May 2008

Links for 2008-05-18

by Sujoy on May 18, 2008

Why to Use Mozilla Firefox and Download Latest Firefox

10 Most Beautiful Looking Linux Desktop.

Winrar Password Recovery Tool Released !!

Watch out for Ipod news, views and reviews

So it has been a year and a half since the last major release of the favorite browser of many- Firefox. We have gone through the different levels of Beta versions for the last couple of months, and now it has finally arrived. The Release candidate 1. There has already been a lot of buzz going on about the many improvements in this version, and here we are discussing them.

Mozilla’s implementation of JavaScript in the new version is claimed to be twice as faster compared to its predecessor. Now, we all know the magnitude of the usage of JavaScript in web content today. And in a way, that is why it makes Firefox WORK. And yes, they have introduced a Memory Cycle Collector (more on that here), which frees memory which is no more used by any modules. For example, if Firefox is kept open and idle for hours, it would no longer suck unnecessary memory- resulting in more Support from us Fanbois. Yayy!! Oh, and yes, PGO-Profile Guided Optimisations -available only for Windows at the moment, designed for significant upgrading of performance.

The Auto Complete Address Bar is way too cool. And guess what, it ain’t limited to just popular web-addresses, but also to Favorites, History and Tags. And now to the most important addition feature- PLACES.

Places is a Bookmark and History Manager. For people like us, who have cluttered Bookmark Bars and Bookmarks scattered everywhere, this is our Kryptonite. It is powered by SQL Lite, (which is also Open Source, and is a lightweight search engine with robust querying capabilities). It is where you can search your History, Tags and Bookmarks and yes, even search a particular Search as Smart Search. And in case you are wondering what Tag am I talking about for so long, Tagging is a new feature on Firefox 3. Much like what we do with blog posts , or Delicious or StumbleUpon, here we do it on our browser.

And yes, apart from all of the above mentioned points, it has got a new UI suited for your OS, an Addon Manager, a more secure Anti-Forgery Site Blocker.Phew. But yes, it has its share of bugs, and they are here in this link of the release notes. Apart from that, you’d like to read the following posts as well.

Full review of Firefox RC1.

Ostatic: A guided tour of Firefox RC1

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Gmail Gets BOOSTED

by Sujoy on May 14, 2008

Our older friendly GMail gave us a new user mail experience compared to the other services that were available. Firstly, it concentrated on one important point and that was- Mail. Inbox is all about how simple and fast we can load the inbox and get to our mails. Not some fancy graphic flashing on the top or some widget loading on and on and on. But with the new version of GMail, we have been encountering certain problems. For example, in sending attachments, or open large mails, or mails with image links etc. We have all seen the irritating message ” This is taking longer than usual”. I even faced other problems like my Chat becoming disabled all of a sudden, or the other error message ” System encountered an error”.

The New GMail Blog post assures GMail users to not face the above mentioned problems anymore and even feel an enhanced user experience. According to the post by Wiltse Carpenter, GMail’s load time has seen a 20% reduction compared to when they started the service. Hmm, hard to believe. But I would like to. Anyway, the technical details of how the reduction of performance time has been implemented is given on the blog. Although, I would like to include an excerpt of it.

We spent hours poring over these traces to see exactly what was happening between the browser and Gmail during the sign-in sequence, and we found that there were between fourteen and twenty-four HTTP requests required to load an inbox and display it. To put these numbers in perspective, a popular network news site’s home page required about a 180 requests to fully load when I checked it yesterday. But when we examined our requests, we realized that we could do better. We decided to attack the problem from several directions at once: reduce the number of overall requests, make more of the requests cacheable by the browser, and reduce the overhead of each request.

So did they finally achieve it? Find out on the blog.