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Firefox 4 Beta 1 now available for download
Whoa, Nelly! Is that a Firefox 4 download button we're looking at? Why yes... yes it is! We can't think of a much better way to wrap up one's workday than by finding out that Mozilla's own Firefox browser has finally made the official leap to 4.0, with Beta 1 going live for the adoring public today. It's ready to be sucked down and installed for those with Windows, Linux and OS X-based machines, and the changelog itself is far too lengthy for this space (though it's linked below for your perusal). You'll obviously notice an overhauled look hitting you front and center, with a new add-on manager, support for the new WebM format, improved privacy settings and crash protection headlining the "big chart o' features." Give 'er a download and toss your thoughts on the new build down in comments below, cool? P.S. - Be warned that this may very well not work with your stable of add-ons right away, so we'd keep that stable 3.x.x build installed as a backup!
Opera 10.6 hits Windows, Mac and Linux with faster Javascript, WebM video support
Four short months after Opera 10.5, the Scandinavian potato boilers are back for more -- the latest version of their lightweight web browser features not only claims to be the fastest, but the first final browser with WebM video support. While we actually noticed a variety of web videos felt choppy with the Windows version, there's no denying it's a speedy little hummingbird; Engadget felt snappier on Opera than Chrome or Firefox by far. Don't take our word for it, though -- try it out for yourself at the source link.
Firefox 1.1 hits Maemo in final form, featuring Add-ons, Save to PDF and more
Two months after an impressive beta, Mozilla's finalized its first full mobile browser for Maemo -- beating iPhone, Android and most assuredly Windows Mobile versions to the punch. Though it doesn't seem to have gained any new features in the interim, what it does bring to the table is sweet indeed: portrait browsing, auto-updating add-ons and the ability to magically convert webpages to PDF right on your phone. If you have a Nokia N900 or N810, do your device a favor and download it right now; if not, you'll find a handy guide to your burning jealousy at our more coverage link.
Opera Mini users increased 4.2 percent in a month (and other interesting tidbits), says Opera
Opera's just released its State of the Mobile Web report for May of 2010, and its touting its continued growth in the space, with Opera Mini usage increasing 4.2 percent over the previous month, and a 7.2 percent gain in overall page views. Good news for them, undoubtedly, but they also have interestingly found that the hours 8:00 pm and midnight are the biggest for browsing -- unless you live in the UK, where you're just as likely to browse in the earlier hours. Nerds. Hit up the source link for the full report.
HTML5 speed test finds IE9, Firefox 3.7 lead the pack in Windows, Chrome a distant last
Curious to see how the latest preview release of Internet Explorer 9 stacks up against the competition when it comes to HTML5 performance in Windows? So was Download Squad, and it's now revealed its findings in some vivid, if not entirely scientific tests. The end result is that Internet Explorer 9 and Firefox 3.7 were well ahead of the pack in the 1,000-fish stress test (with Firefox about 5 or 10 percent ahead of IE), while Opera was stuck somewhere in the middle, and Chrome placed a distant last (and maxed out the CPU) -- all with hardware acceleration enabled, of course, although that had to be done via command line switches in the case of Chrome. Head on past the break to check out the four-way showdown for yourself, as well as an earlier test with just IE9 and Chrome.
Mozilla bundles WebM support into nightly Firefox builds
Google's new web video standard seems to be gathering a bit of momentum, as today Firefox is following in the ultrafast steps of Chrome by offering built-in support for WebM video. Bugs are still being worked out, but the fundamentals are there, and we'll hopefully see all kinks ironed out in time for the release of Firefox 4 Beta, which is expected to land later this month. This is now the third big browser to announce compatibility, with Microsoft already promising it for IE 9, provided users download the necessary VP8 codec first. The HTML5-obsessed Apple hasn't yet decided which way it's going with the standard while Opera is presumably busy figuring out how to parody the whole thing in video form.
Apple releases Safari 5 with Safari Reader, Extensions and Bing search (updated)
Apple has just outed a press release for Safari 5, which curiously didn't get a mention during the company's WWDC10 keynote, but should be ready to download any minute now. Safari Reader is making its debut, as we'd heard it might, alongside a claimed 30 percent performance improvement over Safari 4 and -- mirroring the iPhone 4 -- Bing as one of the preloaded search engine options. Google and Yahoo are still around, don't freak out. Apple is also adding in Extensions (think Firefox's Add-Ons) to the browser, allowing devs to use HTML5, CSS and JavaScript to pretty up the browsing experience. The Reader feature intrigues us most, as it auto-detects articles within webpages and pulls them out for an unencumbered text-only view. The idea sounds great, but we'll naturally need to see how well it works in practice. Apple's been doing a bit of benchmarking too and boasts that Safari 5 runs JavaScript a whole three percent faster than Chrome 5.0 and over twice as fast as Firefox 3.6. Internet Explorer is presumably still working on finishing that test. P.S. We're hearing the current release might be for devs only, hence the lack of a public download. Update: Okay, now it's available for public consumption. Update 2: We've been playing with Safari 5 for a few moments and here's what we've noticed: Reader is pretty gorgeous -- think Instapaper on the fly. It's hard to tell when it'll kick in and show the Reader button in the toolbar, though -- it works on Engadget posts, but not in Wikipedia articles. Yes, Netflix is broken. It seems like it's doing a browser detect and failing with the new build number, so we'd guess it'll be fixed soon. It's much faster at everything from launch to rendering times. We haven't clocked it yet, but it's noticeably snappier on our quad-core i7 iMac. We're dying to try out some Extensions and see how they work, but we haven't seen any yet. Same with the new HTML5 features -- hit us up if you see anything! Bing Search integration is... Bing search integration. What else is there to say?
Firefox Home 'coming soon' to iPhone, will sync with desktop browser
Continuous client functionality, you say? Sounds like Mozilla might be just what the doctor ordered. The company has announced that its upcoming Firefox Home app is coming soon to the iPhone. The program will sync up with your desktop client so that you can go mobile with all your browsing history, bookmarks and "the set of tabs from [your] most recent browser session" going along for the ride. Not only that, but there's an "Awesome Bar" -- Mozilla's words, not ours -- that'll let you search through everything and predict options based on the available data. While not a "full" Firefox browser, according to the blog post (with the addendum, "either technically or due to policy"), the pages still load from within the app itself. No solidified release date yet -- it's still being polished for app store submission, but Opera's luck give us hope for a smooth approval. In the meantime, you can get a quick preview in the video after the break.
Mozilla shares tentative vision for Firefox 4
Our first glimpse of Firefox 4 was limited to a few tasteful mockups; this time, Mozilla's main man Mike Beltzner has revealed the company's plans for its next generation web browser in its entirety. While exact features and dates are sketchy, his presentation reveals Mozilla would like to hold the Firefox 4 beta in June, before unleashing a CSS3, partially HTML5 compliant web browser with multitouch support, background updates, geolocation, Firefox Sync (aka Mozilla Weave) and a greatly streamlined UI this holiday season. The presentation has "PLANS MIGHT CHANGE" written all over it in large red letters, so trust us when we say none of this is for sure, but we like the direction Firefox is going and we'll be happy to see more. Video presentation at our source link, full slideshow after the break.
Opera wades into Flash debate, says it 'makes very little sense' for video
Opera Software already caused quite a stir with the release of the iPhone version of its browser, and it looks like it's now starting to make itself heard in one of the biggest browser-related debates going. Speaking with Tech Radar, Opera's product analyst Phillip Grønvold started out with something of a diplomatic approach by saying that "today's internet content is dependent on Flash" and "if you remove Flash you do not have today's internet," and for that reason Opera needs to support Flash. Things get a bit more interesting from there, however, with Grønvold stating that while Flash has its place for things like dynamic content, it "makes very little sense" as a video container given the impact on processor and battery usage, adding that "you can cook an egg on [devices] once you start running Flash on them and there's a reason for that." Fried eggs, potatoes -- these browsers sure are making us hungry.
Google Chrome: faster than a flying potato
Google's never been shy to make claims that Chrome is the fastest browser on the planet, but it's truly pulled out all the stops to drive that point home for its latest beta. Rather than rely on some simple benchmarks, Google decided to test Chome against some other things that are fast -- namely, a potato cannon, sound waves, and lightning. We won't spoil all the surprise for you, but you can rest assured that Chrome comes out looking pretty good, and that everything else gets a little messy. Head on past the break to check out the speed tests for yourself, as well as the requisite making-of video.
Firefox 1.1 beta for Maemo goes live
The N900 already features one of the best pocket browsing experiences we've ever seen, but it looks to be getting a whole lot better today with the beta release of Firefox 1.1. Major new features include portrait browsing (awesome), form auto-complete, a context menu, volume key zoom, and -- this is pretty neat -- the capability to save pages straight to PDF, so it seems like the kind of thing you'll definitely want to download, even if it's not quite solid enough to earn gold build status. Oh, and if you don't have an N810 or N900 handy and you're amped to play around, you can download the little guy for Windows, Mac OS, or Linux, too.
Skyfire 2.0 beta for Android video preview!
We just spent a few minutes playing with the beta version of Skyfire 2.0 for Android that was released today, and we'll cut to the chase: this is easily the best browser we've used on the platform. Clearly we'll need to spend more time with it to make sure it can handle all the typical sites you'd want to visit while you're on the road -- but loading the desktop version of Engadget is always a great barometer for this sort of thing, and this browser rocked it. Rendering is about as reasonably fast as you can expect it to be (on our Snapdragon-powered Nexus One, anyhow), and everything we saw displayed spot-on perfect (save for embedded Flash, of course), but if you're in a situation where you don't need to see the full page or it looks screwy, you can toggle it to send an Android user agent right from the app's toolbar below the URL field. It works just about as well as Steel and the built-in browser on a G1 we tested, and Flash videos work just fine there as well. The browser touts compatibility with Flash videos, too, so we headed over to YouTube to try our hand at it; it immediately detected the presence of a video and popped up the so-called "SkyBar" at the bottom of the screen, where you can press the Video button to load the video in a new window. It doesn't work embedded in the page, but considering how small your phone's screen is, that's really for the best -- you get the full-screen experience, and in our testing, it looked fantastic. One downside is that you don't seem to be able to scrub videos while they're playing, but maybe this is something these guys can get patched up for the final release. Follow the break for our full video! Update: One annoyance we've noticed is that pinch-to-zoom works in "steps" -- it's not smooth, which makes it pretty weird to use, but remember that Opera Mini doesn't support it at all.
Skyfire 2.0 beta now ready to set Android ablaze
We've been seeing mobile browsers steadily raising their game lately, so it was inevitable that Skyfire would look to shock and awe us with its first release for the Android platform. Version 2.0 introduces a brand new SkyBar -- which ironically sits at the bottom of the screen -- providing users with a trifecta of new features. Firstly, the Video link serves as a workaround for those pesky "your phone ain't got no Flash" missives by doing server-side conversions of Flash video into universally comprehensible formats like HTML5. If implemented well, this should be a major coup for the company, particularly in light of a potential iPhone release as well. There's also a streamlined sharing feature for social networks, and an Explore function that suggests internet content on the basis of what's currently on display. We'll be testing out the usefulness of these shortly -- for now, hit the source link to get your own Skyfire going. Update: Check out our hands-on preview of the new browser right here. Hint: it's pretty awesome. %Gallery-92020%
Opera Mini for iPhone approved, will be available for free (update: hands-on)
Our man Thomas Ricker was just wondering how long it would take before Apple determined the fate of Opera Mini for iPhone, and we've got some good news -- it's been approved and will be available for free on the App Store within 24 hours! Can't say we were expecting that, since non-Safari-based browsers have typically been verboten from Apple's little kingdom, but we're certainly happy to be surprised. We'll do up a full hands-on when we see it in the store, but for now check the demo video after the break. Update: We're getting reports that UK and Australian readers are already able to download and enjoy this surprising little addition to the app store -- be sure to give this iTunes link a shot and see if it works in your region, mmkay? Update 2: We just got our hands on Opera Mini for the iPhone, and the first thing we noticed is, in fact, how fast it renders pages. When we open the app, we are quickly introduced to the default Opera Screen, with links to Facebook, Twitter and the like. Opening a new tab is a single touch and loading virtually any homepage is quick. While scrolling through the loaded page, some images don't fully render until you stop over them. Multitouch is enabled to some extent -- you can pinch to zoom, and double tapping only fully zooms in and out, with really no inbetween. Something else we noticed that we'd been looking for in OS 4, is the ability to Find in Page. It works really well, and the words being searched are highlighted for an easy find. This browser totally kicks safari out of the water, and we're definitely looking forward to updates for Opera Mini. Update 3: It looks to be live in the US now! Hit up that iTunes link and go wild!
Google's Chromium project ported to N900
Web browsing fiends of the world already have enough reason to envy N900 owners on account of the built-in browser's excellence and the availability of an official Firefox release -- both with full Flash support -- but if that's enough, there's now another name-brand option in the works. Well, sort of. You see, Chromium for Maemo isn't an official port -- but the Maemo community is filled with tinkerers, and that has inevitably led to the availability of a hacked version of the Debian release that apparently works quite wonderfully on the N900 (yes, including Flash) with a 100 score on the elusive Acid test. It's said to be a little buggy at the moment, so hopefully that'll improve over time; you've got to download and install the package manually rather than going through a repo, but as an N900 owner, odds are pretty good that you're familiar with the tactic already. Perhaps Google wants to take this little project over? [Thanks, Sp4mer]
Apple announces WebKit2 with Chrome-like process splitting
Apple's big announcement of the day might have been iPhone OS 4, but another reveal that's gone slightly under the radar might actually turn out to be a bigger deal: WebKit2, which now runs browser elements as separate processes, much like Google Chrome. Actually, Apple's devs say it goes a little farther than Chrome, since the process model is built into the foundation so other non-Safari clients can use it. That's pretty wild stuff, considering how prevalent WebKit has become across the mobile space and the fact that Chrome itself uses the rendering engine. No word on when this will all go final, but hey -- it's all open source, and you can actually grab Mac and Windows binaries right now. Let us know how it goes, won't you?
Is Amazon hiring devs to build a robust web browser for Kindle?
Are you a software dev with a Bachelors Degree in Computer Science, familiarity with current Web standards, and experience with browser engines, Linux on embedded devices, and Java? If so, do we have the job for you. Lab126, the group at Amazon responsible for the Kindle, wants you to help "conceive, design, and bring to market" a new embedded browser on a Linux device. Might this be a sign that the company is ready to start taking web browsing on the e-reader seriously? We don't know, but it sure sparked some interesting discussion over at All Things Digital. As Peter Kafka points out, a decent browser for the thing is pretty much a no-brainer in light of the Apple iPad. On the other hand, the idea of a robust browser on the Kindle has its own complications. What about subscription content like the New York Times -- why would anyone pay for something that's available for free on the web, if you're using the same device to view both? And what about all that new data traffic? Surely AT&T will have something to say about that. Of course, we've been hearing enough scuttlebutt about a mysterious next-gen device being developed at Amazon that perhaps this has nothing to do with the Kindle whatsoever. Who knows? These are all questions that will have to be answered sooner or later, but in the meantime we can say with some certainty that E ink is definitely not the best way to troll 4chan.
Opera mini coming to the iPhone
Opera Software announced on Wednesday that they're going to offer a sneak peek of their Opera Mini web browser for the iPhone during Mobile World Congress 2010 (MWC). Several features of the Mac-based Opera will be included, like tabs, Speed Dial and the password manager, says Opera co-founder Jon von Tetzchner. He also mentioned his app's compression technology that will make browsing fast and reduce data surcharges. For more details than that, we'll have to wait until the cat has been let out of the bag. Two years ago, Opera claimed that they submitted an iPhone browser to the App Store only to have it rejected, a claim that was later refuted. In a comment posted to the Opera blog earlier today, Espen André Øverdahl, the Community Manager at Opera Software, said "We have not submitted it yet to the Apple App Store. However, we hope that Apple will not deny their users a choice in Web browsing experience." Before you assume that Apple will deny an iPhone browser because of Mobile Safari, note that there are several other web browsers in the App Store already, including Perfect Browser 3, Full Browser and Mercury Web Browser. As John Gruber notes, however, the browsers that are in the store use the system version of WebKit. [Via Daring Fireball]
Firefox for Mobile makes Maemo its first home
As if you needed any more evidence of the tech supremacy of your Nokia N900 or N810, here's Firefox making its official mobile debut on the most righteous Maemo OS. Available for download right now, version 1.0 will come with a pretty sweet feature named Weave Sync, which harmonizes your bookmarks, tabs, history and passwords across devices, making for a seamless transition between your desktop computer and your mobile one. We reckon we could get used to that. Alas, Flash support is still somewhat shaky, and does not come enabled by default, though you're free to flip the switch and ride the lightning as it were. We're sure Mozilla will appreciate any crash reports you might want to throw its way as well. So come on already, download the darn thing and let us know if it improves on the already spectacular browsing experience of the N900. [Thanks, Ross M.]
