Hasta La Gadget!

Apple has released iOS 7.0.5, though you might find that it won’t show up on your iPhone no matter how often you mash the Software Update button. The new software, … Continue reading

Last week a bunch of Gmail users were affected by a glitch. The issue lasted from January 15 to January 21 for some users. Google acknowledged the issue and set … Continue reading

It’s been years – at this point – since NVIDIA released their TegraZone, a place where the groups that the company had worked with hand-in-hand to optimize games for their … Continue reading

This article was written on August 27, 2009 by CyberNet.

UPDATE: As some commenters have pointed out certain antivirus applications are flagging this application as containing a trojan. My antivirus, NOD32, did not find any virus though. So it’s up to you whether you want to proceed.

We’ve seen all kinds of Aero glass emulators for XP cross our path. The problem is that the moment they start to show any potential the developers fall off the map and updates are pretty much non-existent. A few weeks ago when I saw one called Border Skin over at Lifehacker I put off trying it because, frankly, I was sick of being disappointed.

Man, I have to say that I’m sorry I didn’t try this sooner. First off, it’s portable so there’s no installation involved. Just download, extract, and run. The settings are self-contained in the directory you run it from so there’s not a bunch of random files you need to worry about finding should you decide to delete it.

Second, it looks remarkable. You can turn the blur effect on or off, there are about 15 different colored themes you can choose from (the one pictured above is the Windows 7 style), and overall it just feels like it’s part of the operating system. Over the last few days I’ve been using this full-time on one of my XP machines, and there have been very few times that it even crossed my mind that this wasn’t an integrated part of the operating system. It’s that fluid.

Lastly, performance. This thing performed so well on my XP laptop that it got me wondering what it would be like on a low-end piece of hardware. I don’t have any old computers lying around, but then I realized that throwing it in a virtual machine would be a really good test considering that Aero glass on Vista or Windows 7 isn’t available in any virtual environment due to graphics restrictions. So I put it on an XP virtual machine with 512MB of RAM, enabled all the effects including blurring, and then took the screenshot you see above. It all worked amazingly well even on a virtual machine with limited resources. The only issues I saw was some slight jumping if I’d drag the windows around really fast, and when closing a window the border would remain visible for about a half a second after the app closed. Definitely not a deal breaker, and these results were much less noticeable on my dedicated machine.

It also got me wondering what it does with “borderless” windows such as Google Chrome. Good news… it does nothing! I was worried that it may add a border around those applications regardless of whether they need one or not, but it doesn’t. This is because it has an “exclude list” file that can be used to specify windows that shouldn’t be skinned. Common apps like Chrome and Windows Live Messenger are already in this list for you.

So a big thanks to the developer for coming up with an awesome solution, and I can’t wait to see what else will be added in future versions! This is already the most complete Aero glass emulator for Windows XP that I’ve used, and I don’t think you’ll be disappointed.

Border Skin Homepage (Windows only; 32-bit only; freeware)

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