Author Archive for Michael Calore

File Under: Browsers
Dec
7
2010

Chrome Gets New ‘Crankshaft’ Engine, Syncing, WebGL Support

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SAN FRANCISCO, California — Google has rolled out some enhancements to its Chrome web browser, adding a new JavaScript engine, more hardware acceleration, and finalizing its system that keeps all of your copies of Chrome in sync.

The enhancements were debuted as part of a press event for Chrome OS and the Chrome Web Store here Tuesday.

The new JavaScript component is called Crankshaft, and it’s built on top of the open source V8 JavaScript engine that currently powers Chrome.

Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai says the boost makes Chrome 50 times as fast as web browsers were just two years ago when Chrome launched.

“Something that took a minute to happen in JavaScript two years ago can now happen in under a second,” he said.

We haven’t been able to verify Google’s speed claims yet (we’re still at the press event) but you can test out Crankshaft now. It’s available in the bleeding-edge Canary build of Chrome right now.

The syncing feature, which Google has had kicking around in developer and beta releases for months, offers “the same Chrome experience everywhere,” Pichai says. It syncs your bookmarks, preferences, auto-fill information and themes across all copies of Chrome, and you sync up your browsers by logging in to your Google Account. You can choose which datatypes you want to sync and which you don’t.

Also on display were the new WebGL features, which offload the most processor-intensive tasks for graphics and page rendering to the machine’s GPU. The demo featured the familiar “look at how fast the fish swim around the fish tank” method of showing off hardware acceleration, but Google added a nice touch by introducing sharks with lasers coming out of their eyes. The laser beams even refracted when they passed through the glass of the tank.

Google says Chrome 9 beta will have WebGL enabled.

Pichai also showed off some of Chrome’s other recent enhancements, like sandboxing for plug-ins.

He also said Chrome now boasts 120 million users worldwide.

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File Under: Browsers, Web Services
Dec
2
2010

Xmarks Lives: LastPass Buys Downtrodden Bookmark Syncing Service

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Just when we all thought we’d never see it again, the cross-browser bookmark syncing service Xmarks has received a life-saving injection.

The company has been acquired by LastPass, maker of a cross-browser password manager and form filler add-on. The deal was announced Thursday, and terms were not disclosed.

Xmarks will live on as a freemium service. The initial cross-browser syncing tool you’re already familiar with will be free, but users will be encouraged to upgrade to a paid subscription to unlock more advanced features. It’s the same model employed by LastPass for its own Premium version of its (otherwise free) password-syncing service.

Xmarks Premium will be offered for $1 per month ($12 per year) and it comes with some new features like apps for the iPhone and Android phones, and technical support. You will also be able to bundle the premium offerings from LastPass and Xmarks together for $20 per year.

There’s already an iPhone app for Xmarks, and the company just recently released an Android app, too. Xmarks says anyone currently using the iPhone app can continue to use it without upgrading to the premium service, but they will have to buy in to the $12 per year plan to get future upgrades.

It looked like curtains for Xmarks in September, when the company announced it would shut down its service in early 2011.

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File Under: Browsers, Multimedia
Dec
1
2010

Chrome Browser to Start Sandboxing Flash Player

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The latest developer channel release of the Chrome browser now supports sandboxing for Adobe’s Flash Player on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

This feature should provide extra protection against malicious browser exploits through the Flash Player. The dev channel releases of Chrome on Windows already support sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, two of the most common paths people can use to run malicious code on an unsuspecting user’s machine. Sandboxing keeps these sensitive parts of the browser more secure while still allowing web pages and apps to access the other, less-sensitive parts of the browser.

Windows users on the dev channel should see the update arrive automatically. We should note that the sandbox does have some bugs and may break other parts of the browser — this is a developer release, after all. Once the kinks are ironed out, all of these sandboxing features will begin making their way into proper stable Chrome releases.

Google’s Chromium team has been working with Adobe to build better Flash controls into Chrome, and to utilize Chrome’s sandboxing technology for the plug-in. Google says Wednesday’s update makes Chrome the only browser on XP that sandboxes Flash. For more about sandboxing and how Chrome is implementing it, read the overview post on the Chromium blog from October. Also, Wednesday’s release comes less than a month after Chrome introduced click-to-play controls for Flash and other plug-ins.

Adobe’s Flash Player is the most widely-used browser plug-in on the web, and it’s the dominant choice for video playback and games online. Even so, the technology gets beat up for performance issues and its security shortcomings, and it’s still falling out of favor among standards enthusiasts who are pushing HTML5 as the better solution for displaying multimedia in the browser.

Adobe also released a new beta version of the Flash Player on Wednesday that improves some of its performance issues.

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File Under: HTML5
Nov
18
2010

Beautiful Websites: Google’s Book of 20 Things

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If you’re looking for a nerdy book to give that budding programmer in your family this holiday season, Google has you covered.

Best of all, it’s free (you cheapskate) and it’s written entirely in HTML5 (you nerd).

The book is called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. According to the forward, it’s “a short guide for anyone who’s curious about the basics of browsers and the web.”

It covers the structure of the web, then offers primers in HTML, JavaScript and Ajax, then offers a glimpse at what’s next in the world of browsers and web apps. There are also discussions about privacy, security, open source software, and design.

The book was written and built by the Google Chrome team, so the bulk of the technical stuff highlights features in Google’s browser. Under the hood, there’s some cool tech going on. There are fancy CSS type treatments and animations throughout. They’ve also recreated the familiar page-flipping animation as you thumb through the book, which frankly smells like the 1990s but adds a rather quaint touch here.

It’s a solid demonstration of how HTML5 can be used to present content in a compelling, “featurey” way. Plus, it’s not just for kids — I learned something new flipping through it, though I’m not saying what. I have a reputation to uphold.

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File Under: Browsers
Nov
17
2010

New IE9 Preview Arrives, Now With More JavaScript Power

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Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

Microsoft pushed out another preview release of Internet Explorer 9 Wednesday. This is not a new beta release — we’re still months away from the official release of Internet Explorer 9 — but we’re definitely approaching the finish line.

Wednesday’s release, dubbed Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7 (whew) includes a big performance boost with a newly revamped JavaScript engine inside of it.

The last preview release of IE9, which only arrived a few weeks ago, saw increased support for web standards. But Microsoft made it clear to us during a phone briefing that Wednesday’s release is all about speed and performance.

To that point, PP7 contains an updated version of the Chakra JavaScript engine. This new engine for IE9 was first introduced at Microsoft’s PDC developer event in November 2009. During the last year, the company has been improving Chakra to the point where it’s now scoring over 300 percent higher on the WebKit SunSpider benchmark than it was at launch.

Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin from the IE team says the new release scores 234.6 ms on SunSpider’s JavaScript execution performance test. Read more about the testing stuff on the IE Blog.

While some browsers are certainly faster than others, the major browser vendors continue to tweak their internal workings and make small improvements to speed. JavaScript performance is particularly important, since modern web applications like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter rely heavily on scripted actions. A faster browser means a snappier web app. Just last week, Mozilla released a new beta of Firefox 4 that included revamped code for its JägerMonkey and TraceMonkey JavaScript engines.

You can download this early version of the next IE browser directly from Microsoft. It’s available for PCs running Windows 7 and Vista. Also, this platform preview can be installed alongside IE9 Beta or IE8 with no problems.

Once you grab it, head over to the company’s demo playground and put the new browser through the paces. Be sure to report your results in the comments.

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File Under: Events, Web Basics
Nov
12
2010

20 Years Ago, The Web’s Founders Ask for Funding

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Robert Cailliau's original logo

Ever wonder who the first web developers were?

Twenty years ago today, when Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” was at the top of the charts, two engineers at CERN’s data handling division wrote the proposal to fund the research project that would give birth to the web.

The proposal, submitted by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau on November 12, 1990, laid out what they wanted to build and the resources they’d require. The team wanted to start by building a browser and a server. They estimated development would take six months, and that it would require “four software engineers and a programmer.” There are also some serious hardware requirements totaling tens of thousands of dollars (or is it Swiss francs?), but about a third of the requested funding was dedicated to software user licenses.

Here’s the overview:

The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project. HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.

The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user’s workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material.

Phase one should take 3 months with the full manpower complement, phase two a further 3 months, but this phase is more open-ended, and a review of needs and wishes will be incorporated into it.

The manpower required is 4 software engineers and a programmer, (one of which could be a Fellow). Each person works on a specific part (eg. specific platform support).

Each person will require a state-of-the-art workstation , but there must be one of each of the supported types. These will cost from 10 to 20k each, totaling 50k. In addition, we would like to use commercially available software as much as possible, and foresee an expense of 30k during development for one-user licences [sic], visits to existing installations and consultancy.

We will assume that the project can rely on some computing support at no cost: development file space on existing development systems, installation and system manager support for daemon software.

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File Under: Browsers
Nov
10
2010

New Beta Release Gives Firefox a Shot of Jäger

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A new beta version of the next Firefox browser has arrived.

Mozilla released Firefox 4 Beta 7 on Wednesday. Unlike the last couple beta releases which mostly just tidied things up, this release is a substantial step forward. Most notably, it includes a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey that give the browser a performance boost on script-heavy sites.

It has better support for web graphics and fonts, and it has been deemed complete enough for add-on developers to begin porting over their creations from older versions of Firefox.

If you’re a beta tester already, you’ll see an automatic update today or Thursday. If you’d like to download beta 7 for Windows, Mac or Linux, you can do so from Mozilla’s beta site.

Wednesday’s release comes on the heels of the recent announcement that Firefox 4 won’t be ready until early 2011. Mozilla’s release dates have always been somewhat loose, but the last update was over a month and a half ago, and we were originally expecting the browser to arrive some time between October or January. Now, it looks like Firefox 4′s release date could stretch out as far as the second quarter of next year. It’s a blow to fans of the open source browser, especially since Firefox is seeing increased competition from Chrome, which shifted to an accelerated release schedule earlier this year, and from Internet Explorer 9, which entered a public beta phase in September.

The silver lining here is that it’s looking like Firefox 4 will be much different than 3.6, the current version, and that the update will be worth the wait. Also, the beta releases have been remarkably stable, and, with very few exceptions, are capable enough for every day use.

For the full list of what’s new, check out the release notes. Here’s what has us the most excited.

The enhancement sure to make the biggest splash is Firefox’s new JägerMonkey just-in-time JavaScript compiler. Complicated, JavaScript-heavy sites like Facebook and web apps like Gmail will be more nimble, and you should see a big speed increase on games and demos that previously only impressed those running Chrome or Safari. JägerMonkey is new code that works in tandem with the same TraceMonkey JavaScript code that powered previous versions of Firefox (love the naming convention, by the way) and you can read more about the change on Mozilla engineer David Mandelin’s blog.

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File Under: Browsers, Social
Nov
7
2010

First Look at RockMelt, a Browser Built For Facebook Freaks

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The rumor mill has been buzzing for months about the imminent arrival of a new “Facebook browser” called RockMelt.

Well, it really does exist, and it’s here. RockMelt is being released as a limited public beta Sunday. Anyone can sign up to test it out, but the release will be throttled so as not to overload the cloud-based components of the app. RockMelt will be doling out download links as quickly as it can manage on a first-come, first-served basis.

The two founders, CEO Eric Vishria and CTO Tim Howes, demonstrated RockMelt to Wired a few days before Sunday’s launch.

It’s based on Chromium, so it inherits Google Chrome’s speed, looks, and basic functionality on both Mac and Windows.

And while its Facebook integration runs deep, RockMelt is not exactly a Facebook browser. It’s a social web browser, allowing you to post links, videos and status updates to both Facebook and Twitter (that’s it for now, but more services will be added later). There are also built-in clients for consuming your Facebook feed and managing multiple Twitter feeds, a chat client, and lightweight RSS reader. It does use your Facebook account to personalize the experience, but its reach is broader than just Facebook.

We’ve seen browsers custom-built for the social web before, most notably Flock, which launched as a MySpaced-up version of Firefox. Mozilla experimented with Ubiquity, an in-browser tool for posting to different social sites and interacting with web services. There are a number of add-ons that can embed social networking dashboards into the browser for you. These tools have grown in popularity as we’ve struggled to manage the ever-increasing flow of links, media and bits shared by our online friends.

So, the idea isn’t original. And RockMelt doesn’t sport a complete re-invention of the browser interface, either. But it is very streamlined, and there are some key elements that people who live and breathe the social web will find intriguing.

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File Under: Browsers
Oct
28
2010

Microsoft Drops a New IE9 Preview, Boosts CSS Support

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Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

We’re still months away from the official release of Internet Explorer 9 — it’s likely due some time during the first half of 2011 — but Microsoft continues to roll new features and additional web standards support into its next-gen browser.

The company put out a sixth pre-release “platform preview” of IE9 Thursday. It includes support for CSS3′s 2D transforms. There are also improvements to hardware acceleration, font rendering, and the browser’s JavaScript engine. You can read about these enhancements in depth on the official IE Blog.

Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 in September. But this new release is not a second beta, it’s the sixth platform preview. A bit confusing, sure. But beta releases are considered to be almost totally stable and are intended for a more general audience. Platform previews are on the bleeding edge, and may contain code that isn’t as thoroughly tested. So, this release is primarily aimed at developers.

IE9 Beta is doing spectacularly well, however — Microsoft says its beta release has been downloaded ten million times since its release six weeks ago. It has also been receiving kudos for its expanded support of web standards like HTML5, CSS 3 and WOFF.

Here’s a video showing off the new stuff in IE9 platform preview 6:

If you watch the video and read the post on the IE Blog, you’ll notice a lot of emphasis on “full hardware acceleration” in IE9, and how other browsers like Chrome and Firefox can’t perform as well as IE9 because they only offer “partial” hardware acceleration. In fact, all browsers have access to the same Windows APIs that enable off-loading work to the PC’s graphics processor when needed to speed up 2D and 3D animation rendering. This has been an issue of some debate over the past two months, with Microsoft and Mozilla going toe-to-toe over the issue.

If you want to test the new IE9 platform preview 6, it’s available for Windows 7 and Vista only. Microsoft also released some new tests at the ietestdrive site — run all your browsers through them.

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