Archive for February, 2015
Video: Internet Explorer, A Break From The Past
In a newly published post, the IE Team has revealed the steps they took to modernize its rendering engine (aka split it from the original Trident).
That‘s why Spartan is said to be more compatible than IE has ever been, especially due to a new web approach. Instead of analyzing the top 9000 sites that are responsible for around 88% of all web traffic (like Microsoft did in the past), they actually got to the root cause of compatibility issues and looked for patterns of trillions of urls instead.
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Spartan To Remove The 300ms Delay, Pointer Events Become W3C Recommendation
Recently, Microsoft has announced a couple new things, first of all, their Pointer Events model has now been accepted by W3C and became a recommended standard, which means that other browser vendors should be implementing it in the near future, hopefully.
In addition to that, there have been changes in the new rendering engine that is set to power Spartan. Due to the double tap issue (where a browser must pause for 300ms to see if there will be another one (assuming users want to zoom)), there comes a delay. While there are many workarounds (even for IE10), they are not ideal.
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New Chromebook Pixel Is Coming Soon
Shows that it was not abandoned.
If for some reason you are considering a pretty expensive Chromebook Pixel then hold your horses, at least for now. Why? Well, as you might have guessed from the title, during Google’s Teamwork 2015 event, Renne Niemi who is a director of Android & Chrome has confirmed that the search giant is indeed committed to the hardware and a new Chromebook Pixel will be revealed really soon.
Here’s a full transcript:
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What’s The Most Vulnerable Web Browser? Internet Explorer
Apple tops the OS chart.
In the recently published study by GFI, which took a database of vulnerabilities that were published in 2014 and created a chart that makes sense, it looks like Microsoft‘s Internet Explorer still has a long way to go until it‘s no longer the most vulnerable web browser out there.
As you can see in the chart below, the top application by vulnerabilities reported in 2014 was indeed Internet Explorer (242), followed by Google Chrome (124) and Firefox (117).
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Download Firefox 38 Pre-Alpha
With Shumway.
Back in 2012, Mozilla has announced a new and open source project called “Shumway”, which had a goal to replace Adobe’s Flash player with a web native runtime implementation of the SWF file format. Basically, it’s a HTML5 based tech that does not require native code to render SWF files.
Now, it looks like the project has passed a significant milestone as the latest nightly builds of Firefox for Windows and Mac include Shumway by default.
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If You Bought A Lenovo, Be Worried
Greed 101.
If you have bought a Lenovo laptop this or last year and haven’t heard yet, one of the most successful PC makers has been caught installing adware on a number of machines with reports starting from mid-2014.
Basically, a software called Superfish is injecting third party ads on Google searches. Not only that, it also injects its own certificate, allowing to snoop on secure connections and decrypt them. Just take a look at this screenshot:
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Awesome: Microsoft To Implement Mozilla’s ASM.JS
Shows that they do listen to the community.
If you visit Microsoft’s User Voice web site, on the very first page you will find a request to implement Mozilla’s asm.js, which is a strict subset of the JavaScript language that brings significant performance improvements. As a result, you can run heavy stuff like Unreal Engine 3 right in your web browser.
Now, it looks like the next version of Microsoft’s JavaScript engine (Chakra) on Windows 10 will also support asm.js.
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HTTP/2 Has Been Finalized
And boy did we have to wait.
Back in 1999, the IETF and W3C have finalized the HTTP/1.1 protocol and now, 16 years later, it looks like the IETF HTTP Working Group has finally announced the work on HTTP/2 is now complete and it’s on the way to be published as a standard.
Why is HTTP/2 such a big deal? Well, as you might expect from 16 years of progress, it does bring faster page load times, longer lived connections, ability to deliver tons of requests at the same time thanks to the multiplexing feature, which means that the rest of the page load won’t be blocked by some of the heavier items.
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Latest Opera 29 Build Brings Minor UI Tweaks
Version 29.0.1773.0 Developer Preview.
When it comes to changes, visual ones are usually more exciting than the minor new feature ones. And today we have a new release from Opera, which includes the former. The history page was updated to match the overall Opera style, which also means an inclusion of the navigation bar.
In addition to that, you will be able to access your history much faster now as all internal pages (such as Bookmarks, Speed Dial and Discover) now include a button for a quick access.
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Microsoft Pays AdBlock Plus To Unblock Ads
Joins Google and Amazon.
It looks like Microsoft is one of many big names that are now too paying the company behind everyone’s beloved AdBlock Plus extension.
According to the report by Financial Times, the Bing Ads will now be unblocked by default all thanks to the recently struck deal, which includes an undisclosed amount of money.
The software giant has also confirmed the change with the following statement:
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