LinuxHaxor has discovered that early-pre-alpha builds of Chromium, which Google Chrome is based off, is 4 times faster than current stable builds of Firefox on Linux.
The test was run with the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark tool.
While these results are impressive, LinuxHaxor mentions that current Google Chrome Windows builds are still 2 times faster than early Chromium builds for Linux.
Here are a few articles that may be of interest – yet don’t all deserve their own post:
Can IE8 Really Tempt You Back To Microsoft? (PC World)
How JavaScript became a browser war battle-ground (ZDNet UK)
Is the geek love affair with Firefox waning? (ZDNet)
Firefox proves a hit with web enthusiasts (VNUNet.com)
Rumors have been circulating that the next version of Internet Explorer could possibly use Apple’s open source WebKit rendering engine.
It appears, as expected, that these rumors were indeed false.
Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer put to rest any speculation that IE9 would use WebKit. He also told Ars Technica that IE8 would not be the last version of IE.
That solves that mystery.
Internet Explorer 8 may have just been released in 25 languages in Microsoft’s Download Center, but other languages and availability through Windows Update and Automatic Updates will be coming soon.
The release will be in 3 waves as follows:
Wave 0 – Languages
Arabic, Chinese (Hong Kong), Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional),Czech, Danish, Dutch, English (US), Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew,Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazil),Portuguese (Portugal), Russian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish
Wave 1 – Languages
Bosnia (Cyrillic), Bosnian (Latin), Bulgarian, Catalan, Croatian, Estonian, Hindi, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Romanian, Serbian (Cyrillic), Serbian (Latin), Slovak, Slovenian, Thai, Ukrainian, Vietnamese
Wave 2 – Languages
Albanian, Assamese, Basque, Bengali (Bangladesh), Bengali (India), Gujarati, Indonesian, Kannada, Kazakh, Konkani, Kyrgyz, Latvian, Malay (Brunei Darussalam), Malay (Malaysia), Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Punjabi (India), Tamil, Telugu, Uzbek (Latin)
And the release dates for each wave are:
Microsoft Download Center
Wave 0 – March 19, 2009
Wave 1 – Week of April 20, 2009
Wave 2 – Week of June 1, 2009
Windows Update
Wave 0 – Week of March 23 (for Beta / RC users) and Week of April 13 (for all other users)
Wave 1 – Week of May 18, 2009
Wave 2 – TBD
Automatic Updates
Wave 0 – April 27, 2009
Wave 1 – May 5, 2009
Wave 2 – June 24, 2009
Thanks to Tech ARP for the information.
Microsoft has released Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) final to the web today, and it is currently available in 25 languages.
IE8 is a giant leap over IE7 and includes a new powerful rendering engine. Other features include the addition of accelerators, which let you easily find information such as maps, and compatibility view which helps display websites designed for older versions of IE.
More information and download links are available from the Internet Explorer Homepage.
The mobile version of Firefox, Fennec has now hit it’s first beta. It currently only works on the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet, but it also installs on computers for the aid of developers.
There have been many improvements since it’s early public alpha release, including TraceMonkey, Mozilla’s new JavaScript powerhouse.
This release also includes the Smart URL bar (also known as the “awesome bar”), and now supports tagging for bookmarks.
A full list of changes and features can be found in the Fennec release notes. Installation instructions for the Nokia N810 Internet Tablet are available.
Good news everyone! Google Chrome is getting faster. The Google Chrome Blog has details of the new beta, which suggest that the next version of Chrome is up to 35% faster.
The benchmarks used include Google own V8 benchmark, where the browser was an 25% faster, and the Sunspider benchmark which achieved a result 35% faster than the current stable release.
These improvements should make their way in to the stable release shortly.
After numerous delays, Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 has finally been released.
The release fixes many outstanding issues from Beta 2, and improves features and performance such as private browsing and the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
The full details of the new beta are available in the release notes, while the new beta can be downloaded from Mozilla.
A new report coming out of Microsoft claims that Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) is on average faster than both Google Chrome 1.0 and Firefox 3.0.5.
The report titled Measuring Browser Performance: Understanding issues in benchmarking and performance analyzes how various parts of the browser and their network components can impact on performance benchmarking.
Contradictory to all other tests, Microsoft claims that IE8 outperforms both Firefox 3.05 and Chrome 1.0, so the results should be taken with a grain of salt.
Of interesting note, IE8 loads mozilla.com faster than Firefox while Firefox loads microsoft.com faster than IE8.
The full 14-page report is available from the Microsoft Download Center.
The 13th of March 2009 marks the World Wide Web’s 20th birthday, after Tim Berners-Lee created the very first version of HTML.
Berners-Lee’s idea envisioned researches being able click on links in documents to other relevant articles.
Surely the WWW is one of the greatest inventions of the last 20 years. You can read more about the WWW and Tim Berners-Lee.