Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on September 03, 2007 by CyberNet.

CyberNet Exclusive Look

We’ve decided to break away from our normal CyberNotes today to take an exclusive look at the features in Opera 9.5 (codename Kestrel). Opera has done a remarkable job of keeping the specs and features of Opera 9.5 under wraps. The Opera Desktop Team wrote a post last week that detailed some of the under-the-hood work that has been going on in 9.5, but as expected, they steered clear of mentioning the most notable features. After all, they want to save the excitement for the big Alpha release tomorrow!

Luckily I was able to test drive Opera 9.5 a little bit early, and it’s only fair that I share my findings with you (and we have Opera’s permission of course). I’ve put together a 5-minute video review that details four of what I believe to be Kestrel’s most notable features. So you can start out by watching the video, or you can read through the article as I cover each feature there as well.

–Video Introduction–

I thought it would be best if I start with a video of Opera 9.5’s new features. All of these are covered in detail below, but this will give you a really good idea of what you can expect tomorrow when Opera 9.5 Alpha is released.

–Rendering Engine–

It’s been over a year since Opera’s rendering engine has seen any significant improvements, and this time around there are some significant improvements. Kestrel is now running the same rendering engine that powers the Wii Internet Channel browser as well as Opera Mini 4 Beta, and there are some astonishing differences…probably due to the thousands of bugs they’ve fixed.

I’ve been told to expect to see the rendering speed get better as further builds get released, but I have a hard time believing that they can get better than what I’ve seen. I decided to do a rather unofficial speed test to see how fast the different browsers rank in terms of loading our site (with an empty cache). I did three tests for each browser and averaged out the time it took for each to completely load our site. Here are the results with the slowest browsers first:

• Internet Explorer 7: 18 seconds
• Firefox 2: 15 seconds
• Opera 9.23: 12 seconds
• Firefox 3 Nightly: 11 seconds
• Opera 9.5 Alpha: 8 seconds

Aside from speed improvements, the site compatibility has also gotten much better. They’ve fixed problems with various Google sites, some issues with the default WordPress template, and corrected a few things with some of the JavaScript libraries. Opera 9.5 can now handle many more sites…with ease!

Here are some of the other updates in Kestrel related to the rendering engine:

• A lot more CSS3 support, including complete Selectors
• Support for JavaScript 1.5 Getters and Setters
• AJAX compatibility has been improved
• New JavaScript engine that is faster and more efficient
• Improved HTML table layout algorithm

–Open With… (in the video)–

Despite all of the hurdles Opera has overcome with their new rendering engine, there are still some sites that probably won’t work as they should. Opera isn’t going to deny that it happens, and they are actually going to do what they can to help the situation. You can now right-click on any site and choose to open it in another browser that is installed on your computer!

I’ve also been told that the “open with” command will work with some files as well, but complete support hasn’t been added yet. I would like to see this feature extended to things like images so that I can right-click on an image and have it open in Paint.NET without needing to save it first.

–Restore Windows (in the video)–

Opera has a little trash can on the Tab Bar that is normally used to restore tabs you’ve recently closed (which can also be done with Ctrl+Z). Kestrel has introduced a new feature that will let you restore entire windows that you have closed, which includes all of the tabs contained within that window. I don’t open multiple windows very often, but I know this feature will come in handy.

–Sync Bookmarks (in the video)–

This is one of those things that I had said Opera needs to work on the most. By this point, most Firefox users have grown accustomed to keeping their bookmarks synchronized with an online service. Now Opera users will have the same pleasure! All you need is a free My Opera account, and you’ll be able to privately synchronize your bookmarks, Speed Dial sites, and Personal Bar with their server. You’ll then be able to access that data whether you’re at work, home, or anywhere!

To setup synchronization just select the “Synchronize with My Opera” option from the File Menu.

–Full History Search (in the video)–

The search capabilities in Opera 9.23 vs. Opera 9.5 are like night and day. They have now introduced full history search that looks back over all of the pages you’ve visited. I’m not talking about just scanning the URL and title of the page either…it looks at all the text contained within each site!

There are two ways that you can take advantage of this feature, and the most common one will be straight from the address bar. As you can see in the screenshot above, I was typing in “thumb” into the address bar, and the resulting page that was returned is our homepage. That’s because I had recently visited CyberNet where “Thumbnails” was one of the words used, but it wasn’t in the title or the URL, it was just in the body of the article.

If you’re looking for a more detailed way to search your entire history, just type opera:historysearch into the address bar. The result will be a Google-like search page where you can type the keyword(s) that you are looking for. It will then return the results that matched just like in this screenshot:

–What You Don’t See–

It’s very obvious that there has been a lot of under-the-hood work in Opera 9.5, and you’ll be able to see that as soon as you start using it. There has particularly been a lot of fixing up for the built-in Mail Client. Now it has a new indexing and storage backend that doesn’t use as much memory and runs faster. IMAP also works much better, and the browser isn’t supposed to freeze anymore when checking for new mail or feeds.

Of course Opera still starts almost instantaneously, which is one of its best qualities. And memory usage has (somehow) gotten better. I’ve never seen Opera 9.2 climb over the 250MB marker, and that was when I would have 50 to 100 tabs open at the same time (hey, I go through a lot of news in a days time). Now it seems to run at about 80% of the memory usage that it used to, and for most people it will hover between 25MB and 70MB.

–And There’s More!–

I’ve covered most of the big stuff above, but that’s not everything! Here’s a list of some other things that have been improved in Opera 9.5:

• The Status Bar is enabled by default…yay!
• The “Save your password” dialog box does not stop the page from loading behind it. That way you can verify that the username and password you entered works before actually saving it. What a great feature!
• Content blocking is better
• A “drag to scroll” feature has been added that will let you scroll by “grabbing” the page, much like in a PDF reader. You can enable it by typing opera:config#UserPrefs|ScrollIsPan into the address bar.
• It supposedly looks better on a Mac, and conforms to the Apple Human
  Interface Guidelines. Unfortunately I don’t have a Mac to try that out on.

–Making it Better–

There are some things that I believe Opera can do to make the final product even better, but one of the most important is inline spell checking. This is often the first complaint I hear from existing Firefox users who try Opera, and I think it is an extremely useful feature.

–Overview–

There’s no doubt in my mind that Opera 9.5 is going to be a truly amazing browser once it is released, and it will likely raise the bar for other browsers. However, the build being released tomorrow is an Alpha, and it will have issues at first. There might be sites that don’t work properly with it, and if you decide to try this out, make sure to install it in a separate location from your stable Opera installation.

For more details on some of the backend work done to Kestrel, read this article posted by the Opera Desktop Team.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

Opera 9.5 Download – Alpha Addicts WantedYour Week in Review with Sunday’s SummaryOpera 9.5 Download Available TuesdayCyberNet’s Year in Review: July-AugustFirefox 3 Improves Password Saving

This article was written on November 12, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Having toolbars in a browser can be both frustrating and convenient. On one hand they can often cram a lot of useful functionality into a small area, but on the other hand they eat up precious space that could be used for viewing websites. After all, we know what your browser can look like when you’ve installed a few too many toolbars.

I’ve managed to find a happy medium by automatically hiding the toolbars so that they only appear when my mouse hovers over any other toolbar (ex. the navigation/address bar), and that’s what we’re going to show you today. First we’ll go ahead and demonstrate how to do this with just the bookmarks toolbar, and then we’ll walk you through the steps needed to apply this to just about any Firefox toolbar such as the Google Toolbar.

–Auto-hide a Toolbar–

1. Make sure you have the Stylish extension installed in Firefox.
2. In the bottom-right corner of the Firefox window you should see the Stylish icon sitting in the Status Bar. Click on the icon, and go to Write Style > Blank Style.
   
3. Provide a description for the toolbar that you’re about to auto-hide, such as “Auto-hide the bookmarks toolbar”. In the code box copy and paste the following:

   #PersonalToolbar{display:none;}
#navigator-toolbox:hover > #PersonalToolbar{display:-moz-box;}

   The “PersonalToolbar” ID refers to the bookmarks toolbar, and when all is said and done your Stylish window should look something like this:
   

4. As soon as you hit Save the changes should take effect immediately. The bookmarks toolbar will be out-of-sight, but it will reappear when you hover over another toolbar (like the address/navigation bar).

–Find the ID of a Toolbar–

Now what about the toolbars who’s ID you don’t know? That’s a little trickier, but it won’t take you long to catch on. The toolbar we’re going to use in this half of the demonstration is the Google Toolbar, and we’ll show you step-by-step how you can find its ID so that you can auto-hide it.

1. If you’re using Firefox 3 you’ll need to go and download the DOM Inspector since it’s no longer included with the browser. It is bundled with versions of Firefox prior to version 3.
2. Once it’s downloaded and installed you need to start it by going to Tools > DOM Inspector. This tool will give us the ability to get the ID of any element in the browser, including toolbars.
3. Go to File > Inspect Chrome Document, and choose the first item in the list (it may say something different than what my screenshot does).
   
4. Now in the DOM Inspector click on the icon in the toolbar that has a mouse cursor pointing to a rounded box. Then switch over to the Firefox window and click on an item on the toolbar you want to auto-hide. You should see a red box appear around it as you’re clicking.
   
5. Now if you switch back to the DOM Inspector it will have highlighted the item that you clicked on. We’re looking for the ID of the toolbar itself, and not the item that you clicked on which was likely a button on the toolbar. If you look a little above the item that you clicked on you should see the ID of the toolbar:
   
6. Now we just need to plug that ID into the Stylish script that we provided above. So auto-hiding the Google Toolbar would look something like this:

   #gtbToolbar{display:none;}
#navigator-toolbox:hover > #gtbToolbar{display:-moz-box;}

That’s all there is to it. It may take a little while for you to get the hang of using the DOM Inspector, but it will be worth it.

–Overview–

Now the power is in your hands to auto-hide as many toolbars as you want. This trick will also work for hiding multiple toolbars simultaneously, and they will all appear at the same time when you hover over the navigation bar.

Also, feel free to leave the ID’s of any toolbars you find in the comments below so that you might save other people a little bit of trouble.

Copyright © 2010 CyberNet | CyberNet Forum | Learn Firefox

Related Posts:

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If you’re anything like us, as soon as you get a new PC there’s a laundry list of things you do: uninstall every piece of crapware, change the desktop wallpaper, and fire up Internet Explorer 8 to download a new browser like Firefox or Chrome. Without fail, we’ve repeated that last step on every Windows laptop we’ve reviewed in the last year. Why is it that we almost instantly replace IE with another option? There are lots of reasons, but to name a few… the browser usually comes plastered with toolbars, which makes it painfully slow to load even just a simple news site. And even when those are uninstalled it feels sluggish in comparison to Firefox and Chrome. Also, it’s just not as attractive or intuitive as the others. Oh, and then there are the smaller items, like the fact that it lacks a download manager or uses more RAM than the competition.

That’s no short list of complaints, but you can’t say Microsoft hasn’t been listening. It’s been saying for months that Internet Explorer 9 — which is now available for download as a public beta — will mend all those issues and then some. A lot of the improvements come in speed — Redmond’s been talking about hardware acceleration since November of last year — but there are some other interesting features such as “Pinned Sites” and “One Box” that Microsoft’s been less vocal about. So, does IE9 live up to the hype and will it finally give us a preloaded browser that’s fast enough to run with the others? Should you run along and download it right now? We’ve spent the last week using it as our primary browser on a number of different laptops to find out. We’ll meet again in our full review after the break.

Continue reading Internet Explorer 9 Beta review

Internet Explorer 9 Beta review originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 15 Sep 2010 12:31:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Expect to see some changes to Boxee when its $199 D-Link-built Box ships in November, as Lead Apps Developer / Community evangelist Rob Spectre tells NewTeeVee that among them will be a new Webkit based browser. The current Mozilla based browser is clearly useful for some quick & unblocked Hulu viewing, but still doesn’t render many sites properly. According to Spectre, HTML5 “absolutely should be the future for the browsers you use on your TV,” with competition from Google TV we can see why he’d say that, and it should be ready to stream video from even more sites that don’t build Boxee apps. The desktop versions of the software will get the new browser in version 1.0 after the Boxee Box is released, so make sure your comparison charts are appropriately updated.

Boxee’s new browser is built on Webkit and HTML5 ready originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 09:52:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Looks as if the Internet Explorer 9 Beta has now leaked on video, and — surprise, surprise — it looks exactly like Internet Explorer! If you were out hoping for a major overhaul, it looks as if you’ll need to pick a new wish to cross your fingers for. Design wise, the IE9 beta shown in the video past the break is no drastic departure from IE8, though the internals should obviously be revamped quite a bit. The rest of the world is still awaiting that September 15th launch date, but you and your impatient soul can watch an early build peak at 95/100 (so close!) on the Acid3 test with just a couple of clicks. Enjoy!

[Thanks, pradeep]

Continue reading Internet Explorer 9 Beta sees video demo, hits 95/100 on Acid3 test

Internet Explorer 9 Beta sees video demo, hits 95/100 on Acid3 test originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 07 Sep 2010 12:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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