Hasta La Gadget!

Our friends at Joystiq have obtained screenshots showing off Hulu Plus in action on the console, as well as a shot of the Kinect Hub with Hulu and Netflix apps included. According to their tipster the Hulu (which looks similar to Zune Video as predicted) and Avatar Kinect apps are “fully functional,” with good tracking of their movements similar to existing uses for the peripheral. there’s no word on whether or not members of the larger public preview will get an early peek at these features, but you can still hit the source link below for a better look.

Update: The folks over at OmniTechNews have a hands-on video of Hulu Plus. Check it out after the break.

Continue reading Hulu Plus, Kinect updates for Xbox 360 caught on camera (update: video!)

Hulu Plus, Kinect updates for Xbox 360 caught on camera (update: video!) originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 14 Apr 2011 20:12:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You had to know it was a matter of time before Windows 8 showed up on these great internets for all to download — illegitimately. An early version (6.1.7850) has been making the rounds at manufacturers and it’s finally escaped the confines of beta labs. We haven’t braved the torrent sites ourselves to download this, and we certainly wouldn’t recommend that you do, but the screenshots we’ve seen definitely peg this particular revision as a slight evolution of Windows 7, seemingly not including all the revolutionary tweaks to come. It’s still early days, remember. Plenty of time left for the magic to happen.

[Thanks to everyone who sent this in]

Windows 8 leaked, caught looking a lot like Windows 7 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 13 Apr 2011 07:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This article was written on July 09, 2009 by CyberNet.

Ever since we did a browser comparison test last year there have been a lot of emails and comments asking if we were going to update the article to reflect new releases. I thought about adding in the new browsers as they came out, but decided against it for one reason or another. Instead I thought it would be better to just do a fresh article, and include even more stats than last time.

The main reason that I thought this was worthy of its own article was because a lot has changed in the last year. Since March 2008 we’ve seen major milestone releases from each of big browser makers, and to top it off Google Chrome has come onto the scene. These browsers have also shifted focus from adding nifty new features to diving deep into the code trying to squeeze out every last ounce of performance.

We’ve got a lot in store for you today ranging from JavaScript speed tests to memory usage comparisons, and we’ll even throw in some Acid 3 coverage. Lets go ahead and dive right in.

Notes about testing:

• All of these tests were performed on the same Windows XP SP3 machine that is wired into a network to eliminate the effects of wireless disturbances.
• All browsers started with a clean profile and no add-ons/extensions were installed.
• All browser data, including caches, were cleared before each test was run.
• Only one browser was open at a time, and no other applications (other than standard XP services) were running.
• Internet Explorer 8 was used in the native rendering mode (“standards compliant mode”).
• No plug-ins (Flash, Java, etc…) were installed on the machine to ensure that slow performance wasn’t due to the loading of a plug-in.

–JavaScript Tests–

The main speed test that everyone seems to use for JavaScript is SunSpider. Last year we compared the browsers with the SunSpider test prior to writing our first comparison, and so we wanted to try something different. That’s when we turned to the MooTools SlickSpeed Test. It tests various operations against a lot of common JavaScript libraries including MooTools and JQuery.

So which one did we go with this year? Well, we did both. We ran each test, SunSpider and SlickSpeed, a total of three times each. Then we averaged the results together to get the pretty little graphs you see below. For both of them the goal was for the browser to complete the tests as fast as possible, and so a lower number is better.

Sunspider Test:

1. Safari 4: 603ms
2. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 636ms
3. Google Chrome 2.0: 720ms
4. Firefox 3.5: 1278ms
5. Opera 10 ^Beta: 2975ms
6. Opera 9.64: 3931ms
7. Internet Explorer 8: 5441ms

MooTools SlickSpeed Test:

1. Opera 10 ^Beta: 330ms
2. Safari 4: 355ms
3. Opera 9.64: 375ms
4. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 464ms
5. Firefox 3.5: 580ms
6. Google Chrome 2.0: 763ms
7. Internet Explorer 8: 1901ms

–Website Rendering Tests–

I used the same method for testing website load times as I did last year. It’s a website called Numion Stopwatch that uses some fancy JavaScript to monitor when a page has finished loading, and then spits out the amount of time it took to complete.

We used two extremely popular sites for these tests: ESPN and the Wall Street Journal. Each site was loaded up three times in each browser, and then the results were averaged together. Obviously we were targeting which browser could load the websites the fastest, and so a lower number is better:

ESPN Load Time:

1. Safari 4: 1.936 seconds
2. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 2.194 seconds
3. Firefox 3.5: 2.380 seconds
4. Internet Explorer 8: 2.604 seconds
5. Opera 10 ^Beta: 2.605 seconds
6. Opera 9.64: 2.651 seconds
7. Google Chrome 2.0: 2.873 seconds

Wall Street Journal Load Time:

1. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 1.612 seconds
2. Opera 10 ^Beta: 1.989 seconds
3. Opera 9.64: 2.141 seconds
4. Safari 4: 2.166 seconds
5. Google Chrome 2.0: 2.552 seconds
6. Firefox 3.5: 2.886 seconds
7. Internet Explorer 8: 3.292 seconds

–Memory Usage Tests–

I’m sure this is what many of you were looking for. As geeks we like to have a lean browser that knows how to handle itself without us having to keep a watchful eye over it. That’s why we ran numerous different tests to see just how well a browser controls its memory usage when loading a decent number of sites, and also whether it’s able to release that memory once you’ve closed the tabs.

Here’s a rundown of the order in which we ran the tests to collect the stats:

1. We 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.
5. Closed all the tabs except for Google.com, which was always the first site opened. Then we took a memory usage reading.

And here are the results. The best browser for each test is highlighted in green, and the worst is highlighted in red.

–Acid 3 Tests–

Last year we also took a look at how the various browsers scored on the Acid 3 test. At the time a Safari nightly build was the closest to perfection by reaching a score of 86 out of 100. Today, however, is a different story. A few browsers can handle the test perfectly, some are very very close, and others (yeah, IE) have some work cut out for themselves.

Note: Click on any of the thumbnails for a full-size rendering.

1. Safari 4 (100/100) – It gets a perfect score and renders everything correctly.
   
2. Opera 10 ^Beta (100/100) – It gets a perfect score and renders everything correctly.
   
3. Google Chrome 2.0 (100/100) – It gets a perfect score, but not all tests are executed successfully.
   
4. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta (100/100) – It gets a perfect score, but not all tests are executed successfully.
   
5. Firefox 3.5 (93/100) – It gets a near perfect score.
   
6. Opera 9.6 (85/100) – This is the oldest release we tested, and it comes as no surprise that it doesn’t pass the test. It should be noted that the next milestone, version 10, does pass the test perfectly as seen above.
   
7. Internet Explorer 8 (20/100) – While they still have a ways to go before they get a perfect, I do have to give them credit for at least making the image look halfway normal. You know what I’m talking about if you remember what IE7′s rendering of the Acid 3 test was like.
   

–Conclusion–

So which browser is the winner? I wouldn’t really say any of them outshine the others. The problem that we are going to face with performance tests from here on out is that the browsers will all come very close to each other in the standings… often within a fraction of a second from one another. As the browsers continue to get optimized we will see these times get even closer, and performance might become less of a concern which picking which one we want to use. So I’d say to pick the browser you feel the most comfortable with, because it’s getting hard to distinguish one browser from another when it comes to performance.

What’s your take on the stats? Anything stand out to you? Will you be switching browsers based upon anything you learned here?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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Chrome 11 goes beta with speech-to-text capabilities originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 23 Mar 2011 11:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Announced at BlackBerry’s 2010 Developer Conference last fall, BBM Social Platform has just become available to interested third-party devs in beta form. Of course, you might be hoping that it opens BlackBerry Messenger to other (read: non-BlackBerry) platforms via API… but yeah, that’s not happening quite yet. Instead, the SDK allows folks developing for BlackBerry OS to integrate BBM capabilities into their own apps, and the list of capabilities is pretty extensive: you’ll be able to read and update user profiles, embed BBM chats inside your app, and transfer files, just to name a few of the big ones (with the user’s permission, of course). The current beta works for Java apps, while RIM’s hard at work crafting a new version for release in April that’ll add WebWorks web app compatibility.

RIM’s BBM Social Platform goes to open beta, lets devs bake BBM into BlackBerry apps originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 15 Mar 2011 17:08:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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