Hasta La Gadget!

Nintendo’s latest earnings report may be a litany of woe, but at least the outfit’s semi-annual financial results briefing bore good news: the 3DS eShop is about to get a kick in the pants. Today’s 3DS store gets the job done, but it’s hampered by disorganized categories, limited accessibility, and poor download management. Want something better? It’s on the way — a late November update is slated to bring “sleep mode” background downloading to the fledgling console, and opens the door for publishers to release in-game premium DLC and “limited-play” demos. Nintendo is even taking steps to address the handheld’s lousy shopping experience, announcing a companion website where users will be able to browse the eShop from a PC or smartphone. Eventually 3DS owners will be able to buy content directly from the eShop website, but at launch shoppers will need to scan a QR code with the handheld to make a purchase. It’s not a perfect plan, but at least it’s a start. Baby steps Nintendo, baby steps.

Nintendo’s eShop plans: premium DLC, game demos, smartphone shopping, relevancy originally appeared on Engadget on Fri, 28 Oct 2011 19:02:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It’s hard to believe but WebKit, the rendering engine inside Safari and Chrome, is now ten years old. The forked child of KDE’s KHTML received its first commit of code from Apple back on August 24th of 2001. It would be well over a year before the debut of Safari in 2003, and another two years before it was fully open sourced. Since then it’s begun to replace Gecko (Mozilla) as the rendering engine du jour and even spawned a sequel in Webkit2. So, happy birthday to Apple’s greatest contribution to the open source community.

WebKit turns 10, celebrates a decade of speedy, standards-compliant browsing originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 25 Aug 2011 09:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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It looks like the sly fox is ready to make its worldwide debut a few days early. In typical Mozilla fashion, a complete build of Firefox 6 is now unofficially available for your downloading pleasure, three days ahead of schedule. If you’re looking for a major facelift to the desktop edition, you won’t find one here — most of the new features aren’t cosmetic. Perhaps most visibly, you’ll find the domain name of the page you’re parked on highlighted in the address bar. On the Android side, version 6 makes much bigger promises, like a “fresh visual style in Chrome Gingerbread,” enhanced image scaling, and, perhaps most importantly, it’s “faster and uses less memory.” We’ve downloaded the desktop version of the browser ourselves, and we’ve found the release quite snappy. If you’re not afraid of a little pre-release downloading, you can catch the (desktop) fox at the source links below. And as per usual, please let us know how it’s treating you.

Firefox 6 breaks out ahead of schedule, gets official August 16th originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 13 Aug 2011 14:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Google just wouldn’t be Google if it wasn’t wringing out every last iota of performance from its products. The latest Chrome release is no different, ushering Instant Pages out of the dev channel and into the hands of the proletariat. The headline feature uses an algorithm to “guess” where you’ll click next, pre-fetching and pre-rendering the result if it’s confident enough. Mountain View says it’s the only “high-profile” site to support the tech, but interested web masters can can partake of the instantaneous Google goodies by peeping the more coverage link below. Tweaks to the Omnibox — which now returns URL and title history results based on partial queries — and the addition of print previews for Windows and Linux round out the 13th version of the popular browser. Video of the über-swift search in action’s below.

Continue reading Google’s Chrome 13 brings ‘Instant Pages’ to the masses, saves precious seconds of your life

Google’s Chrome 13 brings ‘Instant Pages’ to the masses, saves precious seconds of your life originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 03 Aug 2011 08:43:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink PCWorld  |  Google (1), (2)  | Email this | Comments

There’s a web browser hiding inside the iriver Story HD, but it’s pretty shy originally appeared on Engadget on Mon, 18 Jul 2011 12:46:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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