On 17th June 2008 @ 03:01 pm by Arul N S
There is a lot of news about browsers these days… Firefox 3, Opera 9.5, Internet Explorer 8 and now its time for Safari 4. Apple unveiled its next version of the third most popular browser on Earth in WWDC 2008. Presently it is available only to the registered developers at Apple Developer Connection. With the present roadmap it is likely that Safari 4 might be released before Snow Leopard.
I downloaded and tried it out today and I should say I am impressed. It is a potential Firefox beater. No wonder, Safari is termed as “fastest browser”. It is quite lite with all the basic features built-in. Right now I am blogging with Safari 4 and I do have a feeling that I might switch over to Safari 4 only for writing posts. It is quite responsive and even Firefox RC3 didn’t match with this performance. In two words — “Smooth Operator”
According to Apple fans, the javascript implementation of Safari 4 is 53% faster than the previous versions. Thanks to SquirrelFish, a open source javascript rendering engine. It replaces old WebKit 3.1 implementation. That makes this edition of Safari much better than the Firefox 3‘s SpiderMonkey engine.
The ability to save webpages as a desktop application is also a notable addition. So if you are a person who constantly saves webpages then Safari 4 is the thing for you.
The spell check along with Grammar check is a must tool for a blogger. One of the major reasons why I would be using Safari for my posting. Other features include more options for new windows and tab, full page zoom and other unexplored features.
You can download your copy of developer preview of Safari 4 from Apple Developer Center if you are a registered developer.
Source : [macnn]
On 17th June 2008 @ 12:23 pm by Arul N S
The entire community living in the eastern hemisphere of the globe have to wait a little longer to taste the final release of Firefox 3. According to the Mozilla blog, the record attempt will start at 10:00AM PDT [05:00PM UTC] [10:30PM IST] [09:00PM GST] on June 17th 2008 CE. But do remember you have entire tomorrow also to download.
On 17th June 2008 @ 07:30 am by Arul N S
I am yet to download the official release of Gran Paradiso, the Mozilla Foundation‘s developers are already discussing about the next update to Firefox. Going with the tradition of naming Firefox projects with place names, the Firefox 3.1 project is named as Shiretoko after the Japenese National Park in the north eastern tip of the island of Hokkaido, Japan. The word in native tongue means “end of earth”.
Shiretoko is a minor update to the Gran Paradiso which would be running the Gecko 1.9.1 Engine and most of the features that didn’t make in time to the 3 release.
- One of the major feature would be visual Tab switching. For now Ctrl+Tab extension serves the purpose in Gran Paradiso. This feature would be integrated into the browser along with Tab searching and filtering.
- There are lot of features for Tagging which include bulk tagging, tag autocomplete, lightweight tagging UI, Advanced Search UI.
- In the add-ons divison there would be enhanced compatibility checking during upgrades which means we might have to really wait till the developer makes the extension compatible than we doing it ourselves
The entire feature list of this release can be obtained from the Mozilla’s planning center for Firefox 3.1. The nightly builds of alpha release 1 can be obtained from Mozilla’s FTP servers here. It will be installed under the name of Minefield, the codename for Mozilla’s testing builds.
Source : [Mozilla Wiki]
On 16th June 2008 @ 01:21 pm by Arul N S
With the everybody getting ready for Firefox 3 release tomorrow, Google silently seems to have updated their Toolbar extension to accommodate the latest version. Even though according to the version info in the official site is still carrying the old version number of 3.0.20070525, the version that is being offered for download is 3.1.20080605W
There has been no significant changes in the layout or any new features in this release but still for those who jumped the wagon with Firefox release candidates and had been handicapped without this, it would be a relief.
