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November 19, 2009

Camino 2.0

It's finally out. Camino 2.0 has tab overview which is like Exposé but for browser tabs, it warns you of phishing sites and sites with malware, you can rearrange the tabs, has growl support, has pop-up and flash blockers, and it also supports Keychain.

It's my preferred browser after Safari.

Download Camino 2 here

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Filed under  //   browser   camino   mac os x  

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June 24, 2009

Adobe says use a Flash blocker to reduce Flash induced-crashes


Use a flash blocker!

Questioned about Flash's torrid performance on platforms other than Windows, an Adobe employee responded to Adobe's favorite cheerleader John Welch by saying that he should use a flash blocker because it will… get this… SLOW DOWN THE CRASH CYCLE. Adobe seem to refuse to even address the fact that they need to fix the bloody thing.

Adobe also won't comment on his question regarding HTML 5, something that is encroaching on the field once held by Flash and now facing competition also from Microsoft's Silverlight. Nevermind the fact that HTML 5 may just kill both Flash and Silverlight, because HTML 5 requires no plugin, just a modern browser such as Opera, Firefox, Safari or Mobile Safari that already supports the new standard.

Mobile Gmail, Mobile Flickr and Glyphboard already employ HTML 5 to store data and in the case of Mobile Flickr, use location services.

(via the always excellent daringfireball)

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Filed under  //   adobe   browser   flash   internet   plugin  

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June 10, 2009

Safari 4 Loading Bar

Noticed something about the new loading bar in Safari 4.
 
Well, first of all, it's has a different look from the one presented in Safari 4 public beta. In the beta it's just a rotating set of bars at the edge of the address bar. In the final version it's a rotating set of bars on a button near the end of the address bar.
 
In Safari 3, to let you know that a page is being loaded, the address bar gets filled up with an incremental blue bar that tells you how much of the page has been loaded. For me this was helpful in situations when my connection is flaky and I need to know roughly whether it has stalled or not or how much to go.
 
For whatever reason, the Safari team at Apple thinks this blue bar is junk and decided to do away with it, replacing it with a button that shows a different shade of gray depending on what is loading. Looks like I'll have to hit the webkit blogs to find out if they explain it there.

 

Update: I remember reading a response on Twitter from Maciej Stachowiak, WebKit Developer, regarding the removal of the blue bar from Safari some time ago so I went to search for it and found it. He said, "The big blue progress bar led to users waiting for mostly-loaded and usable pages. Removing it makes browsing effectively faster." I'm not entirely sure how he came to that conclusion, most of the times when the blue bar hasn't finished loading the page remains blank. Mobile Safari, even on iPhone OS 3.0 still uses that blue bar.

 

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Filed under  //   apple   browser   mac   safari  

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December 27, 2008

Camino 2.0 beta 1

This was out nearly one week but I haven't got the chance to grab it. I've been a long time supporter of Camino, one of the few original Mac browsers. It first came out as Chimera before Firefox (Phoenix) even existed and I've always kept it updated all these years, foregoing the official release builds and skip straight to the latest stable beta and sometimes even the latest nightly build.

Going from 1.0 to 2.0 will have been quite a long journey unlike Firefox who shot through four major releases since 2004. Camino skipped through from 0.1 to 0.7 in under a year but took 4 years to get to 1.0, and two more years to get to the current 1.6 and will be nearly 3 years to 2.0.

This past week the Camino team pushed out 2.0 beta 1. Since I've had very little problems with Camino alpha and beta releases, I hold no qualms about replacing Camino 2.0a1 despite their warning and disclaimer about it being unstable and unsuitable or daily use especially when they have these updates spelled out in the release notes:

Camino 2.0b1

  • Tab Dragging: Tabs can be rearranged by dragging and dropping.
  • Tab Overview: There is now an optional toolbar icon for opening and closing Tab Overview.
  • Blocking Flash Animations: A new exceptions list allows disabling "Block Flash animations" on a per-site basis.
  • Gecko 1.9: Camino 2.0 Beta 1 includes changes that improve stability on Mac OS X 10.4.
  • Downloading: On Mac OS X 10.5, the downloads folder in the Dock will bounce when a download finishes.
Camino 2.0a1
  • Requires Mac OS X 10.4: Camino 2.0 Alpha 1 now requires Mac OS X 10.4 or higher.
  • Tab Overview: The tab overview feature, accessed from the Window menu, displays a thumbnail grid of all tabs in the current window.
  • Recently Closed Pages: The History menu now contains a sub-menu listing the last 20 closed web pages.
  • Complete Keyboard Loop: The keyboard loop in the main browser window has been completely rewritten, bringing keyboard access to the tab bar, the pop-up blocker, and the Find bar. The new keyboard loop also fixes most of the bugs that existed in the main browser window's keyboard loop.
  • Full Content Zoom: This new zoom behavior adds the ability to scale up or down the entire content of a web page instead of just increasing or decreasing the text size. The default behavior of the ⌘+ and ⌘- shortcuts is now full content zoom, and increasing or decreasing text size can now be accessed with the ⌘⌥+ and ⌘⌥- shortcuts.
  • Gecko 1.9: Camino now uses version 1.9 of the Mozilla Gecko rendering engine. This version includes a new graphics architecture based on Quartz, which delivers better compatibility with popular plug-ins and significant improvements in Flash performance. Gecko 1.9 also has enhanced support for web standards, improved handling of fonts and languages, and improved support for author styles on form controls.
Here's where you can grab the preview release. Read through the site and don't blame anyone but yourself if you lose something while using a non-official release. My only problem with Camino now is it seems to be slower than Safari 3.1. I haven't updated Safari to 3.2. Also, I don't exactly use Safari, I use WebKit, which is the open-source non-official version of Safari.



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Filed under  //   beta   browser   camino   firefox   safari   update   webkit  

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