Mozilla recently released Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 5 (aka Firefox 3). This is the up and coming version of Firefox and although still in Alpha, I have been running it for several days now and it is quite stable.
According to the release notes:
Gran Paradiso 1.9 Alpha 5 introduces several new features:
- Bookmarks portion of Places has been enabled
- New crash reporting system, Breakpad. It’s enabled by default on Mac OS X, on about 50% of Windows installations, and not yet available on Linux.
- You can also view crash reports at this site.
- New Javascript-based Password Manager. More details available here.
- Support for Growl notification under Mac OS X
- Support for native controls on Mac OS X
- Miscellaneous Gecko 1.9 bug fixes
Most of these fixes are under-the-hood, so the new Firefox is remarkably similar to the old one!
The major obvious differences are it appears slightly faster (though this could be due to the lack of plugins!) and the pages render better. The major downside is that Gran Paradiso is a memory hog, using 1.15gb of virtual memory on my MacBook Pro! But that is with four windows and fifty tabs open.
Upgrading, as always, disables most of the plugins. I have mixed feelings about that. Some plugins I love and hate having to go without (Adblock, for example) but the majority of the plugins I had in Firefox 2 were downloaded to try out and never used again!
Overall, if you are happy running Alpha software, try Gran Paradiso. You will like the improvements and there are very few downsides.
Wow that was fast!
Apple released a beta of their Safari browser last night to run on Windows and a few short hours later, vulnerabilities which allow remote code execution have been published already!
It looks like Safari for Windows was released a little early. Whatever about the small functionality bug I found, the ability to run code remotely on your Windows machine is a critical vulnerability. Don’t use Safari on a Windows machine until these exploits have been fixed.
Hard to know where the blame lies for this - Thor Larholm blames Apple’s ignorance of Windows:
On the OS X platform Apple has enjoyed the same luxury and the same curse as Internet Explorer has had on the Windows platform, namely intimate operating system knowledge. The integration with the originally intended operating system is tightly defined, but the breadth of knowledge is crippled when the software is released on other systems and mistakes and mishaps occur.
While some commenters on his site blame Microsoft:
I don’t know, the way you described it seems more like a hole in the way Windows handles things than a Safari hole. Does a Windows API call launch a shell process, or does Safari manually go and run a command line program? If it’s the Windows API for URL handling, then it’s clearly broken. Every program that needs to grab a URL should not be responsible for patching holes in Windows.
I saw from Engadget that Apple have released a new beta version of their browser, Safari, which will run on Windows. There are versions for Windows XP and Windows Vista.
I downloaded it and installed on an XP machine and it does appear to run quite quickly.
However, Apple still haven’t addressed Safari’s biggest bug - it is far too easy to close a window in accidentally Safari closing all its tabs. Both Firefox and Internet Explorer give you a warning if you try to close a window with multiple tabs open. How hard would it be for Safari to implement this feature?
Having said that, if you load the Acid2 test on IE7, Firefox and Safari for Windows, only Safari displays it correctly.
Opera also passes the Acid2 test (not displayed). However, Opera also allows you to close multi-tab windows without warning!
So as well as being fast, Safari for Windows is, along with Opera, the most standards compliant browser available. Just don’t close any multi-tab windows accidentally!
You can download the beta from the Safari download page.
Update 1: Apple’s official announcement is now up
Update 2:Â As Conall notes in the comments of this post, the multi-tab warning is working in the new Mac version of Safari.
Oh dear, Dr. Macenstein is reporting that Safari is a resource hog - using up to 76% more resources than Firefox.
According to Dr. Macenstien Safari grabs resources from the system even when idle in the background:
It seems to me that a background application, especially one that should not really be doing anything all that processor-intensive even when in the foreground, should not hog system resources the way Safari apparently does. If Firefox can play nice, why not Safari?
My default browser on the Mac is Flock and my next most used browser is Firefox (with typically 35+ tabs open). After that I use Camino and Safari in that order so this doesn’t affect me to much.
Anyone who is a heavy Safari user might want to look closely at this article and think about using an alternative browser.
Advertising any product to me is becoming more and more difficult. It is not just me, there is a growing number of people who are discovering ways to skip ads almost completely in their daily lives.
In my own case, I honestly can’t remember the last time I bought a newspaper but it would be years ago. I prefer to get all my news online.
I use the Firefox plugin Adblock to ensure I don’t see most ads online (see below)
This is the ENN site viewed without the Adblock plugin
This is the same ENN site viewed using the Adblock plugin
I used to listen to quite a bit of radio when I was on the road. Now however, I fill my iPod with podcasts before setting off on any journey and listen to those instead. This means that I am listening to content of my selection, relevant to my work, and I am not at the whim of whatever presenter happens to be on the radio.
I watch a decreasing amount of television. The TV I do watch tends to be DVDs or movie channels with no ads. I’d potentially watch a little more TV if I had Sky+ (similar to Tivo) but it is waaaaaaay too expensive.
And yes, before anyone says it, I do see the irony of posting this on a site who’s hosting is being paid for by Google ads!
So if you were an advertiser, trying to get your brand/message through to me (and people like me), how would you go about it?
Via Rob Burke, I saw a blog post on the IE blog listing add-ons which are available for IE7 and pointing out a site listing over 400 add-ons.
It is cool that there are now add-ons for IE7 which now give me functionality similar to that I already have in Firefox 2 (in many cases added with add-ons as well).
Unfortunately I couldn’t find an equivalent to my all-time favourite Firefox plugin, AdBlock and even more disconcerting is the fact that many of the IE plugins are commercial (i.e. not free!). Why would people pay for plugins for IE7 when similar plugins are available free for Firefox? Is it simply ignorance?
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