Firefox 3.1 Released

Google has been letting people create profiles for a while now — you can see mine here, and you can create yours here. Until today, your public profile that you created has remained hidden from search engines.

When Google released Chrome, Firefox could finally pick on a kid that was the same size. 

Yesterday Mozilla announced that Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 was available for download. This brings with it a whole new raft of features and improvements:

·          Web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine

·          Added support for CSS 2.1 and CSS 3 properties

·          A new tab-switching shortcut that shows previews of the tab you’re switching to

·          Improved control over the Smart Location Bar using special characters to restrict your search

·          Support for new web technologies such as the

The new tab-switching feature is really neat (press CTRL+TAB to get a view of all the open tabs), and the special character support for the Awesome Bar makes life a lot easier (for example, you can restrict the search to your history by typing ^, or search only bookmarks using *, or tagged pages with+, if you want to match only text in the URL type @, and for title and tags only use #). Immediately we get usability gains without chrome overload or bloat. Nice.

Browser Detection

The JavaScript Navigator object contains all information about the visitor's browser. We are going to look at two properties of the Navigator object:
• appName - holds the name of the browser
• appVersion - holds, among other things, the version of the browser

Insert the Following code inside the body tag.

var browser=navigator.appName; var b_version=navigator.appVersion; var version=parseFloat(b_version); document.write("Browser name: "+ browser); document.write("<br />"); document.write("Browser version: "+ version);

Run that page in all browser you can note the diferrence.

Google Chrome

Rather quietly in early September a press leak was made about a new "open source" browser from Google Inc. named "Chrome". In production for over two years the September "leak" created a lot of conjecture in forums around the net, with most saying "Who cares about Chrome?". Personally, I think the question is "What does Google have in mind for its future?".

Chrome is open-source, as mentioned, and this means it's going to be getting a lot of input from the development community unlike a certain proprietary browser I could name. This browser is aimed specifically at Internet 2 RIA's and especially video. It is available for trial in Beta right now and Google claims it is more STABLE, FASTER, SECURER and has a simpler and cleaner USER INTERFACE than any other browser out there right now.
I'll let you be the judge of that but I dutifully downloaded it and played and was pleasantly surprised by the speed, ease of use and the "stealth" mode or what Chrome refers to as "incognito". Although I did find a lot of the Banks haven't bothered addressing the browser yet, so internet banking may be out of the question for the moment. But there are so many features in Chrome it may make you change your mind about your current favourite browser, even in it's buggy beta condition. Those tabs we're used to now in FireFox and IE 7 have taken a step up in Chrome as each tab runs a different process and should one tab crash it doesn't crash the browser. The separate process logic also applies to processes within the tab (or page) itself ... you can kill flash applications on a page and still continue browsing that page happily. Chrome is no comic book browser (as Google would have you believe) it's the real deal. "People are watching and uploading videos, chatting with each other, playing Web-based games," the official Google comic strip says about Chrome. "All these things that didn't exist when the first browsers were created."

With Navigator officially dead as of 1st February this year, I guess there is room for another in the browser line up. Google's aim, however, appears to be "world domination" as it's the first browser built from the ground up with the idea of running applications rather than displaying pages. Chrome has been purpose built to support itself, or, could that be to make Windows a thing of the past? Who needs an operating system if your browser is going to be capable of doing your OS's job? Pure speculation on my part I know, still, I'm not the only one having that train of thought. Chrome has it's own JavaScript engine, written specifically for it by the Google development team, so Ajax apps are going to perform like a dream, Google Apps will have their own custom built environment ... I know you see where I'm going with this ...

Google's aim hasn't been to start another browser war, they've found the current browsers lacking and they've built one that suits them, their applications and RIAs. If you think about it logically, what else could they do, their whole business IS the internet. It's a brave new world that Google have created and only time will tell if their bravery has been foolhardy or not but at least the ride is going to be an interesting one.

For Further Referrence: http://www.cyber-aspect.com/features/feature_article.asp?art=113