Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 06, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

Netscape is the browser that everyone has probably used at one point or another. Don’t try and block it from your memory, it’s okay, there is no arguing that Netscape Navigator was the hot browser of the 90’s.

Last October I took a look at what Netscape 8 had to offer, which included a lot of improvements over prior versions. The most notable feature was that it was based on the Firefox rendering engine. This was also the first time that they moved away from being an entire Internet Suite (browser, email, etc…) and focused solely on being a browser that people would respect.

Netscape 9.0 Beta 1 was just released last night, and they have decided to bring something back that hasn’t been around since version 6! When Netscape 7 launched they decided to remove “Navigator” from the name, but it returns in full glory in Netscape Navigator 9.

Click to Enlarge

So I’ll give you a visual walk-through of a few new features in Netscape 9, some of which should be included in Firefox. Besides having all of the great Firefox 2 features (spell check, session restore, etc…) it also has all of this included:

–URL Correction–
It looks for common mistakes that you would make when typing in a URL. It can autocorrect up to 30 different mistakes, for example, typing “cybernetnewscom” will automatically get changed to “cybernetnews.com”.

–Link Pad–
This is actually such a simple idea, yet incredibly useful because of how they implemented it. Link Pad is a simple sidebar item that will store hyperlinks you drag on to it (or on the icon in the bottom-left corner). It is essentially a bookmark system, yet it is kept separate from your bookmarks to keep things a little more organized. I look at it as a place for “disposable” URL’s that you’ll only visit one time. After you click on a URL, it will automatically be removed from the Link Pad…that’s the best part.

–Extension Compatibility–
All Firefox 2 extensions should now work perfectly in Netscape. Thank goodness! I tried both IE Tab and Tab Mix Plus, two very popular Firefox extensions, and each worked flawlessly. Kudos to the Netscape team for making sure people could still use their Firefox extensions.

–Sidebar Mini Browser–
You can right-click on any hyperlink and choose to open it in the sidebar. Then the sidebar is its own little browser with an address bar as well as back/forward buttons. Split-screen navigating isn’t such a chore now!

–Restart Netscape–
This is the feature I constantly say that Firefox should include! Restarting the browser is as simple as hitting the File Menu and clicking Restart Navigator. All of your tabs and windows are then instantly restored.

–Resizeable Textarea–
Don’t have enough room to type your thoughts? Then feel free to expand the text boxes at your leisure.

–Tab History–
Okay, this feature is priceless. No, it is not the same thing as the History menu in Firefox, although Netscape does include that as well. Basically when you make a link open in a new tab, all of the backward browsing history is copied to that new tab. For example, let’s say you’re searching on Google and you Ctrl+click on one of the links so that it opens in a new tab — while in that new tab, you’ll still be able to go back to the Google search results. If you try the same thing in Firefox, the back button will be disabled because the new tab doesn’t have any “history” to it.

–Other “Okay” Features–

Some of the things in Netscape 9 pertain only to the Netscape.com site, or aren’t that revolutionary. Since I don’t use Netscape.com I thought these features were a little lame:

• Sitemail Notification – This icon will sport an exclamation point when you have new Netscape.com sitemail messages waiting for you.
• In-browser voting – Share your opinions with the world! The icons in the Navigator address bar let you share interesting stories you find and vote on stories shared by others.
• Throbber – By popular demand, the Netscape 7-style throbber is back. Click on it any time to visit Netscape.com.
• Combined Stop/Reload button – To save space in your toolbar, we’ve combined the stop and reload buttons. Because you never need both at the same time, the toolbar will only show the relevant half of the pair.
• OPML Support – Netscape Navigator supports importing and exporting your bookmarks in OPML, a popular format for sharing lists of news feeds.
• News Tracker – The Netscape Tracker sidebar lets you monitor breaking news as it happens, via Netscape.com.
• Friends’ Activity Sidebar – If you are a member at Netscape.com, you can keep tabs on what your friends find interesting. This sidebar lets you view your friends latest votes, comments, and story submissions.
• News Menu and Sidebar – The latest news is built right into the browser, under the News menu. Provided by Netscape.com, you can customize the menu to only contain the news sections you want to monitor. You can also open the News sidebar to always keep an eye on what’s happening.

Despite the overloaded integration with Netscape.com, I would have to say that the Netscape browser is a step ahead of Firefox. I guess it ultimately depends on how you look at it since a lot of the features they included are also offered as Firefox extensions, but they did a great job bringing some unique things into the browser as well. I can see myself using the Link Pad quite frequently, as well as the mini browser in the sidebar.

Netscape Navigator 9 is currently in Beta so you could run into a few bumps while using it, although it did work flawlessly for me. You’ll find the download links here if you’re interested in trying out the free browser (for Windows, Mac, and Linux).

Thanks for the tip Mohan!

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on December 12, 2007 by CyberNet.

Earlier today I posted instructions on how to download and install Vista SP1 RC, and now that I’ve kicked it around a bit I thought I had enough thoughts to constitute an article. The reason why I didn’t include this information in the earlier post was that my installation had not completed, and in the end it took about 45 minutes to finish installing. A bulk of that time was spent after the computer restarted the first time, so don’t think that your done after the first restart.

–The Good–

Microsoft focused the first Service Pack for Vista purely on performance, stability, and reliability. After running it for just a few hours I’ve noticed that they went for the updates that offered the “biggest bang for the buck.” By that I mean they really hit home on some critical areas where performance wasn’t the greatest, and where users would really notice a big difference.

To be more specific here are some of the things that have really stood out to me in Vista SP1:

• They fixed one of the issues that has irked me the most! Previously when I would start up my laptop Vista would pause for about 15 seconds while it was connecting to the network. During that time no programs or Windows services would load, but things like the Start Menu were still usable. After a lot of research I determined that the delay was caused by Vista looking for other computers on the network, and if I disabled file sharing the problem disappeared. I’m happy to say that there are no startup delays for me in Vista SP1!
• Searching indexed files and folders is way more instant than before. I have Vista index all of the files on my entire computer, and sometimes when performing a search for files it would still take several seconds to bring up any matching results. Now it is able to pull in results almost instantaneously when I begin typing. For the curious minds out there I have 150,000+ files in my index that Vista is searching.
• Big file transfer speed improvements! Transferring files from one machine to another is amazingly faster. Before installing Vista SP1 on my computers I transferred a 500MB file over my local network. It took 3 minutes and 25 seconds to complete, but after installing Vista SP1 on both machines it only took 2 minutes and 22 seconds. That’s a 30% difference!
• Remaining time for file transfers is calculated faster, and seems to be a bit more accurate. When I transferred the 500MB file mentioned in the previous bullet the remaining time was calculated immediately upon initiating the transfer. Sometimes it would take 10 or 15 seconds for it to calculate, so it’s a lot nicer now.
• I have yet to see firsthand the advantages of the hotpatching we discussed yesterday, but the less frequent reboots will surely be a nice touch.

–The Bad–

• One thing that really bugs me with Vista SP1 RC is that Microsoft felt the need to brand my desktop as an “evaluation copy.” Sure I’m not running the final release, and Vista SP1 RC will expire in June 2008, but did they still have to do this? If you’re annoyed by the “Evaluation copy. Build 6001″ message here are some instructions on how to remove it, but I’ll probably just leave it alone.
  
• There hasn’t really been any improvements to the User Account Control (UAC) in Vista. I guess this is something that would be included in Service Pack 2 since it is more aligned with new features, but some minor tweaks could have made it less frustrating for new users. A “remember my choice” checkbox on each of the prompts would make it 1,000 times better!
• I would have liked to see a few improvements to the Vista Gadgets, such as an autohide option for the sidebar. There should also be an easier one-key shortcut to show/hide the gadgets in the sidebar and on the desktop. The WinKey+Space Bar just doesn’t cut it for me.

So those are my initial impressions of Vista SP1, along with what I was hoping to see included. Vista SP1 should be in final form the early part of next year, and I’m just keeping my fingers crossed that two years won’t go by before we see SP2 (there was a two year gap between SP1 and SP2 for XP).

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on October 20, 2006 by CyberNet.

WinZip is finally making a new version available to the public despite it still being in the Beta stage. It definitely took them long enough make WinZip 11 but it will now support RAR archives, well, they only let you extract them. I think it is pretty funny that they have been working on WinZip 11 for who knows how long and they only support the extraction of RAR files? Heck if I just wanted to extract RAR files I would use 7-Zip which is a free application that does practically everything WinZip does.

I have been a WinRAR user forever and normally I just let it continually run in trial mode but when they offered it for free a few months back I swooped in and snatched that up. WinRAR is definitely my favorite archival software and I’m kinda surprised to hear that people still use WinZip. When I setup a computer for someone, however, 7-Zip is definitely the tool that I install because people find it even easier to use than WinZip normally.

If you still decide that you want to give WinZip 11 a try then head on over to their download page. All the way at the bottom of that page there is a download button and once you press that your download should be initiated. You shouldn’t really expect to see too many new things besides the RAR support after you get it up and running but here is a full list of changes for those curious minds.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on June 13, 2007 by CyberNet.

Web Browser Wednesday

The new Safari on Windows is boasted as one of the fastest browsers available for the Windows operating system. Well, that might be a little biased considering that it is according to Safari’s homepage, but I’ve tinkered with it over the past day and it is among the fastest browsers that I’ve used. It also has some shortcomings though…

First and foremost there have been a number of security concerns with Safari on Windows, which is something I definitely expected. Apple released Safari saying that their “engineers designed Safari to be secure from day one.” We all know that talk is cheap, and the vulnerabilities are something that I expected since Apple doesn’t make Windows software very frequently. Not only that, but this is also a pre-release application, so they have time to correct things before anyone can really start criticizing.

All browsers have their security woes, so in this review I’m going to set that aside and look strictly at the features. I’m going to give a bulleted list of the things that Safari includes, and then I’ll provide a short screencast where I’ll point out some of the cool features as well as the things that it lacks.

–The Features–

Here are the more notable features in Safari (for Windows) that you should be aware of, as specified on the Safari homepage.

• Performance – As the Safari homepage points out, this browser is very good at loading Websites quickly. I was able to notice a significant reduction in page load times as I was browsing the Web, but that’s not the only kind of performance that is important. The Safari site fails to say what the memory usage is like for the browser, and I’ll be the first to say it’s horrible. At any given time, it is twice what Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer is using up even when visiting the same sites.
• Interface – Ahh, this is something I don’t really know that I can touch on. Apple made sure that they gave people the feeling that they are using a Mac computer by preventing the Windows operating system from controlling any aspect of the appearance. I think it is safe to conclude that people will be able to easily see when you’re using Safari on a Windows computer. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
• Bookmarks – This is something that I cover more in the screencast, but overall this is one of the biggest downfalls in Safari. I’m a right-click/drag-and-drop freak and the Bookmarks Bar hardly allows for any of that. You can’t arrange your bookmarks by dragging them around in that bar, instead you have to use the Bookmark Collections which is a hassle. Oh, and did I mention that there is no Bookmarks sidebar for you to use?
• Searching – The searching in Safari is almost its best feature. They have done a great job of making the results stand out, and that is something I very much appreciate.
• Tabbed Browsing – Come on, all of the cool browsers have tabbed browsing these days. The only thing cool about Safari’s is that you can drag a tab off of the tab bar and it will open in a new window.
• SnapBack – This is pretty nice as well since many of us perform a lot of searches. After doing a search and clicking on a result there will be a little orange icon in the upper-right search box in Safari. That will always be there as a means to take you back to the initial search that you performed.
• AutoFill Forms – Meh, it’s a form filler and nothing more.
• RSS Reader – The built-in RSS reader is a nice cross between the Live Bookmarks that Firefox has and a full RSS feed reader. It even has a cool slider that instantly lets you adjust the length of the articles being displayed. It’s important to note, however, that they do not let you configure an external feed reader for subscribing to the feeds though.
• Resizable Text Fields – This seems to be the hot new thing since Netscape 9 Beta also has this feature. All it does is let you resize text boxes on a site, such as the one we have below for commenting.
• Private Browsing – With Private Browsing enabled, Safari won’t store your Google searches, your cookies, the history of sites you’ve visited, your download history, or information from online forms you’ve filled out. With the increasing concern over privacy, this is a feature some users will appreciate.
• Security – I think I said enough about this up top.

So that’s how I feel about the features Safari has in it that is supposed to make it the browser for you to use. Some of them are cool, but a lot of them have already been seen in existing browsers which makes them far from spectacular.

–The Screencast–

Latest take a more hands-on look at how I feel about the features in Safari:

–The Overview–

As you can see, Safari has several cool features that I would like to see available in other browsers. There is nothing in it that makes it better than Firefox, Opera, or even Internet Explorer in my opinion, so there will probably be few people actually using it. The only way that it will benefit me is allowing me to easily test my site to make sure it renders properly in the Safari browser.

Download the Safari 3 Preview

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com

This article was written on July 30, 2007 by CyberNet.

One of the things that people complain about the most in Vista is that transferring large files is painfully slow compared to previous versions of Windows. Thanks to a post over at Neowin, both users of the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Vista are able to install a performance and compatibility pack that will address this issue as well as several others.

Some sites appear to be thinking that these patches will be released on Patch Tuesday (a week from tomorrow) via the standard Windows Update system. I’m not so sure about that, and if you look at the bottom of this post I outline all of the things that these patches fix. It’s quite a lengthy list, and I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft held them back for the release of Vista SP1. So I would say that this is kind of like the Beta version of Vista SP1 that we never got.

As soon as I saw this I couldn’t wait to download the fixes, but the problem is that they haven’t been officially posted by Microsoft yet. Have no fear, these updates have been leaked (download links posted below), and I’ve already installed the 32-bit versions on my Vista Ultimate installation. There are just two installation files included that you need to install, and then you’ll reboot your computer. If something does go wrong your System Restore should have automatically made a restore point before proceeding with the installation of the updates (I checked and mine had made the restore point automatically).

What’s the result? The file transfer times are dramatically reduced, and it no longer takes forever for Vista to calculate the remaining time! AeroXP has even gone as far as to say that the transfer times are half of what they were.

If you decide to try these out you should remember that they have not been officially released by Microsoft. In fact, they could be some sort of beta version that isn’t even complete. I’ve had no troubles with either of the updates on my 32-bit version of Vista, but your experience may vary.

IMPORTANT: One thing that a Neowin user pointed out was that the 64-bit version will require that you disable driver signing each time your computer starts, which can be done by pressing F8 during the boot process. This includes everyone that’s using Rivatuner, atitool and/or Peerguardian on Vista 64-bit.

Download from MediaFire: 64-bit and 32-bit
Download from MediaFire (requires 7-Zip to extract): 64-bit and 32-bit

Here are all of the details regarding the two updates:

938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

• Improves performance in resuming back to the desktop from the Photo and Windows Energy screensaver.
• Resolves an issue where some secured web pages using advanced security technologies may not get displayed in Internet Explorer on Windows Vista.
• Resolves an issue where a shared printer may not get installed if the printer is connected to a Windows XP or Windows Server 2003 system and User Access Control is disabled on the Vista client.
• Resolves an issue where creating AVI files on Vista may get corrupted.
• Improves the performance in calculating the ‘estimated time remaining’ when copying/moving large files.
• Improves performance in bringing up Login Screen after resuming from Hibernate.
• Resolves an issue where synchronization of offline files to a server can get corrupted.
• Resolves a compatibility issue with RAW images created by Canon EOS 1D/1DS Digital SLR Camera which can lead to data loss. This only affects RAW images created by these two specific camera models.
• Resolves an issue where a computer can lose its default Gateway address when resuming from sleep mode.
• Improves the performance when copying or moving entire directories containing large amounts of data or files.
• Improves the performance of Vista’s Memory Manager in specific customer scenarios and prevents some issues which may lead to memory corruption.

938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios. Some examples of the improvements contained in this update are:

• Improved reliability and compatibility of Vista when used with newer graphics cards in several specific scenarios and configurations.
• Improved reliability when working with external displays on a laptop.
• Increased compatibility with many video drivers.
• Improved visual appearance of games with high intensity graphics.
• Improved quality of playback for HD-DVD and Blue-Ray disks on large monitors.
• Improved reliability for Internet Explorer when some third party toolbars are installed on Vista.
• Improved Vista reliability in networking configuration scenarios.
• Improved the reliability of Windows Calendar in Vista.
• Improved reliability of systems that were upgraded from XP to Vista.
• Increased compatibility with many printer drivers.
• Increased reliability and performance of Vista when entering sleep and resuming from sleep.

Copyright © 2014 CyberNetNews.com