Archive for March, 2014
Mozilla Kills Firefox UI For Metro
States lack of interest.
If you’re one of two people who has been dreaming about the touch friendly version of Firefox for Windows 8 then we have some bad news for you. As it turns out, no one is really interested in such version and therefore, Mozilla has announced its plans to abandon the project.
So how bad the situation are we talking about? Well, according to them, “On any given day we have, for instance, millions of people testing pre-release versions of Firefox desktop, but we’ve never seen more than 1,000 active daily users in the Metro environment,”. As a result, such release could be ridden with bugs since there was little to no testing.
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Download Opera Mini 8 For Java & BlackBerry Devices
For those that are still using old phones, Opera has cooked a pretty delicious treat: a new version of Opera Mini.
So what kind of new features will you find there? First in the list is a “Private Browsing” mode, which you can use when your imagination is running on empty, next is “Night mode”, a pretty neat option that will dim your phone’s display.
Lastly, a refreshed “Data Usage” menu and improved tab access for phones with keypads. Excited? Grab it below.
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Opera: No Windows Phone Version Yet
Internet Explorer 11 remains the status quo.
If you’ve been dreaming about the Opera browser ever since the release of Windows Phone 8 (not to mention occasional hints by Opera guys themselves), then we got some bad news for you.
According to Vera Lasam Bergtun, the Social Media Coordinator at Opera Software, the team behind one of the better mobile browsers haven’t even began working on a version for Microsoft’s platform.
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UC Browser Receives A Significant Update
Windows Phone users rejoice.
Recently, UC Browser has been updated to version 3.4, which brings a couple of new features that are worth mentioning.
First in the list is ability to export downloaded files to SD card or public folder, next is a convenient way to share downloaded files through Bluetooth or QR Code.
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Meet Mozjpeg, Mozilla’s JPEG Encoder Project
Finally, something other than JavaScript.
Recently, Mozilla has announced a new project called “mozjpeg’”, which aims to improve the overall compression of JPEG images, hence also enhancing web page load times.
So what they did so far was to take a fork of libjpeg-turbo (a JPEG image codec that uses SIMD instructions (MMX, SSE2, NEON) to accelerate baseline JPEG compression and decompression) and combine it with ‘jpgcrush’, which, according to Mozilla, reduced the overall sample size of 1500 JPEG images from Wikipedia by 10%.
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February, 2014 Desktop Market Share: Google Chrome – Up; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera – Down
It looks like February is pretty much identical to January, at least in terms of growth.
Somewhat consolidating, Internet Explorer has lost a tiny fraction of market share, down from 58.21% to 58.19% (0.02 point decrease).
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Dell Charges £16.25 For Firefox Installation
Which makes it a rate of £100 an hour.
If you feel extra lazy today and can’t be bothered to install Firefox, then Dell’s installation service is here to rescue you. As it turns out, this is exactly what the tech giant is offering on newly purchased Dell kits.
Now, the story doesn’t end here, upon learning about such practices, Mozilla has started consulting with “legal teams” as this goes against their software distribution policy.
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Microsoft Made A New Font For IE11’s Reading View
Today, Microsoft has published an article about Internet Explorer’s reading mode, which, just as you might expect, focuses on the required content delivery and its readability.
In order to achieve that, the software giant has designed a new font called Sitka and according to Microsoft, it’s “the first typeface family designed with scientific legibility studies integrated directly into the design process”.
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February, 2014 Mobile Market Share: Android Browser, Google Chrome, Opera Mini, Internet Explorer – Up; Safari – Down
Another month, another report.
Kicking things off with Safari, Apple’s web browser saw a decrease in its market share numbers, down from 54.97% to 53.52% (1.45 decrease).
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Microsoft Research: SurroundWeb
Do you remember Microsoft’s IllumiRoom project (see video above)? Then you’ll be happy to know that this very same concept has been applied to the web browsing.
Basically, it’s a 3D Browser that displays data across multiple surfaces in your room (adapting to them too) and allowing you to interact using natural user input.
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