Internet Archive

Windows 7 Gives Browsers Speed Improvement

Lots of people who are testing the various Windows 7 builds have already reported that Windows 7 is faster and snappier than Windows Vista, and some even say that it approaches Windows XP. Apparently, web browsers in particular will benefit from running on Windows 7 instead of Windows Vista SP2. BetaNews ran tests of all the major browsers on both Vista SP2 and Windows 7, and concluded that in general, browsers are round and about 12%-18% faster on 7 than on Vista.

Mozilla and Google Announce HTML-Based Extensions

It appears that great minds think alike (or in the case of open-source software and the close-ties between Google and Mozilla, share-alike). Within a week of each other both Mozilla and Google have announced new initiatives to allow for extensions to their browsers to be written using regular HTML / JavaScript and CSS, greatly lowering the bar for developers to join in. Strap on your Mozilla Jetpack and take a peek at extensions for Chrome.

Chrome Users Most Up to Date, Firefox Second

When Google released the first version of its Chrome web browser, many eyebrows were raised over the fact that it updated itself automatically and silently, in the background, without user intervention or even so much as a notice. As it turns out, this has been a brilliant move by Google, as Chrome users are the most likely to have up-to-date installations of their browser, followed at a respectable distance by Firefox users. Safari and Opera trail behind significantly.

Australia’s Internet Scheme

Earlier this month, Australian Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, gave the go-ahead on a vast project that will establish a national high-speed network providing 90% of homes and businesses in Australia with fiber-optic 100Mbps Internet, courtesy of the government; the last 10% will be covered with a 12Mbps connection via wireless and satellite. Not only will a vast amount of taxpayers be guaranteed an Internet connection, but this will also provide 37,000 jobs at the apex of construction, a plus in these troubling times. Now CSIRO has jumped on the bandwagon with ideas of how to provide the last 10% (and anyone else who wants a wireless option) with a solid wireless Internet connection with speeds eventually reaching 100Mbps versus the government's proposed 12Mbps. They'll be utilizing the analog TV infrastructure for widespread wireless, which is obviously largely in place already. All in all, both networks most likely won't be available to any of the public for at least five years.

Yahoo! Finally Pulls Plug on GeoCities

We finally have something to be excited about during these dark days of the current economy. Back in the dark ages of the internet, when most people still had to "dial in" while listening to some strange device making weird sounds in order to go on the net, there were services that allowed people with absolutely no knowledge on web design to create and host webpages. One of those services was GeoCities.

Gazelle: Operating System Architecture and Browser Security

"Microsoft Research was in the news not too long ago regarding the innovative, outside-the-box research being done by MSR scientists on display at the annual MSR TechFest event. One of the stars of the show was a new web browser project named Gazelle. This is a great conversation with Gazelle project lead Helen Wang and Alex Moshchuk, a PhD student intern developer working on the Gazelle project. We cover a lot of ground and Erik and I are unusually curious given the fascinating model Gazelle represents for a truly secure web browser."

The World’s First Graphical Browser: Erwise

Conventional wisdom has it that Mosaic was the first graphical web browser. Even though Mosaic - the basis for Netscape - certainly kickstarted the web revolution, it wasn't the first graphical web browser at all - that honour goes to Erwise, developed by four Finnish college students in 1991. It was more advanced than Mosaic, ran on the X Window System, but didn't catch on in the end. The four developers recently gave an interview detailing Erwise and its history.

WebKit Gets CSS Animation

"WebKit now supports explicit animations in CSS. As a counterpart to transitions, animations provide a way to declare repeating animated effects, with keyframes, completely in CSS. CSS Animations is one of the enhancements to CSS proposed by the WebKit project that we've been calling CSS Effects (eg. gradients, masks, transitions). The goal is to provide properties that allow Web developers to create graphically rich content. In many cases animations are presentational, and therefore belong in the styling system. This allows developers to write declarative rules for animations, replacing lots of hard-to-maintain animation code in JavaScript."

Comparative Guide to Browser Security

Roger Grimes offers a comparative overview of browser security, including profiles of Firefox, Chrome, IE, Safari, and Opera. Grimes subjected each browser to numerous tests, including dozens of pre-defined tests made in his lab, Internet-based test suites, and exposing the browsers to known-malicious Web sites. "None of the fully patched browsers allowed silent infections or exploitation beyond simple DoS attacks. All of the browsers stopped the latest malicious attacks available on the Internet. Occasional zero-day attacks could silently infect a particular browser during a particular period of time, but all of the browsers have this same risk, and all of the browser vendors in this review are fairly consistent in patching significant problems in a timely manner." The package also includes articles on each browser's XSS vulnerability profile and cipher support.

EU Might Force OEMs to Offer Choice of Browsers During Setup

Earlier this month, news got out that the European Commission is charging Microsoft with unlawful competition regarding its bundling of the Internet Explorer web bowser with Windows. At the time, information was scarce, but thanks to Microsoft's quarterly filing at the Securities and Exchange Commission. we now have a little more insight into what the EU might force Microsoft to do.

All the Lightweight Web Servers of the World

"There's far more to the world of Web servers than just Apache and IIS. While lightweight Web servers have much in common, there's also variation within the category. Most are written in C, but several other implementation languages have proven successful among the servers with which I've experimented, including Erlang, Java, Lisp, Lua, Perl, Python, and Tcl. If there's a language you favor, you can probably find a lightweight Web server here coded for your convenience. survey the possibilities and see how they apply to you."

Mozilla and Google Relations Strained Due to Chrome

Most Firefox users don't realize that Firefox's current existence is owed almost exclusively to its search partnership with Google wherein Mozilla Corp receives a portion of ad revenue from Google queries initiated from Firefox's search bar. This revenue amounts to tens of millions of dollars. Internet users the world over, who are currently reaping the benefit of a renewed browser war with exciting innovation instead of Microsoft-dominated stagnation, can thank Google for that state of affairs. But now that Google has itself entered the fray with Chrome, what does that mean for the Firefox/Google relationship?

Three of Four Undersea Internet Lines Severed

Though the cause is still unknown, three of the four undersea Internet cables that run from North America to Asia were cut, causing outages in Egypt, India, Saudi Arabia, and a dozen or so other countries. That is a lot of angry World of Warcraft players. It's supposed to have been from ships' anchors, though even two downed cables at one time is very rare, so who's to say it wasn't sabotage?