Fluid - Web browser

Your web browser is for web browsing.

Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or Pandora fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site or Flash ad crashing your browser and causing you to lose your (say) Google Docs data in another tab?

If so, Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your WebApp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite WebApps as a separate Cocoa desktop application. Fluid gives any WebApp a home on your Mac OS X desktop complete with Dock icon, standard menu bar, logical separation from your other web browsing activity, and many, many other goodies.

Fluid includes Tabbed Browsing, built-in Userscripting (aka Greasemonkey), URL pattern matching for browsing whitelists and blacklists, bookmarks, auto-software updates via the Sparkle Update framework, custom SSB icons, a JavaScript API for showing Dock badges, Growl notifications, and Dock menu items, and more.

The Fluid Thumbnail Plug-in allows you to browse the web with CoverFlow or iPhoto-like thumbnail previews for links on the current page. Watch the screencast in the sidebar on the left to see the Thumbnail Plug-in in action. How does the Thumbnail Plug-in know how to find the links on the current page from which to make the thumbnails? Simple... Use CSS selectors to select links or images for a given URL pattern (like *google.com*). Add CoverFlow support for your own site with a simple CSS selector!

(Credit : Fluid)

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Skyfire's cell phone browser

Skyfire is a free, downloadable mobile browser that delivers rich web media

There's nothing fun about being on a wait list, especially when you're told the wait just got longer. Skyfire, a new cell phone browser demoed in February, hit such demand in its closed beta program, the company split participation into two rounds.

According to a Skyfire statement, those lucky ducks who signed up before March 1 made the cut for Beta 1 and will receive the golden invitation to join the testing in phases from now until the end of April. This first phalanx of users will also be invited to continue their testing as the second round of beta testers, who signed up March 2 or after, is welcomed aboard sometime this summer. If you've got a Windows Mobile phone, it's still not too late to add your name to Skyfire's growing list of second-session testers. In the meantime, live vicariously through this video of the browser's current features.

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Xoopit turns Gmail

Xoopit turns Gmail into a gorgeous media browser

All these media-hosting and social-networking services are great, but there's been a relatively untapped resource in tracking what you're sharing: your e-mail in-box. Today a new service called Xoopit is opening up in private beta to Gmail users who are looking to not only sort through the deluge of photos, videos, and other files that make their way into your in-box, but add ways to share that media with social networks you're already using.

Xoopit's answer is to have you install a small browser plug-in and give it the credentials to your Gmail account. It will crawl over all the data, and within 24 hours the entirety of your in-box, sent mail, and mailbox archive will be able to be browsed and sorted through in a whole new (and I think far simpler) manner. While Gmail has its own search function, it's not so good when it comes time to browse and interact with media from those search results like Google does with Web queries.

With Xoopit installed you can view photos sent to you like a photo slide show. It does the same for videos and files too. (Credit: CNET Networks)

I've only had it indexing my in-box for the past hour or so, but it's already made my in-box a lot more useful. The latest media can be browsed in a little thumbnail stream on the top of the page, which reminds me a lot of a similar feature in Flock. Additionally, photos, videos, and files can be viewed off-site at Xoopit.com. It takes a similar approach to DropBox (review) in giving you a reverse chronological stream of your media that can be viewed, downloaded, and managed while away from Gmail. The same interface is actually a part of Gmail once you install the plug-in, so users will feel right at home in either location.

I must say Xoopit is off to a really great start. For a new app, I found very little to gripe about. It succeeds in two major areas: one in speed, since it doesn't slow down your in-box whatsoever, and the other in ease of use. The user interface is incredibly intuitive and provides a far better media viewing experience than Gmail does on its own. (Credit: Webware)

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Firefox 3 Beta 4 Released For Download

Mozilla has released the fourth beta of its popular open source browser Firefox. This almost coincides with the release of the first beta version of Internet Explorer 8.1 by Microsoft. Mozilla says that the new beta version of Firefox has more than 900 enhancements. Additional stress has been given to performance, memory and simplifying the user interface.

The company also claimed that web applications run twice as fast in Firefox 3 when compared to the earlier version. The beta four also has a resume download application, a new location bar and an auto-complete system which presents options for the addresses of pages as soon as a user starts typing. Only the most relevant matches are shown based on frequency of use. Mozilla will release one more beta before coming out with the full fledged version of Firefox3.

Firefox is a fast, full-featured browser that makes browsing more efficient than ever before. More information about Firefox is available.

Firefox 3 Beta 4 is 5x faster than IE7, 3x faster than FF2

The almost-but-not-quite-final beta of Firefox 3 (FF3 beta 4) is now available for download. The most noticeable improvement is speed. In some tests, it’s three times faster than Firefox 2 (meaning the test completes in 1/3 the time), and a whopping five times faster than IE 7:

Other improvements in beta 4 include:
Smarter location bar that tunes itself to your browsing habits. As you type in part of the URL it will offer suggestions based on where you’ve been before. Better native look-n-feel on Vista, Mac OSX, and Linux.

This includes continuing work on icons, menus, native controls.
Zoom just the text or the whole page.
Zooming the text was one feature I missed from Firefox 2.
Reduced memory usage. This is the main reason I switched to Firefox 3 for my everyday use.
The old version often became unstable after a long session with many tabs open.

To see all the changes made so far in Firefox 3 read this excellent summary by Percy Cabello or see the release notes. Mozilla watchers expect one more beta before the production version is released.

Ed Burnette has programmed everything from device drivers and compilers to video games and multi-user servers. He is currently writing enterprise software in a variety of languages including C, Ruby, Python, and Java.

Download It

Source : technozone

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Mozilla VP talks IE 8, Firefox 3

LAS VEGAS--Mozilla Vice President Mike Schroepfer said Microsoft's decision to support a more standards-compliant mode by default should keep Web developers from having to waste so much time.

With the current set-up, he said that developers have a fairly easy time getting a site that renders properly in Opera, Safari, and Firefox, but often spend a lot of energy trying to get that same site to also render correctly in Internet Explorer.

"Web developers burn through a tremendous amount of time getting their sites to work with IE because of IE's special quirks," said Schroepfer, who I caught up with here at Mix '08.

He said that Microsoft's move toward greater embrace of standards with Internet Explorer 8 is a good thing.

"There are some encouraging things there and I hope to see more," he said.

In particular, it would be helpful if Microsoft gave a roadmap for which standards it planned to support down the road, that way Web developers could decide earlier to invest time. He said he would really like to see Microsoft support a new graphics standard known as scalable vector graphics.
"That would be a great win for the Web," he said.

Meanwhile, Schroepfer also talked up the benefits of Firefox 3, which is just hitting its fourth beta and is edging closer to a final release. In particular, he pointed to the browser's "Awesome bar" that remembers not only specific Web addresses that have been visited but also other information from the page. For example typing in "televisions" might bring up a recent TV search on Amazon, even though television wasn't in the address.
"Once you use it you actually can't use any other browser," he said. Also on tap are improved speed and antimalware features, he said.

source : technozone

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Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 - Download

Developer : Microsoft
License : Freeware
Size / OS : 14.4 MB, Windows XP/2003/Vista/Server 2008
Last Updated : March 5th, 2008, 20:04 GMT

Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 description
The first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 is alive and kicking. Well, you have been waiting for it for more than a year. Microsoft has successfully kept the lid closed on the work it was doing with Internet Explorer 8, more so than on the work poured into Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3 and Windows Server 2008. After being dogfooded throughout 2007 over at Microsoft, IE8 first peeped outside of Redmond with the recent private Beta 1 testing program. Now, Microsoft is ready to open Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 to all Windows users.

"Welcome to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, the latest test release of the most popular browser! This release contains some great advances in Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and layout, programming model, performance, reliability, usability and service integration. We are eager to ensure that the transition to Internet Explorer 8 is seamless for you and your audience, and to give you a head start on using many of the new features with your sites and services. We encourage you to test your sites and services, and our platform implementation, and give us feedback," stated Chris Wilson, IE Platform Architect.

The fact of the matter is that Microsoft's official Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1 public release webpage has went live ahead of the company's web-centric MIX08 conference in Las Vegas. During the opening keynote address at MIX08, Dean Hachamovitch, IE General Manager, will give an in-depth presentation of Internet Explorer 8.

To Download Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1, follow this link : Download

source: technozone

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Microsoft Releases Internet Explorer 8 Beta

Microsoft unveiled today the public beta version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) for developers at the annual MIX08 conference in Las Vegas.

By David A. Utter - Wed, 03/05/2008 - Review

Next version of Microsoft's browser emerged at MIX08

The answer to the question "how long until IE8 will be ready for download" turned out to be 3pm ET today.

A funny thing happened on the way to the Internet this afternoon. A few websites noted Internet Explorer 8 emerged as a beta download.

Several clicks and a restart later, we have IE8 Beta 1 for Developers running on Windows XP SP2. First order of business? The Acid2 Test of course!

Where previous versions of Internet Explorer, including IE7, bombed out of Acid2 in knee-slapping fashion, IE8 renders it as well as Opera ever has. Microsoft's chest-thumping about better standards compliance has proven accurate, at least by one measure.

The company also described the two big new features in IE8, called Activities and WebSlices. Activities enable the use of web services provided by Microsoft and other activity providers directly from text highlighted on a page and right-clicked by the user.

WebSlices enable people to subscribe to content directly within a webpage, as though it were a feed. Developers define parts of a web page as a WebSlice. From the WebSlices whitepaper:

WebSlices are enabled by adding HTML annotations directly to the Web page. WebSlices use a combination of the hAtom Microformat and the WebSlice format to describe a subscribable portion of a Web page.

People who subscribe to a WebSlice will be able to keep track of it from the Favorites bar in IE8. "If anything, this launch shows that Microsoft is not taking Firefox's creep into browser market share lightly," ReadWriteWeb's Sarah Perez said of the surprise launch.

Source : technozone

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Microsoft Embraces Standards For IE8

Fear of possible "legal and regulatory" issues likely motivated Microsoft to enable three rendering modes for the next version of the Internet Explorer browser.

Microsoft's rendering gyrations in its widely-used web browser gave web designers fits over the years. Pages needing special tweaks to overcome IE oddities like its handling of CSS meant designers had to practically design the same pages twice.

A nice round-up of standards compliance on HTML, CSS, DOM, and ECMAScript for IE, Firefox, and Opera may be found at Web Devout. We imagine web designers will look at the browser support comparison there and nod their heads in grim agreement.

A silver lining appeared in the cloud of Internet Explorer rendering with Microsoft's announcement of better support for web standards.

"Microsoft is now configuring the settings in Internet Explorer 8, the upcoming version of its browser, to render content - by default - using methods that give top priority to Web standards interoperability," they said.

Web designers may be stunned to read this quote from chief software architect Ray Ozzie: "Even in its first beta, IE8 correctly renders the popular test known as ‘Acid2,’ which was created by the Web community to promote real-world interoperability," he said.

The Acid2 test demonstrates a browser's compliance with HTML and CSS standards. Viewing it under IE7 and other versions of Internet Explorer returns a result that isn't even close to the reference rendering.

But having been stung recently by another fine from the European Union over its business practices, Microsoft found the motivation to make IE8 behave. IE8 will have three rendering modes in place to accomplish this:

Internet Explorer 8 has been designed to include three rendering modes: one that reflects Microsoft’s implementation of current Web standards, a second reflecting Microsoft’s implementation of Web standards at the time of the release of Internet Explorer 7 in 2006, and a third based on rendering methods dating back to the early Web. The newest rendering mode is forward-looking and preferred by Web designers, while the others are present to enable compatibility with the myriad sites across the Web that are currently optimized for previous versions of Internet Explorer.

"While we do not believe there are currently any legal requirements that would dictate which rendering mode must be chosen as the default for a given browser, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue," Microsoft general counsel Brad Smith said in a statement.

Source : technozone

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