Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on October 24, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

One of the new things in Ubuntu 7.10 is the ability to read and write to NTFS formatted drives, which is great for Windows XP and Vista users. What that means is that you can create a Firefox profile in Windows and set it up so that Ubuntu uses the exact same profile.

Why would that be nice to have? Any bookmarks, extensions, and options you configure in Windows will be used in Ubuntu as well. You won’t have to spend extra time trying to setup a Firefox profile just for Ubuntu, which for me makes this trick a must!

Here’s what you have to do:

1. Call up the terminal in Ubuntu, and type firefox -profilemanager at the prompt:
   
2. You should be presented with the Firefox Profile Manager which we’ll use to create a new profile. After you press the Create Profile button you’ll need to click Next on the following screen.
   
3. Here you’ll want to type in the name of the new profile, and once you’ve done that click the Choose Folder button:
   
4. This is where you need to hunt down the location of your Firefox profile on your Windows partition, which in my case was labeled by default in Ubuntu as “sda2″. The profiles are located at Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ on Windows XP/2000 or users\[User Name]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\ on Windows Vista. After you select your Firefox profile folder click the Open button.
   (Click to Enlarge)
   
5. Now you can finish up the profile creation process. When you’re taken back to the Profile Manager, select the new profile that you just made, and start Firefox. If you check the Don’t ask at startup option, Firefox will always use that profile as the default one.
   

See, I told you it was simple! The same type of thing can be done with Mozilla Thunderbird, but I thought Firefox was a good place to start. Enjoy having all of the same extensions, bookmarks, and settings in your Windows and Ubuntu versions of Firefox! 😉

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

You’d be hard-pressed to find a need for which no app exists, and with increasingly higher capacities, the average user’s smartphone is likely packed with apps that span multiple screens, … Continue reading

This article was written on April 16, 2008 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Sometimes it’s hard to grasp just how valuable something as simple as a screenshot can be. When we first started writing on CyberNet we didn’t always focus on providing screenshots of the things that we wrote about, but it didn’t take long for us to see that they often got our point across more than words ever could. And that is part of what’s made our site as successful as it is.

So what about taking screenshots yourself? Sure there are all kinds of applications out there to do it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if many of the screenshots you want to take are only of websites. If that’s the case and you’re a Firefox user then this is the article for you! Today we’ve got two different Firefox extensions that will appeal to both novices and professionals alike.

–Abduction (Homepage)–

First up is Abduction. This extension is rather different from the other one below. It’s not geared towards the people who want a screenshot utility brimming with features. Instead it focuses on how it can make snapping screenshots as easy as possible.

To activate Abduction just go to the File menu or right-click anywhere on the current site, and then choose the Save Page as Image option. You’ll immediately be shown a window similar to this one:

 
(Click to Enlarge)

Immediately after snapping the screenshot the entire site will be highlighted. That means if you hit the Save button without making any changes you’ll be including everything on the page… even the areas you would have had to scroll to see. That can easily be changed by drawing a box around the area that you want the screenshot to capture.

Abduction also lets you choose whether to save the screenshot as a PNG or JPG depending on what filetype is your preference. That’s it. No fancy interface and nothing to confuse you. Just snap your screenshots and go!

–FireShot (Homepage)–

FireShot, on the other hand, takes a completely opposite approach to screenshots. It’s possible to grab snapshots of a website in mere seconds, but it comes with a lot of additional tools that some users may not want. In particular it has a built-in editor that is extremely handy should you decide that you want to annotate a screenshot.

Here’s a list of features that I assembled after using FireShot for a little while:

• You can take a screenshot of the entire site (including scrollable area) or just the area currently visible. And then:
  • Modify the screenshot using the built-in editor
  • Upload it to screenshot-program.com where it will be hosted completely free
  • Save it to your computer
  • Copy it to the clipboard
  • Open it in an external editor that you specify
• Built-in advanced editor
• Add shapes, drawings, lines, or text to any screenshot
• Crop, blur, convert to grayscale, invert colors, or add a glowing border to any area you select on the screenshot
• Color-picker available when selecting colors, which makes it easy to match any color on a screenshot
• One-click screenshots are available using the settings you specify in the options.
• You can automatically have a website URL added as a removable object to each screenshot

The editor aims to keep things simple, but it has a lot of different controls that take a little getting used to. Here is what the editor looks like:

(Click to Enlarge)

–Overview–

The Firefox extension that you choose to use for taking screenshot really depends on what you’re looking to accomplish. If you just want to share a screenshot with someone I recommend Abduction because I found it to be a fast and efficient way to save a screenshot. However, if you need to point things out and need some more advanced tools FireShot will better suit you. Whichever you choose you really can’t go wrong!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

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 June 04, 2008 by CyberNet.

Mozilla has released Firefox 3 RC2 today which is right on schedule, and that means we might still be on for a June launch of Firefox 3! It’s even possible that this could be the last Release Candidate before Mozilla shoots for their world record.

This time around there’s probably nothing that you’ll notice as being different from Release Candidate 1, which is a good thing. At this point they are focusing only on bugs that could keep the user from having a great experience with the browser, and if all looks well in this release it could be signed-off on to be the final version. *cue marching band*

Mozilla hasn’t officially made the Firefox 3 RC2 announcement yet, but it will be coming in the next day or so. That also means the automatic update to RC2 won’t be available until then, but they have posted the files up on their FTP. Just like with previous releases I’ve put together a downloader for those that want to give the new version a whirl right now. And don’t worry, it balances the load between all of the mirrors unlike some of the sites that post direct links to the FTP:

For those of you waiting for your favorite add-ons to get upgraded… hopefully you won’t have to wait too much longer! I do have to say that the add-on developers are much more attentive to the release of Firefox 3 compared to that of Firefox 2.

And once you get Firefox 3 RC2 up and running I highly recommend that you checkout the AwesomeSearch extension. It’s quickly become a must-have for me.

Thanks to Cody for the tip!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com