Posts tagged with "browser"

Opera 11.10 Released With Smarter Speed Dials, Improved Turbo

Alternative web browser Opera has always been the one that experimented with features and user interface schemes before the “big players” like Firefox and Chrome implemented them. This is true for tabs, tab groups, speed dials, and many other little touches the Opera developers played with over the years. The browser failed to gain a massive traction among average users, but it’s got a loyal userbase willing to test the latest beta or alpha version. Opera released today a new stable build for Mac, Windows and Linux – initially codenamed Barracuda and now available for download with version number 11.10.

Opera 11.10 builds on the features introduced in Opera 11 such as tab stacking and extended HTML5 support by further refining the interface, improving support for CSS3 and HTML5 standards, and introducing a tweaked version of Opera Turbo that works through Google’s WebP engine. First off, Speed Dials have been slightly redesign to feature a “flow layout” that allows users to decide the numbers of columns to display and the size of thumbnails – which, by the way, should offer crisper graphics. You can add as many Dials as you want without limitations.

A Mac-specific tweak involves the browser tabs that now have a closing animation on OS X machines. More importantly, the Turbo functionality that’s aimed at speeding up browsing on slow connections like tethered phones and public hotspots has been improved in the way it handles compressions using WebP. Images should be compressed more, better and faster than before, but we’ve noticed some issues with heavy compression cutting off parts of an image or graphics from websites.

Check out the full 11.10 changelog here. The new version of Opera is available here, and there’s a demo video embedded below. Read more

iBooks Can Now Open EPUB Files Directly→

iBooks Can Now Open EPUB Files Directly

Adam Engst at TidBITS details an important change in how iBooks handles .EPUB files opened directly on iOS:

The practical upshot of this fix is that you can now transfer EPUB files into iBooks far more easily than before, when the only way was to drop them into iTunes and do a USB sync. For individual users, that means you can send yourself an EPUB via email and transfer the attachment to iBooks, and you can also copy EPUB files into Dropbox and use the iOS Dropbox app to send them to iBooks.

Basically, forwarding books bought / downloaded in Mobile Safari to iBooks got a lot easier thanks to the “Open In…” menu. Project Gutenberg books work great with this method.

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Social and App Tabs to Play Big Role in Firefox 5

Mozilla has stepped up to the plate with their launch of Firefox 4, which has now garnered well over 59 million downloads as of its launch on March 22nd. With App Tabs, much improved performance, and some incredible features like Panorama baked right in, I’ve adopted Firefox 4 as my browser of choice for the time being over Chrome and Safari. While I leave my love of WebKit behind (perhaps only temporarily), ConceivablyTech dug into the Firefox UX planning pages to give us a glimpse of what’s next for Firefox 5.

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Camino’s Future Is Uncertain, Might Switch To WebKit→

Camino’s Future Is Uncertain, Might Switch To WebKit

The developers of Camino, a Mac browser based on Mozilla’s engine, are not sure about what the future holds for their software. Namely, as Mozilla announced the end of Gecko embedding (a technique that allowed Camino’s devs to include Gecko into the Cocoa interface) the team is asking whether for future versions they should switch to (much more supported and widely adopted) WebKit:

As a purely community-based open source project, no one is employed to work on Camino; all Camino developers are volunteers, working on Camino in their spare time, as a labor of love. While maintaining embedding in a fork of Gecko is theoretically possible, we don’t have the manpower for a sustained effort of that kind. A more realistic option would be to port Camino to WebKit, but while this would be much easier to maintain in the future, it would require a large amount of initial work.

For what it’s worth, a very small percentage of MacStories readers use Camino, but we don’t want to see the project be discontinued just yet. I think turning Camino into a WebKit-based lightweight alternative to Safari and Chrome might actually be a great idea.

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Fresh Feed Elegantly Puts RSS In The Menubar

There are many ways to consume RSS feeds on the Mac platform: when it comes to syndicating content from your favorite websites, apps like NetNewsWire and the Reeder beta come to mind, although many people simply prefer to keep an eye on Google Reader (the most used service nowadays to subscribe and follow feeds) in their desktop browser.

Over the years several alternatives have surfaced that enable users to read RSS feeds in different ways on the desktop. Fresh Feed, a free utility in the Mac App Store, does what many other apps have tried, but in a very elegant way: it puts RSS items in the menubar, and allows you to open them as new tabs in the browser. Where Fresh Feed really shines, in my opinion, is the user interface: it looks like a bigger iPhone app placed in the menubar, yet it doesn’t feel “weird” as several other Mac apps that try to resemble their iOS counterparts. Its “cells” for new RSS entries look sweet and polished. They’re chronologically ordered, but you can scroll with your trackpad to load as many articles as you can. A click on the “more” button loads the item in your desktop browser, automatically leaving Fresh Feed. To add new RSS feeds, you have to open the Preferences and paste a website’s feed URL.

There’s no option to set refresh times or auto-import feeds from Google Reader, unfortunately. If you just want to use Fresh Feed to stay up to date with the articles from a specific website, however, and not your entire Google Reader list, this might just be the app you need.

Looking forward to future updates with more features, Fresh Feed is a free download in the Mac App Store.

Firefox 4 Is Officially Live

Firefox 4 (Glow)

Firefox 4 (Glow)

While sites leaked out the Firefox 4 download yesterday, rumors cropped up that the download was the 2nd release candidate with the 4.0 name. I wasn’t interested in verifying the download or posting it until it officially went, and as of this morning you can download and visualize Mozilla’s success in realtime from glow.mozilla.org. It’s very cool, and also provides ample opportunity to download Firefox 4.0 for yourself.

The new Firefox 4 interface not only looks a lot better (the address bar improvements are very cool), but now you have something Panorama available where you can group tabs by dragging and drop websites into collections for work, play, research, or however you want to organize them. According to Mozilla, Firefox 4 3x faster than Firefox 3.6 in the Sunspider test, and scores 6x higher on the V8 test. You can check out all the features here and download Firefox 4 from the same page.

Prevent Accidental Quit In Google Chrome

In my typical work day, I keep a lot of browser tabs open in the background. MacStories articles, links from Google Reader, Twitter, Reddit and many others are always sitting there in the browser, which is an essential tool in my workflow. Perhaps the most important one. So when I accidentally hit CMD+Q instead of CMD+W and I lose the contents of an article I’m writing in my online visual editor, I usually would like to smash my computer’s keyboard. It actually never happened (otherwise I wouldn’t be here typing on this keyboard), and luckily for me it looks like such a situation won’t ever take place thanks to a subtle, yet life-saving feature implemented in the Dev version of Google Chrome: quit warning.

Enabled by default in the early dev versions (latest one is 11.0.696.14) and now available as an option in Chrome’s settings, the quit warning works a little bit different from what you’d expect: instead of putting a dialogue box up on the screen that asks you “if you really want to quit”, Google thought that it’d be best to implement a system that would prevent accidental clicking of CMD+Q. So instead of just hitting the shortcut to quit Chrome, you have to click & hold CMD+Q for a few seconds. Pure genius: this way, if I accidentally hit “Q” instead of “W”, my browser won’t quit.

To enable the feature, type “about:flags” (without quotes) in the Chrome Omnibox and activate “Confirm to Quit. Enjoy. [Mac OS X Hints]

Scribd To Switch Millions of Old Embeds Over to HTML5, iOS Devices Rejoice

Social document sharing service Scribd has made a major announcement today: they’re in the process of switching millions of old Flash-based embeds scattered around the web over to the new HTML5 layout they started implementing last year. The conversion process will be automatic, shouldn’t break anything for publishers and website owners and, most of all, will dramatically increase the quality and speed of Scribd embeds.

As Scribd swaps Flash with HTML5 on old document embeds, iOS devices like the iPhone and iPad will benefit from the change: the HTML5 tool developed by Scribd is fully compatible with iOS’ Mobile Safari and now every webpage containing a new or old Scribd document will be perfectly viewable on Apple’s phones and tablets.

When Scribd launched its HTML5 reading platform last summer, they said user engagement with the Scribd experience “surged”. The conversion of 20 million embeds to HTML5 should definitely make things even better for Scribd.

Flickr Improves Slideshows for iPad

With a note on the official company blog posted earlier today, photo sharing Flickr has announced improved compatibility of slideshows for the iPad’s Mobile Safari browser. By taking advantage of the device’s touch interface, you can now tap on a photo to view at a larger size in the lightbox, and browse through photos with a single swipe. The lightbox displays photos on a clean, dark background and you also have options to mark an item as favorite or quickly go back to the standard photostream.

Flickr also offers a native app for the iPhone, available for free in the App Store, which was recently updated with Retina Display support and sharing to Twitter through the flic.kr shortener. [via Daring Fireball]