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analysis / linux / software / technology — 5 Comments
27
Aug 11

Linux Browsers Compared – Firefox Aurora, Opera Next, Chrome Dev

Web Browsers Compared

The browser war is once again at it’s peak. Google Chrome has shaken up the web browsers landscape on Linux in terms of speed and it’s agile release cycle. Older established players like Firefox and Opera have responded with their own faster release cycles. All of the browsers allow ends uses to preview and test  upcoming versions. Firefox now has the Aurora channel and Opera has the Next release channel to preview the future versions.

firefox-aurora-download-cropped
opera-next-download-cropped

This review compares the current in-development versions of the Chrome, Firefox and Opera web browsers on Linux.  Is the new release cycle of Firefox and Opera helping them to match Chrome in speed and performance? Cutting the chase, lets find out.

Browsers Tested

  • Opera Next 12 pre-alpha amd64
  • Firefox Aurora 8.0a2 2011-08-25 amd64
  • Google Chrome dev  15.0.861.0  amd64

Test Methodology

  • All extensions disabled in each browser
  • Only one test was run at a time
  • All browser cache in a tmpfs ram disk

Test System

  • CPU   – AMD Phenom X6 1055
  • RAM –  8 GB DDR3 1300
  • Disk – Intel X25V  40 GB
  • Graphic Card – Zoatc Geforce GT 460 768Mb
  • OS Ubuntu 11.04 running Unity/ 2.6.38-11-generic #48-Ubuntu SMP

The Tests

V8 Benchmark Suite – version 6

V8 Benchmark Suite - version 6 - Higher is Better

Google  Chrome dev  is the stand-out winner in the benchmark, for obvious reasons.  This is the bench mark that developers of Google Chrome uses to baseline he V8 javascript engine and most likely Chrome is heavily optimised for  this benchmark.  Firefox and Opera fall way behind as a distant second and third respectively.

Sunspider

Sunspide 0.9.1 - Lower is better (ms)

This is another javascript benchmark.   Here the difference between Chrome and Firefox is not so dramatic as in the V8 benchmark, but tables are turned.  Firefox is significantly faster in this benchmark, interestingly even Opera is faster then Chrome.

HTML 5 Test Suite

HTML5 Suite - Higher is better

The HTML5 test suite indicates how well the browser can render HTML5.  Google Chrome with 342/450 leads the pack, with Opera coming last with 286/450. Firefox is in between with 314/450.

This will be a bench mark to watch out for in future. As HTML5 becomes more widespread in the future, the winner will be the one that has the best support for HTML5.

Acid3 Test

Sunspide 0.9.1 - Lower is better (ms)

Only Firefox Aurora misses out the perfect hunderd and could manage 97/100; while both Google Chrome dev and Opera Next came up with perfect 100/100.

Final Words

It is clear from all the benchmark Chrome remains the king of speed and performance on Linux.

These preview versions of the web browsers we have compared will be released before the end of this year, and Chrome will remain the leader for 2011.

What does Firefox and Opera have for 2012 that will beat Chrome ?

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software — No Comments
05
Apr 08

Install Older Extersions on Firefox 3 Beta

There is a pretty easy way of making older extensions compatible and successfully install on Firefox 3.0 Beta. This should make your test drive on the Firefox 3 Beta build a little more nicer.

Mozilla does not allow incompatible versions of extensions to install on FIrefox for some good reason. Incompatible extension may install through a backdoor,  but there is no guarantee if this will work at all and not cause trouble. Installing is one thing, but making it work is something else. So be cautioned, but if you would still like to try it out read on.

Nightly Tester Tool (NTT) extension –  Lets walk through the process with an example. In my case, AdBlock Plus extension was not compatible with Firefox 3 b5.

  1. Download  & Install the Nightly Tester Tool from this link (external link).
  2. Once NTT extension is installed, restart Firefox. After Firefox restarts, go to the menu : Tools -> Add-ons
  3. On the add-ons pop-up select the NTT plugin and click on  “Make All Compatible”.

The Nightly Tester Tool appears capable of  much more than making older extensions compatible. We will look at this extension itself some other day.

Systems Tested on :

  1. Firefox 3 Beta 5 – Mac OSX 10.5 (Leopard), 20″ iMac Core Duo (early 2006)
  2. Firefox 3 Beta 5 – Windows XP SP2, DeLL D630 Core 2 Duo

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analysis — No Comments
26
Jan 07

ICICI Bank : Anti-Phising ads on National TV

In recent times phishing (read scam) on the internet in increasingly becoming a nasty threat. The term phising generally refers to a kind of internet fraud where an unsupecting person receives an apparently genuine looking email, which has been carefully forged to look almost like an genuine email. Typically, such emails would cite some genuine looking information and ask unsuspecting people to reply back with passwords or pin numbers. In some cases, these emails would provide links to phishing website, that impersonated the real website. If a user clicks on such links and tried to log into the forged website, his/her password would get logged and misused by the phisher(the person or the group responsible for the scam).
Know more about phishing here and here.

ICICI Bank is one of the largest banks in India. Recently it has started a Television campaign on national TV to make people aware of threats of phishing. It is really appreciable effort on the part of the ICICI Bank to launch this effort. In general most people are not aware of what phishing is all about and can easily fall prey to internet scamsters. Like most banks ICICI has a web page education customers on internet frauds and phishing (Link to the page) .
The internet scamsters are always finding innovative ways to dupe normal people who use the internet. Along with awareness of the internet threats, using a good set of tools while using internet could help :

  1. Use email service or email clients that support anti-spam.Email services like Yahoo mail and Gmail have effective anti-spam tools. Email clients like Mozilla Thunderbird, Apple Mail have very good anti-spam filters built into it.
  2. Use web browser that warns when a the user for some reason ends up in a suspected phishing site. Mozilla Firefox 2.0, Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and Opera 9 supports built in anti-phishing protection.
  3. Third party tools like MacAfee Site Advisor can also be very helpful on protecting the end user against phishing and other internet spam. Site Advisor works with both Internet Explorer and Firefox.

ICICI Bank is right on with their campaign against the internet threats like phising. Their nationalally televised ads against phishing will go a long way to make the average internet user aware of threats of internet scams and help safer internet experience. Keep up the good work ICICI Bank.

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macintosh — 1 Comment
09
May 06

Firefox on Mac – Useful Extensions (Part 1) – FlashGot Download Manager

Even in its default installation, the popular Open Source web browser, Firefox is quite feature rich. Most of the competing browsers are playing the catchup game, with the only exception is Opera. The key USP of Firefox is the ability to extend the default browser using the numerous extension available for free. There is a plethora of extension available at this site. There are extension for blocking web ads, for writing blogs, for tracking stocks, for managing downloads ………….

Over the next few days I will cover some of the most useful Firefox extension. For today, I intend to cover extensions for managing downloads. I am writing this post on Firefox 1.5.3 Mac OSX (universal).

FlashGot

Where to get : https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/220/

How to Install : From the above page click on the “Install Now” link.

How to configure: From Firefox menubar go to Tools -> Extensions. A new window pops up. Select FlashGot here and click “Preference” at the bpttom of the window.

At the time of writing this piece, FlashGot was the most downloaded extension on the mozilla.org extension site. The reason this extension is so popular is because the default download manager is firefox is quite inadequet for large file downloads.

Default Firefox Downloads Window

As you can see from the screenshot to the right, this is the stock download manager you will find in Frefox or Safari (this still is better than the one in IE6 or IE7 Beta). I still say this is inadequate because :

  1. It cannot resume broken downloads
  2. It cannot do multi part downloads which is critical is speeding the downloads

So, we have to depend on third party products like iGetter or Speed Download on Mac. Unfortunately the developers of these tools do not have plugins for Frefox.

FlashGot fills the important void by allowing us to seamlessly use these download acceletors from Firefox. This makes FlashGot a must have.

FlashGot supports lot of download managers or accelerators. After installation, FlashGot can autodetect which download manager you would want to us. In my case I use iGetter, and I will use iGetter as an example here.. Flashgot can autodetect downloads that needs to be transfered to iGetter by the type of content. Suppose, I need to download the latest update for firefox. FlashGot will see that this is a dmg file and pass this iGetter. Downloading with iGetter is far more secure and faster then the stock Firefox download manager.

FlashGot is designed for ease of use and can work without any custom configuration. For power users it also suports quite extensive set of configuration options.

Options

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macintosh / reviews — No Comments
08
May 06

Firefox Mac OSX Theme

Firefox Mac Theme
Firefox Mac Theme,originally uploaded by manaskb.

Mac OSX users can make Firefox look like Safari using the GrApple theme that can be found here : http://www.takebacktheweb.org/

Safari is a pretty good browser, still there are some people like me who would like to use Firefox (www.mozilla.com). Safari users who would like to move to Firefox would be at home after installing this theme.

How to Install :

Go to site : http://www.takebacktheweb.org/

find the Mac OSX theme you like. Just click on the “Install Now” button for the theme you have selected.

Other option : From Firefox ->Tools->Themes-> Get New themes; This opens a new browser window for the addons.mozilla.org site. On the search box, search for GrApple. You will get the Mac OSX themes for Firefox.

Note : These themes only work on Mac OSX. If you are on Windows, just get a Mac 🙂

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