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September 15, 2010

Internet Explorer 9 Beta Available Today

Internet Explorer 9 Beta Drops. It’s Lean, Fast and Modern


Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

Microsoft released the first beta version of its new Internet Explorer web browser Wednesday morning.
Internet Explorer 9 Beta was made available for download shortly after it was announced at a launch event in San Francisco, around 10:00 a.m. Pacific time. The download link for Windows Vista and Windows 7 users can be accessed here.

The final version of IE9 is still some months off — Microsoft wouldn’t commit to a definite time frame for the browser’s release when we asked. But we’ve spent a few days in IE9 Beta’s company, and so far, it has proven to be a thoroughly modern machine. The world’s most-used browser is getting a new look, much expanded support for HTML5 and other 21st-century web technologies, and a big speed boost.

Quite a change. Microsoft has a reputation for being an also-ran when it comes to browser innovation. When IE8 arrived in March 2009, we found it rich in features, but lacking in support for the emerging standards powering the shiny apps that make the web exciting. IE8 was faster and more secure than its predecessor, but when it came to speed and productivity, it wasn’t up to snuff with its peers — Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera. In fact, it was a bit of a snooze.

A year and a half on, Microsoft has smelled the coffee and is wide awake at the wheel. IE is fit to play in the same league as the other browsers.

Keep in mind, IE9 Beta is still pre-release code, so it may not run perfectly. But there’s enough new going on here — especially that speed boost — to make the download a must for the curious who want a taste of IE’s future.

A new look

 

The most striking difference between this browser release and the IEs of old is the new user interface. It’s sleek and minimal, and — what are those? — it now has the inverted top-tabs, which are quickly becoming common.

We first caught wind of this design change when a screenshot of the new IE9 leaked onto the web. It decreases the amount of real estate the browser consumes on screen and makes way for more content.


 

Another shot of IE9 Beta.

“The browser is the stage and the backdrop, but the website is the star of the show,” Microsoft general manager of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch tells Wired.com. “We think the browser should totally take a back seat to the sites.” Freeing up those extra pixels with a minimal top bar is a path others in the industry are taking. Chrome shipped with the tabs-on-top look two years ago, Mozilla has adopted it for Firefox 4, and Safari has flirted with in the past. Opera offers a few different choices for where to put your tabs.

Other notable details: a unified search and URL bar (a la Google Chrome) where you can get search suggestions as you type. Bing is the default, but you can add Google, Wikipedia or a host of other engines. There’s also an enlarged back button, (a la Firefox) and a noticeable lack of menu items in the main bar. Something else new in IE9 is the New Tab window with thumbnails of your most commonly-visited sites, which looks much like what you’ll find in Safari, Chrome and Opera. A nice addition here is a little bar in each thumbnail that shows how much time you’ve spent on each site.


The reason these same design themes (top-tabs, unified URL bar) keep showing up in all the browsers is that they just make sense from a usability standpoint. Designers use a constantly evolving visual language to suggest interactions.

It’s no different than the way advertisers, filmmakers and visual artists borrow ideas from each other to trigger certain emotions and reactions in an audience.
So we can’t cry “copycat.” Plus, IE9 does offer some unique UI enhancements you won’t find elsewhere.

One is the new notification system — instead of a pop-up in the middle of the screen or at the top (“You need to install Flash!”), you see only a slim notification about as tall as your index finger slide up from the bottom of the screen.
But the coolest new innovation is the ability to “pin” a web page to your Windows taskbar.

Pinned sites

 

Instead of bookmarking a site, clicking the “favorite” star or dragging a favicon to the bookmarks bar — all of which you can still do, of course — you can drag the favicon to the Windows taskbar at the bottom of the screen. Once it’s there, the browser’s buttons will change color to match the color of the favicon, making the browser feel more like a site-specific tool than just an all-purpose piece of software.

“We’re saying ‘Look at the site!’ instead of ‘Look at the app,’” Hachamovitch says.
Something else happens in the taskbar that enhances this effect.



It works sort of like a Fluid app or a Prism app. Click on the favicon in the taskbar and the site launches in a new, single-tabbed window. Right-click on it and you get a jump list — a list of actions specific to that website like “Top Stories” or “Latest Photos”.

Hachamovitch says Microsoft is responding to users’ desire to go directly to a website from the desktop. He cites internal Microsoft data that shows only about ten percent of IE users actually launch sites from the bookmark bar. The rest type URLs or click a link somewhere on the deskop.

“We’ve spent 15 years developing a browser UI, and nobody’s using it,” he says. “What actually gets used is the landscape around the browser.”

These action inside the jump lists can be defined by site developers, who can add whatever they want by adding some markup to their pages (we weren’t supplied with examples of this markup in time for Wednesday’s launch, but we’ll provide details as soon as we can). There are also default actions to close the window and to start an In-Private browsing session, so if there’s no special markup added to the page, at least those will appear.

Performance

 

As we noted in the most recent preview releases, IE9 earns big points for performance improvements. It’s the same story with Wednesday’s beta.

IE9 Beta owes much of its speed boost to the new hardware acceleration features inside the browser. It passes off the most complex rendering tasks — animations, video and heavily-styled text — to the graphics processor, and its new JavaScript engine (which Microsoft calls Chakra) is capable of using your PC’s extra processing cores to execute scripts on pages.

We first saw these hardware acceleration enhancements in the third preview release of IE9, and we’ve seen other browsers incorporating similar features recently, as well.

Firefox 4, now in the beta stage but due in a month or two, has similar hardware acceleration features that tap into the same Windows 7 APIs that IE uses (Firefox’s extra hardware sauce is only available on Windows builds for now). Also,

Google Chrome has begun including hardware acceleration for compositing in both Chrome 6 and Chrome 7 builds for Windows.

Since this is still a beta, we’re likely to see very close to the same level of performance when the browser ships. Between now and then, you may encounter some quirks and bugs.

The enhancements to the JavaScript engine were evident when I ran some of Microsoft’s official demos on its test drive site, as well as in the SunSpider benchmark suite. In real-world applications, like Gmail and Facebook, the browser’s speed and behavior was very close to what I normally see in Chrome and Firefox. There were a few things that didn’t work as advertised, like the chat windows in Gmail. They failed to minimize properly, preferring to dumbly blink when I clicked on them.
Developer’s tools are built in (just hit F12) if you want to dig into the DOM or measure performance.

Web standards

 

Internet Explorer 9’s support for both established and emerging web standards is sure to be sharply scrutinized. It’s an area where previous versions of IE have lagged considerably. For years, Microsoft was loathe to adopt support for unratified standards, considering them a moving target and thus a waste of time. As such, IE8 contained only partial support for HTML5 and newer CSS 3 components.

With IE9 Beta, we see a reversal of that stance. IE9 supports much of HTML5, and there’s a new parser to handle the new markup language. There’s support for native playback of audio and video files, and the Canvas element, with support for animated 2-D polygons and text. HTML5 selection is supported, but not drag-and-drop or Microdata.

The Scalable Vector Graphics, or SVG, standard is supported, and like other animation and media features in the browser, it can take advantage of hardware acceleration.

There’s finally real support for CSS 3 in this release — media queries, borders and backgrounds, selectors, the fonts module and the Web Open Font Format, or WOFF, rich type standard, among other things.

Web standards support in IE9 isn’t perfect (who can claim that?), but it’s certainly admirable. Most importantly, IE9 is likely to be a boon for the web when the final version ships sometime in the coming months.

Once all the Windows 7 and Vista users out there update to the final version of IE9 — either manually or automatically — the web will begin its shift to a new era where the large majority of browsers can handle more complex graphics, behaviors and markup. Which is not to say the web won’t still be fractured and forked in various ways (vendor-specific capabilities will probably always be around), but the browser’s arrival will signal a much-needed step forward.

What’s next?

 

Internet Explorer 9 will arrive either later this year or early 2011 — Microsoft isn’t saying. And that brings up a danger point.

The number two and three browser vendors have all sped up their development cycles. Chrome is releasing new code every six to eight weeks, and Mozilla is committed to pushing out new Firefox releases every six months. Microsoft has made no mention of its intent to speed up its own browser release schedule, so it’s likely Internet Explorer 10 is a year or two off. Meanwhile, the competition will continue to deliver improvements at a pace that far outstrips Microsoft.

This article originally appeared on Webmonkey.com, Wired’s site for all things web development, browsers and web apps. Follow Webmonkey on Twitter.

See Also:


Read More http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2010/09

September 14, 2010

Free Chrome add-on turns Web into music library

June 16, 2010 6:03 PM PDT

by Matt Rosoff, CNET

ExtensionFM is a free Chrome add-on that catalogs every free MP3 file you run across and builds a virtual library. It's an amazingly convenient way to discover and catalog new music without waiting for downloads, and may convince me to use Chrome on a regular basis.



Chrome has always seemed like a solution in search of a problem: I've had Firefox installed on my PCs and Mac for years now and it works fine 99 percent of the time. If I need an alternative I can always go with the built-in Internet Explorer (Windows) or Safari (Mac). Chrome may render some pages more quickly, and I like some of its user interface features, but not enough to switch.

The ExtensionFM music library contains links to MP3s from sites that you surf with the Chrome browser.

But ExtensionFM actually changed how I think of Web browsing, blurring the line between offline and online in a very seductive way. The basic idea is straightforward: install the add-on, and from that point on, any time you run across a page that has a link to a downloadable MP3 file, ExtensionFM will add a permanent link to that MP3 to its library, which looks a lot like iTunes (or just about any other music player). The ExtensionFM library is always accessible from Chrome--just click the icon in the upper-right corner of the browser, and you'll launch a tab with the library. The library itself lets you organize all the MP3 links by source, artist, or album, and you can stream any song on demand or add it to a queue. If you don't like a song, you can delete it from the library.

The experience is a lot like surfing the Web for free MP3s and downloading every single one of them, except without waiting for downloads. I installed it and after about five minutes of surfing I had an on-demand library containing more than 100 songs from music blogs like Spinner and Brooklyn Vegan, as well as from a couple of Seattle bands that have made free MP3s available on their sites.

ExtensionFM will continue to feed new links from these pages into its library with no further intervention on my part--every time the Spinner home page is updated with more free MP3s, they'll appear in my library.

The experience isn't perfect. Some of the listings in the library didn't link to a real sound file, and I had to delete them manually. Some listings had wrong or missing data (no artist name, or a title like "Free download"). It doesn't work at all with files that require you to launch a mini-Flash player to play. And the library could get large and cluttered quite quickly. Nonetheless, if you're constantly on the hunt for new music, this is a great way to access large volumes of free music without having to download each file yourself.


It's also the first really great example I've seen of how Google envisions the future of the Web, in which the lines between offline and online blur and the Web browser becomes the only application you need. Sure, there are plenty of Web apps today--I spend a large part of my day in them, including Google's Gmail service. But most Web apps run inside a browser window and disappear as soon as you close that window, and the application itself is responsible for storing data (usually in a back-end database, sometimes in the browser cache). ExtensionFM is a persistent application that runs in conjunction with the browser regardless of where the browser's currently pointed, and it stores only the links to data, which can come from multiple sources around the Web--the data themselves never leave their original spots. It's a subtle but fascinating difference.
Matt Rosoff is an analyst with Directions on Microsoft, where he covers Microsoft's consumer products and corporate news. He's written about the technology industry since 1995, and reviewed the first Rio MP3 player for CNET.com in 1998. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mattrosoff.


Source: http://news.cnet.com/8301-13526_3-20007988-27.html

The link to get Extension FM is: https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/ehohhddamheegbbkabfgegbaeminghlb


September 3, 2010

10 Sources for Free Textbooks Online

How to Find Free Textbooks Online


Ten sources for free online textbooks

By , About.com Guide

Going to university is expensive, and textbooks can make the bill go even higher. However, you don't have to break the bank to finance a good education; there are plenty of places on the Web where you can find and download free online textbooks for nearly any class available. Here are ten sources on the Web you can use to find free textbooks freely available to either download and print offline or view online in your browser.

1. USE GOOGLE

The first place to start when looking for a textbook is Google, using the filetype command. Type in filetype:pdf, followed by the name of the textbook you're looking for in quotes. Here's an example:
filetype:pdf "history of anthropology"
If you don't have any luck with the book's title, try the author (again, surrounded by quotes), or, you can also look for another type of file: PowerPoint (ppt), Word (doc), etc.



2. OPEN CULTURE

Open Culture, a fascinating repository of some of the best content on the Web, has assembled an ongoing database of free textbooksranging in subject from Biology to Physics. This list will be updated on a regular basis.
MIT has offered free, open courseware for several years now, and along with these free classes comes free textbooks. You'll have to search for specific classes and/or textbooks on the site in order to find what you're looking for.

4. TEXTBOOK REVOLUTION

Run by students, Textbook Revolution offers free textbooks organized by subject, license, course, collections, topic, and level.

5. FLAT WORLD KNOWLEDGE

Flat World Knowledge is an interesting site that offers textbooks free of charge, mixed with other applicable resources that serve as supplements. All of the books are free to view online.

6. ONLINE MATHEMATICS TEXTBOOKS

Professors from the Georgia Institute of Technology have collated an impressive list of online mathematics texts, ranging from calculus to mathematical biology.

7. WIKIBOOKS

Wikibooks offers a wide variety of free textbooks (over 2000 at the time of this writing), in subjects from computing to social sciences.

8. FREE DIGITAL TEXTBOOK INITIATIVE

From the California Learning Resource Network, the Free Digital Textbook Initiative offers a good selection of free textbooks suitable for both high school and college students.

9. CURRIKI



Curriki isn't just about free textbooks, although you can find those at the site. Curriki offers a fantastic array of free educational resources, anything from science kits to novel studies.

10. SCRIBD

Scribd is a huge database of user-contributed content. Sometimes you can get lucky and find full textbooks here; type in the name of your book into the search field and hit "enter". For example, I just found a textbook about quantum physics mechanics.

Search all of Craigslist with SearchTempest

Search all of Craigslist with SearchTempest

Monday August 30, 2010, from Wendy Boswell, Ask.com
searchtempest
I'm a huge fan of Craigslist, but searching for something on more than just one geographic location is a bit tricky. That's where SearchTempest comes in.
SearchTempest lets you search as much or as little of Craigslist as you possibly can handle, for any category, whether it be jobs, real estate, stuff for sale, etc. Here's how a basic search on SearchTempest works:
  • Key your location into the "Where" search field. Using the drop-down menu right beneath the search field, decide how far or near you'd like your search to range. You have the option of just a few miles to anywhere Craigslist roams within Canada, the United States, or Mexico (not sure why Europe, Africa, and other countries outside the range of North America weren't included).
  • Type what you're looking for, say, a new iPhone or a leather couch or a new car, into the "What" field. You can get as advanced or as vague as you want to be here (note: usually, starting out a little vague rather than exceedingly detailed will bring back better search results).
  • Click "Search" and you'll see your results, which will start at the Craigslist closest to you and fan out from there. SearchTempest gives you quite a few options for manipulating your search results: you can map something, get directions, delete a location you don't want, sort by date, best price, best match, state, distance, size; you can even get anRSS feed for results you'd like to keep track of.
In a word, SearchTempest is fantastic. I've only spent about 45 minutes on the site so far and I can tell you right now that it's definitely going to save me a lot of time and effort. Job seekers, especially, should take advantage of how SearchTempest can expand a job search - I plan on adding to my list of useful job search engines.
More about Craigslist