Author Archive: Armin Seuchter
Being passionate about software, Armin joined FavBrowser.com in early 2011 and has been actively writing ever since. Having accepted the challenge, he also enjoys watching anime, indulging in good books, staying fit and healthy, and trying new things.
Firefox’s Memory Appetite Decreased By 20% To 30%
Firefox 7, set to ship in late September, will be quite a bit faster because of recent efforts to plug the browser’s memory leaks. Mozilla developer Nicholas Nethercote credited the “MemShrink” project for closing memory bugs in the browser and producing a faster Firefox. MemShrink was announced approximately two months ago.
Firefox 7 uses less memory than Firefox 6 (and 5 and 4): often 20% to 30% less, and sometimes as much as 50% less. This means that Firefox 7 is faster (sometimes drastically so) and less likely to crash, particularly if you have many websites open at once and/or keep Firefox running for a long time between restarts. – Nicholas Nethercote, programmer at Mozilla
Firefox Overtaken By Chrome In The UK
Google’s first product that has been advertised on TV in the UK, Google Chrome, has become more popular than Firefox. Seems like advertising works!
Yes, that’s right. Chrome is now the second most used web browser in the UK after having overtaken Firefox. That is, according to StatCounter. Being only just ahead of Firefox, Chrome currently possesses 22 percent of UK users. Internet Explorer, however, still has more market share than both of them combined, lying at 45 percent.
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WhoIsLive Makes The Whole Web Social
What if every web page you visited became an instant chat room? Startup WhoIsLive released a browser extension yesterday that let’s you find out the answer to that question.
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New Web Based Mobile OS By Mozilla On The Way
It appears as if Mozilla is planning on developing what is deemed a truly open source mobile operating system based on the web. An HTML5 based mobile OS, to be exact.
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RockMelt Updates To 0.9.62.313
The latest version of RockMelt is out and it includes a number of improvements to performance and stability. The newest Chromium enhancements have been added as well as over 130 issues have been fixed, allowing for what the company promises to be a better browsing experience. No new features have been added otherwise, so it’s a particular minor update.
Mac OS X 10.7 Lion also got some love, with RockMelt now running a lot more smoothly on the newly released operating system. The RockMelt experience on Lion is said to become even better in the near future, however. What this promise entails is better support for full screen mode, gesture based navigation, and hiding scrollbars until sites are scrolled.
RockMelt can be downloaded from here.
58 Safari Bugs Patched To Prevent Drive By Attacks
Apple updated Safari to version 5.1 yesterday, patching 58 security vulnerabilities and beefing up the browser with several new features, including sandboxing on Mac OS X 10.7.
Safari 5.1 is bundled with Lion, the operating system Apple released earlier yesterday. Good news is that it also runs on Mac OS X 10.6 i.e. Snow Leopard. A separate Safari update to version 5.0.6 was also issued today for users running Mac OS X 10.5, or Leopard.
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Mozilla To Implement Multiprocess Browsing
According to Christopher Blizzard, Mozilla’s Web platform director, via a blog post, Mozilla has renewed its efforts to bring multiprocess browsing to Firefox. The post stresses the key advantages that process isolation will transfer to Firefox and tackles some of the requirements for Mozilla’s implementation.
Although multiprocess browsing became a higher priority for Mozilla after the release of Firefox 4, it is still not clear when the feature might land. Current and upcoming versions of Firefox do not yet have the feature, so chances that the it might hit the public by the end of this year are slim.
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Maxthon 3.1.3.1000 Is Out!
A new version of the highly unknown browser is out and brings about quite a few changes, the majority of them being to the UI. For one, the Menu button no longer exists on the right, instead having been replaced by Quick Tools i.e. Feed Reader, Online Notepad, Translate, Snap, and Resource Sniffer.
What was once found under the Menu button has now been moved under the Avatar whose only purpose was to allow you to log in with your Maxthon Passport which contained all your synchronized data. It wasn’t simply a copy paste job, however, as it is now quite akin to Opera and Firefox.
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Opera Working To Fix Facebook Video Calling
Facebook unveiled its new video calling feature this week right after Google+ came out and boasted with Hangouts (video chats with up to ten people). Unfortunately, Opera is not supported by Facebook for this feature at present. An Opera employee had the following to say about the matter:
The reason for Facebook’s block seems to be a problem with our version of Opera on OS X. Facebook’s plug-in installs itself as FacebookVideoCalling.webplugin on Mac, but our browser only recognises plug-ins with a .plugin extension. This causes their plug-in detection scripts to think the installation failed, triggering a renewed installation process. Our fearless engineers are working to fix this issue in Opera code as soon as possible, and we’re also in talks with Facebook to find a quick resolution to the problem. – Patrick H. Lauke, Web Evangelist in the Developer Relations Team at Opera
Firefox 5 Update To Fix Mac OS X Crash Bug
Firefox 5.0.1 will arrive shortly going by an announcement made by Mozilla. No release date was given, however. The update isn’t for Windows or Linux operating systems either, just for Mac OS X. This is because Lion i.e. Mac OS X 10.7 possesses a bug that makes Firefox 5 crash when showing websites that utilize downloadable fonts.
We alerted Apple to the problem before the release of 10.7 but they did not fix the problem before 10.7 went to final release. We’ve changed the font APIs that we’re using to newer versions which appear to fix the problem. The bug in Lion will cause severe crash problems for Firefox 5 users if it’s not fixed. – Christopher Blizzard, Mozilla’s Web platform director
