Maxthon 3.2.1.2000 Changelog Summary

New Features:

• MaxSnap: Added printer colors with white. Supported arrow keys to select screenshot area. Supported to adjust the selected area size with Ctrl+arrow keys.
• Now supports “Snap Whole Page” in Retro Mode.

Improvements:

• Updated Webkit Core to enhancw the stability and compatibility of the core features.
• Updated Maxthon Thunder Downloader module.
• Enhanced the compatibility of Magic Fill to support more page types.
• Decreased the installation package by 15%.

The full changelog can be viewed here. Maxthon itself can be downloaded here.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire tablet recently launched in New York. What’s more interesting to us is that the company also showed off a bit of potentially radical software technology as well, namely the new browser for the Fire, called Silk.

Silk is different from other browsers because it can be configured to let Amazon’s cloud service do much of the work assembling complex webpages. The result is that users may experience much faster load times for webpages, compared to other mobile devices, according to the company.

Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos noted that most modern webpages, such as Amazon’s own or CNN’s, are complex creations, with multiple photos, animations, and complex scripts and mark up code. The CNN home page, for instance, is built by the browser from 53 static images, 39 dynamic images, three Flash files, 30 JavaScript files from seven different domains, 29 HTML files and seven CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) files.

The modern Web has become a complicated place. It is difficult – challenging – for mobile devices to display modern webpages rapidly. To speed up page rendering on the Kindle Fire, Silk uses a “split browser” approach. It partially lives in EC2 and it partially lives on Kindle Fire. – Jeff Bezos, Amazon CEO

All the user’s webpage requests will be sent through a service in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) for processing. The service will act as a caching service, as well as a staging area where the more complex bits of webpages can be pre processed before being redirected to the user’s browser.

Silk is fully functional as a stand alone browser. It supports HTML5, JavaScript, CSS, and associated next generation Web standards. It also supports Flash. Amazon built the software from the ground up, using the WebKit open source browser engine.

Safari 5.1 is bundled with Lion, the operating system Apple released earlier yesterday. Good news is that it also runs on Mac OS X 10.6 i.e. Snow Leopard. A separate Safari update to version 5.0.6 was also issued today for users running Mac OS X 10.5, or Leopard.

58 flaws in Safari were patched with this update with one of them specific to the Mac version, 14 that affected only the Windows edition, and 44 that impacted both platforms. 47 of the 58 were associated with Apple’s “arbitrary code execution” phrasing, meaning that the company considered them critical.

The vast majority of the bugs patched today – 43 of the 58 – were in WebKit, the open source browser engine that powers Safari and also Google Chrome.

Multiple memory corruption issues existed in WebKit. Visiting a maliciously crafted website may lead to an unexpected application termination or arbitrary code execution. – The security advisory that accompanied the Safari 5.1 update

Apple’s description indicates that the vulnerabilities could be exploited through drive by attacks that only require cyber criminals to trick victims into visiting a malware serving URL.

Regarding new features, Reading List is one of them, and is inspired by the third party program Instapaper. What it does is eliminate Web ads on content marked for later viewing, so that certainly comes in handy.

Safari 5.1 also supports some features exclusive to Lion, ranging from the operating system’s multi touch support and full screen view to automatic resume and sandboxing.

If a website contains malicious code intended to capture personal data or take control of your computer, sandboxing automatically blocks it to keep your computer and your information safe. - Apple on its Safari 5.1 website today.

Baidu, China’s largest search engine has launched the Beta version of its own web browser, which was in development for quite some time, as reported earlier by FavBrowser.

Codenamed FlyFlow, Baidu Browser uses the WebKit rendering engine that seems to be a number one choice for many web browser developers these days.

Furthermore, FlyFlow has over 30,000 available applications for its users to choose from, ranging from online games to videos.

Download.

Via: PCWorld.

[Thanks, Sebastian]

Brings terminal into 21st century.

If you’ve been playing with the terminal for many years, like this guy, then 80s like command line interface is probably already wired into your brain.

Why does it have to be like that? Good question.

Steven Wittens had the same issue and came up with a solution: he took WebKit and built a rich command line interface called TermKit.

Want to know more? For all the details and thought process, check the original blog post.

Here is how:

- Start your web browser with the remote-debugging-port command line switch and open preferred pages.

Chromium –remote-debugging-port=9222

- Using other web browser, navigate to the given port and you should see all the opened pages from other web browser as web links:

- Just hit on one of those links and start debugging.

Here is how everything works:

Target browser acts as a web server bound to the port 9222 on the localhost.

Once you follow the link, your client browser fetches HTML, JavaScript and CSS files of the Web Inspector front-end over HTTP. Chromium serves as a web server in this case.

Upon load event, Web Inspector establishes Web Socket connection back to the target browser and starts interchanging JSON messages with it.

Source: WebKit

Browsers

Internet Explorer 8
Internet Explorer 9
Firefox 3.6
Firefox 4
Google Chrome 7
Google Chrome 8
Opera 11
Opera 10.6
Safari 5
WebKit

Results

Higher is better. Maximum score: 377 points.

Internet Explorer 8 – 32
Internet Explorer 9 Beta – 80
Firefox 3.6.10 – 145
Firefox 4 Beta 6 – 235
Google Chrome 7.0.517.41 – 248
Google Chrome 8.0.552.11 Beta – 262
Opera 11 Alpha – 223
Opera 10.63 – 203
Safari 5.0.2 – 178
WebKit r70433 – 196

Conclusion

As per our test, Google Chrome 8 takes the lead, followed by Google Chrome 7 and Firefox 4 Beta 6.

Unfortunately for Internet Explorer 9 and 8, they are in the bottom, followed by Firefox 3.6 and Safari 5.

Thanks to Nox for the tip.

[digg-reddit-me]

What’s new?
In order to access specific web sites faster, engineers have redesigned browser start page which now includes a single URL and search entry box. Therefore, as you enter address, it will also seek your history and bookmarks sections.

There is also a a “Tabbed Browsing” icon in the top right corner allowing you to access currently opened sites. It’s also worth mentioning that the approach is similar to Apple’s Safari browser, where you slide through web page thumbnails.

Anything else? Yes, it also features a social feeds integration, new options menu and improved content viewing capabilities. Visit the following post for more details.

[digg-reddit-me]

Although it’s still in early development stages, browser does look promising and we are looking forward to the final version capabilities.

[digg-reddit-me]