Digital Blog India.in » Browsers

Which browser is the fastest ?

admin — Mon, 25 Jan 2010 04:43:17 +0000

Great article with speed comparisons of the different browsers currently available. According to PC World, the fastest browser currently is the Apple Safari following by Google Chrome, both of which are twice as fast as the Mozilla Firefox 3.6.

Firefox 3.6 has improved in performance nevertheless with about 15% faster than its predecessor the Firefox 3.5

Check out the full story at http://www.pcworld.com/article/187569/firefox_takes_a_15_speed_jump.html

Google Chrome introduces browser extensions

Firefox 3.5 supports open video formats

admin — Mon, 11 Jan 2010 00:43:31 +0000

The new Firefox 3.5 now supports open video formats. What does this mean ?

Firefox now supports Theora, which is a truly free and open video format for the internet. This means that we would have to do away with proprietary plugins or restricted codecs and license fees and be able to embed videos in websites are truly free and viewable by everyone. Mozilla believes that the quality of Theora can be improved and is supporting the development of Theora by giving a US $100,000 grant. This grant is to be administered by the Wikimedia Foundation and will go towards improving Theora’s encoders and playback libraries.

So what is Theora ?

Theora is a free and open video compression format from the Xiph.org Foundation. The same guys who brought you the Ogg Vorbis open music format.

Theora can be used to distribute film and video online and on disc without the licensing and royalty fees or vendor lock-in associated with other formats. Theora scales from postage stamp to HD resolution, and is considered particularly competitive at low bitrates. It is in the same class as MPEG-4/DiVX, and like the Vorbis audio codec it has lots of room for improvement as encoder technology develops.

Theora is in full public release as of November 3, 2008. The bitstream format for Theora I was frozen Thursday, 2004 July 1. All bitstreams encoded since that date will remain compatible with future releases.

Theora comes without licensing fees. Neither commercial nor private use will make you owe money to us. The Theora specification is in the public domain, its reference implementation is open source and subject to a license which permits inclusion in proprietary commercial products. On2, which owns patents that apply to the technical foundations of Theora, granted an unrevocable free license regarding those patents.

Theora on the Internet

Theora, as every member of the Ogg family, can be streamed easily. Existing solutions do exist (e.g. Icecast or Flumotion streaming server) that have a proven track record and itself are free and open.

Theora also can be streamed from virtually any HTTP server, making it easy to provide static streams.

On the technological side Theora is well engineered for low-bitrate streaming. Its in-loop deblocking filter is efficient at preventing a distracting, blocky look of the encoded content. Thus perceived video quality usually degrades gracefully as bitrate decreases, which is an essential property for any video codec targeting web video.
Theora is cross-platform

Basically every major Linux distribution ships with support for Theora by default. The licensing terms of MPEG or e.g. VC-1 make those compression schemes inherently incompatible with the idea of truly free open source software. If you want to target the growing number of Linux users shipping your content as Theora is a good idea.

Apart from the Linux platform, where Theora is considered “standard”, there also exist easy to install solutions for Windows and Mac OS, making authoring and consuming of Theora encoded content easy.
Theora is reliable

In contrast to proprietary codecs with no public documentation available Theora is subject of a specification which is available to everyone at any time without restrictions. The open source nature of Theora makes it very unlikely it’ll simply disappear, which may happen to proprietary codecs once their developers decide to leave the codec business.

More about Xiph.org Foundation

Xiph.Org is a collection of open source, multimedia-related projects. The most aggressive effort works to put the foundation standards of Internet audio and video into the public domain, where all Internet standards belong.

The .ogv file

Theora uses the .ogv ( video/ogg ) file extension.

More reading about Open Video formats and Firefox support

Christopher Blizzard on “Why Open Video” : http://www.0xdeadbeef.com/weblog/2009/01/why-open-video/

Greg Maxwell compares the quality of Ogg Theora with real world examples: http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/open-video-codecs-and-quality/

WebMonkey.com How Firefox is pushing open video onto the web : http://www.webmonkey.com/blog/How_Firefox_Is_Pushing_Open_Video_Onto_the_Web

What’s the ideal video quality for Theora : http://pacoup.com/2010/01/09/whats-the-ideal-video-quality-for-theora/

Give Google Chrome as a Christmas gift

admin — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 02:07:52 +0000

Am I hearing this correctly ? Give Google Chrome as a Christmas gift to your ….Grandma ? W T F is my grandma going to do with Google Chrome ? I thought the same thing, but here is what Google is upto

http://www.givechrome.com/

Step 1: Click on http://www.givechrome.com/

Step 2: Select a theme to wrap your gift in. The theme then dutifully wraps itself around the Google Chrome logo

Step 3: Type in the recipients, your message et all and send.

So what does this do ? Probably just sends a Chrome download link to the recipient, but the main thing I like about this is the Ajax powered design, its lovely ..simple and elegant..and you should give it a try just for the sake of seeing the creation.

Google Chrome extensions on a Mac

admin — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:57:12 +0000

So the Macintosh’ers have been left behind as usual. But here is a solution, thanks to DotSpots founder Matt Mastracci and a blogger at Grack.com.

All you need to do is,

Frag this button to your toolbar: Enable Extension Install

Try it out on the DotSpots extension page here. Click the bookmarklet and the Install button will be activated.

You need to download the latest version of Chromium for Mac, which you can get right here.

Google Chrome introduces browser extensions

admin — Sat, 19 Dec 2009 01:40:59 +0000

Google Chrome

What is a great browser ? One that loads up quickly OR one that makes your browsing experience speedier than the other browsers? OR is the add-ons or the extensions which might include functional add ons or themes.

I would say that a major selling point of Firefox initially was its support for extensions which let you do all kinds of goody functional stuff with either the websites, bookmarks, web development functionality or other stuff.

And now Google Chrome is onto the bandwagon announcing that Chrome will support extensions, and which can be downloaded from https://chrome.google.com/extensions/

You would have to however, download the latest beta version of Chrome for running these extensions.

At the time of writing this article, these are the popular extensions,

Google Mail Checker

(1389)

- 112,109 users

Displays the number of unread messages in your Google Mail inbox. You can also click the button to…

AdThwart

(835)

- 72,164 users

Blocks ads on websites. Includes the EasyList ad filter list as of 18 Dec 2009.

Google Translate

(375)

- 66,020 users

This extension translates entire webpages into a language of your choice with one click. By the…

Google Wave Notifier

(312)

- 50,866 users

Displays number of unread Waves.

Full list of popular extensions at : https://chrome.google.com/extensions/list/popular

What is the Google Chrome Omnibar ?

admin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:35:02 +0000

One of the best known features of Google Chrome is the Omnibar or the so called ‘Psychic Bar’ by the developers.

Simply speaking it combines the address bar and the search box in one. So you would type in your search query right where you would have typed the web page url.

And Google Chrome goes further. It guesses what you are looking for, by showing you a list of websites from your browser history, bookmarks and search results from Google.

You can also search inside a website from your address bar, by pressing the tab key.

See the omnibar in action,

Google Chrome Demo

Omnibar for Mozilla Firefox

If you are looking for a omnibar add-on for firefox, there is one available on the add-ons page

Google Chrome browser debuts for Macintosh’s

admin — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 13:21:18 +0000

Finally, after a wait of nearly one year Google has released its web browser for Apple Mac’s. Google Chrome is mostly popular as a fast start-up and fast loading browser, but it’s best known feature is probably the omnibar (web address and search box in one area of your browser). With the omnibar you can type in your search query right in your address bar, where you would usually type in the web page url. Developers also call it the ‘psychic bar’.

Google says that “we’ve focused on uniting our clean, simple design with subtle animations and effects to create a snappy and satisfying browsing experience on OS X. As you might expect, the speed of Google Chrome for Mac is something we’re very proud of. If you have a Mac, try installing the beta and see how fast it launches — there’s hardly even time for the icon in the dock to bounce!”

Another feature to look out for is themes, with Chrome featuring ready-made themes available to jazz up your browser. The first beta release for Mac doesn’t feature a bookmark manager, syncing bookmarks, extensions/add-ons or even a cookie manager.

Download Google Chrome for Mac.