“You don’t need to invent anything, you just have to do traditional research where you look at history and then compliment that with scientific research where you’re trying to do something new. That can lead to a lot in the business and technology sectors these days” – Bill Buxton
A chat with Microsoft Principal Researcher Bill Buxton, Part I
LOL 
Microsoft revisits the best and worst of the web – from bleeding GIFS to pointless status updates.
Tags: IE8, net history, Microsoft
Paul Thurrott’s SuperSite for Windows has posted new screenshots for the Windows 7 build 7048. According to the site, this Build 7048 is different however, which includes the first major functional change to Windows 7 since the Beta: You can now remove Internet Explorer 8 using the standard Windows Features applet.
Tags: Windows7 build 7048, Microsoft, IE8
Lifehacker.com has made an interesting review of the three beta browsers: Chrome, IE8 Beta 2 and Firefox 3.1. They have run comparison and speed tests using a controlled environment. The results are quite promising for the new Chrome and Firefox, but no so good for IE8 Beta 2.
Here are the details:
Google’s new Chrome web browser beta is getting a lot of attention for its slick looks, helpful features, and performance, but how does it rank against the early releases of more established browsers? We’ve previously put the major browser releases to the speed test, but today we’re measuring Chrome against the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, as well as the beta of Firefox 3′s next iteration, 3.1. We tested tomorrow’s browsers on startup and page-loading times, JavaScript and CSS performance, and, perhaps most importantly to the average user, memory use on launch and with lots of content loaded. Read on to get the scoop on which bleeding-edge beta has the edge in the browser time trials.
As with my previous browser tests, I installed completely fresh copies of the three browsers on my Windows Vista laptop, with all settings left to defaults. With the second beta of Internet Explorer 8, I reset the browser to factory settings and chose whatever Microsoft suggested during the click-through setup.
My test system has the same specs as before: A 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor, 2GB of memory, and running Windows Vista Home Premium. For the time-based tests, I again used Rob Keir’s ultra-lightweight timer app, simultaneously tapping the “\” key with “Enter” to launch a browser shortcut or folder full of bookmarks. I performed each test on each browser three times and averaged out the results, while eliminating obvious oddities. (With Vista’s often empirical hard drive usage, there were definitely artificially long start-ups).
It’s the same system I used to test Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3 RC3, Safari for Windows, and Opera 9.5, so you can make fair comparisons between all the browsers. It’s not scientific in the strict sense, but it’s meant to measure browser performance as real humans experience it—load, click, and wait.
Drawing inspiration again from Mark Wilton-Jones trend-setting tests, I timed each browser loading up “cold” load (straight off a system restart) and “warm” (having run twice already). I used a locally-saved copy of Google’s minimalist home page to negate net connection variations, and, to compensate for Vista’s start-up fickleness, timed each browser exactly two minutes after boot-up. Here are the first results:
Note the small scale of the time on the X-axis: Even though Chrome was (quite surprisingly) slower at startup than Firefox or even IE 8, it’s less than a second of difference between them all. That’s a bit more than an error from my twitchy fingers, but probably not enough to rate any one browser on. Let’s check out the warm boots:
As you can see, Chrome’s noticeably fast on reload, although all the results are so close it’s hard to confidently crown a winner. Just like last time, IE 8 slightly edges out Firefox on warm boots, but lags just a bit behind when starting up.
You don’t start your browser to look at clean, white, locally-saved pages, do you? No, you speed around your must-visit sites, and often keep a bushel of them open at once. For the next test, I led each browser page-by-page through the assortment of web sites pictured at right—some heavy with interactive elements, some just text and pictures—before jumping back to a blank page (entering about:blank does this in any browser) and loading all the links at once. Each browser keeps a spinning icon on tabs as they load, so I measured from first click to the last tab settling in.
IE 8 and Chrome clock in too close to call, but Firefox fell behind. Based on the minuscule difference in cold-boot time and the two warm tests, I’d call Chrome the fastest, but definitely hand IE 8 a Most Improved Player trophy at the awards banquet.
JavaScript continues to grow in importance as a browser benchmark, because it’s the backbone of no-reload interfaces like Gmail, Facebook, and lots of other webapps. Once again I used Sean Patrick Kane’s revised JavaScript speed tests and averaged out three results to measure the browsers:
Firefox bests Chrome in this test by a handy lead, while IE 8 takes nearly twice as long (in milliseconds, of course) to perform all the actions Sean runs it through. It’s anybody’s guess who’s got the most objective test—CNET’s testers show Chrome wrecking all comers, while Mozilla’s own tests declare their orange scrapper the winner in tight races. I can only take away that IE 8 is definitely an improvement from IE 7′s fall-behind pace, while Chrome and Firefox are pretty evenly matched…
…until I ran the CSS tests, that is. CSS determines the layout and appearance of a page, and nontropp’s downloadable form makes a browser work like a page designer on an all-guarana-and-coffee diet.
In the CSS test, as you can see, Chrome takes a commanding lead, Firefox doesn’t lag too far behind, and IE 8 actually stalled and froze on just about one of every two loads I ran. When it came out of memory freeze, it did report consistent times, though—consistently behind. One could hand the Dynamic Web Performance title to Firefox for the probably weightier JavaScript test, but Chrome also shows a notable grace in running down the type frequently found on blogs. Let’s call this a tie.
How far the great-great-nephew of Netscape has come in its respect for your system’s resources. Measured by Vista’s Task Manager from cold boots and then with eight tabs loaded, Firefox shows some serious savvy with megabytes:
Do note, however, that Chrome handles tabs differently than others—each tab loads as its own process, so that if it crashes or stalls, the rest of your reading doesn’t go down with it. So if you’ve got solid-state chips to spare, it’s not that much more of a hit to run Chrome in a busy session.
As with our last test, we’ll note that browsing is much more than speed and bit usage—many of us can’t imagine web life without our favorite extensions, or Windows integration, or, soon enough, Chrome’s unique features.
What’s been your experience with the newest competitors in the web field? Got your own criteria to compare? Share it all in the comments.
Tags: IE8, Firefox 3.1, Google Chrome, browser speed test
From: DailyTech
IE8 could give Opera and Firefox a run for their feature money
Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) is the king of the hill when it comes to web browsers. That is despite the fact that many computer users feel IE is a much less usable browser than its main competitors like Opera and Firefox.
For instance, Microsoft was way behind its competitors adding features as basic as tabbed browsing, which only showed up in IE7. It appears that Microsoft is intent on making a browser that competes with the newer browsers on a much more complete basis feature wise with Internet Explorer 8.
IE8 will offer a wealth of new features starting with Activities. Activities allow you to open links to external web services within the context of a page you are looking at. If you are looking at the webpage for a store or restaurant, you could get driving directions with Live Maps or send the information to another web application.
Webslices is another new feature that allows users to subscribe and bring content on the links bar as they surf the web. IE8 also comes a long way on standards compliance and offers three different rendering modes — Quirks mode, Strict mode, and IE8 standards mode. Quirks mode supports IE5 and legacy browsers, strict mode supports IE7 and is accessed through an emulate IE7 button.
IE8 is compliant with cascading style sheets (CSS) 2.1 and offers HTML improvements intended to fix cross browser inconsistencies. IE8′s get/set/remove attributes are now compatible with other browsers and default attributes for HTML are supported. IE8 also includes integrated developer tools. This will allow web developers to debug HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a visual development environment included with the web browser.
CNET News reports that IE8 Beta 1 has some significant new security features. One of the features is a cross-site scripting filter. Microsoft says this is one of the first scripting filters on a mainstream browser. This feature is meant to protect a user from a malicious webpage that tries to execute a script on a user’s browser without them knowing. When a page requests a cross-site script to be executed, IE8 changes the content on the web page being viewed with a notice that the script wants to run. When IE8 recognizes a malicious script, it keeps the script from executing.
Another significant new feature is called InPrivate. The feature allows users to browse the internet without having IE8 cache the content being viewed. When the function is activated, you can keep the rest of your browsing history intact. IE8 also adds ActiveX components security, which eliminates drive-by downloads. IE8 has Microsoft malware protection built-in — a feature that Opera and other competitors feature.
One of the best new features of IE7 was the addition of tabbed browsing. IE8 takes tabbed browsing to the next level for Microsoft. IE8 will also users to reopen the last few tabs that were closed. This is a great feature if you have ever accidentally closed a tab while working. Tabs opened from the same page are also color coded to make keeping groups of tabs easier. IE8 also offers the ability for the browser to suggest new websites similar to the websites you have previously viewed. The option is turned off by default.
IE8 competitor Firefox set a record for the most downloads in 24 hours when its latest version launched recently.
Tags: IE8, activities, internet explorer, firefox, opera, browser
