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Dreamweaver CS5 First Look: More WordPressy, More Firebuggy

Michael Calore — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:28:53 +0000

There’s a new version of Adobe Dreamweaver on the way, and it includes new features for building sites with WordPress, new CSS enhancements and a new set of tools that let you see code changes in real time as you work, much like the popular Firebug add-on.

Adobe announced details about its latest Creative Suite bundle of applications on Monday morning. Creative Suite 5 is Adobe’s new package of apps for building websites, assembling videos and editing photos. We have a first look at Flash CS5 here on Webmonkey, and we have a first look at the new Photoshop on Wired.com’s Gadget Lab.

Dreamweaver, which has been one of the most popular apps for developing websites since its debut (as a Macromedia creation) in 1998, gets a fairly substantial update in Creative Suite 5. It doesn’t have the whiz-bang new features found in Photoshop CS5, but if Dreamweaver is part of your development workflow, you’ll definitely find much to appreciate in the new Dreamweaver CS5 that makes it worth an upgrade.

Of course, whether or not to use a WYSIWYG editor like Dreamweaver is a debate in itself. Most can get by with a text editor, a few browsers and a short stack of reference materials. But if you’re working with a team of developers, or if you’re building more complicated sites with dynamic elements, databases and hundreds of pages, tools like Dreamweaver are essential. They speed up the workflow, keep everything organized and ease the pain of constant testing and iteration.

So, if Dreamweaver has a place in your life, here’s a rundown of what’s new in the latest version.

One of the biggest improvements in the new Dreamweaver is the inclusion of better development tools for dynamic sites built using PHP-based content management systems like WordPress and Drupal. These systems, which of course are super-popular for blogs and community sites, don’t spit out static HTML files. Rather, most of the pages on a WordPress blog or a Drupal site are generated on the fly using templates and include files. Dreamweaver CS5 now gives you tools to design templates and see what your layout will look like in your final design. The built-in WebKit engine renders your page as it would render in WordPress (or whatever PHP-based system you’re using).

New CMS tools let you edit template files and see your changes right away (click for larger image).

PHP support has been improved in other places within Dreamweaver, too, with new code hints for WordPress, Drupal and Joomla, plus support for custom functions and classes, so you can create your own code hints and error highlights for other PHP frameworks.

Added support for WordPress and other like-minded CMS tools is a big improvement, and one that’s necessary since so much of web publishing has moved to PHP-based systems. Fans of WordPress or Drupal should find reason to test out the latest Dreamweaver and see if it takes some of the pain out of designing templates.

The new inspection tools in Dreamweaver CS5 let you make adjustments to the CSS or the DOM of whatever page you’re working on and see them rendered in real time. The inspector shows you how your code will change as you interact with dynamic elements on a page, and it will show you how various changes you make to stylesheets show up on the rendered page.

Dreamweaver's inspection tools let you edit your CSS and JavaScript and see your changes in real time.

As with several of the features in Dreamweaver, this is something that you can do with the free browser-based plug-in of your choice. In particular, the inspection features offer an experience similar to the Firebug add-on and its various extensions, but here it’s baked right into the development environment. The primary advantage of having these tools sit directly inside your editing environment is one of convenience. Once you make the changes, there’s no copying, pasting, testing and redeploying. Most Dreamweaver users have found a happy medium between browser-based and IDE-based inspection and testing tools.

Speaking of testing, Dreamweaver fully integrates Adobe’s BrowserLab web service, which lets you examine your layouts as they appear in different browsers. So you can look at your page in a 2-up dialog, with Firefox on one side and IE8 on the other (or any two browsers). There’s also a cool “onion skin” feature that overlays your differently rendered pages on top of one another, so you can clearly spot any layout inconsistencies, color differences or interactive elements that don’t work.

BrowserLab is a free service available to anyone right now, and it very well may remain free for its entire lifetime. But the fine print on the site warns that Adobe could make it a paid service at any time. So, fair warning. UPDATE: Adobe’s site says “Notice: On April 30 2010, the limited free preview of Adobe BrowserLab will conclude. [...] If you sign up by April 30, 2010, you will receive one year of complimentary access to all CS Live services.” [Thanks, Scott!]

When it comes time to deploy files, Dreamweaver CS5 has vastly improved Subversion support. There was some support for Subversion in CS4, but it was pretty limited. Now, you can make all your changes, moves and deletions locally, then sync to your server. The svn:ignore command works now, too. Also, the the Extensions Manager (which has been a vital part of Dreamweaver since the Macromedia days) now handles the Subversion libraries, so if there are any updates, you’ll be able to download them for free from Adobe Exchange.

Finally, something helpful for the new users: the addition of some new CSS starter layouts. These are basic CSS files that help you kick-start a site design using the latest web standards, including totally bare-bones layouts and more complicated things like dropdown menus. So if (like a lot of people starting out) you understand CSS but you don’t feel confident writing it all yourself, Dreamweaver’s templates will provide a boost — and hopefully keep you from taking the easy route and doing your whole site in tables. There, of course, similar templates available on the web, but they vary in quality and in compatibility across browsers.

The new Dreamweaver will ship soon, (Adobe says mid-May), along with the rest of Creative Suite 5. Dreamweaver on its own costs $400, or $200 for an upgrade from any previous version going back to Dreamweaver 8. You can also get Dreamweaver in one of the Adobe Creative Suite 5 bundles, which vary in cost from $1,800 to $2,600 depending on which one you buy. Upgrades vary between $500 and $1,400 for the suite. Also, we should note that Adobe has done away with the Web Standard edition of Creative Suite, so now the Web Premium edition is the cheapest CS5 bundle you can buy that includes Dreamweaver.

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Flash CS5 First Look: Adobe Drops a Hefty Update Into Stormy Waters

Michael Calore — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:27:55 +0000

Adobe has released details about the latest version its Flash authoring tool, which arrives amid great uncertainty concerning the multimedia platform’s future.

Flash Professional CS5 boasts a number of improvements over previous versions, including better animation physics, improved typography controls, new code hints and snippets for building webapps in ActionScript, some new data formats, and better ability to add cue points to videos. It also has a few tricks for developers eager to publish apps to places where Flash isn’t allowed.

Flash is part of Creative Suite 5, Adobe’s new package of apps for building websites, assembling videos and editing photos. The new suite of apps, which Adobe says will ship mid-May, was announced Monday. We have a first look at Dreamweaver CS5 on Webmonkey, and we have a first look at the new Photoshop on Wired.com’s Gadget Lab.

Adobe Flash has taken a beating lately, especially from the hurricane that Apple’s public relations team generated around the launch of the iPad. Apple’s mobile devices don’t support Flash Player, so Apple is encouraging web developers to make their sites “iPad-ready” by removing Flash elements.

Also, last week, the new iPhone OS was announced, and it includes a new rule banning applications built with cross-compilers. Flash CS5 will ship with such a cross-compiler, Adobe’s Packager for iPhone, which lets developers build apps in Adobe’s suite of tools that can be exported with the click of a button and wrapped up as Apple-native code. Well, those apps won’t run on iPhones and iPads once the devices get their software updates this summer and fall, respectively. (There’s also a note on Adobe’s website Monday noting the use of Packager for iPhone is “Subject to Apple’s current requirements and approval.”)

Even with this cloud of negativity hovering overhead, Flash has plenty of steam left. The biggest factor in Flash’s success — video playback — is still a killer app on the web. The latest version of Flash Player (version 10.1, which came out earlier this year) addressed many of the performance and consistency issues that have been dogging Flash for the last year. And Flash will continue to be a key to video experiences in browsers, at least until the mess that open video is stuck in right now gets cleared up.

Even so, Adobe is smart enough to see that HTML5 is going to be a big part of the web’s future, which is why the company has built tools into Creative Suite 5 for rendering Flash elements as HTML5-ready Canvas animations, as seen in this video. As developer and blogger Simon Willison notes, this feature could be very useful for displaying newspaper infographics and other “Flashy” data visualizations on iPads and iPhones.

The HTML5 debate aside, here’s a rundown of what else is new in Flash Professional CS5.

Video cue points

If you’re building content around a Flash-embedded video file, you’ll be keen on one of the new enhancements in CS5: the ability to use cue points in the videos’ timelines to trigger ActionScript events.

You'll find code snippets and new code hints in Flash CS5's ActionScript editor. (Click for larger.)

Building ActionScript apps

There are also new tools for building ActionScript apps. The most powerful tool is Adobe Flash Builder, which is fully integrated with Flash CS5 (It used to be called Adobe Flex Builder, and it’s been in an open demo program since early 2009).

Flash Builder is an Eclipse-based IDE for building web apps with Flex, Adobe’s open source web framework. You can use Flash Builder to create apps that interface with local databases or the APIs of various web services. You can also set up Flash Builder to be your default code editor for ActionScript.

ActionScript editor

If you’re a whiz at ActionScript, you’ll appreciate the new ActionScript editor in the new Flash Pro. You get new custom class-code hinting and code-completion features. There’s also a library of ActionScript snippets for new coders — so many, in fact, that you don’t really need to know that much about ActionScript to build simple animations.

Natural animations

Animations will be more natural overall since Adobe has updated its physics engine in Flash CS5. The last version saw the inclusion of a new inverse-kinematics engine, and it’s been enhanced in CS5 to produce animations that are more lifelike and realistic.

Flash CS5's text-handling capabilities have been improved. (Click for larger.)

Text handling

There are new text handling tools, too, including Adobe’s Text Layout Framework. This framework has been built into multiple products, including Flash Player 10.x and the other CS5 production tools. So, when a designer hands you a file with text laid out in InDesign or Illustrator, that text will be better preserved once you start playing around in Flash.

Flash Catalyst

Shipping along with Flash Pro in most of the Creative Suite 5 packages is Flash Catalyst, another product that began life as a free beta in Adobe Labs. Flash Catalyst lets you take a static design created in Photoshop or Illustrator and make a functioning Flash web app out of it.

You select the different things like scrollbars or menu elements, and apply ActionScript actions to them. Catalyst basically brings a static illustration to life as you define how the parts move and how they interact with one another. When you’re done, you can export it to Flash Builder, where you can tie the interface to a database or to web APIs. There’s more info about it on Adobe Labs, including a video.

Outside the box

One more cool thing Adobe has done in CS5 is they’ve solved Flash’s hermetically-sealed–box problem. When you export your Flash project, you can just spit out a single, binary FLA, or you can choose to export as an XFL package. It’s a new XML-based format developed for Adobe Flash.

The XFL option produces an uncompressed package where your various elements — video, objects, scripts — are all left separate. You can edit individual elements of your project (or pass them off to other team members for editing) without having to repackage everything any time a change is made.

We’re not going to spend too much space here encouraging anyone to ditch Flash in favor of open web technologies. There is plenty that HTML5 can do when it comes to building apps, animations and playback experiences, and the smart developers out there are already using emerging standards to do those things (with and without Adobe’s tools). For everything else, Flash will continue to fill in the gaps. Love it or hate it, Flash has its place on the web, and for those of you using it, Flash Professional CS5 should serve as a welcome upgrade to your workflows.

Flash Professional on its own costs $700, or $200 for an upgrade from any previous version going back to Macromedia Flash 8. Flash Catalyst CS5 costs $400, and Flash Builder costs $250. So, if you’re interested in getting all of the Flash tools, you should also look into one of the CS5 packages, which come with other flagship apps like Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

The Adobe Creative Suite 5 bundles containing the Flash tools vary in cost from $1,800 to $2,600 depending on which one you buy. Upgrades vary between $500 and $1,400 for the suite. Also, we should note that Adobe has done away with the Web Standard edition of Creative Suite, so now the Production Premium edition ($1,700) is the cheapest CS5 bundle you can buy that includes the Flash apps. For that price, you also get Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere Pro, Bridge and several other apps.

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Kickball Plots Foursquare Domination With Better Maps

Michael Calore — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 19:12:10 +0000

The Kickball slogan.

A new iPhone app makes messing around on Foursquare a more-visual experience than ever before.

The app is called Kickball, and it more tightly incorporates maps into the Foursquare experience. It has many of the same features as the official Foursquare app, like check-ins, history, badges, tips and shouts, and the list view that shows all your friends’ statuses.

But Kickball (App Store link) ups the ante by letting you plot all of the current Foursquare activity within your network on a map. You can see where your friends are, zooming in and panning around to different neighborhoods. Also, at any time, you can pop up a map that shows you the 15 venues in the Foursquare system that are closest to your current location. Kickball uses Mixer Labs’ GeoAPI, which is now owned by Twitter, for location data.

This discovery feature is especially handy if you’re in a city or a neighborhood you don’t know that well. Even in a place I know all too well (the Wired office), I was able to see all the places within about 100 yards where I can go fight for mayorships. Oh, it’s ON.

While you’re browsing one of these maps, and you zoom in on a friend or on a venue, you get a button that says, “I’m here too,” making it easy to check in with one click. Equally as accessible within the app is the “Off the grid” choice. There’s also the ability to view details about a place, view relevant tweets and add photos (something else missing from Foursquare).

I’ve been using both Kickball and Foursquare’s official iPhone apps side by side for a couple of days, and the map experience in Kickball is far better than the map experience in Foursquare. The user interface in Kickball is also a little less chaotic than Foursquare. Both have their ups and downs, but if you’ve been wanting a stronger, more elegant integration of maps, Kickball is your answer.

Just a few days ago, Foursquare and Microsoft announced that Bing’s mapping service will begin to pull in Foursquare data, allowing a Bing user to be able to perform many of the same Kickball-style searches and discovery tasks on its maps site. But Kickball is more convenient, since you get what’s more relevant to you directly inside the app — and without the Silverlight.

There are big plans for the future, according to the development team, Portland, Oregon’s Gorlochs. Kickball will soon integrate Gowalla and Brightkite and make the Twitter integration tighter. But for now, it’s all about Foursquare, and it’s iPhone only.

The iPhone app is free and available now in the App Store. The “for a limited time” tag on the free price point is a hint that Kickball may be a paid app soon.

Kickball was released this week to coincide with the all-things-location Where 2.0 conference, which kicks off in San Jose, California, on Tuesday and runs through Thursday.

See Also:

Hands On With Google Buzz – It’s a Stream in Your Inbox

Michael Calore — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 01:01:10 +0000

Tuesday saw the debut of Google Buzz, a new service for sharing status updates, links and media with your friends. It’s currently being rolled out to the public slowly — you can sign up at buzz.google.com — but we’ve had access to Buzz since shortly after it launched, and I’ve had a chance to play around with it.

Buzz integrates directly with your Gmail inbox, so updates and comments appear along side your e-mails. It bears a strong resemblance to other sharing platforms like FriendFeed or Twitter and Facebook’s News Feed — imagine all of those magically inserted into your Gmail inbox and you get the picture.

It has all the makings of a powerful, real-time social platform that’s ready to compete with, or compliment, those established players.

But for now, Buzz is a bit of a mystery. Only a handful of people are actually using it, so the sharing features don’t really feel that social. It’s as if you’re broadcasting into an empty void. In that regard, my first day with Buzz reminds me of my first few days with Google Wave, or my first few days with FriendFeed. That feeling of being in a big empty room will change once Buzz opens up and more of my friends join, just as it did for those other services.

There’s another more serious limitation: What happens in Buzz stays in Buzz. You can’t use it to post to your favorite social networks. You can add feeds from Twitter, Flickr, Google Reader and any other social site (except for Facebook, notably), and all that stuff gets aggregated into a single feed on Buzz where your friends can leave comments. But when you post a status update or share any sort of link or media on Buzz, you don’t have the option to CC Twitter or FriendFeed.

Google noted during Tuesday’s launch event that it does plan on adding the ability to post out to Twitter and other services soon. And, since all public posts in Buzz are available as an XML feed, you could hack together a way to post to Twitter if you know what you’re doing. But for now, for most every user, Google Buzz remains a one-way street.

Once those two things change — the volume problem and the cross-posting problem — Buzz will be a serious player on the social web. Right now, it’s worth playing with and getting used to, because once it gains momentum, it’s going to become part of our daily lives. It’s that easy to use, and that powerful.

Here’s how it works

Once you’re given access, you’ll see Buzz appear in your Gmail sidebar just below your Inbox. Click it and you’ll see something familiar: a white box inviting you to post a status update.

When you first arrive in Buzz, it’s automatically set up to follow the few dozen people in your Google Contacts list that you correspond with the most. It’s a rather genius bit of engineering — Buzz taps into your Gmail network so you don’t need to go through that process of importing contacts or “finding friends,” one of the most painful experiences on the social web.

Each post to Buzz can be public (for the whole web to see) or private (you select which friends see it). The default is public, but you can also address posts directly to a friend using a variation on Twitter’s @ reply syntax, like this: @joe@gmail.com.

Send one of those updates and it shows up in your stream and in his stream, and anyone following either one of you will see it. But the note will also show up in his Gmail inbox, so you can make sure he sees it.

You can type text of course, but if you put in a link, Buzz will go gather photos or videos that live behind that link and give you the option of adding them to your update. Photos show up in a nice little gallery of thumbnails. Videos get embedded and can be played inline.

Above that white box, you can see the number of services Buzz is aggregating for you. Click on that number and you can add or subtract services to control what shows up in your feed.

Also above that white box is the number of people you’re following. Click on that number and you can add or subtract followers. This will control whose updates show up in your feed.

All of your activities, comments and all those of your friends will show up here. Everything appears in real-time and the updates are very fast. If you or one of your friends posts something boring that doesn’t have any comments or media associated with it, Buzz will eventually collapse it. So long, clutter.

People can like, comment and e-mail anything that shows up in their feed, whether it was posted by you or them or whoever.

If you want to see your public feed of everything you’re sharing, check out your Google Profile (you know you have one, right?).

There’s a new Buzz tab that displays all your public posts. Google Profiles and Buzz are intricately tied together.

Posts can be geotagged, and the location-aware features really comes to life when you post from a mobile with GPS inside. There’s a mobile webapp optimized for Android and iPhone browsers — surf to m.google.com/app/buzz

Buzz will figure out where you are using the mobile browser’s geolocation abilities through HTML5. The interface for picking your location is elegant.

Buzz will then show you recent posts around your current location. It can also plot nearby Buzz posts on a layer in Google Maps.

Clearly, Buzz mimics the functionality of Facebook’s News Feed — minus all the Farmville, Mafia Wars and Superpoke notifications. It draws upon a common vernacular for sharing and commenting that Facebook helped establish.

So, is it a replacement for Facebook, or a compliment to Facebook? In a way, Google’s rapidly-expanding social stack — Buzz, Gmail, Contacts, Chat, Profiles, Picasa and YouTube — could be seen as a clone of Facebook that operates on the open web. If anything, it’s a version of Facebook for people who never got into Facebook, or chose not to participate because of its closed nature.

No matter how it ends up impacting Facebook, Buzz will go down in history as a transformative step in Google’s timeline. It brings a whole new utility to what is already our most critical social tool — the e-mail inbox.

See also:

Firefox Has Been Hitting the Gym — Version 3.6 Is Faster, More Capable

Scott Gilbertson — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 10:16:33 +0000

Mozilla has unleashed Firefox 3.6, the next version of the popular open source web browser.

The new and improved Firefox 3.6 is now available as a free download for Windows, Mac and Linux.

There isn’t much new to look at on the surface, but we’d strongly recommend you upgrade to Firefox 3.6, based on the work that’s been done to improve the browser’s speed and support for the latest web technologies.

Thursday’s release brings significant performance boosts and a number of new features like support for custom skins, full-screen support for native web video and much-improved font support for developers looking to use new fonts on their sites.

It arrives only six months after the previous version, Firefox 3.5. The shorter-than-usual wait between versions means that Firefox 3.6 doesn’t have quite as many new standout features as 3.5 brought to the browser when it debuted. But we don’t want to give the impression that Firefox 3.6 is only an incremental performance upgrade from the previous version.

A Nimbler Fox

The fact is that there’s quite a bit of new technology under the hood. Users who spend the bulk of their day in JavaScript-heavy web apps — which these days is most of us — will notice faster page loads thanks to improvements to the browser’s rendering engine. Much of the added speed is due to enhancements to TraceMonkey, Mozilla’s JavaScript-rendering engine.

Not only does the tweaked TraceMonkey speed up webpage rendering, it’s now available to speed up Firefox UI elements written in JavaScript. That change means the Firefox interface is snappier, and — when combined with the new version of Gecko, Firefox’s core rendering engine — there’s a noticeable improvement in Firefox 3.6′s overall performance.

In our testing of pre-release versions (the last of which were nearly identical to the final code), JavaScript-heavy sites like FriendFeed, Facebook and Gmail loaded faster, and the browser’s initial startup time was much better than with Firefox 3.5 — especially if you’re reopening a large number of tabs.

Also new under the hood is the new about:support page which offers a simple place to look up all the pertinent information about the current Firefox installation, including a list of installed extensions, any user-modified preference settings, links to installed plug-ins, and other configuration details.

Fullscreen HTML5 Video

Firefox 3.6 now supports fullscreen video playback through native HTML5 video embeds. Just right-click a video embedded using the HTML5 video tag and you’ll see a new menu item for full-screen playback.

Currently video on the web is generally embedded using proprietary technologies like Adobe’s Flash Player or Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin.

Native HTML5 video will give users a way to watch movies online without the need of third-party plug-ins.

Firefox previously supported HTML5 native video but lacked the ability to play those videos in full-screen mode, an oversight that Firefox 3.6 corrects, putting open source video on largely equal footing with proprietary technologies like Flash or Silverlight.

Curiously, Firefox 3.6′s release comes only a day after YouTube announced it would begin supporting playback of embedded videos with HTML5, albeit using the h.264 codec which Firefox does not support, as it’s proprietary. Mozilla prefers the open source Ogg Theora video format instead.

More Web-Standards Support

Web developers and open-web proponents alike will be happy to hear that quite a few new features in CSS 3 have made their way into Firefox 3.6. Firefox now supports the background-size property as well as some cool tricks for handling background images with CSS. Designers can specify the size of background images on web pages, stretching them by dictating what percentage of the browser window’s width they take up.

There are also some new methods for applying gradients to page backgrounds, enabling designers to create more interesting, colorful backgrounds without using images at all, just by defining a few colors in their HTML.

Firefox 3.6 also supports the Web Open Font Format (WOFF), which allows developers to use server-side fonts to build better typography into their designs.

Personas

Firefox 3.6 brings built-in support for lightweight themes, which Mozilla calls Personas. Personas have been around for a while (you can even sync them across multiple browsers if you’re running Weave, Mozilla’s syncing tool), but installing Personas previously required a separate extension to manage them.

Now Personas can be installed right out of the box, allowing you to tweak and theme Firefox as you’d like. Although Personas don’t offer quite the options of full-fledged themes, they’re much easier to create and install. If you’d like to try out some custom themes, head over to the Personas site.

Improved Tab-Switching Previews

Also new on the tab front are the long-awaited preview thumbnails in Firefox’s built-in tab switcher, which have finally arrived, sort of. The tab previews have been in the works for quite some time, and — sadly — enabling the previews will still require a trip to about:config (set browser.ctrlTab.previews to true).

Unfortunately for Windows 7 users, much of the Windows 7 integration — like Aero tab previews and jump lists — did not make the final release. Not officially, anyway.

According to Mozilla Director of Firefox Mike Beltzner, support for Windows 7′s Aero Peek tab previews — the page and tab previews available in the Windows 7 task bar — can be enabled in the about:config page. But the feature wasn’t quite ready to be switched on by default.

If you’d like to turn it on now, just be aware that sometimes the previews don’t render properly. Look for this one to be officially turned on by an incremental update in the near future.

Security Enhancements

Firefox 3.6 includes the ability to check for out -of-date plug-ins and will point you to the offending plug-in’s website to download the latest version.

The primary target here is the Flash plug-in, which previously had no update mechanism in Firefox and could leave Firefox users vulnerable to attack even if the browser itself was up-to-date.

Mozilla has also changed the way third-party add-ons integrate with Firefox. The Firefox components directory is now off-limits to third-party tools like Firefox add-ons. The move is mainly designed to make Firefox more stable by preventing add-ons from accessing lower-level tools that could cause crashes.

According to Mozilla, there are no features to be gained from accessing the components directory, so your favorite add-ons should not be adversely affected by the change.

Why the Long Wait?

Although the turnaround time for Firefox 3.6 was faster than its predecessor, Mozilla was still plagued by delays, and it released an unprecedented five beta versions to testers before Thursday’s final release.

However, while there were more betas than previous releases, according to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s Director of Firefox, the overall development time was actually shorter.

“We did something very different with betas this time around, and this has been one of the shortest beta periods in terms of calendar time that a Firefox release has ever had,” Beltzner tells Webmonkey.

“Once people have agreed to test a beta, it’s our responsibility to give them updates as quickly as possible. Instead of spending three to four weeks making changes and releasing a beta, for Firefox 3.6 we decided to create a beta version that would be updated every one or two weeks with the latest changes.”

He says that cranking out more betas at a faster pace made development smoother and allowed for more feedback from Mozilla’s community of over 600,000 beta testers.

Conclusion

Firefox 3.6 is not the radical overhaul that Firefox 3.5 offered, but the latest version is a worthy upgrade nonetheless. The welcome speed improvements combined with the UI changes and expanded HTML5 support make Firefox 3.6 a must-have upgrade.

We’re already looking forward to the next version of Firefox, tentatively listed as Firefox 3.7, which, with any luck will bring isolated tabs for application crashes (a la Google Chrome), integration of the Ubiquity add-on into the Awesome bar and of course, even more enhancements for HTML 5.

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Latest Opera Update Hopes to ‘Unite’ the Web

Scott Gilbertson — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 13:36:06 +0000

Opera software has released an update to its flagship desktop web browser. This update incorporates Opera’s lightweight web server Unite, previously only available as a separate beta download, into the browser.

Opera 10.10 is an incremental update to Opera 10, released in September. If you’d like to take the new browser for a spin, head on over the to official site and download it. Opera 10.10 is a free download for all major platforms.

The only new notable feature in this release is Opera Unite, which is essentially a webserver built in to the web browser. Opera Unite allows users to build and host not only web sites, but also custom web apps powered by JavaScript. Apps running on Unite could be used to power private social networks like mini-Facebooks or mini-Flickrs, as well as collaborative tools like Google Wave or even file-sharing darknets.

With Unite, Opera is making it possible for anyone to host their own server with the click of a button. Once Unite is up and running, anyone can connect to it from any browser. While your copy of Opera runs the server, your visitors can use any browser they’d like.

Opera Unite is probably the easiest way to self-host a web site that we’ve seen. However, it’s not without some significant drawbacks — namely the issues of bandwidth and uptime, which we covered in detail in our initial review of Opera Unite.

While upload speeds from most ISPs are reasonable, don’t expect your Opera Unite pages to perform like a server sitting at the end of fiber optic cable. Then there’s the uptime problem… put your laptop to sleep and your locally-hosted website disappears from the web.

Still, for casual purposes, like hosting some photos for friends and family or sharing some files, Opera Unite works admirably well.

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Faster, Sleeker Opera 10 Is Built for Better Web Apps

Scott Gilbertson — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 08:28:28 +0000

Opera 10 Beta 1 on the desktop. Click the image for a larger view.

Opera has released the first beta version of its upcoming Opera 10 web browser. The latest test release gives Opera fans a taste of what’s coming in the final release later this year, namely a faster, slicker browser with a whole new look and feel.

Opera 10, available for download now, is chock-full of new features, but the most noticeable change is the slick new interface designed by the renowned Jon Hicks, who joined the Opera team in 2008. Mac users especially will notice the difference in the new look which is now much more “Mac-like.”

Under the chrome, much of Opera 10′s focus is on speed. Already no slouch when it comes to page rendering, an overhaul in the JavaScript engine means that intensive web apps like Gmail or Facebook load and respond considerably faster in Opera 10. In fact Opera, claims that the new beta has a 40 percent speed gain over its predecessors.

Like the coming Firefox 3.5 and the latest versions of Safari, Chrome and IE, Opera is a browser built for empowering web applications. As more of our daily tasks move into the web browser, developers are beefing up the rendering and scripting engines inside the latest browser releases to handle the sometimes heavy loads of web apps with more grace and raw speed. Another key component to making web apps feel closer to their desktop counterparts in the browser is support for emerging standards like HTML 5, which Opera has long supported.

Along with the faster engine and the new look and feel come a few new features and some welcome refinements to the features that have long set Opera apart from the pack.

The most noticeable new feature is what Opera calls “visual tabs.” Visual tabs refers to the expandable bar just below your tabs. Either pull down the tab bar or double-click the handle to reveal thumbnails of all your open tabs (see screenshot above). It’s a quick way to get to a specific tab, but it would be much nicer if the new feature had a keyboard shortcut or a tab switcher — as it stands in beta 1, the new visual tabs feature is not integrated with the control-tab tab switcher.

Opera’s speed dial, the feature which shows your ~~most-visited~~ favorite websites in thumbnails [thanks for the correction, Meek!], and which has proved popular enough that every major browser has since copied it, also gets some new features in Opera 10. It’s now possible to customize your speed-dial page, for example, those with large monitors can increase the number of thumbnails displayed by default.

As far as support for the emerging HTML 5 specification, Opera was the first browser to the party and remains one of the web’s primary proponents of the newest web-app technology. So, there isn’t much new to report on that front in Opera 10, but it’s worthy to note the beta does include support for the controversial @font-face rule. This CSS element will allow site designers to embed custom fonts on their servers and break free of the web’s long-standing limitation of rendering type with only a handful of usable fonts. So far few websites are using web-based fonts, but if companies like Typekit catch on, Opera users will definitely have a head start.

As Opera users know, Opera isn’t just a web browser, it also includes an e-mail client, a newsfeed reader and even a BitTorrent client within the browser. But for those that don’t want to use Opera’s various auxiliary apps, Opera 10 makes it much easier to set your own defaults for handling e-mail, RSS subscriptions or torrent files.

Other new features in Opera 10 include an update for Dragonfly, Opera’s set of debugging tools for web developers, which now allows you to edit the DOM and inspect HTTP headers.

While today’s release of Opera 10 is still technically a beta, we didn’t encounter any bugs or strange behavior. Still, as always, you might want to hold off on using the release for mission-critical tasks. For those that would like to test out the latest version and enjoy the speed benefits and slick new look, head over to the Opera 10 download page and grab a copy.

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