PHP is probably the most used scripting language behind the internet. So taking a hint from last weeks list, we point to Smashing Magazine and their Advanced PHP Tips. Don’t worry if you’re a beginner, these tips are a good starting point for anyone interested in learning (and so is Webmonkey’s PHP Tutorial for Beginners, ahem).

Our favorite tips? Database injections can be a pain. The SQL Injection cheat sheet will help. Speed up your website with Memcached. The list even mentions some popular frameworks, like CakePHP and Solar, that will help take care of some of the legwork for you.

[Updated 3/31. Whoops! Broken link. Thanks @Arlen]

• Tutorial: PHP Tutorial for Beginners
• Tutorial: PHP and MySQL Tutorial
• Get Started with SimpleXML in PHP
• Tutorial: PHP and MySQL Tutorial
• Generate PDFs Dynamically With PHP

On Tuesday Marcy 19th, the second day of Microsoft’s MIX09, Microsoft’s Dean Hachamovitch’s keynote announced the highly anticipated release of Internet Explorer 8 — the browser to be included with the equally anticipated Windows 7 release around February 2010.

The browser claims better standards compatibility than Internet Explorer 7, unparalleled speed, fewer computing ressources, better security and some competitive features like a “Smart Address Bar” and porn Private browsing mode.

However, thanks to being slightly overshadowed in overall Mix09 coverage and a general failure to match the successes of competing browsers, Internet Explorer has failed to attract the very technophiles they need as allies in order to stem protracted loss in marketshare to its Mozilla, Apple and Google rivals.

Over the course of last week, download numbers did not look too promising. According to Net Applications (via a TG Daily post), IE 8 topped out at 2.6%, but hasn’t made much headway since. Given that this is the first week its been available, it doesn’t look likely that this is going to stem the continuing marketshare loss to Firefox.

In many ways, the bar has risen too high for Internet Explorer’s slow development cycle. By last week, the new features offered in Internet Explorer 8 are old hat to Firefox, Opera, Safari and Chrome users. The most exciting new end-user features, like Smart Address Bar, private browsing modes, find on page and the new tab page, are all old news by now.

Security upgrades mostly work to protect against cross-site scripting through the use of filters and add some protection for ActiveX controls, Microsoft’s own proprietary multimedia software.

Standards-wise, it is the first Internet Explorer browser to pass the Acid 2 test. However, it utterly fails Acid 3, scoring 20 out of 100.

What Internet Explorer has is better compatibility over competing browsers when it comes to CSS 2.1, W3C’s latest CSS spec. Meanwhile, evangelists are touting its speed, but not against typical benchmarks like SunSpider. Microsoft chose to basically time how fast Internet Explorer took to load the top 25 web pages on the internet. As we’ve mentioned when we built our first internet stopwatch, it’s not the most perfect test (with variables such as machine speed and internet connection), but in some ways it is the most real test of how fast the browser is.

Microsoft’s marketshare issues could be assumably traced back to when the company started draining resources from Internet Explorer when the browser hit about 95% market share around 2000. Perhaps caught off guard, the behemoth has taken steps to remedy that error. According to a blog post by Hachamovitch, it looks like there will be no rest for the Internet Explorer team in the future.

“Our next steps start with listening. We’re going to listen for customer and security issues and respond appropriately. We’re going to engage with web sites and developers on compatibility. We’re going to finish Windows 7. We’re going to work with standards bodies to finish CSS 2.1 and bring other standards to a customer-ready state faster. We’re going to stand behind this product and service and secure it for many years. We’re going listen to your feedback while we start work on the next version of IE” wrote Hachamovitch. “We’re going to finish Windows 7. We’re going to work with standards bodies to finish CSS 2.1 and bring other standards to a customer-ready state faster. We’re going to stand behind this product and service and secure it for many years. We’re going listen to your feedback while we start work on the next version of IE.”

See Also:

• Internet Explorer 8 Catches Up, Shows Improvements With Beta 2
• Microsoft Quietly Launches Private Internet Explorer 8 Beta
• Developer Reverts to Flash to Correct IE Standards Shortcoming
• MIX09: Silverlight 3 Brings HD, Multitouch, Offline Apps to the Web

Daniel Chait, managing director of Lab49, has been working the halls of Mix 09 to record the voices of those in the know.

Among the Podcasts, James Pratt talks about the upcoming release of Internet Explorer. The news? Internet Explorer 8 is done, ready for market. Among the new features, IE 8 should be compliant with most current W3C standards. Other cool new features are custom themes, embedded search and security upgrades.

Other notable podcasts include Johnny Lee who chats about Human-Computer Interaction at Microsoft, including multi-touch and Microsoft Surface. John Lam speaks of IronRuby and DRLR.

Finally, Christian Schorman talks about what is probably the highlight of Mix09′s keynote speech, SketchFlow. Sketchflow is a part of Expression Blend 3  that wowed the audience by creating a fully featured prototype of a website in about 15 minutes.

The interviews are broken up between two pages. Part 1 and Part 2 were co-produced by Lab49 and Zoom-In Online. The podcasts can be found at <a hrev=”http://www.zoom-in.com/blog/zio-pro/aanarav-sareen/mix-2009-audio-podcasts-part-01″>Zoom-In Online’s site</a>.

[Updated to correct Daniel Chalt's title and production credits on 3/23]

LAS VEGAS — Scott Guthrie from Microsoft took advantage of Wednesday’s MIX09 conference keynote to show off the new Silverlight 3. The new beta shows off new hardware integration, interactive controls and the ability to download Silverlight applications to your desktop.

Silverlight 3 takes advantage of the latest in hardware. Most notably, it supports multitouch devices — the kind you’ll find mostly on Macs right now. The multimedia software also takes advantage of hardware (GPU) acceleration and 3-D visuals.

Since Silverlight’s initial announcement at the MIX07 conference, the underdog software excelled at streaming live HD. Flash has similar high-quality video, but as evidenced by NBC’s 2008 Olympics coverage, Silverlight was able to stream high-definition video (720p) without waiting for the video to buffer. The site managed to serve about 1.3 billion pageviews. So successful was it, in fact, that an NBC representative joined Guthrie on stage today to announce NBC will be stream live 2010 coverage of the Winter Olympics in Vancouver.

Expression Blend, the primary tool designed to create Silverlight media, has also seen an upgrade to version 3 as well. Applause and Twitter excitement arose under Expression Blend’s Sketchflow tool — a tool designed to prototype sites and workflow. The software allows you to sketch out the workflow of your site, create rough outlines of site design, import images from Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop and even export it as a document into Word format — saving hours of documentation time.

Mac users are able to develop Silverlight through the popular programming editor Eclipse after downloading the SDK from the Eclipse for Silverlight project.

Silverlight applications will also support being downloaded as standalone applications — similar in function to yet another Adobe product: Adobe AIR.

What Silverlight does not have over its rival? Flash has a 99 percent adoption rate. Silverlight claims to have about 25 percent of consumers worldwide. That said, today’s announcement is a shot across Adobe’s bow. The makers of Flash and AIR should be worried about what Microsoft has up their sleeves. It looks a lot like innovation.

Finally, among today’s announcement was the unveiling of Playboyarchive.com. Fifty-four free archived issues of Playboy magazine will be available for free through the site starting late Wednesday night. The site will showcase Silverlight’s Deep Zoom technology that pretty much does what its name suggests. That should get those adoption numbers up.

The beta download is available today through the Silverlight site. The cherry on top of the announcement is the Windows download is actually 40k smaller than Silverlight 2. Mac downloads are closer to twice the size of the Windows version, coming in around 12 mb.

• Silverlight Update Aims for Greater Adoption Through Developers
• Microsoft’s Silverlight Gunning for Flash
• Microsoft Launches Silverlight With Full Linux Support
• Silverlight: Microsoft Launches Flash Competitor

According to Google, the first thing you’ll notice about its new beta version of Chrome Browser is speed.

The V8 JavaScript engine has been streamlined for speed. According to a blog post by Brian Rakowski, the new browser is “25 percent faster on our V8 benchmark and 35 percent faster on the Sunspider benchmark than the current stable channel version and almost twice as fast when compared to our original beta version,”

Some of the Beta’s features are inherited from its Webkit rendering engine, including full page zoom and support for autoscrolling. Other features include basic form autofill and a way to drag tabs into a side-by-side view.

The actual announcement of the beta seems to be foregoing version numbers. It appears as if the Chrome launch process will host a “stable” Chrome and a “Beta” chrome concurrently. The latest stable version lost its Beta label in December.

You check out a walkthrough of some of Chrome’s new features in the video above. Download the beta directly from the Google Chrome site (Windows only).

See Also:

• Fast Safari Beta Boasts Chrome-Like Features
• Mac Chrome Starting to Look Like a Real Browser
• How Chrome Changed the Web Overnight
• Google Takes On IE, Firefox With Chrome Web Browser

In the war for browser superiority, Microsoft may be showing signs of yielding to upstarts from Mozilla, Opera and Google.

Over the past few years, Firefox has been slowly stealing away the numbers from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Microsoft still holds the greater share of users, presumably thanks to legacy versions of its Windows operating system. However, despite some movement in Internet Explorer 7 and 8 (in beta now), Microsoft has been slow to play catch up, and users have been slow to upgrade.

It is enough for some to question whether Microsoft can keep up, and rather, why would they want to? There is no official word of Microsoft giving up on the browser. However, one can speculate that Internet Explorer is not a particularly valued Microsoft product next to its bread and butter software: the Windows operating system.

Unlike Windows, Internet Explorer is not a cash cow for Microsoft. It is also under the demands of a very diverse and rapidly moving web industry, one growing more crowded with browsers like Firefox, Opera and newcomer Google’s Chrome.

Internet Explorer used to drive this industry due to its market relevance and now Microsoft representatives only have a hand in directing standards and features going forward as these other browsers bring more — a task growing far more arduous with the demands of AJAX web applications like Gmail.

Furthermore, browsers is a gateway to various security flaws and viruses, and protecting users from themselves via browser security protocols and fixes is an elephantine task. Microsoft has been under the microscope for the various security holes in its system and browser. Offloading this task to third-party browsers must seem pretty attractive.

Perhaps the greatest evidence of Microsoft letting Internet Explorer slip is Microsoft Windows 7 will not require an installation of Internet Explorer. This is a dramatic shift from Microsoft’s usual operating procedure, relatively strong-arming customers to use Internet Explorer by integrating the browser in various elements of its operating system, such as file exploration.

Windows 7 not only removes that functionality, you can decide whether or not to install it on your system at all. This is a big win for browser competition, and perhaps a sign that Microsoft is ready to share the PC with the growing community.

The third Firefox 3.1 beta was released Friday. The latest beta contains mostly bug fixes and better stability.

We covered a few of 3.1′s features before, including an enhanced JavaScript rendering engine named Tracemonkey and a porn private browsing mode. Still absent from this release is a cover flow-like tab browsing feature, missing since Firefox’s alpha version.

The features are more than you’d typically see in a small incremental version increase, which is why the heads over at Mozilla are considering re-versioning this release as 3.5.

Work has already begun on Firefox 4 which will include further upgrades to its JavaScript rendering engine and integrating a Mozilla side project called Ubiquity for a smarter address bar.

Testing betas are not for the feint of heart. Crashes and other wonky behavior occur pretty frequently. If you’re otherwise daring, head over to Mozilla’s Firefox site for the latest and greatest.

See Also:

• Firefox 3.1 Will Add More Awesomeness to the Awesome Bar
• Firefox 3.1 to Offer Improved Session Recovery Tools
• Firefox 3.1 Alpha Preview Delivers Slick New Features
• Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 Arrives

Former Webmonkey Scott Gilbertson is covering Firefox over at Epicenter and explains why we aren’t currently installing the latest JavaScript enhanced version of Firefox right now.

In short, Safari 4 kicked the upcoming Firefox’s 3.1 beta 2′s butt when it comes to JavaScript speed benchmarks, which had Firefox engineers going back to the drawing board to make more tweeks to its own engine, nicknamed Tracemonkey. Beta 3 of Firefox is expected in mid-March.

Thanks to the delay, Firefox engineers started considering jumping ahead to the next big version, 3.5. Meanwhile, Safari, Chrome and Opera engineers are eagerly working on their JavaScript runtime engines. The choice quote from FireFox lead Mike Shaver, who predicts the browsers will play leap frog with each other for the foreseeable future:

Shaver says the various Javascript engines and the competition between them is good for users. “We’re pushing each other in lots of different directions,” says Shaver, “having multiple [Javascript engines] has been great for everyone and it’s great for users.”

Check out Scott’s Firefox beta coverage and interview with Mike Shaver and follow up with Firefox 3.5 coverage.

See Also:

• Mozilla Mulls Adding a Third Beta to Firefox 3.1 Schedule
• Firefox 3.1 Alpha Preview Delivers Slick New Features
• Firefox to Embrace Porn With New ‘Private Browsing’ Mode