Firefox 3.5 RC2 available

Posted on June 22, 2009 by Jeremy Clark

firefox-logoFor those who don’t know Firefox is the leading alternative browser to Internet Explorer. In constant development Firefox is continually improving and version 3.5 should be released soon. For those that can’t wait or want to help find bugs the second release candidate has been publicly released. It’s available for download from Mozilla’s Blog. There are big improvements in memory management which has always haunted Firefox. According to this site it is now a non-issue, even out performing the other big free browsers. Another big feature is the inclusion of HTML 5 elements, and native support for open-source audio codec Ogg Vorbis.

Source: PCMag

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Google’s Chrome Released on Mac and Linux

Posted on June 5, 2009 by Jeremy Clark

Google ChromeGoogle’s Chromium browser (open-source Chrome) has been released for Mac and select Linux Distros, but the release page warns not to download unless you like incomplete software. Keep in mind this isn’t even beta yet, for Google that’s something. Pretty soon though Mac, Linux, and Windows user will get to enjoy Chrome. Me personally I’m waiting for an extension system like Firefox before I’ll use it solely as my browser of choice.

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Mozilla Moving Away From Tabs

Posted on May 18, 2009 by Jeremy Clark

Mozilla the company behind Firefox thinks that the tabbed interface it’s so famous for is reaching the end of it’s lifespan. So they’re launching a design competition to come up with the next big thing in browsers.

Tabs worked well on slow machines on a thin Internet, where ten browser sessions were “many browser sessions”. Today, 20+ parallel sessions are quite common; the browser is more of an operating system than a data display application; we use it to manage the web as a shared hard drive.
— Mozilla Labs

One interesting idea is already floating around from Mozilla Labs, having the tabs on the side instead of the top.

Source: PCPro

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Windows 7 “XP Mode” Mistake

Posted on May 9, 2009 by Jeremy Clark

LogoRecently Microsoft had announced a big feature of Windows 7, “XP Mode” as most call it. This allows people to install all their favorite XP software that won’t run in Vista or 7 in a XP virtual pc. Or at least as it was supposed to work, but many people with Intel processors won’t be able to use this feature. Microsoft is requiring that the computer on which 7 is installed to have hardware virtualization support. Since VirtualPC that the XP mode uses is a software hypervisor the decision makes no sense.

AMD processors have AMD-V (hardware virtualization) on all but their Sempron line. Intel on the other hand used the feature as a way to divide their processor models and don’t have as many models with the support. Tom’s Hardware has a list of all the Intel models that support VT-x.

Source: ArsTechnica

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Multi-Process Firefox

Posted on May 8, 2009 by Jeremy Clark

multi-firefoxHow many time have you been browsing in Firefox and something hang or crash, not many probably but when it does it takes down the whole browser. Now it seems Mozilla is taking a hint from Google’s Chrome, by splitting tabs into multiple processes that are independent of each other. So if one tabs crashes oh well close it and continue. The development of this project is in the beginning stages and could be up to a year to see a workable release but, it should be worth the wait.

Source: Mozilla Links

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