Hasta La Gadget!

While the PC and Xbox One versions of the Titanfall Beta are appearing in access code form this weekend on eBay, we’ve set about looking for a few more sources … Continue reading

This article was written on May 13, 2008 by CyberNet.

Flock 1.2 Beta is now available, and as hard as it is to believe this version is even more social. This Beta makes it possible to keep up with your friends’ activity on Digg or Pownce, and get AOL email notifications instantly as new messages come crawling in.

Below are two screenshots of what the Digg integration looks like. On the left is what appears in My World, which is your personalized homepage. Here you’ll see your friends’ activities from all of the social networks including Digg. Pictured on the right is the People sidebar, and it shows stories that were recently submitted and Dugg by your friends. There’s also a handy little search box at the bottom that makes it easy to search through your Digg friends.

Curious what services Flock supports? The list continues to grow at a steady pace, and right now it includes:

• People: Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Pownce, Twitter, and YouTube
• Media Sharing: Photobucket, Picasa, Piczo, Blogger, Blogsome, LiveJournal, and Typepad WordPress.com, and Xanga
• Online Favorites: Del.icio.us and Magnolia
• Webmail: AOL Mail, Gmail, and Yahoo! Mail.

Flock is truly becoming a shining point of Web 2.0 services, and to help attract new users the Flock team has also started to assemble how-to videos on using Flock 1.2. Here are the six that they have put together thus far:

• Getting Started
• Getting Social
• Reading Feeds
• Finding and Sharing Media
• Blogging
• Uploading Photos

Once Flock gets updated with Firefox 3 I think it will become an even better browser. Hopefully that will help out on the performance side a bit, because even in Flock 1.2 I still see it eating up too much of my precious memory.

Flock 1.2 Beta

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

As promised, Pebble rolled out an app store for its iPhone users earlier today, and Android users were left asking for info about when their own would surface. Fortunately, the … Continue reading

This article was written on March 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

We’ve been asked for quite awhile to provide a performance comparison of the different mainstream browsers out there, and so today we are going to show you the stats from several different areas that users generally find to be the most important. Things like memory usage, page load time, and JavaScript performance will all be covered below.

One thing that you need to remember with these tests is that the results are all relative to each other. Each browser is running on the exact same machine so that the comparisons are accurate. What we heard the last time we did tests like this is “such and such browser performed a lot better/worse for me.” We appreciate hearing what your results are, but for the sake of accuracy they can’t really be compared to what we get.

Notes:

• All of these tests are performed on the same Windows Vista SP1 machine, and is wired into a network to minimize the effects of wireless disturbances.
• To test both IE7 and IE8 Beta I ran all of the tests in IE 7, installed IE 8, and then reran all the tests again.
• All browsers started with a clean profile and no add-ons/extensions installed.
• Caches were cleared before each test was run.
• Only one browser was open at a time and no other applications (other than standard Vista services) were running.
• Internet Explorer 8 was always used in the native rendering mode (a.k.a. standards compliant mode).

–JavaScript Tests–

We’ve previously run Apple’s SunSpider JavaScript tests, but there was apparently some controversy of using that because people felt that it could be a little biased. We wanted to pick a test that used tools you’ll find in sites you visit everyday. That’s why we went with the MooTools SlickSpeed test which checks the browser against different JavaScript libraries: Dojo 1.0.2, JQuery 1.2.3, MooTools 1.2B2, and Prototype 1.6.0.2.

Many sites use those libraries, and even we use JQuery for things such as the AJAX commenting. By putting the browsers back-to-back with the SlickSpeed test, we’ll be able to find out exactly which ones will give us the better JavaScript performance (this is what really matters on a day to day basis).

Pretty much none of the browsers were able to complete all of the tests error-free, and so we’re focusing purely on the speed. We ran each test three times, totaled the runtime (measured in milliseconds) for all four libraries, and then averaged the results. In the parenthesis you’ll see the results of each test we ran before averaging them together (the overall smaller number is better):

1. Safari 3.1: 447.33ms (407,536,399)
2. Opera 9.5.9841 Beta: 502.00ms (523,456,527)
3. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 909.00ms (921,904,902)
4. Opera 9.26: 1036.33ms (992,1034,1083)
5. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 1507.67ms (1523,1472,1528)
6. Internet Explorer 7: 5944.33ms (5965,5998,5870)
7. Internet Explorer 8 Beta: 6690ms (6245,7206,6619)

It looks like the new Safari 3.1 takes the crown on this set of tests!

–Page Load Times–

I was trying to figure out what the best method would be to measure page load times in all the browsers. Sure some of the browsers report how long it takes for a site to load, but we wanted a universal way that would work across all of the browsers. We figured sitting here with a stop watch just wouldn’t cut it.

After some searching around I came across the Numion Stopwatch, which is a great tool for measuring how long it takes for a site to load. It’s entirely encased in a website so that there is nothing to install, and it uses JavaScript to notify you exactly how long it takes a page to load. From what I can tell it does a rather superb job!

We ran the page load test three times on two different sites so that we could really see what the results were like. We used the Official Google Blog and the Yahoo Search Blog for our benchmarks, and there are very good reasons that we chose those sites. Both of those serve up nearly the exact same content every time you load the site. If I chose a site such as ours we would run into the issue of different ads being served in the different browsers.

For each test the browser started with a cleared cache, and the three results were averaged together to get a single overall load time (measured in seconds). In the parenthesis you’ll see the results of each test we ran before averaging them together (the overall smaller number is better):

Note: I literally went and deleted each browser’s cache after each refresh just to remove any concern that a Control/Shift refresh was not deleting the site’s cache correctly.

The Google Blog:

1. Opera 9.5.9841 Beta: 2.498s (2.129,2.606,2.760)
2. Safari 3.1: 2.798s (2.619,2.963,2.811)
3. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 3.009s (3.167,3.347,2.513)
4. Opera 9.26: 3.360s (3.606,3.215,3.260)
5. Internet Explorer 7: 4.235s (4.402,3.800,4.504)
6. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 4.485s (4.852,4.258,4.346)
7. Internet Explorer 8 Beta: 4.602s (4.409,4.238,5.158)

The Yahoo Search Blog:

1. Safari 3.1: 1.411s (1.547,1.312,1.375)
2. Opera 9.5.9841 Beta: 1.599s (1.578,1.625,1.593)
3. Opera 9.26: 1.677s (1.547,1.625,1.860)
4. Firefox 2.0.0.12: 1.771s (1.797,1.844,1.672)
5. Firefox 3 Beta 4: 2.055s (2.430,2.143,1.591)
6. Internet Explorer 7: 2.594s (2.563,2.219,3.000)
7. Internet Explorer 8 Beta: 3.365s (2.875,3.750,3.470)

It looks like Safari 3.1 and Opera 9.5 both do really well in these tests, and I would consider it a tie between the two.

–Memory Usage–

This is probably one of the areas that interests most of you. Memory usage has become a big concern these days as we’ve seen some browsers (*cough* Firefox *cough*) use up insane amounts of our computer’s resources. So we took each of the browsers seen in the previous tests, developed a list of sites to open in each, and went at it.

We’re not going to list out all of the sites that we decided to visit, but they are all sites that are extremely popular. Places like MySpace, YouTube, CNN, and others were all included as we chugged through our four different memory usage readings:

1. Started the browser, and took a memory usage reading.
2. Loaded 10 predetermined sites in tabs, and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
3. Loaded 15 more predetermined sites in tabs (totaling 25 sites), and took a memory usage reading after all the sites finished loading.
4. Let the browser sit for 10 minutes with the 25 tabs open, and then took a memory usage reading.

And now for the results! The table below lists the different browsers and the result from each test mentioned above. The best browser from each test is highlighted in green, and the worst is highlighted in red.

For this round it’s clear that Firefox 3 Beta 4 walks away as the clear winner. Mozilla has obviously put some work into making Firefox 3 a more memory efficient browser than it previously was, and this is proof of that.

I can’t say that I was surprised that some version of Internet Explorer almost always did the worst, but I was quite taken back that Internet Explorer 8 shows little improvement over version 7. Apparently that is not the focus of Microsoft right now.

–Overview–

It took us about 6 hours to compile all of the results that you see above, and I would say that doing this on your own is not really for the faint of heart. Things like not being able to run IE7 and IE8 side-by-side is really a time killer, but we wanted to be sure to include both versions in our results. And surprisingly the only browser that crashed on us was Internet Explorer 8 Beta when trying to open the 25 tabs.

We’d love to hear any comments you may have regarding our results, but remember that what you’ll see on your computer will likely differ from what we see. The important thing to take out of the stats is how each of them relatively rank up against each other.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on March 26, 2008 by CyberNet.

Fedora 9 is stepping forward with their first Beta, and it looks like it has quite a few quality enhancements that both GNOME and KDE users alike will appreciate. Being a KDE fan myself I’m extremely happy to see that the Fedora team has taken the time to integrate the new KDE 4.0 into the operating system. And it apparently works so well that they decided to make 4.0 the default for anyone using the KDE desktop. I could be wrong, but I believe Fedora is the first to make KDE 4.0 the default for that type of desktop.

There has been a lot of work going on that will make this an incredible release, and you’ll even see the improvements during the installation. Now you’ll be able to resize ext2, ext3, and NTFS partitions during the installation process making it easier to install Fedora on a drive that isn’t empty.

That’s not all you’ll find in Fedora 9 either. Here are some of the other features you’ll find in Fedora 9 Beta:

• GNOME 2.22
• Helpful world time clock
• Better file system performance
• Security improvements
• Power management at the login screen
• The ability to dynamically configure displays
• Better Bluetooth integration
• Improved podcast support
• And many other enhancements
• KDE 4.0.2, which includes a brand new desktop and panel with many new concepts:
• Integrated desktop search
• Brand new visual style called Oxygen
• New multimedia API called Phonon
• New hardware integration framework called Solid
• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• Native look and feel
• Desktop integration
• The new Places that replaces bookmarks
• Reworked address bar
• NetworkManager Improvements
• Ad-hoc support, so that you can easily form a network with any near-by wireless devices
• Support for mobile broadband cards (GSM/CDMA) through PPP
• System-wide network configuration through NetworkManager with PolicyKit
• Support for creating and installing to encrypted filesystems

My download of Fedora 9 Beta is still in the process of finishing, but for those of you who decide to give it a whirl post your thoughts in the comments below.

Fedora 9 Beta Homepage

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com