web-browser

The web-browser war is once again going to get interesting with Internet Explorer 9 Preview now available for public download promising impressive upcoming features, boasting 100% support for W3C Web Standards (see comparison table after the jump) IE9 will support hardware assisted page rendering, background compiled JavaScript and GPU-powered HTML5 graphics for superior performance.

Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha was promising and as expected the final version of Opera 10.5 Final is a pleasure to use, Opera 10.5 features the brand new Carakan JavaScript rendering engine which is said to be 7x faster than its predecessor, coupled with a brand-new interface design and support for latest web-technologies this browser is surely going to be hit.

Opera is claiming their latest Windows browser release as worlds fastest web-browser, but in our benchmark tests using PeaceKeeper this claim does not seem to be valid as shown in the results below.

Firefox takes up too much system resources with multiple tabs open, there have been addons like RAMBack, Clusters, and TooManyTabs promising to take care of this but none of the above were practical to use and therefore did not remained on my computer after few days usage, however new addon BarTab is a perfect practical solution to the problem which works amazingly and I am definitely going to keep it - what BarTab does that it prevents loading tabs until needed saving system resources. Whenever you start Firefox instead of loading all the tabs BarTab puts all the tabs on your bartab and loads them only when you click on them.

Since there is no extra tab-bar this is very practical to use providing EXCEPTIONALLY good results, my Firefox memory resources usage went down from 241 MB to just 82 MB that's an amazing 290% improvement.

Google Chrome is doing great slowly gaining web-browser market share, now you can enjoy the same web-browsing experience using a more security hardened version of Chromium code-base developed by well-known security software vendor 'Comodo', the all new Comodo Dragon Internet Browser features greater stability, less memory bloat, improved privacy, easy SSL certificate identification, faster website access, more private Incognito mode which also stops cookies, and easy migration from your existing browser.

Since Comodo Dragon is based on same Chromium code-base which powers Google Chrome plus some more performance and security tweaks the browser looks pretty fast in initial usage, the new look and feel also makes it a good alternative to Google Chrome.

If you work with many tabs open Firefox is known to be a memory guzzler, RAMBack a free Firefox addon promises to take care of this by issuing an internal notification to free up memory that is otherwise held for performance purposes.

I tested RAMBack on two different computers and the results were very much varying, on one computer I did noticed decrease in FIREFOX RAM Usage but on second PC there was no change at all.

Firefox 3.6 public download release will go live Thursday, January 21st at 9:30am PST as reported earlier but we now have access to the final build which you can download right now, as you might know Firefox developers have access to FTP servers having exclusive access to all builds - however, these are restricted and will end-up in access denied errors when trying to download anything for example try using this server - ftp://ftp.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.6/. The good news is with a bit of tinkering we have got access to the final Firefox 3.6 build and you can download it right now using the link posted at the end of the post.

Official announcement from Mozilla has confirmed that Firefox 3.6 download will be made available to public from Thursday, January 21st at 9:30am Pacific Standard Time, an intro video by Mike Beltzner, Director of Firefox has also been put online featuring major new enhancements introduced in the latest version of the web-browser (watch video after the jump).

Apart from being 20% faster than Firefox 3.5, the new features include automated plug-in update scanner for better security, quick theming with Personas, accelerometer support and support for new web-standards.

Opera has always been the leader in innovating web-browser technologies and once again the Opera team has came-up with some promising stuff with public release of Opera 10.5 Pre-Alpha, the major new features worth mentioning here would be the all new JavaScript rendering engine Carakan which is touted to be 7x faster in benchmarks then it's predecessor Futhark used in current stable release of Opera 10.10, new Presto 2.5 engine with support for CSS3 transitions and transforms with more HTML5 features, new hardware accelerated VEGA graphics library and support for private tab (no need to open a window) apart from the new address-bar and other GUI enhancements.

Yes, that's right just days after final version of Google Chrome 2.0 got released the Chrome team is ready with development release of Google Chrome 3.0, the latest development build is now available for public download via Chrome dev-update channel, the most notable change in new build is support for HTML5 VIDEO tag.

The browser war is expected to heat up once again as Microsoft announced the next version of IE “Windows Internet Explorer 8" to be made available for downloading as beta version in the first half of 2008.

The most notable change being support of web standards in IE8 which Microsoft has ignored long time in previous versions of IE, webmasters will need to place a special tag instructing IE8 to render the page in new IE8 web standard mode, else the site will load using normal IE rendering mode to prevent site layouts from breaking.