Opera 12 Alpha + Hardware Acceleration = Fast!

Last week saw the release of Opera 12 Alpha with full hardware acceleration for WebGL graphics.

Opera 12 Alpha can be downloaded from their site over here.

The main benefits being touted include:

• Faster graphics with hardware acceleration
• New HTML5 engine
• Faster browsing with reduced memory usage
• New themes
• New address field
• WebGL support for games 3D content

All in all it's looking good for this release.  To get the most out of Opera 12 Alpha although you will need to have a modern graphics card with up to date drivers.  DirectX support isn't in there yet  but the notes claim this will be available later at some point.

It's a good release for an alpha and it feels smooth and speedy.  I still find that some pages look a little odd sometimes in Opera, and it's something that has happened over the past five or six releases and I have never worked out why.   That might just be me, but I don't think it is.  It's also a bit of a memory snatcher as well, but this is quite typical of an early release.  It's worth a try anyway.

Firefox 7 Released (three weeks ago!)

In a rather delayed post, Firefox 7 has now been released, wooo!  The release comes just six weeks  (yes you read that correctly) after Firefox 6 arrived.  The two major selling points of this release are speed (as ever!) and the memory demand has been reduced by half, which is quite impressive.

Over the past few releases, I have noticed that Firefox has become a bit of a pig for the amount of memory it uses.  Why that is I'm not sure, but anything like this is always a welcome boost.

For web developers, the news gets better.  Navigation timing spec will benchmark your pages which I'm all in favour of as this is something that I've always tried to run to get the best out of the user experience.  More good news comes from the people that make Firefox who claim that this release will be less likely to break your addons.  There is better support for compatibility with your older addons that were download from their own site, however bits from elsewhere may not work as well.

Firefox Silent Updates

Future versions of Mozilla Firefox will shortly be delivering updates to your computer without you even knowing about it, saving users the bother of downloading and installing updates.  Good idea?  Maybe.

Right now, both Firefox and Chrome are seeing frequent updates and if reports are to be believed, Microsoft will be joining that party soon with the development releases of Internet Explorer 10.  The danger is that users are no longer aware of these updates and what benefits they will bring.  Personally, I'm a little bored of minor releases being marked as new version releases which I feel Firefox has been doing as of late.

Notifications are irritating, full stop.  Every time I load Firefox at the moment it tells me that an update is available.  The problem is, I don't want to update.  The last time I did this, it broke all of my addons which is one of the reasons that I use the browser in the first place.  Ironic.  This will also cause problems in large companies where users do not have permission to install updates and then deployment also becomes a problem.  This is why most companies use Internet Explorer which ties in nicely with other Microsoft products so that updates are easily deployed along with security fixes.  Right now, Mozilla say that they are testing a Windows service that will install an optional component that will automate the update install without UAC prompts.  Sorry, but if something changes on my machine, I want to know what is going on.

This is both good and bad, but perhaps they need to start to change the approach that they are taking right now.  The benefits may outweigh the problems.  By taking the rapid release cycle approach, we are constantly moving forward so that we are no longer stuck with older browsers like we had with the IE6 fiasco.  I really am in favour of this as the envelope of web technology is constantly being taken forward.  As long as the way in which pages are rendered doesn't change, this is good with me.  I remember when IE7 was released and many developers complained back then that had to write hacks to get their code to work with IE6.  This can't be allowed to happen again.

So yeah, as you can imagine I'm a little divided!

Google Page Speed for Chrome and Online

Another of my favourite performance tools for reducing every millisecond from loading times is Google Page Speed.  Although it's a little fiddly to install (fiddly in the sense that it takes more than 30 seconds), it's still a brilliant extension to have for Chrome.

If you already have Chrome, take a look over at the Page Speed site for what it brings to the table.  The install notes and download links are available here.

Again, I recommend using this in addition to certain other tools so that absolutely everything is covered.  Other tools that you really should use are: -

• Smush.it;
• Yslow (Firefox, Chrome and Opera extensions available);
• JCompress;
• HTML Validator Firefox extension;
• Firebug Firefox extension;

Don't take everything that these tools say as gospel though.  There are some things that you might absolutely need to load first, i.e. your JQuery JavaScript for example.  And while I'm about JQuery, Page Speed also picked up errors in the code that aren't your fault and aren't easily correctable so you will get marked down for those.  Other things in there are quite easy to correct, such as where you've specified an image but missed out the image dimensions for example.  I managed to get my site up to 98/100 which I'm quite happy with.
Some of the recommendations that it will ask you to make include: -

• Minify HTML and JavaScript;
• Combine images into CSS sprites and avoid CSS @import;
• Optimise images and specify dimensions;
• Specify a character set;
• Put CSS in your document head;

I found that it made a small difference, but if that difference is your user sticking with you and the user going elsewhere, it could well be worth a small amount of your time.  Oh and lastly, there is an online version of this available as well.  Head over to Page Speed Online and give your site a test.  It should also be noted that there is a version available for Firefox versions 4 and above.

YSlow now Available for Opera, Chrome in Beta

For those of you who have read some of my previous posts, you will know that I'm a big fan of the YSlow extension that until now has only been available for Firefox.

For those of you who don't know what YSlow is, it's basically a small tool that analyses every part of page performance.  Each aspect of your site is graded and improvements are suggested.  If you get a chance, have a read through my post on 'How to Speed up Your Website' where I use YSlow in combination with a number of other tools that really work.

Chrome users can have their cake as well, albeit a slightly smaller piece until it leaves the beta stage.  Version 3.0.6 is available from the Chrome Web Store right now.

YSlow really is one of the best tools out there for squeezing every drop of performance out of your pages.  Be aware for those people who want to use this who are using Firefox, you will need to have the Firebug extension installed.

If you want to get started, here is what you need to do.

1. Using Opera for desktop, install the extension from the Opera extensions sites.
2. Visit the website you'd like to measure the performance of.
3. Click the YSlow icon in your toolbar, then click the "Run Test" button.

For more details about YSlow, take a look at the main YSlow site.

Beef up your Security with HTTPS Everywhere

EFF have released HTTPS Everywhere version 1.0 for Firefox as the project has recently come out of the beta testing stage.

The question is, why should you use it and what does it give you?

Well, in a nutshell it enables you to browse the web securely, even when you don't realise that you aren't browsing an HTTPS enabled website.  The problem with a lot of what you do is that a lot of your requests are sent over a vanilla HTTP connection, which is, err, insecure.  For example, your normal request to http://www.facebook.com/ will be redirected to https://www.facebook.com/.  Simples!

HTTPS Everywhere addresses this issue by rewriting all of your requests to HTTPS.  Full details of the product are available here, and the download is available from here.  It also boasts that it now supports over 1000 websites including all of the big names such as Google, Wikipedia, Twitter, Facebook and PayPal to name a few.

If you use Firefox, then this is a must as 'it just works' to quote Apple without you even noticing.

If PHP Were British...

I've just come across this great article from AddedBytes which is quite frankly, brilliant!

It's a bit tongue in cheek but very funny if you read through the article.

Taken from the article:

When Rasmus Lerdorf first put PHP together, he - quite sensibly, despite his heritage - chose not to write it in Greenlandic or Danish. Good job too - that would have been rather unpleasant to work with. He opted instead, being in Canada at the time, for the local tongue. No, not French - that bastard dialect of the Queen's English commonly referred to as "US English".

PHP developers in Britain have been grumpy about this ever since. What was he thinking? And more importantly, how do we undo this travesty? How do we developers ensure the traditions of the British Empire continue to be upheld, even in the digital age?

Enjoy!