Hasta La Gadget!

If there was a day to be joyful for the end of software builds, today is that day. Both Windows XP and Internet Explorer 6 have officially been dumped by … Continue reading

Microsoft did knock Netscape off from their pedestal, and they have remained at the top of the pack for the longest time already. Of course, over the course of time, there has been new challengers along the way such as Mozilla’s Firefox as well as Google’s Chrome web browsers. The very fact that Microsoft’s Internet Explorer had managed to maintain its position at the top is because it comes pre-loaded with the Windows operating system, but their market share has been declining slowly but surely. When Microsoft first rolled out Internet Explorer 11 as part of Windows 8.1 in October last year, before it was made available to Windows 7 users a month after that, it seems that Internet Explorer 11 has gathered a fair amount of steam – with the latest data from Net Applications showing that IE11 is the second most used desktop browser in the world, taking less than 5 months to do so after its release.

(more…)

Internet Explorer 11 Is Number 2 Desktop Browser Used In The World original content from Ubergizmo.

This article was written on June 29, 2012 by CyberNet.

When you install applications such as Adobe Acrobat they like to tuck away menu items in the context/right-click menus in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. They tend to think that this kind of stuff is there to make your life easier, but often times they end up cluttering up the menus so much that it takes even longer to find the things you really need.

MenuMaid is an app that is will help you do some housekeeping on the menus in Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer by giving you a list of all the non-standard entries that have been added. Simply uncheck the boxes next to any of the items you want removed and the change will be made immediately. If you change your mind and want to add the entry back just check the box again.

The really handy thing is that MenuMaid will tell you when the context menu entries will appear in both Internet Explorer and Windows Explorer. From the screenshot above you can see that some of the entries appear when I right-click on everything, some only on drives, and then some only on folders. That can be really handy to know to help ensure you disable the correct thing.

MenuMaid Homepage (Windows only; Freeware)

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on August 22, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Like many of you, I use bookmarklets on a daily basis to complete tasks a bit faster. Many of them offer features that normally require Firefox extensions to do, and I am one of those people that try to minimize the number of extensions I use. Not only that but if you use other browsers, such as Opera or Internet Explorer, then you’re forced to look for an alternate method of doing some things.

What is a bookmarklet? Here is Wikipedia’s definition:

A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program that can be stored as a URL within a bookmark in most popular web browsers, or within hyperlinks on a web page. Because Internet Explorer uses the term favorites instead of bookmarks, bookmarklets are also less commonly called favelets by users.

This article is the second installment in our “Best Bookmarklets” series. In the first edition we covered over 20 great bookmarklets that let you do everything from delete a site’s cookies all the way to searching a page for text. This time around we have about another 20, and we have personally tested each one in Firefox 2 , Internet Explorer 7 , and Opera 9 .

Note: To use any of the following bookmarklets just hold down the left mouse button and drag the hyperlink to the bookmark toolbar in your browser.

–Hyperlinks and Navigation–

• Open All
  Loads any URL’s found in the text you highlight.
• Target Alert
  Adds an icon next to URL’s that open in a new window, point to a different site, link to a movie clip, link to an audio clip, or the source is a PDF.
• 
  Makes internal links red, external links blue, and same-page links orange.

–Cache–

• Rewrite All – Google
  This will rewrite every link on the current page to point to the Google Cache version.
• Rewrite All – Coral
  This will rewrite every link on the current page to point to the Coral Cache
  version.
• Archive
  Pulls up a listing of archives for the current page on Archive.org.

–Websites–

• Digg All
  Diggs all of the articles submitted by your friends. All you have to do is go to your Friend’s submission page and run the bookmarklet. Be careful because you could probably get banned if you’re Digging too many articles too fast.
• MultiSubmit
  Submit an article to over a dozen social network sites at one time. The link for the bookmarklet points to a page where you can customize which services are used. Note: You will have to be logged into each service for it to work.
• In IE
  Opens the current site in Internet Explorer.
• In Firefox
  Opens the current site in Firefox.

–Web Development–

• Show Comments
  Shows and highlights any HTML comments that would otherwise not be seen.
• Show DIVs
  Outlines all of the DIV elements on the page.
• View Selection Source
  Lets you highlight some text/images on the page and view the source code for that section. Firefox has this built-in to the right-click menu, but this does kind of work for it if you need it.
• Get Site Size
  Returns the dimensions of the website.
• Show/Hide Grid
  Puts a grid on the current page divided out into boxes that are 50-pixels on each side. This makes measuring a bit easier.

–Other–

• Edit Site
  This lets you edit the content of a site. You can add/remove images, text, and just about anything. A great tool for taking screenshots and removing personal information from the page first.
• 
  Click on elements throughout the page to remove them, and then print the page. Great for removing ink-eating ads and sidebars before you send a page to the printer.
• Anonymous Form Filler
  Fills in forms and email address fields with anonymous information. Great for commenting on sites where you don’t want to enter in your information.
• Word Count
  Counts the number of words from the text you’ve selected.

We would love to hear about any bookmarklets you might be using. Let us know in the comments below if you have found any great ones, and we’ll add them to the list!

Sources for the above bookmarklets: Opera Watch, Jesse Ruderman, Bookmarklets, Masatomo Kobayashi, Opera Wiki, and Andy Budd

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