Internet Archive

Yahoo! Finally Pulls Plug on GeoCities

Internet 38 Comments
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.
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Gazelle: Operating System Architecture and Browser Security

  Submitted by poundsmack Internet 2 Comments
"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."
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The World’s First Graphical Browser: Erwise

Internet 26 Comments
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.
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WebKit Gets CSS Animation

  Submitted by Hakime Internet 11 Comments
"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."
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Comparative Guide to Browser Security

Internet No Comments
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.
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EU Might Force OEMs to Offer Choice of Browsers During Setup

Internet 89 Comments
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.
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All the Lightweight Web Servers of the World

Internet 5 Comments
"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."
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Mozilla and Google Relations Strained Due to Chrome

  Submitted by judgen Internet 53 Comments
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?
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Three of Four Undersea Internet Lines Severed

Internet 29 Comments
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?
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Switch Seamlessly Between Trident, Gecko, WebKit

Internet 8 Comments
A common problem for web developers - but some users as well - is that of websites that work in one browser, but not in another. Some websites are (still) 'optimised' for Internet Explorer, but with the popularity of other browsers reaching ever greater heights, the problem becomes apparent to more users. A new browser from Japan, called Lunascape5, tries to address this issue by allowing you to seamlessly switch between three different browsing engines (IE's Trident, Mozilla's Gecko, and Safari/Chrome's WebKit).
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Interview with Horde Lead Developer Jan Schneider

Internet 5 Comments
Are you looking for an open source, Web-based e-mail and groupware suite with its own development framework, Ajax interface, more than 50 applications, an active developer community, and millions of end users all over the world? The Horde communication and collaboration suite may not be as well known as the big name commercial offerings, but according to lead developer and release manager Jan Schneider it has just as much to offer, and more.
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Epiphany, the Ultimate Gnome Browser

  Submitted by fsmag Internet 32 Comments
"Epiphany is the web browser for the GNOME desktop. Its goal is to be simple and easy to use. Epiphany ties together many GNOME components in order to let you focus on the Web content, instead of the browser application." This article starts out with a little history about the Epiphany browser and goes on to talk about the advantages of this light-weight browser.
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Cisco IP Alliance Formed, Based on Open Source OS

  Submitted by Rabby Internet 6 Comments
Cisco and a group of leading tech companies have formed an industry alliance that promotes the Internet Protocol (IP) for interconnecting millions of embedded devices such as thermometers and light switches, forming an "Internet of Things". Many OSNews readers should be familiar with the technical basis of the alliance: embedded open source developer Adam Dunkels' lightweight uIP TCP/IP stack from the Contiki operating system. Nice to see that open source OSes besides Linux and BSD also have a major impact on the technology industry.
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Microsoft, Mozilla, Google Talk Browser Futures

Internet 20 Comments
From eWeek: "In a session billed as the browser wars up close and personal, key Microsoft, Mozilla and Google representatives spoke about the past present and future of the browser platform as they see it . . . one of the issues that stood out to me was that of developer discontent. When the Ajaxians opened up questioning to the audience, an attendee stood up and said Google's announcement of its new browser "was greeted with shock and horror," by him."
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Introducing SquirrelFish Extreme

  Submitted by Hakime Internet 29 Comments
Just three months ago, we announced SquirrelFish, a major revamp of our JavaScript engine featuring a high-performance bytecode interpreter. Today we’d like to announce the next generation of our JavaScript engine - SquirrelFish Extreme (or SFX for short). SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance. Benchmarks can be found Squirrelfish Extreme benchmarks can be found on the "Summer of Javascriptcore" blog. As seen, it claims to be faster than both Squirrelfish, Google's V8, and the upcoming Firefox javascript engine, Tracemonkey.
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