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Chrome: Google did it again!

h3rald@h3rald.com — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 00:31:00 -0000

It looks like there’s a new open source browser in town. As usual, nearly everything about it leaked before its release. Every blog that matters is talking about it, so if you didn’t hear anything about it, you’d better take a look yourself. Don’t be fooled by the usual senseless ravings of some weird, overly-hyped blogger though: a browser just came out, nothing more and nothing less. It’s not the end of Windows, it’s not the end of the Internet, it’s not the end of the world as we know it. It’s just a new player in the Browser Wars.

I particularly recommend reading the official Google Comic Book about Chrome, however I included some of the most interesting parts of it in this article. It’s a nice 40-page comic booklet explaining how the browser works in a friendly way… I found it quite amusing and an interesting way to ~~leak~~ distribute info on a new project.

Getting the damn thing

You can freely download Google Chromm from here. You’ll get a tiny 474KB setup file which installs the browser automatically. When I say automatically I mean automatically: you double click it, and it won’t ask anything: it will just install it in Program Files by itself. Idiot proof. Clever. Some people may like it, I damn hated it.

I downloaded it and installed it fine from home, on Vista, and it was blazing fast (on Vista_, imagine!). I tried to do the same thing from work and I couldn’t. The damn installer is supposed to pick up the proxy settings from your default browser, but if the proxy uses authentication (like 99% of corporate proxies) it simply won’t work. As far as I know, there’s no way around thisthread/thread/4c07ec5124f2eebc.

This is the reason why this article won’t have any chrome screenshots… to protest against Google’s stupid way of doing things “too user-friendly”.

Update 1: Actually, it is now possible to download the full Chrome setup from here (Thanks Crazy Australian).

Update 2: After installing Chrome, if your company uses an automatic proxy script you won’t be able to browser web sites using Chrome. If that’s your case, make sure you change IE’s proxy settings by specifying your proxy address and port explicitly.

How Google “re-invented” the browser

Why did Google bother? Officially because…

“[…] we believe we can add value for users and, at the same time, help drive innovation on the web.”
(from Google Blog)

In practice, a Google-branded browser makes sense especially because of the services offered by the search giant right now: nearly every kind of web application, from mail clients to RSS readers.

The philosophy of Google Chrome is fairly simple: the Web has changed since the nineties, we now have full-fledged applications instead of crappy hypertexts with animated GIFs, therefore browsers must change, too.

Every major browser has a fairly long development history. Think of Firefox: version 3? Not really: try adding up at least 7 versions of Netscape before that. Internet Explorer 8, Opera 9.5, …
Safari is probably the newest of the lot, but still not quite right.

All major browsers evolved through the years, but they never really changed: so why not to start from scratch?

Starting from scratch has a lot of advantages:

You can learn from other people’s mistakes, and try to fix them
You can get things right from the very start
You do not have to worry about breaking compatibility with previous versions
People won’t have extremely high expectations, and they’ll be prepared for a relatively unstable product

Obviously building a browser from the ground up is not a weekend project, but things changed since the nineties and starting fresh does not necessarily means re-inventing the wheel!

An “old” Rendering Engine

Let’s just say that the main work was already done for Google by the WebKit guys. The rendering engine which now powers Safari, the Nokia Series 60 browser, Gnome’s Epiphany, Adobe AIR has been picked by the Google guys for Chrome.

This is a fairly obvious choice, if you ask me. Why?

Presto (Opera’s engine) is proprietary
Trident (IE’s engine) is proprietary, and it sucks
Gecko (Mozilla’s engine) is open source, but a bit bulky
WebKit is open source, and arguably the fastest rendering engine to date

The rendering engine, after all, may be considered one of the most important parts of the browser: it’s responsible of what users see, after all.
Google made the right choice, in my opinion: WebKit is also the most “embeddable” and lightweight engine available, and it is also used on the Android platform for this very reason.

A “new” Javascript

Mozilla has a fast engine, which will soon become much faster. WebKit has a blazing fast Javascript engine too, don’t forget. So why Google didn’t just use that?

…Because they wanted something much faster than that, in their own way (as someone already pointed out).

Meet V8, Chrome’s very own Javascript Virtual Machine. When reading the Chrome Comic, I was particularly impressed of two improvements introduced by this new javascript VM:

It actually compiles Javascript to machine code via a Just-In-Time compiler (JIT). This means that whenever you refresh a page containing Javascript the browser won’t re-interpret the whole script, but it will simply run the compiled version of it which was generated the first time the page was loaded. New concept? Not really, Mozilla is going exactly in the same direction with their own engine, and JIT compilation will be added as of Firefox 3.1.
V8’s incremental garbage collection looks like a much better alternative to the current conservative garbage collection methods used for Javascript. Because of V8’s new concept of Hidden Class Transitions, V8 knows exactly when something is no longer needed and thus it is able to garbace-collect it more effectively.

While there has been some initial skepticism on this new Javascript implementation, it looks like Google did it right. If you don’t believe it you can download V8’s C++ code and try it out yourself.

One Process per Tab

Google Chrome is the first multi-process browser. The idea is that each tab (because you can’t do browsers without tabs, these days, right?) has its own phisical process and it is therefore independent from each other.

Hang on, isn’t that what IE 5 did? A new instance of the browser for each window? No, not quite: there’s a single instance of the browser and multiple tab instances. Each tab is independent in the sense that it has its own address bar, but it’s just a tab, at the end of the day.

This is what Internet Explorer could have done, before Internet Explorer 7, as an answer to the traditional concept of tabs promoted by Mozilla and Opera.

Actually, it turns out that this is exactly what’s planned for Internet Explorer 8, as someone already pointed out!

Additionally, Google thought of building in a mini task manager to let users monitor the CPU and memory usage of each tab. This is interesting, but it has a few implications discussed later on in this article.

What’s truly remarkable about this is that each tab seems to have an initial overhead of 1-2KB, which of course grows according to the site it loads. You can see all this in the task manager, which also picks up similar stats for any other browser running at the same time on your machine.
This was another clever move by Google: by looking at their own task manager, and running more than one browser together, you have everything you need to instantly compare browser performance (thus discovering that Chrome does an outstanding job, it seems).

What’s also remarkable about Chrome’s tabs is the way you can interact with them:

You can move them around smoohtly, exactly like with Safari
You can detach them by drag and drop
You can re-attach them by drag and drop (which is truly awesome!)

AwesomeBar OmniBox and Speed Dial New Tab Page

Did you like Mozilla’s AwesomeBar? Well, I personally did, others didn’t so much. Meet OmniBox™ Google’s very own, semi-sentient address bar which really understands you.

Here’s what you can do with it:

Type in URLs and view web sites (it would be damn funny if it couldn’t do that)
Get ~~extra Google crap~~ useful suggestions while typing. This includes, but it is not limited to:
- Pages you visited
- Bookmarks
- Popular pages (guess who decides that…)
Custom searches: search IMDB, Wikipedia, Amazon and google itself with a few clicks

Unlike Firefox’s AwesomeBar, Google’s OmniBox seems more “evolved”: it doesn’t get too much in your way, it lets you go where you want to go, and it’s smart about searching. Apparently Mozilla is already planning to remove the search bar completely and incorporate it in the AwesomeBar… but Google released it first, sorry guys.

The other handy thing they ~~stole~~ kindly borrowed from Opera is the New Tab Page, basically like Opera’s Speed Dial, but with two interesting things:

It displays the nine most visited pages: you don’t have to configure it!
It displays search boxes for the most visited sites where you searched something on.

While I really like how this works (it requires no configuration whatsoever), I kinda miss dragging my favorite pages in the New Tab Page. If you come from Opera, you’ll miss this too: the pages I have in my speed dial are NOT necessarily the pages I visited the most!

I guess I’ll get used to it, though…

Relax, it’s Google!

Google is not Evil™. Google is good to everyone, from their own employees to developers and end users: and the funniest part of this whole thing is that everything they make looks good for you. You have absolutely no reason to fear Google.

They did it again: they apparently released a new browser which definitely looks inherently more secure than competitors.
Here’s why:

It has an Incognito mode, which lets you browse everything you want without logging anything anywhere.
It confines popups to the tab they belong, minimized. You can then seletively decide to drag them out and promote them to their own window.
Each tab is sandboxed: i.e., it has no rights to write anything to your PC. Absolutely no chance. When plugins for Java and Flash are used, however, this doesn’t apply.
Chrome continuously downloads lists of malicious sites, so that you’re protected against phishing in real time.

Now, if everything goes wrong, you know it’s definitely someone else who did it. If you read the comic book between the lines, you’ll notice a not-so-subtle message to the end users:

The browser is sandboxed, so if anything goes wrong, blame others (Adobe for Flash, Sun for Java, Microsoft for some other crap)
You can monitor the resource consumption of each tab, ergo what each website uses. This means that if a site is slow is definitely the web developer’s fault.

This is basically what John Resig immediately pointed out when the comic came out.

How it feels

Google Chrome is clearly a very nice product to use. It’s as intuitive as IE for the average Windows user, it has the best of Firefox and Opera features and it’s even more sleek than Safari. The UI, in my opinion, is a true masterpiece and feels well though out.

Everything is aimed to be intuitive and does not get in your way: it just works. You want to download a file? You can just do it, without worrying about where to save it: it will appear in a “download bucket” at the bottom of your tabs, and you can just drag and drop what you downloaded anywhere you like, if you need to.
Why nobody thought of this before?

Even the program settings are simple to understand. The Options dialog is divided in “Basics”, “Minor Tweaks” and “Under the Hood”. The idea is that anyone can understand the Basics, some people may tweak a bit more, and only geeks may want to go beyond that. This is particularly evident in the Italian translation (it comes bundled with 40 localizations, by the way), where they translated “Under the Hood” with “Roba da smanettoni” which means something like “Stuff for people who fiddle with PCs”. I personally found this translation a bit irritating, but anyway…

Media Coverage and Target Audience

The overall impression is that Google wanted to target end users with this browser, but also appeal geeks, too. This makes sense from a marketing point of view. While 90% of geeks switched from IE to another browser, ordinary people are still stuck with IE. Why? Because alternative browsers have gained a reputation of being geek-friendly (which, by popular belief, does not mean user-friendly).

Google’s marketing strategy is quite clear, and it doesn’t seem to be failing on any point:

They targeted Windows first, because that’s what the bulk of IE aficionados uses.
They did their best to make it as user-friendly as possible: the sleek GUI, the comic book, etc.
They spread the world like crazy: every blog is talking about it, but also major news sites like BBC and CNN. When I got to work, a collegue of mine asked me if I tried the new Google browser and if I read the comic. She heard it at the radio. Here in Italy!
At the same time, they made the whole thing open source, released APIs and emphasized this, so that “computer fiddlers” couldn’t resist.

To me, it looks like Google Chrome stands a good chance to succeed where others have failed: drive most of the Internet population away from Internet Explorer.

Open Source, testing and quality

Google is well known for its massive infrastructure. Moreover, Google is the only “entity” (let’s call it that way, shall we) who knows and visited almost every web page on the Internet. If something is not “on Google”, it may well not exist at all: this is not strictly true, but it’s the user perspective and ad the end of the day that’s all that matters.
Google, as a consequence, has virtually unlimited resources (compared to any other possible competitor) and virtually unlimited knowledge of the Internet, which makes automated testing no more than a joke.

From the Google Chrome Comic:

“Within 20-30 minutres of each new browser build, we can teswt it on tens of thousands of different web pages”

…and that’s certainly not an understatemend: you can believe that.

Google seems very concerned of building a “rock-solid” browser rather than being the coolest guy in town, and that’s a good sign. Google is smart, remember?

As if it weren’t enough, the entire thing (the rendering engine, the javascript implementation and the whole code of the broswer) is 100% open source which means, in a nutshell:

Free testers
Free developers
Good publicity

If things go as planned, Chrome may become the most widely tested piece of software in the world. Let’s just see how the community takes this.

Why it matters

Everyone seems to have gone crazy about Chrome, even long before it was made available. Why does it matter, anyway? Isn’t it just a browser, at the end of the day? Well, yes, but:

It’s 100% open source. If you like something of it, you can get it, modify it, bundle it in another project and redistribute it. Give it a few weeks and extensions which use some of Google’s new API will flock to the ’fox like crazy.
It’s small, fast and very promising. Sure, it’s not perfect, but YOU can help improving it. Get it?
It’s on Windows, so it will reach the majority of Internet users… in theory.

Last but not least, it comes bundled with Gears, i.e. what Google would like you to use for RIAs. That’s perhaps the only “subliminal” message they are trying to send to their users (for now, at least).
As a matter of fact, nothing prevents them from using Chrome as a way to promote their technology and products. But at the same time nothing prevents a random developer to just fork the project and distribute a neutral and unbranded version of Chrome.

See? Google is not evil at all, it’s just smarter than others.

The Bottom Line

Google showed us once more that their “innovation” can be summarized with the following:

“Do not invent new things, just make them better”

They didn’t invent Internet search: they just made it better and smarted. The same philosophy applies to Chrome, too. Some examples? Sure:

They didn’t create a new rendering engine, they used an existing one
They analyzed Safari’s neat GUI tricks and implemented something even better.
They added an IE8-like domain highlight in the URL.
They got the Firefox’s AwesomeBar and improved it.
They got Opera’s Speed Dial and improved it.
They got IE8’s one-process-per-tab architecture and improved it.
They didn’t think of a Javascript JIT first, they just made it widely-available first.
They didn’t think about merging the address bar with the search bar, Mozilla announced it first, but Google released it before they did.
Safari 4 allows users to create shortcuts for their favorite web apps, but unfortunately it’s only out for developers…

Google did it, again. Exactly as planned.

Firefox 3 Revealed

h3rald@h3rald.com — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 02:46:00 -0000

When the SitePoint staff asked me to write an article summing up all the new features of Firefox 3, I gladly accepted: I wrote about Firefox before, and I thought it was just going to be a 2-3 hours job maximum.
After diving deeper into Firefox 3 development, reading dozens of different blogs and scouting Mozilla’s web sites, I realized I was wrong: Firefox 3 introduced a lot of new things, and keeping track of all of them, I admit, was quite a hard task.

Nevertheless, I wrote the article and delivered it to SitePoint in time fore the release, but my editor “complained” that 8,300+ words was about 3 times over the minimum requirements for a feature article!
“I don’t really think that people can read the whole thing online” —, he said, and I somehow agreed.

In the end, they decided to pack my “article” into a 30-pages PDF eBook which can be downloaded absolutely free of charge from SitePoint web site as well, so here it is:

Firefox 3 Revealed

If you prefer though, you can still read the article directly on SitePoint, here.

This guide aims to give you a comprehensive overview of virtually all the new features and improvements introduced by Firefox 3.

I would like to thank the whole SitePoint staff for giving me the opportunity to write this eBook, and in particular Matthew Magain for his help and support (and for creating the PDF on a Sunday evening!).
Additionally, I would also like to thank the Mozilla Development Team for their awesome job with Firefox 3 and everyone else who made this eBook possible.

Update: Feel free to digg this eBook!

Thoughts on Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 03:18:00 -0000

Opera 9.5 is out, Firefox 3 too (more or less), so, which browser are you going to use today?
This new generatio of browsers offers plenty of new, innovative features and improvements over the past, in both cases:

You can finally use Firefox because it finally doesn’t eat up all your RAM
You can finally use Opera because it is finally “understand” ajaxified web sites like Gmail

Amazingly, these two releases have a lot in common…

A fresh new look

Both browsers needed a new look, let’s be honest. Both didn’t really care that much in the past releases, but suddenly things changed: the new Opera theme, Sharp, looks truly awesome on any platform, and the Mozilla development team came up with FOUR different themes, aiming to camouflage Firefox as a native application for all the major OSes.

Personally, while I was really impressed by the new Opera theme, I was not too sure of the new direction taken for Firefox UI. Why a different theme for each different major operating system? In particular the XP theme could have been better, in my opinion.
Not a huge deal though, as both browsers are skinnable (although I’m not gonna alter the way Opera looks!).

The speed of light

My main complaint about Firefox 2 was its slow startup and generally slowness due to several memory leaks. This eventually led me to “switch to Opera” for my daily browsing a while ago.

Firefox 3, luckily, is much faster and more memory-efficient than its predecessor, as the development team squashed most of the memory-related bugs. The introduction of jemalloc as the new memory allocator and also the new cycle collectory improved things quite a bit.

Opera 9.5 still “feels” faster at startup and also the GUI is a bit more snappy than Firefox’s, but Firefox 3 is terribly fast at interpreting Javascript.
As a result, sites like Gmail or Google Reader are rendered almost instantaneously in Firefox 3, while Opera 9.5 is slightly slower.

Address Bar 2.0

Both browser struggled to add more features to the Address Bar: Opera now supports search-as-you-type history search and Firefox… well, let’s just say that Firefox Developers built something truly wonderful with the new “AwesomeBar”: it is now possible to search history items tagged pages and bookmarks.

But there’s more: you’ll notice that the AwesomeBar does an outstanding job in retrieving results ordered by relevance, frequency and access time, and it also allows the user to restrict search to specific page types.

As an Opera user, I must admit that Firefox is really way ahead with this. Unfortunately, Opera toolbar still is not that smart.

Sync’ing up

Opera offers the ability to sync your bookmarks, notes, custom toolbars and Quick Dial pages via the new Link service.
It looks awfully similar to Mozilla Weave, an experimental extension aiming to synchronize the whole Firefox profile.

Currently, Weave allows users to sync bookmarks, history and passwords in a very secure way: this truly preserve the “state” of your browser across multiple computers.

On the other hand, Opera is virtually on any device or platform, so Link can be handy if you use Opera as your mobile browser. Unfortunately, we’ll still have to wait a bit for a proper Mozilla competitor for mobile device, but it already looks very promising.

Be nice, be open

Firefox is THE (only?) open source browser. Opera has always been (and always will be?) a proprietary, freeware, closed source app.
Some people are really bothered by this, especially Linux users of course: it really comes down to how religious you are about the software running on your machine.

Being open source, Firefox is more hacker-friendly: this release, especially, also delivers an awful lot of useful APIs which can be used to develop extensions in a much easier way. This of course isn’t an option for Opera.

From a different point of view, Opera actually implements more ‘next generation’ open standards than Firefox, and it scores more than Firefox in the Acid 3 test.

Does this matter in the end? Well, yes and no: it’s nice that Opera struggles to be way ahead than others in this, but in the end, until Firefox 3 (and Internet Explorer too!) catch up, web developers won’t dare using any of the new features.

Do you have a web site optimized for Opera? No, probably not: you’re normally aiming at Firefox or IE (sigh!) when it comes to development, because they are still more widely used.

All this is very sad, but still terribly true. But at least, other browsers will feel more compelled to catch up.

Usability is the key

Personally, I prefer Opera’s philosophy of “everything in tabs” rather than having many dialog boxes floating around for downloads, history, bookmarks etc.

From this point of view, Firefox is arguably not as usable as Opera. Before Firefox GUI purists start screaming insults, I repeat that this is entirely up to your taste.

While Opera’s GUI didn’t undergo any major change, Firefox 3 definitely did:

A new Library now holds all your bookmarks, history and feeds
The new Downloads dialog supports (finally!) download resumes, even across different browsing sessions
It is very easy to access information on web site, especially with the new identity button (that’s where the web site favicon is displayed).

Another trend introduced by Firefox 3 is the ability to search-as-you-type in all these dialogs and in many others (like the Cookie Manager). This makes finding information much easier.

Opera didn’t need any major overhaul, but I would have liked to have cookies and preference in tabs, too (they are pretty much the only dialog boxes left).

To extend or not extend?

This is always the eternal dilemma when it comes to Firefox vs. other browsers.

The major strength of Firefox 3, like all its predecessors, lies in the hundreds of free extensions which can be installed by user to enhance browser’s functionality. You can turn Firefox into almost anything you like.

Because I’m trying to be browser-independent, I like to keep my Firefox extensions to a bare minimum:

Weave
Operator
Web Developer
Del.icio.us
Firebug
StumbleUpon
ColorZilla
Secure Login

Opera fans always boost that Opera can do pretty much everything you’d ever need out of the box, so you don’t need any extension at all. Part of this is true (does Firefox have an e-mail client? No. Does Firefox offer a Wand out-of-the-box? No., …read this for the details)

In the past release, Opera added widget to let developers unleash their creativity. And I must admit that they are quite cute and work well enough (a few of them at least).

One of the most frequently-missed feature was a Firebug equivalent for Opera. Luckily, this was fixed in this release with the introduction of DragonFly, which is already bundled with the browser itself.
I’m pretty sure this will make a lot of web developers very happy.

Personally, I still miss an equivalent of the del.icio.us extension in Opera, but I guess I can survive with just a bookmarklet, if needed.

Choose your winner

It is really up to you. I don’t have a true favorite as for now: Firefox 3 is very, very tempting because of three things:

The AwesomeBar: I feel I’m already becoming addicted to it
Some of its extensions, including Weave
The performance improvements, especially concerning memory management and the rendering of pages making extensive use of Javascript

Opera, on the other hand, charmes me for what it can do out-of-the-box: it’s fast, sleek, has almost everything I need with no configuration at all. It’s ideal if you use multiple systems, including mobile devices.

Definitely I will not abandon any of the two as for now: I’ll probaly use Firefox for a more enhanced browsing experience, but I’ll definitely use Opera when I’m in a hurry to look something up for example, and every time my fiancée is using Firefox on the same account.

There’s no absolute winner in the Browser Wars yet: just different browsers for different occasions!

A Firefox Lover's Guide to Opera

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 28 Dec 2007 13:19:00 -0000

Note: This article can be considered a sequel for An IE Lover’s Guide to Firefox, which described Firefox through the eyes of an Internet Explorer fan. Similarly, this article describes Opera’s features from the point of view of a user – myself – who has been using Firefox for years and is now considering another browser switch.

I am a Firefox fan. I’ve been using Firefox since it was named “Firebird” and calling it “stable” was a big overstatement. Firefox dragged me out of Internet Explorer, and that was definitely one of its biggest achievements.

Because I’m addicted to trying out new tools, however, I always kept testing new browsers I discovered here and there. K-Meleon, Flock, Sleipnir… When Safari came out for Windows I immediately installed it and used it for about 2 hours, only to realize that it wasn’t – and it still isn’t – usable at all, mainly due to sporadic crashes.

Similarly, I’ve been trying out Opera periodically, as new releases came out, but again it didn’t seem to work for me. The biggest complaint I had was its inability to render heavily-ajaxified web sites properly. However, now it seems that the Opera Development Team made a big effort to improve the browser, and I was pleased to notice that Opera 9.5b (“Kestrel”) doesn’t seem to have this sort of problems at all.h3. Planning the Switch

Firefox has extensions. Plenty of them actually. Some are useful, like the newish Del.icio.us one made by Yahoo, and also crappy ones you’ll never use unless you want to have a fancy button on one of your over-cluttered toolbars which enables you to interface more easily with X or Y web services you hardly ever use.

By contrast, Opera never attempted to add full-blown extension support to its venerable and yet very powerful browser. Instead, they kept building more and more features right into its core, being careful not to undermine the browser’s two proverbial qualities: speed and stability. What seemed a doomed philosophy at first turned out to be a good thingin the long run. More and more people are getting more and more worried about Firefox’s memory issues and begin to wander off to explore new things, exactly like I did.

The first step to switch from Firefox to Opera is to reduce the number of Firefox extensions to the bare minimum you need:

Colorzilla
Web Developer
MeasureIt
Search Status
Gmail Manager
Secure Login
Del.icio.us

How many extensions do you actually use? Here’s a short analysis for the ones above:

The first three are related to Web Development only, which means that I don’t need them unless I’m doing some web-development tests during which I’m always going to have more than one browser open anyway. UPDATE: there are a few Ruler widget which can be used instead of MeasureIt (thanks Ameer).
SearchStatus gives me Alexa Rank and Google Pagerank: I think I can survive without those for a while. UPDATE: if not, there’s always SEObar (thanks Ameer).
I use Gmail Manager because my girlfriend uses Gmail on the same computer. I’m switching to Opera and she’ll stick with Firefox, so no problem there…
Secure Login? It’s called Wand and it has been built-in into Opera for the last decade or so.
Del.icio.us – OK, I won’t be able to access my favorite tags as quickly, but someone already came out with a few handy buttons for a better integration with the popular social bookmarking service.

UPDATE: For a list of the features provided by Firefox extensions which are included in Opera, see Rijk’s Top 150 Popular Firefox Extensions and Opera

Because I’m addicted to betas, I immediately downloaded Opera Kestrel, i.e. Opera 9.50 beta 1. I never actually liked Opera’s default theme, so I started looking around for new skins (yes, eye-candy matters sometimes) and came across the Ximple series by serafins. In particular, 2nd thought – Jimple quickly became my favorite.

Tabs

“Opera is the Web pioneer that delivered tabbed browsing in 2000 […]”

Opera tabs feel stable and mature. Why? Probably because tabs are used more consistently to open not only web pages but also:

Downloads (“Transfers”)
RSS feeds
Notes
Emails
Bookmarks
Widget Management
Contacts
History
Page Links

I think this is a great feature and Firefox should definitely consider it: v3.0 comes with new download and bookmark managers, but they’re still dialogs. Yes, I know, there’s probably some extension which allows you to display them in the sidebar, but that’s not the point: Opera brings more consistency to the overall browsing experience by using tabs wherever they should be used.

Additionally, Opera tabs…

Can be rearranged, exactly like Firefox tabs
Can be restored, if closed accidently, by re-opening them from the Trash can
Can be locked, meaning that they can’t be closed accidently
Can be duplicated
Can be saved in groups (sessions) and re-opened later on
Can be restored if Opera crashes

Speed Dial

When you open Opera for the first time, and whenever you open a new empty tab the Speed Dial is displayed. What I originally thought it was one of the most annoying things introduced by Opera 9 turned out to be actually useful and very addictive.

The idea behind it is simple:

Show a default page with 9 slots
Allow users to drag links to those slots
Display preview of each slot (which is cached and can be updated by refreshing the page)
Allow users to quickly access pages saved in the Speed Dial via CTRL+1 .. CTRL+9 or simply by clicking them.

Simple and effective. Once you get going with it, you’ll overcome the initial feeling of imposition and you’ll use it more and more: I literally can’t live without it now!

Right-click goodies

While I was testing Opera, my girlfriend came along and asked me to look something up on IMDB. I normally had IMDB as custom search engine in Firefox, but unfortunately Opera didn’t seem to allow users to customize their search engines…

Totally wrong. Not only Opera lets you add any search engine to the search bar, it also does it with style and in the easiest way possible:

Go to your search engine or any website with a search form
Right click the search field
Click Create Search…
Specify a name and a keyword for your search engine

Done. You’ll now be able to search that particular site directly from the search bar. As you can see, I added Wikipedia, IMDB and even the Unofficial Elder Scrolls Pages in this way.

Besides creating searches, Opera lets you do a lot by right-clicking anywhere on a page:

Block Content: Right-click an empty area of any webpage and select Block Content to select which ads, scripts and images will be blocked from now on.
Validate: Validate the HTML source code of the current page.
Translate: Translate the current page into a foreign language with just two clicks.
Open With: Open the current page in another browser installed on your system.
Edit Site Preferences…: Choose to block/allow cookies and popups, identify Opera as another browser, set a different encoding, enable/disable scripts, images, flash, etc. These setting apply to the current web site only.
View source, reload page every X seconds/minutes, send by email, etc.

Widgets

Opera Widgets must not be considered as Opera’s counterpart to Firefox extensions. Instead, Opera Widgets can be used as poor man’s Vista Gadgets on Windows XP, and they do their job most remarkably.

I’m personally very fond of these ones:

They all have a common trait: they all behave as standalone programs, as they should be. The Wikipedia one, for example, can display Wikipedia entries directly inside the widget, unlike some others which just take you to Wikipedia, which is rather pointless.

Although widgets live within Opera, they can be displayed “always behind”, which means they’ll be glued to your desktop and therefore will be visible whenever Opera and other applications are minimized.

Needless to say that anyone brave enough can make widgets for Opera by following a simple Widget Specification.

Everything you can do on the Internet

The term browser applied to Opera is somehow misleading. Personally I would have called it something like “Internet Suite”, because that would be a better choice due to the features it offers and the things it can do.

Traditionally speaking, a web browser can be used to browse web pages, read feeds (sometimes) and navigate through FTP directories. Here’s what Opera can handle:

Web Pages – No need of explanations here.
FTP – FTP directories are listed very clearly, overriding server’s settings with a more user-friendly layout.
Local Files – This was a surprise for me. Typing file:// will automatically load a list of the drives currently available on your machine. Similarly, auto-completion for directory and file names is supported! I almost started using Opera as my everyday’s file manager (almost).
Feeds – An embedded feed reader can be used to subscribe to RSS/Atom feeds and view them… in a tab, of course.
E-mails – Opera is also a pretty decent email client. As of version 9.5 full IMAP support has been added, which definitely makes the difference.
IRC – Opera can be used as an client, which works pretty well. Who needs ChatZilla anymore?
News – Opera can be used to signup and retrieve news from newsgroups.
Gopher/WAIS – Although not used everyday, Opera can handle these old protocols as well.
BitTorrent Files – By default, Opera can act as a BitTorrent client as well, so you can just open .torrent files through the program and then monitor the download progress in the Transfers window, like with any other normal download. While this feature is indeed useful, it is also possible to disable it and still use your favorite BitTorrent client.

Portability and Synchronization

Let’s spend some words about portability. Sure, there are two “Portable Opera” apps out there, and they work well enough, but one thing I’d like about a web browser is the ability to synchronize my preferences, customizations, themes, passwords etc. etc. across multiple computers.
Firefox is getting there, although the technology is still at a very early stage.
Opera is doing something similar through Opera Link, which allows you to synchronize automatically your Bookmarks, your Personal Bar and your Speed Dial. All you need is to get a (free) Opera account, login to Opera Link and enable the synchronization feature from the File menu. From now on every time you’ll modify your Speed Dial or Bookmarks, the changes will be sent to your Opera Link page. Similarly, whenever you start using opera somewhere else, if you login to your Opera Account you should be able to synchronize your Bookmarks and Speed Dial.

Here are some thoughts on this type of technology:

It’s not totally private yet. While it’s great to be able to sync bookmarks and speed dial, the problems arise when you finish using your friend’s computer for example… what happens to the bookmarks you just sync’ed? The only way to delete them would be to have your friend to log in to his Opera account and re-sync them. Not enough privacy for my liking.
Your passwords, notes, widgets, etc. etc. cannot be synchronized yet, but that will hopefully be possible in near future.
Sync’ing bookmarks is pointless for me. Although Opera still hopes to compete with Del.icio.us & Co., that will be very hard to achieve. I stopped using in-browser bookmarks long ago.
Link seems and interesting feature considering that Opera is available on virtually any operating system and a lot of different devices (mobile phones, Nintendo DS & Wii, …).

At any rate, it is still possible to “carry around” your personal opera settings by following the instructions provided on this page which explains pretty much everything you need to know aboud Opera files and local storage.

Advanced Features

Opera looks more “polished up” than Firefox in most cases. The superb usage of tabs for nearly everything is one example, and another one is the possibility to apply skins (themes) on-the-fly, without having to restart the browser.
Firefox can do this via the Personas extension, but Opera had this built-in for a long time.

To apply a new skin:

Go to the Skins Directory
Download a skin you like
Opera will download and apply the skin immediately, and it will ask you whether you want to keep it or not. If you choose not to, it won’t save it in your profile (very useful for quick previews). Neat.

Another quality opera always excelled to is accessibility. Besides using the interface in the traditional way, it is also possible to:

Use mouse gestures – I wasn’t a big fan of this until I bothered reading the excellent documentation Opera provided for them (which is significantly better than the Firefox’s equivalent). It can be quite useful at times.
Use keyboard shortcuts – Believe it or not, you can literally use Opera without a mouse.
Speak to it – Opera’s voice integration is getting better and better. Not only you can effectively tell your browser what to do, you can also use the built-in text-to-speech function (Windows only) to have it read entire pages for you. It actually works quite well and it can parse punctuation well enough to apply the right intonation. Just for fun, I had it read it an Italian page… and it actually worked as expected: it was like listening to an American reading an Italian text using US pronuntiation!

Finally, power users will be delighted of the way opera lets you hack the program settings, as you can:

Use Tools > Quick Preferences to block/unblock popups, cookies, Java applets, images, etc.
Use Tools > Advanced to access detailed information concerning cookies, cache (it lists every image/object cached!), plug-ins, Wand passwords, etc.
Use Tools > Appearence… to access and manage appearance-related settings, like skins, toolbars, buttons and panels
Use Tools > Preferences… to access general preferences (all the rest)
Type in opera:config to view and tweak Opera’s internal settings, somehow like Firefox’s about:config, but much cleaner and easier to use.
Download the Developer Console to have a simpler alternative to Firefox’s Web Developer Toolbar extension, to view DOM elements, CSS and Javascript information.

Annoyances

After using as main browser for a few weeks now, I can say that it’s great but not perfect yet. It’s very advanced, faster and more mature than any other browser, of course,but there are a few things which should be fixed or improved.

In particular:

It’s not open source – This may not matter to someone, but some people consider this an essential requirement for their browser, and that’s why Firefox is their most obvious choice. Although Opera is free, it is proprietary software after all, which means is definitely not as open as you may want it to be. Personally I’m not too bothered, as I’m starting to think that too much openness may lead to too many unuseful and bloated extensions and make the program somehow “unpredictable” and heavy.
No address bar search – Amazingly, only Firefox seems to have this feature built-in. I’m referring to the ability to type whatever in the address bar to be redirected to the site returned by a Google’s I’m feeling lucky search. It is possible to emulate this feature in Opera by creating a custom search for I’m Feeling Lucky and assign it a short keyword like “l”. In this way, for example, typing in l h3rald should lead you to this website. Not quite as immediate as in Firefox though.
No find as you type – Another big disappointment for who comes from Firefox or Safari: Opera still uses a dialog box to perform page searches.
No spell clecking – Again, both Firefox and Safari now offer text fields spell checking. Opera doesn’t yet.
No HTML mail composer – Opera’s built-in mail client can display HTML emails but doesn’t yet allow users to create them.
Auto-start widgets? – This is a feature enhancement Opera Dev Team should consider: allow users to configure certain widgets to start automatically when Opera starts.
Google Reader + Flash problems – Sometimes I experiences some scrolling problems when reading news which contain embedded flash movies on Google Reader.
Corporate Sites – Unfortunately some corporate web site do not support Opera or are not displayed correctly in Opera. Unfortunately there’s nothing much we can do about it but trying to “mask” Opera as another browser (via right-click > Edit Site Preferences…)
Default Browser Problems – Setting Opera as default browser on Windows doesn’t seem to set the file icons accordingly (or worse, it resets them to the default file icon).

ERRATA:

It is possible to have Opera to redirect you to the right after typing a few words in thr address bar by setting Google’s “I’m feeling lucky” as default search engine (thanks EJ902).
Spell Checking is supported via GNU Aspell (thanks cvm) or by using Ospell for inline spell checking (thanks Dava).
Find as you type can be triggered by pressing . and typing (thanks cvm).
It is possible to auto-start widgets by saving a session with all your widget open and reloading it at every startup [CTRL+F12 > General > Startup > Continue saved sessions] (thanks Tamil & Ameer).
As of the latest snapshot, setting Opera as default browser and handler for HTML files doesn’t cause any problems thanks Ayush).

Conclusion

Despite the few annoyances listed in the previous section, Opera 9.5 beta 1 truly impressed me. I was waiting for Opera to get better before switching and now I’ve not been using Firefox for a few weeks.
Although Opera offers a lot of features, there’s still room for improvements, especially for what concerns integration with third party services: I would really like to see some sort of integration with del.icio.us, and that could be possible via widgets at least.
Regarding the new Opera Link feature, it looks very promising and a potential competitor for Mozilla Weave even though it will be used mainly to get more and more users to register to the Opera community (I did, at least), which is indeed very active any way.

To conclude this article, which still barely scratches the surface of this very powerful application, I’d like to praise two more things about Opera:

Their website network, and in particular their truly excellent documentation knowledge base, which is very comprehensive of references, tutorials and interesting articles. I am a full time technical writer myself, and I’ve hardly ever come across better documentation.
Their extensive support and compliance to web standards, which makes Opera the most advanced browser ever made.

If you’ve not tried Opera before, or if you’ve always dismissed it because “X browser is better”, you may want to give it another shot: for me it was definitely worthwhile!

An IE Lover's Guide to Firefox

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:47:00 -0000

This is an attempt to explain to Internet Explorer users what Mozilla Firefox is, what its features are and how it can be enhanced or customized. Although this article is written primarily for IE users, it will make interesting reading for any Firefox user who wants to try to convince even the most hopeless IE fan to adopt Firefox for everyday use.
My Point of View
After using Mozilla Firefox for at least 2 years, I must admit two things: I'm biased towards Firefox, and I just about forgot what IE is like. When you ask someone who's been using Firefox for a while why he likes it, he would probably say something like, "because Firefox is much better than IE." Then he would start boasting about Firefox's features, like tabbed browsing, security improvements, popup blocking, extensions and so on, without thinking that maybe an accustomed IE user would be overwhelmed by all these new things, and in the end, might become even more obstinate in using IE.

From here on, I'll play the part - for teaching purposes only, of course - of an Internet Explorer lover: IE is the only browser I've ever tried, and it is the only thing you need to surf the Net. I also talked with some IE users I know and I actually opened the browser myself (once again, for teaching purposes), and visited some sites.

Why not have a real IE Lover write this article? Well, I thought about it, actually, and the only answer I could come up with was: there's no such thing as an 'IE lover', only a lot of people who are too used to IE to want to switch to Firefox. So, I'd better write this all myself; after all, a long time ago, I was just like those people.

IE: I've used it for years and it does the job

When I bought my computer from my favourite retailer, I immediately asked him: "Can I go on the Internet with it? Do I need to buy any particular program to visit websites?" and I was told that I didn't need anything at all, because it was all included in Windows XP. I just had to click on the start button and choose "Internet" from the pop-up menu. "Straightforward," I thought. "Anybody can do that!"
I soon noticed that to browse the Internet, Windows used a program called Internet Explorer 6, which was actually part of the whole Windows infrastructure, somehow: it's the same thing, more or less, that I use to view directories on my hard drive, just online. This is the way it should be - so tightly integrated with the operating system that you hardly notice its presence!

After a while, I learned some more about Internet Explorer, and I noticed that a lot of other applications could be integrated into it, like download managers and PDF viewers. I also discovered that I could even listen to music and watch videos through my browser, directly from webpages.

Then I discovered toolbars - and I wasn't entirely happy about them. I installed Google Toolbar, and I really enjoyed its features, but I noticed that some other toolbars seemed to be installed, even if I didn't want to: I think some other program asked me to install them or something; I don't really know. All I do now is just set Internet Explorer not to display them, and change my starting page back to what I want, because sometimes, for some reason, IE starts with a different page than what I want.

All that aside, what I really like about IE is that I can use it for anything and everything, even updating Windows! Microsoft has another cool technology called ActiveX which allows me to download and install Windows security patches and upgrades automatically!

I really don't understand how people can run an operating system other than Windows: the Web was made for Internet Explorer! It's even available for Macintosh.

A friend of mine told me he started using another browser called "Firefox" or "Firebird" or something, and he really likes it! He said it can be used on Windows, Macintosh, Linux, Solaris, and Unix, but when I asked him why it was so good, he told me, "Because it's better, and IE sucks."

I don't understand how he can say that, especially because everyone I know uses Internet Explorer, Bill Gates made loads of money out of it, so it can't be that bad! Anyhow, I decided to give this Fire-thingie a shot.

Face to Face with a Fox
My friend told me to download this thing from a website, because it's free. So what? IE is free, too, because it came with my PC. Anyhow, I figured I'd just go and download it so he'd leave me alone about it. I read that Firefox - that's its name - is a free browser developed by the Mozilla Foundation which has received a lot of awards from various well-known computer-related websites and institutions. It also seem to have a promotional website that says it has been downloaded nearly seventy million times! All the geeks seem to use it, and they love it. Maybe it's really good, or maybe they just don't like Microsoft.

When I ran Firefox for the first time, Internet Explorer warned me that it couldn't verify the authenticity of the download, or something like that, but it says that all the time when I download stuff.
The first thing that happened was that I was prompted to import my favourites from Internet Explorer. Great! I didn't want to lose all the sites I have had bookmarked for years. So far, so good.

There were no XP-related icons at all, just some weird ones I didn't like, especially the "Home Page" icon. It sucks compared to the one in IE. It doesn't integrate with Windows; it's just another application for browsing websites, like that Netscape thing my friend made me try a few years ago. That at least had an email client and other things included with it.

Firefox isn't worth the hassle: my favourite websites look "broken" and the thing is continuously complaining about plugins to view some pages. Some websites even tell me off now because I'm not using IE, in particular Microsoft, which doesn't let me update anymore. I switched back to IE after a few minutes of pointless struggle.

Here's What You Get
Firefox and IE are two very different things, and I didn't like that, but I admit I had some prejudices, maybe because of the fact that my friend told me to download something and said it was better, and it really wasn't. So I decided to give both him and Firefox a second chance, and I asked him to explain to me why Firefox is better than Internet Explorer.
The first thing he mentioned was the different terminology used by the two browsers, which can be summarized as follows:



| Internet Explorer        |  Firefox            |

| Internet Options 	   |  Options            |

| Temporary Internet Files |  Cache              |

| Favorites                |  Bookmarks          |

| Address Bar 	           |  Location Bar       |

| Refresh 	           |  Reload             |

| Links Bar                |  Bookmarks Toolbar  |

| Explorer Bar             |  Sidebar            |

| Copy Shortcut            |  Copy Link Location |

| Save Target As 	   |  Save Link As       |

and that once you get used to the new terms, finding what you're looking for is easier than in Internet Explorer.

My friend also said a new feature implemented by Firefox is popup blocking. So I told him that as of Service Pack 2, even Internet Explorer blocks popups (and before that, so did my Google Toolbar) but apparently Firefox had this feature long before Microsoft did. Good to know, but not really impressive.
What was more interesting was that Firefox lets you type in whatever you want in the Location bar, even if it's not a Web address, and you will still get the most relevant page available: for example, typing "firefox" takes me to http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. This is accomplished through Google's "I'm Feeling Lucky" feature. IE doesn't do this: it gives me a search page for what I typed, or it tries to 'guess' the domain by adding a .com or .net after the word.

Firefox still didn't really impress me: some nice tricks, but nothing that would make me want to switch. What started to make the difference was the Tabbed Browsing feature: I knew about it already, because IE started implementing that through the MSN toolbar, but it's a bitbuggy, so I didn't even try it. Firefox has had this feature since its very first release, so I guess it they represents a fully-functional, stable, and key feature of the browser. Tabbed browsing introduces a new philosophy for browsing the web: there is only one browser window, but it can have multiple tabs, each displaying a different page. You can switch from one tab to another by clicking on the title (tab titles appear horizontally under the location bar), "Open Link in New Tab" by right-clicking on a link, and open empty tabs with either CTRL+T or from the File menu. It takes a while to get used to it, but after a while I couldn't really live without it!

I then asked my friend why Firefox doesn't allow me to play music or videos or read pdf files, etc., and he said that I needed to install all the necessary plugins. This is the most annoying thing about Firefox: you have to "feed" it and "teach" it things - a lot like a baby, really. If the analogy is truly valid, in the end it should be worth it, and I have the feeling that my Firefox will grow up well, if I'm careful.

After learning about plugins, and teaching my little Firefox what to do with movies, songs and other types of files, I learnt that it had another really smart feature: outstanding, built-in search capabilities.
I had already noticed the small search bar on the top right, next to the location bar: it's basically a shortcut to Google Search. Cool, but I already had this in IE. One thing I didn't like about IE though, was that if I wanted to use a different search engine, like Yahoo or MSN, I had to install another toolbar, and I ended up with something like three different toolbars under the address bar, so I could hardly see the webpages I was browsing!

Firefox apparently knows that people might need to use more than one search engine, so you can select other search engines by clicking on the little icon on the left of the aforementioned search bar. Yahoo, MSN, Wikipedia, and others are available, and others can be installed easily. If you need a plugin for a search engine, and it doesn't exist yet, you can even make it yourself quite easily.

But let's come back a bit to when I ran Firefox for the first time: where did my IE Favourites go? Under the Bookmarks menu, obviously, and they even kept their folder structure. They can be organized through the Manage Bookmarks option, and indeed Firefox's Bookmarks Manager's interface looks much cleaner and is easier to use than IE's. However, since all the imported bookmarks get dumped in a subfolder, it takes a little time to get them all up to the top level.

Firefox also implements Live Bookmarks: some sites, especially news-related ones like Yahoo News and BBC News, and Slashdot offer RSS feeds which are updated several times a day. With Firefox, you can subscribe to a particular site's RSS by clicking on the little square orange icon which appears on the status bar, and a Live Bookmark will be saved. They appear under the Bookmarks menu, in a specific folder, and also on your Bookmarks Toolbar which is under the location bar: clicking on one of them will show the corresponding site's current headlines. You can click on any of the headlines to read the full story/article.

Even if my friend realised he just created another Firefox fan, he insisted on telling me a few words about Downloads and Options. Regarding Downloads, there's not much to say: Firefox incorporates a Download Manager that saves all files downloaded from the Net in a specific (selectable) folder, and keeps a history of all downloads. The download manager is opened automatically whenever a file is downloaded, and it also can be opened manually by selecting Tools-Downloads. The really handy part is that you can easily open a downloaded file or the folder it's in, or clear your download history all in one place. The drawback is that it stays open until you close it, and you have to click a button to clear the already downloaded files from the queue.

Options is more complex to deal with, as Firefox does not rely on Windows' Internet Options. Firefox's Options (under the Tools menu) are more complete and better organized, as they are clearly divided into 5 main categories:

General
In this panel you can set up your starting page, fonts, colors, language, character encodings, whether or not Firefox is the default browser, and your connection settings.

Privacy
Here - and this is really much better than in IE, I must admit - you can clear and manage history items, saved form information, saved passwords, download manager history, cookies and the browser cache. You can clear everything with a single click, but you'll lose all your saved passwords and your history lists.

Web Features
This panel is for setting your preferences regarding popup blocking, software installation, images, Java and JavaScript.

Downloads
Here you can choose your download destinatination folder as well as set other download-related preferences, like setting particular file types to save to a particular folder.

Advanced
This panel is for - as the name implies - advanced preferences regarding accessibility, browsing, security, validation and certificates. You don't need to change anything here unless you've been told to or you know what you're doing.

Is That All?
That's what I thought, and although I was really impressed with Firefox, I was still missing some features that IE had, such as third party toolbars. My friend was about to go, but he quickly opened a pre-defined firefox bookmark: Mozilla Update. "Now you know how Firefox works: I'm sure you can work this out by yourself," he said, and left me with a door to another vast world to explore. The journey was far from over.

Extensions and Themes
One aspect of Firefox that was a bit discouraging was the fact that once you install the browser you need to install this, download that, and configure the other thing. For any IE user (like me), this is a major hassle: before, I just wanted to browse the Net, and I didn't care what I was using or how I was using it. Now, I have to be aware of certain things, and more or less create the browser I need! On the other hand, this is sort of exciting, in the sense that unlike IE, Firefox can became whatever you want it to be.

Even after using Firefox for a while, and even after my friend had explained all its nice features, I still felt that it was somehow incomplete. Luckily, Firefox has extensions and themes. The numerous Extensions enhance Firefox by adding new features which - honestly - I never thought were even conceivable to be included in a browser. Furthermore, Firefox also has Themes, so you can change the browser into something completely different, with different icons, shapes and colors!

It's worth it to mention some Extensions which really impressed me by the functionality or behaviours they added to Firefox:

Adblock
This extension blocks ads - if you don't want to see a banner on a certain site anymore, just right-click on it, select AdBlock, and it's gone! It also remembers your preferences for every URL or site. It's easily customizeable and useful.

Tabbrowser Preferences
This adds a new category in your Options called Tabbed Browsing, where you can customize particular behaviours concerning tabs, like opening all addresses typed in the location bar in a new tab (focused or unfocused), forcing links to open in new tabs instead of new windows, and so on.

FlashGot
I complained before that my download manager wasn't integrated with Firefox: this extension does that, and supports nearly every possible download manager and accelerators. It also has a built-in gallery to quickly see what file types you are downloading.

CustomizeGoogle
This personalises Google-related sites and services, such as using Google Suggest in every search, filtering content and ads, anonymizing data transmitted to Google, and much more.

ForeCastFox
Get weather forecasts from all over the world displayed directly on your status bar or anywhere you want.

Developer Tools
This is THE ultimate solution if you are a web developer or interested in knowing more about webpages. With this extension you can:
- Disable anything with a single click (images, JavaScript, cookies, colors, animations, etc.)
- Get CSS information or modify a page's CSS
- Have fun with Forms (convert POSTs to GETs, show hidden fields, and so on)
- Perform image-related operations: show paths, attributes, outline particular images, etc.
- Get infos about various elements on a page
- Clear history, cookies, open java console, view document's source
- Outline particular elements (images, tables, etc.)
- Resize your browser to a custom or predefined resolution
- Validate a page (HTML, CSS, WAI accessibility, speed reports)

Googlebar
Clone of the IE Google Toolbar.

Yahoo Companion
Clone of the IE Yahoo toolbar.

FoxyTunes
Control your favourite media player (several programs supported) directly from Firefox!

ChatZilla
A complete, fully functional, easy-to-use IRC client which runs from Firefox.

FireFTP
Fully integrated FTP client.

There are actually many more extensions available from either the Firefox website or other portals which can be very useful, depending on your needs, but there are also Themes which can change Firefox's look and feel completely, such as:

Qute
This theme inspired Firefox default theme: "Icons designed to be modern, dynamic and fresh, with attention paid to usability and comfort over extended use".

Silverskin
"Your favourite browser with a silver skin (With the Qute icons by Arvid Axelsson)"

Saferfox Xpanded
"A full skin theme with a modern aqua design"

Plastikfox Crystal SVG
"Plastik style from KDE with Crystal SVG icons"

Noia (eXtreme)
"This theme is based on the Noia2.0 icon set by Carlitus."

Brushed
"A Brushed and Polished Browser Interface."

Again, many more themes are available. There's something for everyone, really!

To switch or not to switch?

Yes, OK, it's not one of those questions which will keep you up at night, but for sure it can be a quandary. Personally, I decided to switch to Firefox gradually, while still viewing some sites in IE, because I think this can be a good compromise. The biggest problem is that even if Firefox supports Web standards (my friend said IE doesn't) some sites do not. Especially before Firefox, web developers apparently had to create their sites to be viewed correctly with Microsoft's browser. That's why some sites still have things like "This site is best viewed in Internet Explorer 6", or even, in some cases, they'll suggest you download the latest IE version, because your browser is incompatible when actually it's the site which is not compatible with Web Standards.
Furthermore, ActiveX is a non-standardized proprietary technology which Microsoft uses to make software components communicate and also provide complex functionalities necessary for things like Windows Update. Firefox doesn't support ActiveX, which has been exploited many times in the past (and still now): tough luck. Nowadays, Microsoft wants you to have Automatic Updates turned on, so you don't need to visit the Windows Update site anymore. As far as I'm concerned, I'm not too bothered by that, but if someday I need ActiveX technology, there's already a Mozilla Project on it. Final note: If you need to switch back to IE for some reason, the IE View extension can quickly give you the opportunity to do so, opening IE to view the page you're visiting.

It looks like the Browser Wars have started again, and as a matter of fact, Firefox is becoming known for its features, innovations and community support. Switching can be scary, and people can try forcing you to do it, but you shouldn't listen to them: don't start using Firefox just because "it's cool" or "everybody uses it"; try it first, understand how it works, and spend time learning it, because it just might be worth it.

One thing is certain: The existence of IE lovers is debatable, but there are over 170 million Firefox lovers. Go get it!

Pre-review of Internet Explorer 7

h3rald@h3rald.com — Fri, 25 Nov 2005 17:16:46 -0000

Internet Explorer 6.0 was officially released on August 27th 2001, and it still runs on millions of computers across the world: it's probably the browser release which has lasted the longest in the entire history of the Internet! While I'm not sure if this is an "achievement" so much as it is an "imposition", Uncle Bill admitted that his latest baby, Internet Explorer 7, is due soon...In the Beginning
Recently (5 months ago, that is) the aforementioned "Microsoft Chairman and Chief Software Architect Bill Gates announced Internet Explorer 7.0, designed to add new levels of security to Windows XP Service Pack 2". This happened at the RSA Conference in San Francisco, and although I wasn't there, I can imagine that amongst the oohs and ahhs of the crowd, someone must have whispered "It's about time".

Firefox, on the other hand, keeps its fans alive with pseudo-releases every so often, 1.0.4, 1.0.5 and so forth, which at least makes you feel like some progress is going on, be it a security fix or a new feature. Firefox will hopefully release version 1.1 at any time now, with various new features that Microsoft can only dream about. I think that when Bill created Internet Explorer 6, he probably commanded that it should be called "version 6.0" for ever and ever: fixes, service packs, and new features (popup blocking, etc.) have been added, but after 4 years I'm still running "Internet Explorer version 6.0".

Version 7.0 is supposedly due soon, and - guess what - not only for Longhorn users (but where's Longhorn anyway?), but also for Windows XP SP2 users, there's great news: beta testing! If you run Windows 2000 it looks like you'll have to keep using IE6 until you get a "more advanced" version of your OS, butInternet Explorer 7 is supposed to be "freely downloadable, as always" this summer.

So what's new in IE7?

Discovering (and guessing) further details
Although nothing was supposed to be known until the first beta release, according to what seems to be Microsoft's official procedure in these cases, after Bill's announcement, speculations on IE7's new features and improvements (and quirks?) began to spread across the Internet in various forms. IEBlog seems to be the most authoritative (and biased?) source to get information, simply because the folks there are those who ( supposedly) are planning and developing IE7.

When the announcement was made, those guys wrote something like:

First, some basics: we?re committing to deliver a new version of Internet Explorer for Windows XP customers. Betas of IE7 will be available this summer. This new release will build on the work we did in Windows XP SP2 and (among other things) go further to defend users from phishing as well as deceptive or malicious software.

Why? Because we listened to customers, analysts, and business partners. We heard a clear message: ?Yes, XP SP2 makes the situation better. We want more, sooner. We want security on top of the compatibility and extensibility IE gives us, and we want it on XP. Microsoft, show us your commitment.?

That's so sweet! They are doing this for us, and they are listening to us...

Sarcasm aside, it was clear from the beginning that Microsoft wanted to focus more on security: maybe because of the stereotype of IE which has emerged through the years (IE = An easy way for bad people to do bad things to you), maybe because it was time to do it, or maybe because they got bored. The most likely reason, though, is commercial: Firefox's popularity has surged recently, and Microsoft felt an urge to open (Fire)fox-hunting season as soon as possible.

Back in March, more details about this new amazing product began to leak, inevitably, and here are the new features that IE7 is supposed to have:

Tabs
International domain name

Transparent Portable Network Graphics

Simplified printing from inside IE 7.0
A built-in news aggregator.
Somewhat extended support to CSS2

Wonderful and incredible at the same time: is IE7 trying to emulate Firefox?

So, what will this wonder look like? - Someone might wonder... And here are some leaked screenshots that could be real enough. Impressive.

New support for old stuff
Any Firefox user reading the features list above probably wasn't terribly impressed: everything mentioned there has been supported in Firefox for ages, but personally, I'm truly pleased to see that Microsoft finally decided to try to catch up with more advanced browsers (not just Firefox, but Opera as well) and web developers can relax a bit (maybe).

There's a nice post on IEBlog regarding PNG Support, where the guy who made the thing possible, Sam Fortiner, explains what he had to do and why.
It's widely known that PNG images currently aren't handled correctly in Internet Explorer: if they are transparent, in particular, they will show a grey-ish background instead of being transparent. I guess that's not a good thing to see, after trying to overlay PNG images, for example. As a result, web developers currently don't use the PNG format, nor its transparency support. With IE7's transparent PNG support, sites which seemed to only display properly in Firefox will appear equally beautiful in the new Internet Explorer.

Tony Schreiner, on the same blog, provides a detailed explanation on his work concerning Tab Support: tabs are a new thing for Microsoft, and for long it was feared that they could cause "confusion" among end users accustomed to the tabless policy of IE6 and of the whole Windows interface. Regarding this, I think that people at Redmond should thank firefox a million times for "pioneering" into the unexplored land of Tabbed Browsing: firefox has been using tabs since the very first release, and it was highly acclaimed for this. Eventually then, Microsoft folks released that people are not as stupid as they hoped they'd be, and aren't confused by tabs at all, so they decided to implement them in IE7.

Tony gives away some technical details regarding IE7's implementation of tabs, which essentially consists of "pushing a large part of what you see in IE6 into a tab", and let's hope it works. IE was born and evolved as a single-window browser, so this addition represents quite a challenge to Microsoft's way of thinking about User Interfaces... what's next then? Maybe Tabs in Windows Explorer as well? Maybe...

Little is known about the other "new features", apart from CSS2 support, which will be described in the next paragraph. A built-in RSS aggregator? It's now acknowledged that Longhorn will have an extensive RSS support itself, so this seemed a logical addition to IE7.

The fear of uncertainty
IE support for web standards, in particular CSS, has always been a hot topic for developers.

When we shipped IE 6.0, we finally fully supported CSS 1, and had some pieces of CSS2 implemented as well.

That's honest, at least. Microsoft - so far - does not support CSS2, but at least offers full CSS1 support. As a personal note, I'd reword the previous as "Microsoft does not want to fully support web standards because 90% of Internet users use IE, hence, they can make the laws". Cruel, but basically true: Microsoft does not care about web standards, and IE's lack of support can be used as a way to force developers to create websites which are IE-compatible rather than standards compatible. There's more information here.

Words in an official post don't bode well for the future either:

Given the strong usage of IE in the corporate space as well as embedded in applications, we have a strong requirement for backwards compatibility with our previous behavior, compliant or not; that requirement does not mean ?don?t touch anything?, it is just a recognition that keeping our engine in sync across strict and quirks modes is challenging when quirks mode has to work nearly exactly the same as it always has. We will continue to improve our compliance under strict mode even when it breaks compatibility, and under quirks mode when it?s not damaging to our backwards compatibility.

Basically, this provides an excuse to not fully adopt web standards, which can be seen as legitimate or not, according to your browser preferences, so I'm not going to comment on that...

In another article, MicrosoftWatch, reports that "One partner said that Microsoft considers CSS2 to be a "flawed" standard and that the company is waiting for a later point release, such as CSS2.1 or CSS3, before throwing its complete support behind it".
Although this cannot be regarded as a 100% authoritative source, people started speculating that IE7 could potentially become a dictator for other browsers (like its predecessor), because so many people still use the MS browser. It could help Microsoft, as it did in the past, so why shouldn't Bill take advantage of it?

From Firefox to... Deer Park?

h3rald@h3rald.com — Sun, 20 Nov 2005 18:05:30 -0000

On May 31st 2005 the Mozilla Foundation silently released the Deer Park browser... no, it's not another name change for Firefox, but the codename they gave to the long-awaited 1.1 release of the free, famous, award-winning browser. Actually what we have for now is just a non-feature complete developer preview release of the new milestone, the first alpha release, in other words. The alpha release nevertheless seems to be fully functional and already useable.ETAs for the actual stable version are not given as usual, but we should expect another alpha candidate soon hopefully (They wrote "June" on the roadmap, and we're already in July). Anyhow, this developer-oriented preview release can be downloaded and installed on Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X systems plus eventually, Solaris and others. The decision of using the codename Deer Park instead of naming the release Firefox 1.1 alpha 1 or something of the like was made to avoid the havoc which occurred before the official release of Firefox 1.0 (which was codenamed "Phoenix" by the way,) when some websites offered a late preview release as the actual new version to download.
This time when you install and run the program the Firefox name has been substituted with Deer Park Alpha 1, so for example Deer Park is used in the browser's title bar and in the "About Deer Park Alpha 1" menu under "Help". The icon they used for this testing release is not even the usual firefox icon - it represents a plain blueish globe with no fox whatsoever. They have definitely put in effort this time to avoid confusion.

Furthermore, when the browser is installed it does not overwrite your existing firefox installation, simply because (on windows) it's installed under a directory named "Deer Park Alpha 1". As a side note, the process is "firefox.exe", so you cannot run Firefox and Deer Park at the same time: you'll just open another window of the browser which is already running. Having said this, let us now examine what is new in this developer's release.

Fixed bugs
Like any other Firefox Release, Deer Park comes with several Bug Fixes. On the official changelog there are many bugs reported to be fixed, sometimes they are hardly noticeable but I experienced some of them when browsing some websites and also when creating applications myself:

- 103638 - Targets with same name in different windows open in wrong window with javascript.
- 97283 - Mouse wheel scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
- 251986 - Keyboard scrolling does not work for elements such as div using overflow - auto or scroll.
- 245829 - Download manager progress and title do not update correctly, wrong number of files and percentage after finishing or cancelling a download.

These are in my opinion the most notable of the notable bugs which have been fixed in this release. I was particularly relieved when I noticed that all the issues regarding scrolling divs or similar elements had been resolved. Also, it must be noted that Deer Park seems overall slightly faster than Firefox 1.0.4 (Note: I also have a Pentium II, that is why I could notice that probably). The speed increase is most probably caused by the base for Deer Park being the Mozilla 1.8 Beta 2 code, which is almost 1 year newer than what used for Firefox 1.0.

New Features
Although announced as a non-feature complete release, it comes with some new and useful features. The new feature list includes nothing too extraordinary for now and they are all somehow minor changes but they really do represent some improvements. Perhaps the two most obvious features introduced with this release are the Sanitize Deer Park and the Report Broken Sites functions. The first one is accessible through the Tools menu and basically allows you to delete the Browsing History, Saved Form Information, Saved Passwords, Download History, Cookies and Cache. Actually you can accomplish the same feat via Options->privacy, but with Sanitize you need just one click. Convenience I suppose?

The Report Broken Sites feature is reachable via the Help menu and basically starts a short wizard that you can use when you notice something wrong with a website. You just have to provide the url of the website, the problem you experienced (Browser not supported, cannot login, plugin not installed, other content missing, odd behaviou, odd appearence, etc.) and an optional description and email and then the report will be submitted to the Mozilla Deleopers.

Additional features included are also Image thumbnails as Tab icons, used when viewing a single image with firefox, not a shocking feature really but it's just a little (tiny) bit of eyecandy I guess. Furthermore, when you try accessing an FTP server anonymously and that server doesn't allow anonymous access, you are prompted to provide appropriate credentials (before it just didn't let you in)... another little improvement, which probably will not change your life, but it's nice to know that it's there.

Another more notable feature only for linux and mac users though allows changes made in the Preferences menu to be applied immediately without restarting your system. Using Windows on the other hand, they improved the option interface with a more extensive use of tabbed interfaces, and also additional options concerning tabbed browsing (BUT in my opinion the tabbrowser preferences extension is still necessary to achieve certain behaviours).

Regarding something more technical, among the so-called developers features there are various improvements regarding CSS support, in particular CSS2's quotes nesting and even some new CSS3 (!) features, like Multi-column layouts the :only-child selector, overflow-x and overflow-y properties and even various new cursors names.
Even more news from Mozilla suggests that Deer Park already supports some functions for resolution-independent scalable vector graphics (SVG 1.1), but it's obviously just experimental, and even scriptable bitmap drawing surface (). Last but not least, even support for Xforms is already possible in Deer Park through a related project/extension.

Final Thoughs
Again the Mozilla Foundation - with this fully functional but yet incomplete preview release,- seem to be always improving their foundations, and always offering support for new technologies and features before others. This release has certainly seen some great improvements, on the other hand hardly anything changes for website developers with this release. It is without a doube that websites are viewed better with Deer Park than with Firefox 1.0.4 or IE or any other browser for that matter. But it is impossible to even start planning at this stage for the development of a publicly accessible site using for example SVG graphics and Xforms, as visitors using other browsers will not be able to see any "magic" in them, or perhaps even view them at all.

It's always the same paradox of web-development: where on one side of the coin there are new and better products are available, a website/online application should be accessible by at least 90-95% of visitors. Unfortunately, for now though 90-95% of all internet users seem to use some other product instead of Firefox or Deer Park... But that's another story!