daria42 writes with news that Mozilla has released the second alpha build for Firefox 3.1, codenamed “Shiretoko.” The new build includes “support for the HTML 5 <video> element” and the ability to “drag and drop tabs between browser windows.” ComputerWorld is running a related story about benchmarks shown by Mozilla’s Brendan Eich which indicate that Firefox 3.1 will run Javascript faster than Chrome.
Mozilla has officially announced the availability of the second Firefox 3.1 alpha. This release includes support for the highly-anticipated HTML 5 “video” element and a handful of other features that move the browser forward.
http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080905-first-look-firefox-3-1-alpha-2-officially-released.html
The auto-suggest feature of Google’s new Chrome browser does more than just help users get where they are going. It will also give Google a wealth of information on what people are doing on the Internet besides searching.
http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/09/03/it-looks-like-yahoo-dislikes-internet-explorer-too/
Mozilla CTO and JavaScript creator Brendan Eich has posted the results of benchmarks which indicate that Firefox’s new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine outperforms Google’s new V8.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/linux.ars/2008/09/03/new-firefox-javascript-engine-is-faster-than-chromes-v8
From incognito browsing and the streamlined download manager to URL highlighting and improved search, let’s take a look at how you can bring some of Google Chrome’s best features to Firefox.
http://lifehacker.com/5044518/enable-chromes-best-features-in-firefox
Today Google unveiled Chrome, an open-source web browser built for web apps. The release begs the question: What happened to its relationship with Mozilla, its Mountain View, Calif.-based neighbor and formerly close collaborator on Firefox, the open-source upstart trying (and to some extent succeeding) to take a piece out of Internet Explorer?
http://gigaom.com/2008/09/02/why-did-google-abandon-firefox/
Google’s Chrome trounces Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Safari on speed tests for JavaScript, a key foundation for rich Web apps.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-1001_3-10030888-92.html?part=rss
snydeq writes “Consuming twice as much RAM as Firefox and saturating the CPU with nearly six times as many execution threads, Microsoft’s latest beta release of Internet Explorer 8 is in fact more demanding on your PC than Windows XP itself, research firm Devil Mountain Software found in performance tests. Accroding to the firm, which operates a community-based testing network, IE8 Beta 2 consumed 380MB of RAM and spawned 171 concurrent threads during a multi-tab browsing test of popular Web destinations. InfoWorld’s Randall Kennedy speculates that Microsoft may be designing IE8 for the multicore future. But until your machine sports four or eight discrete processing cores, IE8 will remain ‘porcine,’ Devil Mountain’s Craig Barth says.”
Firefox is a fastest growing popular web browser. There are lots of ease provided by the firefox and this is the main reason for its popularity. There are lots of free downloadable extensions and add-ons available on the internet for firefox and there demands are increasing every day.
http://www.smashingapps.com/2008/09/01/9-amazing-firefox-add-ons-that-will-save-your-time.html
Firefox 3.0, released not too long ago, was generally well-received. It added a load of new features, while also providing much-needed speed improvements and better memory management. Some new features, however, have met more resistance - one of them is the rather complicated user interface thrown at users when they reach a website with an invalid or expired SSL certificate.
When I encountered the page for the first time, I was at a loss as to what to do. The OSNews backend apparently has an invalid security certificate, as well as various websites of my university, so whenever I re-install Firefox somewhere, I need to add an exception for each of these websites. The new Firefox 3.0 exception interface, however, is a four-step process that is wholly unclear (the “Or you can add an exception” is easily overlooked), and will be especially difficult to grasp for ordinary, normal users - exactly the group of users the feature tries to protect. As the Pingdom weblog explains:
The problem is that Firefox doesn’t just give you this page following expired certificates, but also with self-signed certificates - something especially annoying for smaller websites. However, big websites are also affected, such as the official website for the United States Army. Heck, even Google forgets to update their certificates.
The Mozilla Foundation defends their decisions as being necessary to prevent malicious and fraudulent websites from carrying out their malintent. Jonathan Nightingale writes:
With a self-signed certificate, we don’t know whether to trust it or not. It’s not that these certificates are implicitly evil, it’s that they are implicitly untrusted - no one has vouched for them, so we ask the user.
Personally, I agree with the fact that Firefox properly warns me that I’m visiting a site with an invalid or self-signed certificate, but it would be nicer if the user interface that I’m presented with is less complicated, clearer, and easier to use.