Firefox

Internet Explorer 9

Well its about time the Microsoft is putting some new and useful things into IE9, instead of waiting for Google Chrome or Firefox to implement some cool new feature, then just copy it… here is a statement from Dean Hachamovitch.

“This is a direct improvement to everybody’s usage of the Web on a daily basis,” Hachamovitch said in an interview after Sinofsky’s speech. “Web developers are doing what they did before, only now they can tap directly into a PC’s graphics hardware to make their text work better and graphics work better.”

A couple of interesting improvements are frame rates when resizing text, Bing Maps(frame rate jumps from 5-8fps to almost 60fps) Java scripting has been improved also. How did they do this? They are using something called Direct2D which lets IE9 use hardware acceleration for web graphics, much in the same was as 3D games harness the GPU.

I guess Microsoft finally realized that they have to pour some resources back into Internet Explorer considering that Mozilla Firefox has 25% of the browser share and IE slipping to around 63%. They definitely don’t want to slip below 60% that would look ugly.

Check out the video, its quite interesting. accelerated

-NS

Internet Privacy, You are not Alone.

There is a really interesting story over at TechNewsWorld. I have included an insert below…

“When you’re surfing online, privacy is really a matter of degree. If you’re browsing unprotected, site owners can manage to figure out quite a lot about you based on where you go. Many browsers now offer so-called privacy modes, but those don’t come close to masking everything about you. Even advanced proxy systems aren’t always a complete privacy panacea.”

Check out the full story.

NS

Internet Explorer 8 or Firefox 3.5

Well Firefox hit the 1billion mark for downloads on July 31st, they are now at 1,000,122,057 downloads! Internet Explorer 8 is up there, but no where near that number… according to sources familiar with Microsoft’s statistics there has been more than 200 million times in the last 4 months. Beta testing Windows 7 has caused me to stop using Internet Explorer 8 and start using FireFox 3.5, nothing personal Microsoft, but Firefox just works better… check out the full story here. “Nothing like a good ole competition”, I say!

NS