Ilya Kozhevnikov

Browser Newsletter #25

June 06, 2008

Nielsen: Mobile Internet Causes 13% Jump in Web Site Audience

CenterNetworks reported yesterday on the launch of the new TotalWeb tracking service from Nielsen, which includes mobile traffic along with desktop PC traffic in its measurement of top Internet properties. When including mobile traffic, says Nielsen, top Internet sites can extend their reach an average of 13%. Though TotalWeb only covers about “200 leading Internet sites” (ironic for a product called TotalWeb), the data is nonetheless interesting.

“The data demonstrate that the mobile Internet can not only increase the frequency of visits to a website, but also grow the overall size of the pie,” said Jeff Herrmann, Vice President of Mobile Media, Nielsen Mobile in a press release. According to Nielsen, leading sites with a mobile property could increase the size of their audience via the mobile Internet.

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© Read Write Web, 02/05/08

Dragonfly Smashes Bugs in Opera

Long-time browser competitor Opera is out with a new piece of software today: Opera Dragonfly. Web developers (especially those concerned with cross-browser compatibility) will want to have a look at this first release and keep track of it as it evolves.

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© Web Worker Daily, 06/05/08

IE8 to boost ActiveX security on Vista

ActiveX has long been regarded as a thorn in the side of Windows users everywhere; a gaping hole through which spyware and viruses can contaminate your PC and compromise your data. Although much of the criticism leveled at ActiveX is excessively harsh, binary browser plugins—that can do just about anything the user can do—do have security concerns. With Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft’s forthcoming version of its embattled browser, steps will be taken to further reduce the exposure caused by ActiveX. The IE blog has recently given details of what we can expect.

Opera Mini 4.1 released with better page and file management

Opera today released version 4.1 of its Opera Mini browser for mobile phones that can run Java applications. Even though version 4.0 just landed last November, version 4.1 makes an equally significant splash with a number of new features for searching, exchanging files, and archiving pages for offline viewing.

Adobe Releases Flash 10 Beta

Adobe announced today the release of the Flash Player 10 beta, previously code named “Astro,” on the Adobe Labs site. The beta is available for download immediately at the Astro web page and adds a number of compelling features to the Flash player. Adobe, which claims that the Flash player is on 98% of Internet connected PCs, says it has seen an acceleration in the penetration rate for new versions of the player which each new release. It took just 3 months to reach 62% of Flash users for the last version of the player (verion 9), according to the company.

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© Read Write Web, 14/05/08

Apple okay with Safari ‘carpet bombing’ vuln for now

Next time you get nagged to install Apple’s Safari browser keep this in mind: The company’s security team has dismissed research that shows a simple way miscreants can use the browser to litter an end user’s machine with malicious files.

According to researcher Nitesh Dhanjani, Safari doesn’t bother to ask for user permission before downloading resources from websites. When encountering malicious iframes and other scripts, the browser obediently does what the website tells it to do, including downloading a file as many times as html scripts order.

When informed of this “carpet bombing” vulnerability (as researcher Billy (BK) Rios has dubbed it), Apple agreed that it might be good if Safari actually checked with the user before downloading potentially vicious files, but signaled that kind of addition wasn’t much of a priority.

A tantalizing taste of Firefox 3: testing RC1

Mozilla has issued the first official release candidate of Firefox 3, the next major version of the popular open source web browser. Firefox 3 includes a visual refresh as well as a multitude of exciting new features and significant improvements. Our experience indicates that this release candidate is fairly robust and ready for widespread testing.

One of the most impressive features in Firefox 3 is the new Places system, a massive overhaul of the browser’s bookmark and history functionality that is built on SQLite and provides noticeable improvements to performance and data integrity. The Places system has facilitated a number of very compelling user interface enhancements, like the new combined history and bookmarks organizer and an impressively intelligent new autocompletion implementation for the browser address bar.

Firefox 3 is built on top of Gecko 1.9, a new version of Mozilla’s powerful rendering engine, which now uses the cross-platform Cairo rendering framework. Gecko 1.9 brings Firefox into the age of Acid2 compliance and also greatly improves SVG handling and reflow. It also made possible a handful of other long-awaited feature like full-page zooming.

Performance and memory efficiency were high priorities for Firefox 3. Adoption of FreeBSD’s jemalloc allocator and the implementation of a new XPCOM cycle collector have significantly cut down the size of Firefox’s memory footprint. Firefox 3 now uses less memory than Safari and Opera in some benchmarks.

Firefox 3.1 targeted for year’s end

Mike Shroepfer, Mozilla VP of Technology announced today a draft plan for Firefox and the Mozilla platform beyond the upcoming Firefox 3 (and attached Mozilla platform 1.9) release next June.

Most notable is Firefox 3.1, the next update to the Firefox 3 branch. It would add a few features that were not ready to ship in Firefox 3 development time frame. Among the most relevant: Support for the

Opera Takes on Apple With Open Widget SDK

The popular mobile browser Opera today launched a software developers kit (SDK) for widgets. While rival Apple’s iPhone SDK requires that applications be distributed exclusively through the still-unlaunched iPhone App Store, pay a $99 application fee and wait - Opera SDK built widgets appear to be much more open and free.

Opera’s widgets will be able to run on the company’s wildly popular mobile browser, Opera Mini excluded, the desktop version of Opera, the Nintendo Wii and any other devices that run Opera 9.5. We covered the launch of 9.5 here.

A second Firefox 3 RC confirmed

On today’s Firefox 3 status meeting, the need for a second release candidate was confirmed and it has been tentatively targeted for early June.

RC2 will fix about a couple dozen bugs including some top crashers, some affecting performance and localization related. Most of the bugs already have patches waiting for review or landing and the revised code is expected for tomorrow, with initial builds available on Thursday. QA will start the same day and last for about a week.

If all goes as planned, RC 2 should be released close to June 6 for a new round of tests by Firefox users. Depending on whether a new critical bug is found or not, a third RC could be necessary or RC2 will become Firefox 3 final.

SquirrelFish: WebKit has a new, fast, JavaScript engine

SquirrelFish seems to be the code name for a new JavaScript engine for WebKit.

You can see performance benchmarks that show a significant increase across the board of tests.

On average the tests show a 4 times improvement (compared to Safari 3.1), with spikes of 12.6x improvements on some access tests, and with the lowest grade of 1.63x for String unpacking.

IE8 Beta 2 Coming in August

In addition to the features for developers we showed in IE8 Beta 1, we’ve been working on great new features for consumers and IT professionals (as well as doing even more cool stuff for developers). I’m happy to announce that we’re on track to deliver IE8 Beta 2 this August when you’ll get a chance to see what we’ve been up to in these areas. Furthermore, in order to help us get even more feedback for this global product, we’ll be releasing Beta 2 in over twenty languages within a month of the initial release. This is a big step up from the three languages we released for beta 1 and much more than we ever did during IE7.

Browser Newsletter #25

Nielsen: Mobile Internet Causes 13% Jump in Web Site Audience

Dragonfly Smashes Bugs in Opera

IE8 to boost ActiveX security on Vista

Opera Mini 4.1 released with better page and file management

Adobe Releases Flash 10 Beta

Apple okay with Safari ‘carpet bombing’ vuln for now

A tantalizing taste of Firefox 3: testing RC1

Firefox 3.1 targeted for year’s end

Opera Takes on Apple With Open Widget SDK

A second Firefox 3 RC confirmed

SquirrelFish: WebKit has a new, fast, JavaScript engine

IE8 Beta 2 Coming in August

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