Avencius

The Opera Core Concerns blog has been updated with a post about the upcoming support for native JSON. Now this may not be new as other browsers already support it, but the inclusion in Opera is.

The folks at Opera Software are working hard. On one hand they're working on the increasing popularity of web applications (Opera 10.20 with stand-alone widgets), while on the other hand working on speed (Opera 10.50 probably includes the new JavaScript engine called Carakan).

ECMAScript Edition 5 may not yet be a finished standard, but as a member Opera already is working on supporting it as much as possobile. JSON, which stands for JavaScript object notation (think XML notation but easier to parse), is being included in this new standard. By supporting it natively by the web browser (instead of parsing it through the JavaScript based parser itself), significant performance gains can be made. While no public build is available, the first number crunching results from Opera Software show that the performance is sometimes on top of everyone, and sometimes needs some little tweaking.

Nonetheless, the efforts are certainly welcome, and it's one of the larger collection of improvements that Opera Software has in store. It seems almost like they've awoken from their winter sleep too early ;)

Mark your calendars, as the vikings from the north of Europe are really on to it. You would have thought they would be playing with snow balls, snow men and other frozen water stuff. But apparently the weirdos at Opera Software like to stay indoors.

While Opera 10.20 may be in Alpha phase, the next next version is almost at our doorsteps, Opera 10.50 pre-alpha (code name: Evenes). Although Opera Software hasn't made any official statements yet on what's really new in this release, they did say one thing: speed.

So, if we look at Opera 10.10, what's the first thing that it misses compared to other browsers, such as Chrome, Firefox and Safari in speed? Yup, the most logical answer would be JavaScript execution speed. Opera 10.50 is more than likely to contain Carakan, the newly developed JavaScript engine. Hopefully it will be comparable in performance to Nitro (Safari) and V8 (Chrome). Another likely change in the traditional semi-major release (we've had dot-five releases that made impact for a while now, such as 7.5, 9.5) is an updated rendering engine. Who knows it may support even more (future) standards and performance enhancements.

What I don't expect is that Opera 10.50 suddenly changed to a multi-process architecture, similar to Chrome. Although it increases stability (and security) it also has a severe impact on memory usage, and should not be taken lightly (although memory is cheap these days). Looking at Safari 4 on Snow Leopard, which isolates plug-ins from the web browser, this may actually be the best, quick way to go to increase stability (read: Flash stability).

All in all it seems Opera Software is increasing its development and may pack a punch against Firefox and Chrome in the near future.

Note: There is a leaked build circulating, which was never intended for public release. It may not contain all the features (Carakan?) and fixes (show stoppers) of the real pre-alpha release. As we do not support leaks (they are illegal and may contain trojans), we ask the same of you, please do not link to them and be a little more patient.

Been a year and ten months since the last blog post about the site itself. You may have noticed it already, but Avencius is in a maintenance mode. I still try to keep you posted about the latest releases and technologies, but it also means that no theme or feature work is being done.

First of all I would like to welcome all the spam sites that have been hammering on the servers, filling up the comments and increasing the user account database with numerous accounts (85 pages with 20 accounts per page in the last weeks). The Drupal spam module has been replaced by Mollom. Hopefully this free (and paid) service can help reduce this, while also helping Mollom to keep up their database on hostiles. Anonymous comments have been re-enabled now that the module is active, but I'll keep an eye out in case things turn nasty.

So what will the future bring for Avencius? Obviously the site has been slowing down for the last year(s) now, and several other sites have emerged who offer better and more intense coverage. Possible directions are: a generic technology web site (think Engadget, Gizmodo) with a taste of gaming (like Joystiq and Kotaku), and the occasional nerdy accent (much like Lifehacker and Slashdot).

Whether it will be based on Drupal, Wordpress, or custom made remains to be seen. But I just want to let you know I'm not letting this location become a post-apocalyptic era of the browser war =)

While the last betas followed up each other almost weekly, this latest beta took a bit longer. Surely everyone is waiting for the first release candidates to appear or a final release before the end of the year. But alas...

Don't be too hard on the folks at Mozilla, as competition has grown much more volatile with the recent release of Chrome 4.0 Beta by Google, which includes extension support and is available on all major platforms.

Compared with previous betas, even this release comes with a bucket full of new fixes. With a hundred changes in store, the road to a most stable release should be smooth and near by now. A lot of crashes (including Flash Player 10) have been fixed as well as tweaking the newish security model for extensions.

If you're already using the beta release you'll get an update notification automatically (or by going to Help > Check for Updates). Of course you can download the full installer as well.

While everyone is waiting for the upcoming Firefox 3.6, the folks at Mozilla released yet another maintenance release of Firefox 3.5, bringing the version up to 3.5.6.

As usual with these updates, the release notes are crowded with either stability or security bug fixes. In these release three new critical labeled security holes were plugged, concerning: integer overflow, crash in libtheora video library, memory safety fixes in liboggplay media library and crashes with evidence of memory corruption. Other issues that were plugged are: NTLM reflection vulnerability, location bar spoofing vulnerabilities, privilege escalation via chrome window.opener and GeckoActiveXObject exception messages can be used to enumerate installed COM objects.

The rest of the stability bug fixes can be revised on the bug list from Mozilla, and contains a lot of crasher bug fixes. As expected this release is a recommended update for all Firefox users and will be offered automatically when you use Firefox 3.5. Of course a manual download is also possible if you don't have Firefox installed.

The news has already spread across the globe through the means of the internet, but the first beta release of Chrome, which is also right away version 4.0, has been released for Linux and Mac.

Up till now all Chrome releases were for the most popular platform on the planet: Windows. But today marks a new day, one that shows that Google and its engineers are committed to bringing Chrome to the other platforms, mainly Linux and Mac. Of course Linux is quite important for Google as it is the basis of it's upcoming new Chrome OS as well.

However Linux and Mac users should still be realistic. It's an early beta and it lacks a lot of features. For instance the Mac release comes without extensions, while both platforms lack a bookmarks manager, the latest bookmarks sync (through Google Docs) feature, and more. Of course the folks at Google are working hard to make the non-Windows platforms equal in features, but it also means they need time, and a lot of it.

On the bright side it feels solid and does include the well known new architecture in Chrome, using multiple processes for tabbed/windowed browsing as well as the sandbox principle. Of course V8 is included and shows that it is one of the world's fastest JavaScript engines out there.

You can try Google Chrome 4.0 Beta for yourself, while Windows beta users can indulge themselves in the recently opened extensions website.

Opera 10.20 Alpha, much like Opera 10.10, is a strange beast. The major new feature of this test release is not necessarily a browser feature, but a web feature.

Previously seen as a build in the Opera Labs, Opera Widget Runtime makes it serious entrance in a real Opera release. In the mean time the developers worked hard to polish the entire release, meaning installing and uninstalling Opera Widgets is painless.

Compared to full web applications, Opera Widget adds several extensions which is proposed as the widget standard to W3C as a Widget API. These extensions focus on File I/O, simple notifications, native borders and more.

If you're afraid that it might harm your browser stability you'll be surprised to know that new runtime, intended for desktop use, starts a separate process for each widget. Thus if a widget were to crash, the rest of your widgets, and your Opera browser simply continues to run.

You can try this new alpha release from the Opera Desktop team blog, be sure to understand this is an early preview, features might disappear or get added and stability might suffer. Don't forget to give the Opera developers feedback on this latest build.

First Microsoft announced and showed performance benchmarks of Internet Explorer 9, which leverages your GPU to speed up rendering. Playing a so-can-we-game, Bas Schouten demonstrated a Firefox build using Direct2D, the replacement for GDI.

Suffice to note is that competition is good. With Microsoft and Mozilla sparring on another dimension of gaining performance, instead of just the JavaScript engine, we the users can only benefit. As you may know from before, Opera Software is working silent (but deadly?) on Vega, which would introduce GPU powered rendering for at least several HTML 5 / SVG elements. Plans from Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome are unknown, but you can bet they'll keep a close eye on it all.

So what are the gains of using the GPU, through the means of Direct2D, for rendering? Well, looking at the graph on Bas' blog, it can reduce time twice as much when browsing popular web sites such as Facebook, Google and Twitter. There is one catch though, you'll need Windows Vista or Windows 7 and a preferably a DX10+ card.

When Direct2D support in Firefox is included by default, and if it will also become cross platform (with the use of OpenGL) is still unknown, but surely the development of GPU usage is a warm welcome to increase performance overall.