the new bling at DiscoverBing or learn the void that Bing will attempt to address, or see the video here.

Wonder why they decided on Bing?

Ding ding ding == bing bing bing?

“Just Bing It.”

“Dewd, just Bing the bastard”?

“Bing is Not Google”?

Cashing in on the Lara Bingle’s ‘where the bloody hell are you?’ campaign, which btw was one of our clients at Vividas last year.

In either case, its an interesting take on the ‘aging’ way we search for what we want and seems to go onto the concepts that came with the Wolfram Alpha. When it actually comes out – still shows as coming soon for me, we’ll have to see.

Steven Wolfram of Mathematica fame (and pure genius) has launched Wolfram Alpha, its a ‘computational knowledge engine’ and quite a cool tool too! Taking on the big giants Google and Yahoo, Live etc, this bit of kit allows you to search using natural language.

Let me demonstrate, suppose you want to know who the prime minister of Bulgaria is, it will not only give you the answer but also some background information on the person.

Not only can you ask formal questions, but you can even give it some mathematical problems to solve.

tan(x^2+sin(x))

Try some of the examples on the right hand menu.

Some cool things to try,

• What is the meaning of life?
• Convert 88mph to kmh (see the note ‘comparison at speed’)
• When is mothers day (notice it picks up the different countries)
• The name Homer gives stats on people named homer. Note the huge amount of homers back in the 1800s! and what about stats for Bender?

Ok I could waste a day on this, so instead I’ll let you do it for me.

wotnews Logo

Got told by a co-worker about this today, a news site that searches, scrapes and analyses news items for you. wotnews.com.au, even has a Google Alerts style notification system to get told when interesting news items trickle through. Whats really impressive about this little beauty is that its written by a very small team and is packed with functionality.

Say we want to know more about the Sun being acquired by Oracle item from yesterday, query it. You’ll get a bunch of highlights for the month regarding the two keywords, and the latest articles aggregated over the internet. It even has Twitter integration to findout the latest goss.

While it seems to be still in its infancy, this web-application (and the AI behind it) will surely improve over time bringing some very interesting utilities for gathering news. Who needs Digg.com now apart from the memes and references to PedoBear?

The web framework behind it I was told is Django (which I’ve toyed around with) and the front-end makes heavy use of CSS Sprites as seen on this graphic.

Learn about CSS Sprites

You can learn more about CSS Sprites via these links:

• A List Apart: CSS Sprites: Image Slicing’s Kiss of Death / CSS Sprites2 – It’s JavaScript Time

• CSS-Tricks: CSS Sprites: What They Are, Why They’re Cool, and How To Use Them
• Website Optimization.com: CSS Sprites: How Yahoo.com and AOL.com Improve Web Performance

Funky!

Now that the road to downloading Windows 7 Beta 1 and finding a key for Windows 7 Beta 1 have been travelled by most, its time to look towards Windows Server 2008 R2 Beta.

This release contains some significant updates to the virtualisation hypervisor in Windows Server (Hyper-V – wiki) and will only be offered as a 64-bit release sporting 256 processors (with 32 processors in VMs).

• Download Enterprise Server x86:
  7000.0.081212-1400_server_en-us-GB1SXFRE_EN_DVD.iso
• Download Enterprise Server x64:
  7000.0.081212-1400_serverenterpriseia64_en-us-GB1SIAIFRE_EN_DVD.iso
• Download Server:
  7000.0.081212-1400_serverweb_en-us-GB1WXFRE_EN_DVD.iso

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.

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.