Ilya Kozhevnikov

Browser Newsletter #21

April 05, 2008

WebKit gets perfect score on Acid3 web standards - iPhone Safari and S60 web browsers will be even better

Webkit’s developers have been working to make their little darling of a rendering engine the fastest and most standards compliant solution available. And, it looks like the investment has paid off. Webkit has announced that their Webkit core scored a perfect 100/100 score on the Acid3 web browser standards compliance tests.

For the purposes of web browsers, think of Webkit as the rendering engine that determines how the web-code is displayed as a webpage. Webkit was originally devised by Apple for use in Mac OS X’s Safari browser, and has now found its way into other browsers, including the iPhone Safari browser, S60 web browser, Android’s web browser, and others. Now, the announcement that Webkit is basically at the top of the game when it comes to standards compliance and speedy page rendering only points to continued improvement in the mobile browser segment. Faster web browsing on our mobile phones? Yes, please.

Q&A with Mozilla’s John Lilly on 10 years of Mozilla and the future of browsers

Matt Marshall and I sat down with Mozilla CEO John Lilly, who was recently promoted to the top post (our coverage). We talked about everything from the origins of Firefox to what’s wrong with Google’s Android cell phone platform.

Two vulnerabilities found in Safari browser for Windows

Apple’s recently released Safari 3.1 browser for Windows not only contains two “highly critical” software vulnerabilities, but it has come under fire for its poor functionality. Apple also received criticism for the manner in which it released the browser last week.

One of the software vulnerabilities allows an attacker to run code remotely on a Windows PC. With this flaw, files with long names downloaded via Safari 3.1 “can be exploited to cause memory corruption,” leaving the PC vulnerable to the execution of arbitrary code, Secunia said in a security advisory available here.

The second bug could allow attackers to display their own content in pages loaded into Safari 3.1 without changing the URL information shown in the browser’s address bar.

Apple’s Safari Security Woes

It has not been a good couple weeks for Apple and Safari. First Opera knocked it from its position as sole 100 percent compatible Acid3 browser. Then it tried to force iTunes users to unintentionally download the browser as part of an iTunes update, which included a pre-checked install option for Safari. The move was met with broad criticism, including from Mozilla’s CEO, who commented that Apple was bordering “on malware distribution practices.” Finally, Safari users who updated to v3.1 reported many bugs and crashes.

Now the browser, which Apple CEO Steve Jobs once called the “most innovative browser in the world and the most powerful browser in the world”, has had more bad news. At the CanSecWest Show, an annual security conference, it was found that the Safari browser was surprisingly insecure, allowing successful attacks on Mac computers.

First look: Adobe AIR alpha unleashed for Linux

Adobe has announced today the public availability of an Adobe AIR alpha release for Linux. Although the alpha is not feature-complete, it is already capable of running some mainstream AIR applications and is robust enough to facilitate AIR development on the Linux platform. Adobe has also officially joined the Linux Foundation and plans to collaborate with the group in an effort to bring rich Internet application and Web 2.0 technologies to the open-source operating system.

Mozilla wants to put Firefox in the cloud and your pocket

At Mozilla’s headquarters in Mountain View last week, we talked to Mozilla Labs manager Chris Beard and Mozilla Mobile director Jay Sullivan about their plans to put Firefox in the cloud and in your pocket. With the guidance of Beard and Sullivan, the open-source browser is extending itself beyond the desktop and taking its first tentative steps into new frontiers.

Mozilla Labs is experimenting with several emerging technologies that fill important niches in the Firefox ecosystem. Among these are the Prism site-specific browser deployment tool and Weave, a web services integration framework that lets Firefox push local data into the cloud. Weave is still in early development, but the current version already provides support for automatic web-based synchronization and storage of bookmark and history data.

Internet Explorer: A Browser Breaks

Enterprises are holding onto IE 6 and giving Firefox some love. IE 6 usage is going to be a problem for Web developers, because of the browser’s weak standards support. If there were a Web equivalent to Frankenstein’s monster, IE 6 could be it.

The monster is driving away customers. Enterprise IE adoption dropped from 88.7 percent to 78.7 percent in 2007 with gains mainly going to Firefox, according to a new report. Forrester published the data on March 27, but only released it publicly today. Forrester surveyed a whopping 50,000 users at over 2,300 large to very large enterprises throughout 2007.

IE 7 and Firefox 2 were released around the same time. Firefox’s overall enterprise adoption nearly doubled, to 18 percent, in 2007. IE 7’s share climbed from about 10 percent to near 30 percent during the same time frame.

Read more…
© Microsoft Watch, 31/03/08

Firefox Gains On Internet Explorer In Businesses

In what could be a foreboding sign for the future of Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) Internet Explorer, a new study finds that IE7 has done little to slow the gains Mozilla Firefox is making on Microsoft in enterprises despite Firefox’s relative lack of business-oriented features.

A Forrester Research survey of more than 50,000 large enterprise employees found that over the course of 2007, Internet Explorer’s overall market share in that segment decreased by 10%, while Firefox’s share almost doubled from 9.8% to 18%.

Also hidden in the numbers is an indication that Internet Explorer 7 is having trouble finding traction as companies are sticking with the 6-year-old Internet Explorer 6. Microsoft released IE7 in October 2006, but 55.2% of companies still used IE6 as of December 2007. Only 23.4% of companies used IE7, barely outpacing the growth and use of Firefox.

Read more…
© InformationWeek, 01/04/08

Updated IE Mobile to bring “real Internet” to Windows Mobile

Remember when the “baby Internet” was all you could access on your mobile phone? That wasn’t all that long ago, although mobile technology has come a long way in just a few short years. As Apple CEO Steve Jobs has reminded us on more than one occasion, people don’t want the “baby Internet”—they want the real deal on their mobile devices. Microsoft apparently agrees, as the company announced today that it plans to roll out a “desktop-grade” web browser for Windows Mobile devices later this year.

The announcement came during CITA Wireless 2008, where Microsoft said that phone manufacturers would have access to the new browser by the third quarter of 2008. This would make the first phones with the improved IE preinstalled available to consumers by the end of the year.

JavaScript slows down the Internet; WebKit to the rescue

Despite increases in CPU and broadband speeds, the ‘Net stubbornly refuses to get much faster. The WebKit team behind Apple’s browser Safari has found an important contributor to the Web’s slowness: external JavaScripts that are part of many web sites get in the way of a browser’s ability to load in parallel the different elements that make up a page. This means that browsers—and users—spend most of their time waiting for packets to flow to and from remote servers, which, even at the speed of light, takes a considerable amount of time. Addressing this issue made WebKit almost twice as fast in some cases.

IE 8 strict mode doesn’t allow for CSS opacity?

IE8 Strict Mode correctly omits the filter: alpha(opacity=xx) in CSS which allows the user to specify the opacity in pre-IE8 browsers but does not implement the CSS3 opacity setting. While I understand that opacity is part of the CSS3 spec which is not finalized, this leaves developers with an odd regression in functionality where it is no longer possible to change opacity on css elements (where as it was with IE 5.5, IE 6.0, IE 7.0, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, among others).

The New Opera Mini Arrives - Now 50% Faster Than Before

Today, Opera released a new version of their mobile web browser, Opera Mini. This latest version, Opera Mini 4.1 beta preview, offers some new features, but most notably, it claims to be 50% faster than Opera Mini 4.0 when it first launched in November of 2007. For the 40 million users who are currently using the mobile browser, this is welcome news, since one of Opera Mini’s previous weaknesses was speed.

Firefox 3 beta 5 now available for download

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is now available for download. This milestone is focused on testing the core functionality provided by many new features and changes to the platform scheduled for Firefox 3. Ongoing planning for Firefox 3 can be followed at the Firefox 3 Planning Center, as well as in mozilla.dev.planning and on irc.mozilla.org in #granparadiso.

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is here, and reviewed

Firefox 3 Beta 5, Gran Paradiso’s milestone #13 is here and the list of features and improvement it brings along is pretty long so let’s get started.

[...] for those following Firefox 3 development you may want to jump to the sections marked in green for what’s new in Beta 5.

Browser Newsletter #21

WebKit gets perfect score on Acid3 web standards - iPhone Safari and S60 web browsers will be even better

Q&A with Mozilla’s John Lilly on 10 years of Mozilla and the future of browsers

Two vulnerabilities found in Safari browser for Windows

Apple’s Safari Security Woes

First look: Adobe AIR alpha unleashed for Linux

Mozilla wants to put Firefox in the cloud and your pocket

Internet Explorer: A Browser Breaks

Firefox Gains On Internet Explorer In Businesses

Updated IE Mobile to bring “real Internet” to Windows Mobile

JavaScript slows down the Internet; WebKit to the rescue

IE 8 strict mode doesn’t allow for CSS opacity?

The New Opera Mini Arrives - Now 50% Faster Than Before

Firefox 3 beta 5 now available for download

Firefox 3 Beta 5 is here, and reviewed

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