Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on June 17, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows only
Being able to use Alt-Tab (or Command-Tab on Mac) to switch between running applications is something that I don’t think can ever be replaced. It’s just so simple and fast that it’s pretty hard to beat… unless you’re the type of person who keeps one hand on the keyboard and one hand on the mouse. If that sounds like you then maybe you should checkout the tiny application called AltTab Fingertips.

AltTab Fingertips requires no installation and is completely portable. When it’s running you can press the F10 key to initiate a popup menu similar to the one shown in the screenshot above. It will list out all of the open windows, and selecting one will switch over to that particular application. The thing that makes this really nice is that the menu always appears in the spot where your mouse is currently located, meaning you won’t have to shift your focus (or mouse) to a different part of the screen to switch between windows.

To make this a little nicer the developer has made it possible to change the keyboard shortcut that displays the menu, and you can also exclude specific applications from appearing in the list. These two things can both be configured from the System Tray icon.

I think the only thing this is missing would be displaying the icons for each of the different applications in the menu. That’s something many people use for quick identification, and it would help make this a must-have app for any Alt-Tab user.

Get AltTab Fingertips

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on May 15, 2008 by CyberNet.

Windows; Mac;
One thing that has always amazed me is the fact that none of the desktop feed readers currently available synchronize with Google Reader. Maybe I’m wrong and I just haven’t searched hard enough, but we’re getting a little closer with ReadAir. It’s a free (and open source) download that leverages off of the relatively new Adobe Air to bring your Google Reader feeds to your desktop.

At first glance it will probably remind you of Newgator’s free NetNewsWire app for Mac’s, and I’m guessing that there was definitely some inspiration taken from it. Don’t be fooled by the appearance… this is a both a Mac and Windows application since it runs on Adobe Air (doesn’t appear to work in Adobe Air for Linux). Albeit it does look a little weird on Windows since the skin is still the same, but it’s not any weirder than iTunes on Windows.

There are some pitfalls though. You can star, share, and search items in your feeds, but there are no offline capabilities. For some people the whole point of using a desktop feed reader is so that they can easily read the news when their not connected to the Internet, but you can’t do that with ReadAir. Plus there are no keyboard shortcuts, and no more than 20 items can be viewed in a single feed. Yeah, those are some deal breakers for me.

I think I’ll be sticking with NetNewsWire until something better comes along, but I do like Google’s online feed reader better than Newsgator’s. So hopefully a better Google Reader synchronization option will come about so that I can use a desktop client on my computer, and use Google’s new iPhone interface when I’m on the go.

ReadAir Homepage [via Download Squad]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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

The Firefox development team has finally resolved what was probably the longest outstanding bug for the browser: full page zoom. Up until now Firefox has only been capable of increasing and decreasing the size of text to simulate zooming, but now it handles images as well! The funny part is that it only took 8-years for this bug to get fixed.

This is something that the Opera browser has had ever since I can remember, and it is something I’ve always longed for in Firefox. Heck, even Internet Explorer 7 has some sort of zoom capabilities that also scales images, but the results are typically not the best.

To get it in Firefox 3 you’ll need to be using the latest nightly build, along with this extension. The extension is just a temporary fix that lets you add buttons to the navigation bar for zooming, and without it there is no way to take advantage of the new zoom capabilities. Eventually the developers will get the feature integrated with the browser, but the extension is the best way to test it out for those that want to see what it is like.

The results are much better than what Internet Explorer 7 produces, but not quite as good as Opera’s. I noticed in Firefox 3 that it has problems scaling some Flash and JavaScript objects, and one example of this can be seen in the screenshot above where it didn’t actually scale the contents of the ad located at the top of the screen nor the one at the top of the sidebar. I’m sure that these are just some bugs that they will be working out, and I look forward to seeing this feature in full swing when Firefox 3 gets released!

Source: Mozilla Links

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on July 09, 2009 by CyberNet.

Ever since we did a browser comparison test last year there have been a lot of emails and comments asking if we were going to update the article to reflect new releases. I thought about adding in the new browsers as they came out, but decided against it for one reason or another. Instead I thought it would be better to just do a fresh article, and include even more stats than last time.

The main reason that I thought this was worthy of its own article was because a lot has changed in the last year. Since March 2008 we’ve seen major milestone releases from each of big browser makers, and to top it off Google Chrome has come onto the scene. These browsers have also shifted focus from adding nifty new features to diving deep into the code trying to squeeze out every last ounce of performance.

We’ve got a lot in store for you today ranging from JavaScript speed tests to memory usage comparisons, and we’ll even throw in some Acid 3 coverage. Lets go ahead and dive right in.

Notes about testing:

• All of these tests were performed on the same Windows XP SP3 machine that is wired into a network to eliminate the effects of wireless disturbances.
• All browsers started with a clean profile and no add-ons/extensions were installed.
• All browser data, including caches, were cleared before each test was run.
• Only one browser was open at a time, and no other applications (other than standard XP services) were running.
• Internet Explorer 8 was used in the native rendering mode (“standards compliant mode”).
• No plug-ins (Flash, Java, etc…) were installed on the machine to ensure that slow performance wasn’t due to the loading of a plug-in.

–JavaScript Tests–

The main speed test that everyone seems to use for JavaScript is SunSpider. Last year we compared the browsers with the SunSpider test prior to writing our first comparison, and so we wanted to try something different. That’s when we turned to the MooTools SlickSpeed Test. It tests various operations against a lot of common JavaScript libraries including MooTools and JQuery.

So which one did we go with this year? Well, we did both. We ran each test, SunSpider and SlickSpeed, a total of three times each. Then we averaged the results together to get the pretty little graphs you see below. For both of them the goal was for the browser to complete the tests as fast as possible, and so a lower number is better.

Sunspider Test:

1. Safari 4: 603ms
2. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 636ms
3. Google Chrome 2.0: 720ms
4. Firefox 3.5: 1278ms
5. Opera 10 ^Beta: 2975ms
6. Opera 9.64: 3931ms
7. Internet Explorer 8: 5441ms

MooTools SlickSpeed Test:

1. Opera 10 ^Beta: 330ms
2. Safari 4: 355ms
3. Opera 9.64: 375ms
4. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 464ms
5. Firefox 3.5: 580ms
6. Google Chrome 2.0: 763ms
7. Internet Explorer 8: 1901ms

–Website Rendering Tests–

I used the same method for testing website load times as I did last year. It’s a website called Numion Stopwatch that uses some fancy JavaScript to monitor when a page has finished loading, and then spits out the amount of time it took to complete.

We used two extremely popular sites for these tests: ESPN and the Wall Street Journal. Each site was loaded up three times in each browser, and then the results were averaged together. Obviously we were targeting which browser could load the websites the fastest, and so a lower number is better:

ESPN Load Time:

1. Safari 4: 1.936 seconds
2. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 2.194 seconds
3. Firefox 3.5: 2.380 seconds
4. Internet Explorer 8: 2.604 seconds
5. Opera 10 ^Beta: 2.605 seconds
6. Opera 9.64: 2.651 seconds
7. Google Chrome 2.0: 2.873 seconds

Wall Street Journal Load Time:

1. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta: 1.612 seconds
2. Opera 10 ^Beta: 1.989 seconds
3. Opera 9.64: 2.141 seconds
4. Safari 4: 2.166 seconds
5. Google Chrome 2.0: 2.552 seconds
6. Firefox 3.5: 2.886 seconds
7. Internet Explorer 8: 3.292 seconds

–Memory Usage Tests–

I’m sure this is what many of you were looking for. As geeks we like to have a lean browser that knows how to handle itself without us having to keep a watchful eye over it. That’s why we ran numerous different tests to see just how well a browser controls its memory usage when loading a decent number of sites, and also whether it’s able to release that memory once you’ve closed the tabs.

Here’s a rundown of the order in which we ran the tests to collect the stats:

1. We 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.
5. Closed all the tabs except for Google.com, which was always the first site opened. Then we took a memory usage reading.

And here are the results. The best browser for each test is highlighted in green, and the worst is highlighted in red.

–Acid 3 Tests–

Last year we also took a look at how the various browsers scored on the Acid 3 test. At the time a Safari nightly build was the closest to perfection by reaching a score of 86 out of 100. Today, however, is a different story. A few browsers can handle the test perfectly, some are very very close, and others (yeah, IE) have some work cut out for themselves.

Note: Click on any of the thumbnails for a full-size rendering.

1. Safari 4 (100/100) – It gets a perfect score and renders everything correctly.
   
2. Opera 10 ^Beta (100/100) – It gets a perfect score and renders everything correctly.
   
3. Google Chrome 2.0 (100/100) – It gets a perfect score, but not all tests are executed successfully.
   
4. Google Chrome 3.0 ^Beta (100/100) – It gets a perfect score, but not all tests are executed successfully.
   
5. Firefox 3.5 (93/100) – It gets a near perfect score.
   
6. Opera 9.6 (85/100) – This is the oldest release we tested, and it comes as no surprise that it doesn’t pass the test. It should be noted that the next milestone, version 10, does pass the test perfectly as seen above.
   
7. Internet Explorer 8 (20/100) – While they still have a ways to go before they get a perfect, I do have to give them credit for at least making the image look halfway normal. You know what I’m talking about if you remember what IE7′s rendering of the Acid 3 test was like.
   

–Conclusion–

So which browser is the winner? I wouldn’t really say any of them outshine the others. The problem that we are going to face with performance tests from here on out is that the browsers will all come very close to each other in the standings… often within a fraction of a second from one another. As the browsers continue to get optimized we will see these times get even closer, and performance might become less of a concern which picking which one we want to use. So I’d say to pick the browser you feel the most comfortable with, because it’s getting hard to distinguish one browser from another when it comes to performance.

What’s your take on the stats? Anything stand out to you? Will you be switching browsers based upon anything you learned here?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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This article was written on February 26, 2007 by CyberNet.

When I think of BitTorrent, the first word that comes to my mind is illegal. While it is generally used for illegally downloading movies among other things, BitTorrent is hoping that at least one-third of the 135 million people who have downloaded their software are willing to pay for it. That’s why they are launching a store where they will rent videos and sell TV shows at prices of $3.99 for new movies and $2.99 for older movies. TV shows will be 1.99 which will be downloaded for keeps.

The problem that they are going to run into is simply that the people who know how to use BitTorrent are already cozy with getting their movies for free. The general public are not going to be willing to download the software and try to familiarize themselves with using it when there are other easier services offering the same type of thing. It will definitely come as a surprise if they’re able to get their goal of 45 million people who are willing to pay for the content that they previously got for free. From a cost standpoint, you’re better off going with something like Netflix where you have the option of getting movies in mail and/or download.

There’s also another catch.  The movies will be protected by Windows Media DRM (this means you can only play them in Windows Media Player) and will automatically destroy in 24 hours. Although, at some point, someone is bound to break the Windows Media DRM protection which will would possibly allow people to keep the downloads for an indefinite period of time. If people are willing to go to those lengths to get the full video on their computers for keeps, they’ll just download it illegally anyways.

They’ve got deals with some of the major studios like 20th Century Fox, Lionsgate, MTV Networks, Paramount, and others. The content will be plentiful, but will the customers?

Source: Associated Press [via Yahoo]

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

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