Glen Scott - Keeping it simple » browsers

BrowserPlus to become Open Source

Glen — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 08:56:04 +0000

The new BrowserPlus framework – a way of extending your browser capabilities – will become open source next year, which seems a sensible way to increase its adoption:

The big idea here is that we’ll have the whole platform open sourced by mid-next year, and as soon as possible we’ll have many of the services we’ve written open sourced, as well as the APIs needed to write new services. Our goal is to empower the community to contribute actual patches and new services – code to compliment the feedback.

Microsoft considers WebKit for Internet Explorer

Glen — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 10:00:00 +0000

Wow.

Open source is interesting. Apple has embraced Webkit and we may look at that, but we will continue to build extensions for IE 8.

AppleInsider | Microsoft considers adopting WebKit for Internet Explorer

JavaScript engine war hots up

Glen — Fri, 19 Sep 2008 08:25:33 +0000

Coming soon after the announcement of Google’s new Chrome browser and its V8 JavaScript engine, the WebKit project has now released details of SquirrelFish Extreme. An update to the never officially released SquirrelFish engine, the benchmarks against Safari 3.1 certainly look impressive. Other benchmarks also show it outperforming both V8 and Firefox 3.1′s TraceMonkey engine.

SquirrelFish Extreme uses four different technologies to deliver much better performance than the original SquirrelFish: bytecode optimizations, polymorphic inline caching, a lightweight â€œcontext threadedâ€ JIT compiler, and a new regular expression engine that uses our JIT infrastructure.

Surfin’ Safari – Blog Archive » Introducing SquirrelFish Extreme

Google bringing new browser to the party

Glen — Tue, 02 Sep 2008 08:05:38 +0000

Google have announced news of Chrome, a new open source Webkit-based browser. The central premise is that it has been designed from the ground-up to work efficiently with the demanding web applications of today’s web. In particular, it features a JavaScript engine called V8 which can utilise multiple processes, as opposed to the single-process engines that power Firefox and Safari.

As Google are emphasising performance, it will be interesting to compare their efforts with Safari’s new SquirrelFish JavaScript engine.

Google Chrome, Google’s Browser Project

Internet Explorer beta with new porn mode

Glen — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 08:36:48 +0000

The new beta of Internet Explorer 8 for Windows features a new feature called “InPrivate Browsing”. As Microsoft explain,

Now you can shop for that special gift with confidence knowing your family wonâ€™t accidentally find out.

Windows Internet Explorer 8: Home page

Firefox 3 released: still looks dodgy on Mac

Glen — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 15:16:36 +0000

Using Firefox 3 is really a different experience from using OS X. Itâ€™s not Windows, itâ€™s not OS X and itâ€™s not Linux. Itâ€™s something else.

Yahoo preview Web desktop platform

Glen — Thu, 29 May 2008 08:12:00 +0000

Today Yahoo are entering the world of Web desktops (“Webtops”) with BrowerPlus, a plugin for your browser that makes building rich applications a lot simpler.

Included is an example Flickr uploading application that allows you to drag and drop files from your desktop onto the browser.

BrowserPlus

My favourite Safari Extension

Glen — Thu, 15 May 2008 14:48:31 +0000

Inquisitor is a fantastic search add-on for Safari, and it’s recently been updated to version 3. Basically, it enhances the Safari search box by suggesting results and allowing searches on sites other than Google. Pretty essential, I would say.

Inquisitor

Flock browser a real contender

Glen — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 20:03:24 +0000

It’s been about a year since I last looked at Flock, the “Social Web Browser”. In that time it’s matured into a very stable and useful application, perfect if you are into social networking and blogging. Some of the sites that it integrates with are:

Facebook
Flickr
Twitter
Youtube

Flock

Make Safari More Accessible from the Keyboard

Glen — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 00:36:08 +0000

To make it easier to navigate pages using the keyboard, go into Safari Preferences and under the Advanced tab, turn on “Press Tab to highlight each item on a webpage”. Now you can use tab to go forward through links and form elements on a page, and shift-tab to go backwards. Follow a highlighted link simply by pressing return.