Browsers

Well this came way out of left field for me, but after reading their thoughts and plans on the matter makes a lot of sense: Google have released a browser, called Chrome. Main highlights: based on Webkit and using a spanking new Javascript engine called V8.

I’m using it right now to type this and everything seems in order. It feels faster than Firefox 3, the interface is nice and clean and I’m generally revelling in the nice newness of it all. Interestingly it seems to have a spellchecker built-in that doesn’t recognise the word “Google”…

Anyway, anything I might say about the browser this early will end up repeating most of their hype, and that is done much better by this comic strip they released.

PS. Currently the beta version is Windows only with Linux and Mac versions to follow..

Windows Live is the name for the new set of technologies software and computery goodness Microsoft is developing.

A lot of the components aren’t especially related, it’s just a brand name of sorts. Part of it is Windows Live Mail, designed to ultimately replace Hotmail. As of this morning, it doesn’t work on Firefox. You are greeted with the normal Hotmail interface and a message saying due to various problems they’ve rolled back to a previous version meaning Firefox users have to use Hotmail Classic. Well it is beta (and they’ve said it’s beta instead of releasing it and then finding these problems) so I’ll let them off.

Ever heard of Internationalised Domain Names? They allow you to register domains with non-Latin characters (i.e. Unicode). They actually do a bit of cheating but I’ll let you find that out. In the meantime check out these interesting addresses showing that just using Chinese or Arabic characters is not the limit IDNs.

• http://www.®.com/
• http://www.©.com/
• http://www.€.net/
• http://www.☎.com/
• http://www.♬♬.com/

Quick warning, they don’t work in IE without a plugin and to see them in their true glory you need Opera…

Internet Explorer (and possibly every other browser including Firefox and Opera is about to become a lot more annoying. Apparently a company called Eolas has a patent on browsers with plug-ins. Or to be more precise they have a patent on:

“Distributed hypermedia method for automatically invoking external application providing interaction and display of embedded objects within a hypermedia document”

The result is Microsoft having to come up with a way round it to avoid paying license fees. Any plug-in content on a web page (Flash, Shockwave, the dodgy XForms support or any ActiveX control) will have to be explicitly activated before you can interact with it. In most circumstances this isn’t so bad - except for those annoying floating ads: you’ll have to click them twice to get them to go away.

If you have automatic Windows update, you’ll get it on April 11th as a critical update. Wikipedia article.

Baekdal article.