Hasta La Gadget!

When a tablet version of Chrome OS was teased back in February of last year, we found it a legitimately exciting proposition. Now that we have Android’s Honeycomb iteration designed specifically for slates, however, we’re having to wonder just why Google’s still chasing that keyboard-less dream with its web-centric OS. CNET has been doing some snooping in and around the latest iterations of Chrome OS, where it’s discovered numerous pieces of circumstantial evidence, such as a new onscreen keyboard, suggesting tablets are still very much on the menu. Chrome OS kicked off life on the development device known as Cr-48 and will resume availability this summer courtesy of Acer and Samsung, though we’d kind of assumed it would stick to notebooks now that Android’s making a sincere effort on devices bigger than an EVO. Mountain View has responded to CNET‘s queries with a pretty inconclusive statement, saying only that “We are engaging in early open-source work for the tablet form factor, but we have nothing new to announce at this time.” Check out last year’s concept video after the break.

Continue reading Google adding touchscreen-friendly tweaks to Chrome OS, still has tablets on its mind

Google adding touchscreen-friendly tweaks to Chrome OS, still has tablets on its mind originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 07 Apr 2011 07:59:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink   |  CNET  | Email this | Comments

This article was written on October 27, 2006 by CyberNet.

I’ve been wondering how the Firefox 2 downloads have been coming along and I managed to find someone who put together a live online graph of the current download rate. You can see from the chart above the big spike in downloads after Firefox 2 was released.

Actually the cool thing about the graph is that you can place it on your site and have it update itself live. Just use the URL http://ff.asbjorn.it/chart-[w]x[h].png and replace [w] and [h] with the width and height of the image, respectively, that you would like. For example, click here to see a 3000 x 1000 pixel graph. I didn’t place a live graph above because I am afraid that too many people will be using it and the site will get overwhelmed.

As you can see there have been more than 3 million downloads since it was released on Monday which is very good. There are also several ways that you can put a download counter on your site, including PHP Scripts and Flash, which can be found here. Or maybe you want to make your own way using the RSS Feed, that Mozilla provides, of the total downloads.

I’m sure Firefox 2 is going to spread very virally and a lot of it will be because of the strong user base. If you want to help you can get buttons for Firefox 2 to place on your site and banners should be coming soon (a mockup of a banner is pictured to the right).

I can’t wait to see how Firefox will continue to grow but I’m sure it will be quickly.

Thanks to Curtiss for pointing out the Firefox banners!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Firefox Hits 300 million Downloads! When will it hit 1 Trillion?Firefox Hits 200 Million DownloadsLive Bookmarks in Your Firefox SidebarDownload Firefox Portable 1.5.0.6Two New Features at CyberNet News

This article was written on December 03, 2008 by CyberNet.

Last week Cody sent me in a tip for an experimental Firefox extension that I just had to try out. It’s called TooManyTabs, and it essentially adds another tab bar to your Firefox window where you can temporarily store some of your existing tabs. To do this all you have to do is hover over a tab, and you’ll see the tab’s icon turn into an up arrow (as seen in the screenshot above). Clicking on that arrow will move the tab to the new temporary bar.

Why would you want to do this? I’ve got a list of features below, but one of the nicest things is that it will free up some of your memory. It does this by unloading the page from the memory that is consumed by Firefox, which means any forms you’ve filled out will be lost once you’ve moved it to the temporary tab bar. To test this out I opened up 25 tabs which ended up consuming 184MB of memory. After moving them all to the more temporary tab bar that was created by the extension it brought the memory usage down to 133MB. Not too bad.

Here are some of the other things that you can use TooManyTabs for:

• Multiple rows for storing up to 50 tabs
• Restore up to 20 recently closed tabs
• Marking tabs in different colors
• Options to customize number of rows
• Option to open tabs adjacent to your selected tab
• Open all tabs of the same row in TooManyTabs
• Pin your most frequently visited tabs onto TooManyTabs and access them easily anytime
• Pinned tabs will stay on the TooManyTabs row unless you unpin them; clicking a pinned tab will open a new instance of the tab

One nice thing that I have noticed is that if Firefox does get restarted the tabs stored by the extension will automatically get restored. So you don’t have to worry about losing them if Firefox closes.

Get TooManyTabs for Firefox
Thanks Cody!

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Keeping Track Of Firefox Extensions That Leak MemoryClear Firefox Caches to Recover MemoryCyberNotes: Minimizing Firefox Memory LeaksMust-Have Firefox Extension: StatusbarExTweak Firefox’s Performance Using FireTune

This article was written on February 14, 2008 by CyberNet.

Something you may not realize is that Firefox has a setting that will prefetch websites and images to improve the user’s browsing experience, and it’s actually enabled by default. It will utilize your browser’s idle time to prefetch images and websites as determined by the webmasters.

Mozilla has an entire page setup to describe how the link prefetching mechanism works, and here is the summary that they provide:

Link prefetching is a browser mechanism, which utilizes browser idle time to download or prefetch documents that the user might visit in the near future. A web page provides a set of prefetching hints to the browser, and after the browser is finished loading the page, it begins silently prefetching specified documents and stores them in its cache. When the user visits one of the prefetched documents, it can be served up quickly out of the browser’s cache.

Webmasters can enable the prefetching by placing code like this in their website:

<link rel="prefetch" href="/images/big.jpeg">

The HREF is what points to the website or image that needs to be prefetched, and in this example a fullsize version of a thumbnail is cached so that it loads faster. This can obviously be a useful feature, but it can also result in unwanted cookies and cached items showing up on your computer. Even Google uses this to cache the first result that is displayed.

If you don’t want Firefox to do this then you’ll have to manually go and disable it:

1. In the Firefox Address Bar type about:config and press Enter.
2. Find the option that is named network.prefetch-next and double-click on it.
3. Change the value to false.

I’m not quite sure how I feel about Mozilla prefetching content without the users ever knowing. To me that is something they should ask users whether they want to enabled it when initially setting up the browser, especially since it can store cookies for websites that you yourself never actually visit.

What do you think about the prefetching?

Copyright © 2011 CyberNetNews.com

Related Posts:

Helpful Tip: Disable Drag & Drop Images in FirefoxCyberNotes: Cooliris Provides Faster, Easier Way To Browse The WebHelpful Tip: Disable the System Beep in WindowsHelpful Tip: How to Quickly Save an ImageEasily Disable The IE7 Automatic Install From Happening

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

Related Posts:

Standalone Versions Of Internet Explorer 3, 4, 5, and 6Microsoft: Firefox/Chrome are Insecure, Difficult to Use, and UnreliableFirefox Experiences Continued Growth With More than 15% of the U.S. MarketIs Firefox Going To Pick Up After Microsoft’s Mistake?Firefox, Safari, & Opera Hit Record-High Market Share