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Adobe Announces Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 with Multitouch Support

Bart Salisbury — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 14:16:51 -0600

It’s not just the season for giving thanks, it’s apparently the season for coughing up betas. Yesterday Microsoft released the Office 2010 beta to developers (and to regular users on November 18). Today Adobe has announced beta versions of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0.

AIR allows developers to create Internet applications that run outside a browser on a variety of operating systems. Flash provides multimedia content within a browser, again on various operating systems. Both beta versions will offer global error handling (a benefit for developers), local microphone access, and, should you be blessed with a touch screen, support for multi-touch and gestures. Flash will also incorporate the latest hardware decoding of H.264 on Windows PCs. While AIR will add communication with native applications on the local machine; mass storage detection; an open document API; a faster JavaScript engine; and new HTML5/CSS3 capabilities.

The betas for Flash Player and AIR are available now for Windows, OS X, and Linux, as well as x86-based netbooks.

Image Credit: Adobe

Netscape Navigator Turns 15

Ryan Whitwam — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 19:23:15 -0500

The Internet was just beginning to find a mainstream audience in 1994. It could be said that the introduction of Netscape Navigator on October 13th of that year had a lot to do with increasing internet adoption. Netscape was a huge leap forward, easily leapfrogging other graphical browsers. It supported colored backgrounds, text styling, JavaScript, and media embedding. In many ways, it was the first modern web browser.

By 1996, Netscape had captured 80% market share. Development was rapid, seeing the incorporation of CSS and table layout features as time passed. Microsoft put out the first version of Internet Explorer a year after Netscape, but found little success.

The good times couldn’t last forever, though. Microsoft released IE 4 in 1998. Thanks to some advanced features, IE captured the number one spot in only 12 months. A series of poor decisions left the Netscape browser in the hands of AOL, and we all know how that went. Development slowed, and the once great browser languished. Support was finally completely dropped in 2008.

Amid all the dark times, one great thing did happen with Netscape. The browser code was open-sourced in February 1998. It wouldn’t become apparent until years later how well that worked out for the web. From Netscape, the Mozilla Foundation built Firefox. Many feel that the Firefox browser is the best available, and it enjoys a healthy 27% market share. Let’s all have a moment of silence to remember Netscape on, this, its 15th birthday. Was Netscape your first browser? Any fond memories of those dial-up days?

Google Adds In-browser PDF Previewing to Search Results

Bart Salisbury — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 15:29:00 -0500

Google is taking steps to make viewing PDF files that appear in search results a whole lot easier. With “Quick View” PDF files can be viewed directly from the search results page, rather than having to visit the originating site, load the page as HTML, or use a third-party plug-in.

PDF has the advantage of displaying material as originally formatted. This is invaluable for forms or other complexly formatted documents which HTML is a poor substitute. This feature, which Google has been testing since July, is now available.

For search results that are PDF files Google will include a “Quick View” link. Clicking this opens up the original PDF file in Google Docs, where it can be reviewed or downloaded. (A plain HTML display option is also available, for those who can’t live without.) The only downside, so far, is that Google has connected Quick View to about half of the PDF files in their index. Unindexed PDFs will still have to be handled old-school.

Image Credit: Google

Webkit's WebGL Arrives, Poised to Revolutionize Browser-based Gaming

Ryan Whitwam — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 20:04:58 -0500

A big WebGL patch has recently been released, bringing us a step closer to 3D gaming in the browser. WebGL is a project attempting to bring a few new features to HTML5 allowing JavaScript binding to OpenGL ES 2.0. When complete, this could mean fairly complex 3D games running in a WebKit browser with no plugins required.

It may even be possible to see support for WebGL in native WebKit browsers in as little as 6 months. Safari and Chrome are probably on the forefront of this technology, as they are based on WebKit. Firefox, while based on the Gecko engine, has an extension capable of displaying a WebGL 3D canvas. As for Internet Explorer, don’t hold your breath. Microsoft still has yet to implement HTML5, let alone upcoming technologies.

New Browser Benchmarks: Safari 42 Times Faster Than IE7

Andy Salisbury — Wed, 25 Feb 2009 15:03:36 -0600

Upon the release of the Safari 4 Beta, Apple was boasting some mighty impressive speeds. Now, thanks to some extensive testing, it looks like the boys down in Cupertino deserve a pat on the back, with their browser clocking in at a staggering 42 times faster than Internet Explorer 7.

Most surprising, is that Apple’s latest addition was able to beat out Google’s Chrome (the proclaimed “Speed King”) in testing, along with Firefox 3, Opera 9.6 and Mozilla’s developmental Minefield. The tests were conducted on both a PC running XP SP2, and a Mac running OS X 10.6 with all of the latest updates applied.

If you’re looking to check out the full results of the speed testing, check them out here.

Image Credit: CNET

Mozilla Launches Fennec Alpha 2 – Is This the Safari Killer?

Justin Kerr — Sun, 28 Dec 2008 23:03:17 -0600

Outside of mobile Safari, and perhaps to a lesser extent Opera Mini, the mobile browser experience can be somewhat unsatisfying. Poor page rendering, or completely unusable interfaces seem to plague the mobile experience. That’s where Mozilla has seen an opportunity to expand its browser platform, and a market that is still relatively untapped. With the launch of Fennec Alpha 2, Mozilla is one step closer to its goal of a mobile Firefox. Alpha 2 seems to address many of the performance issues that hindered the previous version, and these complaints were clearly acknowledged in a blog posting by Mozilla’s Mark Finkle.

“While we focused much of the previous alpha on getting the user experience how we wanted, we’ve spent much of the time since focused on improving performance. We’ve made major strides improving startup performance, panning and zooming performance, and responsiveness while pages are loading.”

My somewhat unscientific testing seems to backup these claims and performance has defiantly improved. Currently support is limited to Nokia's Maemo based N800 and N810, but compatibility with Windows Mobile and Symbian is apparently well underway. These platforms could defiantly use a bit more choice when it comes to browsers, and many are hoping it will finally give the power enjoyed by mobile Safari users to those who prefer non Apple hardware.

Do you think Fennec has what it takes?

Opera 9.6 Beta Launch - A Private Affair

Pulkit Chandna — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 02:29:52 -0500

In the last few months there have been a couple of pompous browser launches – FF3 and Chrome. But the launch of Opera 9.6 beta went largely unnoticed. In fact, Opera’s latest browser version failed to elicit any interest whatsoever. Its Opera 9.6 announcement felt like an inaudible whisper compared to Google’s bellowing Chrome marketing campaign. But Opera Software’s PR manager, Thomas Ford, offered a sanguine view of the entire situation to DailyTech. He took pride in the fact that Opera had managed to stay in business, despite the challenge offered by new entrants like Chrome. Ford pointed that Opera’s usage grew by 3% after Chrome’s launch.

Get Your Hands on Firefox 3 RC2 - Now! (Updated)

Mark Soper — Wed, 04 Jun 2008 15:00:55 -0500

As reported by MacObserver and ZDNet's Andrian Kingsley-Hughes, Mozilla is rolling out Firefox 3's Release Candidate 2.

Update 2: 6-4-2008, 2:14PM PDT

Firefox 3 RC2 is now available using the shortcuts on the Firefox RC page. No "surgery" is necessary. Enjoy!

Although the Firefox RC page doesn't yet provide shortcuts to RC2, it's easy to edit the shortcuts provided on the RC1 page to get your hands on RC2 right now:

1. Navigate to the Mozilla Firefox RC release page.

2. Right-click on the link for RC1 and select Copy Shortcut.

3. Paste the shortcut into a text editor (like Notepad).

4. Change the reference to RC1 to RC2.

5. Copy the changed shortcut.

6. Paste it into your web browser and you're downloading RC2!

RC2 is designed to make sure that any lingering bugs found in RC1 are thoroughly exterminated by the time Firefox 3 rolls out in mid-June.

Enjoy!

Updated 6-4-2008 1:31PM PDT

If you're more comfortable with drilling down manually into the FTP folder, start here: ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/firefox/releases/3.0rc2/.

Just keep in mind that you must make sure you choose the correct language folder after you choose the correct operating system folder. For example, choose the en-US folder for US English.