Firefox 3 Beta 5 Released

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"Firefox 3 Beta 5 includes more than 750 changes from the previous beta, improving stability and web compatibility, providing platform and user interface enhancements, and resulting in the fastest Firefox ever. Many of these improvements were based on community feedback from the previous beta."

Full Release Notes.

Tags : internet, browsers

WebKit the first to get 100/100 on Acid3

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WebKit has become the first publically available rendering engine to achieve 100/100 on the Acid3 test.

This is a big step forward, with other browsers not far behind. Opera employee David Storey announced yesterday that the Opera browser now achieves a 98% score. With Firefox Beta 4 not too far behind with 71%.

It's not all about the 100/100 score though, the animation also needs to render "smoothly", but I think the meaning of "smoothly" is open for interpretation. I imagine we'll start to see a lot more browsers getting 100% over the next few days. Unfortunately I doubt IE will be in that group, but I can always hope.

EDIT : Seems I spoke too soon, Opera is now at 100%.

Tags : internet, css, browsers

Acid3 Test Released

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The Acid3 Test has been released by the Web Standards Project.

There's an article on DrunkenFist with screenshots of how the most common browsers render the test. From what I can see not a single one passes with 100/100, but Safari 3 gets pretty close with 87. Of course, Internet Explorer fails miserably, but I'd expect nothing less. Firefox 3 doesn't mess up the layout as much as the others, but still only scores 59/100.

It'll be interesting to see how, and if, popular browsers like Firefox and Opera adjust to be better at handling the standards and whether any of them will be able to get 100/100 anytime soon.

Tags : internet, css, browsers

First Look at IE8 Beta

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Microsoft have released the Internet Explorer 8 Beta for XP SP2, Vista and Windows Server 2003. You can download it here.

I'm currently running Linux, so it won't install under wine. But I'll switch over to Windows this weekend and give it a full review. I'm looking forward to seeing if it's any better than IE7.

Microsoft have a list of the new features though. One thing that they've also started to focus on is better AJAX support.

Tags : internet, browser

Hurrah! IE8 to be Standards Compliant by Default

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According to a recent post in the IE8 blog, IE8 will be in standards compliant mode by default.

"We’ve decided that IE8 will, by default, interpret web content in the most standards compliant way it can."

This is a change from the previous thinking whereby web developers would have to explicitly opt-in to make IE8 render in standards mode. Thank God they've changed it to be default. IE8 is shaping up to be a good browser for web developers, let's hope the improvements keep coming and maybe, just maybe, websites won't need to be hacked to render correctly in IE8.

Tags : internet, browsers

Last.fm Frees the Music

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Last.fm announced today a new service on their site. As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free!!

This is BIG. Not only can you listen to an entire track before you buy it, rather than the usual 30 second clips, but they will be paying artists directly. This is going to be great for unsigned artists, who will be able to let people listen to their music on Last.fm and actually get paid for it!

They're also going to be releasing a subscription service soon. At the moment you can listen to a track in full, 3 times before being told about the subscription service. Apparently it will let you listen to the track unlimited times. The article doesn't say how much the subscription will be, so you'll have to keep an eye on the website for more information.

It does however say that artists will be paid a share of the advertising revenue from the website, so they'll still get paid even if people are listening to the full tracks without a subscription.

It's been a long time coming, and I for one welcome our new music overlords. All glory to Last.fm!

Tags : music, internet

IE8 Passes the Acid2 Test

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A few of you may be wondering what the Acid2 test actually is. There's a Wikipedia article about it, but basically it's a test designed to highlight flaws in the way a browser renders CSS and HTML. Any standards compliant browser will render the image of the Acid2 Face correctly. As you can imagine, IE doesn't render the face correctly at the moment.

However, all that is about to change. Today, Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch posted an entry on the IEBlog declaring that the latest build of IE8 now passes the Acid2 test.

All I can say is, "About time!". I'm very much looking forward to not have to put up with all the quirks IE causes with compliant code. Of course, who knows when it'll be released, but it's a step in the right direction at least.

Obviously Acid2 doesn't test everything about the standards compliance, so it will be interesting to see if it copes with everything else.

Oh, and for those who are wondering, Firefox 2 fails the test and Opera 9 passes. Hopefully Firefox 3 will pass once it's out of beta. You can take the test here.

Tags : internet, css, browsers

Looking at Safari 3 on Windows

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I've been meaning to try out Safari 3 for the last week, but only got around to it today. The Apple site claims that Safari is twice as fast as IE7 and Firefox. Something which I don't believe is true at all.

It was easy to install, but their claim that it loads faster than any other browser is very wrong. It took about twice as long to load on my system than both FF2 and IE7. I figured it would just be because it was the first run, so I kept trying, but each time I tried, it took just as long to start. But of course, that's not really a big problem for me as once my browser is open, it tends to stay open until my computer gets turned off (which is a very rare event).

The interface is just as you would expect from Apple, in the same style as iTunes. Easy to navigate and pretty intuitive, so there's no problems there. I'm not a fan of the brushed metal look though, but I'm sure there's some tool out there that will allow you to change that.

The claim that the pages load twice as fast is perhaps an overstatement, however I will admit that they do load faster. At least for the sites I visited. I also like the smooth style fonts it uses to render the page, which is a noticeable difference from IE or FF.

CSS compliance is always something I look for in a browser, and Safari stands up very well. It's no better or worse than FF or Opera, so that's good. We all know what IE is like for standards, so I'm not even going to go there.

It's got all the features you would expect like tabbed browsing, RSS integration and Google search.

However, despite all this good, there is also some bad. Not being an Open Source browser like FF, is going to hurt it. The reason I like FF so much is because of the ability to make extensions and themes as you want, and I have several extensions which I simply could not live without (such as Chris Pederick's Web Developer Extension). The other annoying thing is that Safari seems to like my CPU.. so much so that it insists on using 95% of it, and likes to use more memory than Half Life, averaging at around 200Mb. I tried several times to use Safari today, and after roughly 5 minutes, the CPU usage would shoot up and not come back down. This is a serious problem and is the sole reason I won't be using Safari other than for testing.

Obviously though, this is just the Beta, so it isn't going to be perfect. It's certainly a browser I will be keeping my eye on (if only for the lovely smooth fonts). As people who know me well will know, I'm not a big fan of Apple, I've never owned a Mac and I never will, but I will admit when I'm wrong, and if the final release fixes these issues, then I may just become a Safari user.

I wouldn't hold you breath though.

You can download a copy of the Safari 3 Beta from the Apple website here.

Tags : Technology, Internet