Archive for the ‘Browsers’ Category

File Under: Browsers, JavaScript, Web Apps
Mar
28
2013

Mozilla, Epic Bring Unreal 3 Gaming Engine to the Web

By

Unreal 3 engine in Firefox.
Screenshot: Webmonkey.

Mozilla has partnered with Epic Games to bring the Unreal 3 gaming engine to the web. The result is a high-end gaming engine that could change the way you think of web-based games.

The Unreal 3 engine has previously been ported to Flash, but this is the first time a plugin-free (and therefore mobile-friendly) version has been built for the web.

Mozilla is hoping this project will help turn the web into a more serious gaming platform capable of running top-tier console titles.

Combining WebGL, Emscripten, a tool for compiling C++ apps into JavaScript, and the brand new asm.js, Unreal 3 for the web can, according to Mozilla, “rival native performance.”

While the Unreal 3 port is incredibly cool, there are still some stumbling blocks on the path to the web as a top-tier gaming platform, not the least of which is that load times for most games would be massive. Think hours, not minutes, to stream the complex graphics from a server to your mobile device — probably not something anyone particularly wants to sit through.

In other words, while Mozilla and Epic have made some impressive progress bringing Unreal 3 to JavaScript, it’s still going to be a while before you’re playing your favorite console games on the web.

However, Mozilla says it is “working with premium game publishers such as Disney, EA and ZeptoLab who are using the same technology to bring performance optimizations to their top-rated games.” The company is also hoping other browsers will make it possible to run the Unreal engine in their own JavaScript engines. The Chromium project is already discussing just how to do it.

For more on the project and to catch a glimpse of Unreal 3 running in the browser, check out the video below.

File Under: Browsers
Mar
27
2013

Latest Chrome Tries to Rid the Web of Misspellings

By

Google has updated the stable release of its Chrome web browser, adding a much-improved native spell check and word suggestion features.

The new versions are live for Windows, Linux and Chrome OS. Google says it is “still working on Mac support” (Chrome for Mac has been updated to v26, but it does not yet contain the new spell checker).

To use the new spell checking feature, turn on the new “Ask Google for suggestions” option which you’ll see when you right click any highlighted misspelling. The new spell check also does some grammar checking and recognizes proper nouns (especially people’s names, handy for composing email) and homonyms.

Chrome 26 also sports a new personal dictionary. If the spell-checker keeps underlining a word you want it to ignore, just right-click the word and select “Add to dictionary.” If you’re signed in and syncing your data through your Google account your dictionary additions will go with you.

Tags:
File Under: Browsers, search, Web Basics
Mar
25
2013

Google Discontinues Site-Blocking Service

By

Image: THOR/Flickr

The hits just keep getting killed off. Google is shutting down yet another service — the company’s domain blocking tool, which allowed logged-in users to block unwanted domains from Google’s search results.

Google’s site-blocking tool was originally aimed at “content farm spam,” but Google hasn’t done much with it of late, and it even stopped working for a while, despite being available via a link from your profile.

Now the service is officially gone, replaced by a Chrome add-on that does nearly the same thing. Unfortunately that means the ability to ban sites from Google’s search results is now limited to those using Google’s Chrome web browser. For more on the Chrome add-on see our earlier review.

The bad news about the Chrome extension is that it’s client-side filtering, not server-side. That means that if Google returns results from domains you’ve blocked those results are simply hidden (sometimes there’s even a brief flash of the blocked results).

That means you’ll end up with fewer search results than you would with the server-side solution, which filtered out your blocked domains before the results were sent. For example, if there are ten results on the first page and three are from domains you’ve blocked, using the add-on method you’ll only see seven results, whereas the server-side method would have fetched the next three results to show a total of ten.

If you used the account-based version of the blocking tool, you can head over to your account and grab the list of sites you had blocked. Just add those sites to the Chrome extension and you’ll be back up and running in no time, with not an Experts-Exchange, Quora or W3Schools link to be seen (or whatever you consider search results spam).

Home Page Photo: Carlos Luna / Flickr

Tags: , ,
File Under: Browsers, privacy
Mar
21
2013

New Adblock Plus Doesn’t Need No Stinking Google Play Store

By

It may have been kicked out of the Google Play Store, but you can still get your Adblock Plus for Android.

In fact, even if you already have Adblock Plus installed on your Android phone you should install this latest release direct from the source since the older, Play Store-based versions will no longer be receiving updates.

To install Adblock Plus manually you’ll need to make sure that you’ve enabled your phone to install software from “unknown sources” (you can enable this in Settings under either Applications or Security, depending on which version of Android you have). Then just head over to the Adblock Plus site and hit the download link.

A number of people in the comments on the Adblock Plus site have reported installation problems with various Android phones, but I had no issues installing Adblock Plus on a Galaxy Nexus using the latest beta of Opera Mobile.

Among the notable changes in this release are the automatic updates — which no longer require the Google Play version — a new user interface theme and a fix for a bug that would sometimes cause blank pages in Chrome for Android. For the full details on everything that’s new, be sure to check out the release notes.

Tags:
File Under: Browsers
Mar
19
2013

Mozilla Shows Off Powerful New Developer Tools for Firefox

By

A mockup of what it might look like to author your pages right inside Firefox. Image: Paul Rouget.

You asked for them and now Mozilla’s Firefox developer tools team is hard at work building a slew of new tools for web developers.

A few weeks back Mozilla’s Paul Rouget asked developers what they’d like to see in future versions of Firefox’s developer tools. The resulting thread on Hacker News is quite extensive and full of some great ideas that Rouget and others have been hacking on ever since.

The result is a bunch of new tools that are mostly still at the experimental mock-up stage, though a couple are available now in the Nightly Channel if you’d like to try them out.

The most popular request, and by far the coolest of the bunch, is the ability to do live edits in the text editor of your choice — effectively controlling Firefox with your editor. The video below shows an example of live editing via the popular Sublime Edit. This would essentially eliminate the need to jump from your editor to the browser, hit refresh, jump back to your editor, and so on. A dance that most of us are all too familiar with. Perhaps the best part, Rouget says this will work with the mobile version of Firefox as well.

Mozilla is also working on the opposite idea — authoring in the browser. That means putting an editor inside Firefox’s Dev Tools suite. Thus far this idea is less fleshed out, but the possibilities include putting in something like jsFiddle or perhaps a more traditional file-based editor.

Other new tools include some catch up features that bring Firefox’s Dev tools up to speed with what you’ll find in WebKit browsers. Examples include a new network panel prototype and the ability to doc the tools to the right side of the screen — great for wide monitors (this is already available in Nightly). There’s also a new “repaint” view that shows what gets repainted on the page, very useful if you’re trying to improve performance. Rouget has also been working on a new, dark theme for the Firefox dev tools.

Rouget recently added a font inspector panel (available in the Nightly Builds) that makes it easy to see which fonts a page is using, including details like whether or not the font file is local or served through a service like Typekit, as well as the actual @font-face code used.

In what appears to be an unrelated effort, Mozilla developer Dave Townsend has been hacking on Firefox’s Tilt View Tool. Tilt View offers a 3D look at a page that can be very helpful for visualizing the structure of your code and spotting bugs you might otherwise miss. Townsend has come up with a number of ways to extend Tilt, including showing only links and only elements that change on hover.

Townsend even suggests that in the future you might be able to pair Tilt with your site analytics to see which links are most frequently clicked. Unfortunately you’ll have to wait a while before these features are actually available in Firefox; Townsend’s hacks rely on some core Firefox features that aren’t ready for prime time just yet.

While many of these coming features are, as yet, only prototypes, things are clearly looking up for Firefox’s dev tools. For more details on everything that’s new, be sure to check out Rouget’s post, as well as the related Hacker News thread that Rouget has been posting to with some follow up info.

Tags:
« OLDER POSTS