IE9 Boasts 2.3 Million Downloads in First 24 Hours, 6 Million Less than Firefox 3′s World Record

March 17, 2011 By 1 Comment

Microsoft officially launched the final release of Internet Explorer 9 this past Tuesday at midnight. IE9 represents Microsoft’s biggest browser overhaul in quite a while.

The Official Windows blog announced yesterday that that IE9 was downloaded 2.3 million times in the first 24 hours.

Sounds pretty impressive until you consider that back in 2008 when Mozilla released Firefox 3 they set an official Guinness World record for the “largest number of software downloads in 24 hours”. Over 8 million copies of Firefox 3 were downloaded within 24 hours of its official release.

Firefox (and Chrome) users are generally considered to be more “tech savvy” than IE users as a whole. So, while IE didn’t blow the roof off the joint with first day downloads, IE users aren’t necessarily thought of as “early adopters” so it’s possible that, as the word spreads IE9 could indeed help Microsoft take back some of that browser market share Firefox has been slowly chipping away at.

Chart via: W3Counter

What’s new in Internet Explorer 9

Firefox and Chrome have been using compliant web standards for years but IE has been notoriously lacking in that area which has given many a designer and developer a headache or two trying to develop and design a site that renders the same across multiple browsers.

A few of the top issues IE9 has promised to address are speed, usability, standard web compliance, lack of a download manager and general sluggishness compared to FF and Chrome.

Nine reasons to get Internet Explorer 9 according to Microsoft

  1. It’s all-around fast — hardware-accelerated text, video, and graphics speed up performance and make websites perform like programs that are installed on your computer.
  2. Streamlined and simplified design — gives you the basic controls you need and puts the focus on your websites.
  3. One-click access to your favorite sites — with Pinned Sites, you can get to your favorite sites directly from the Windows taskbar without having to open your browser first.
  4. A combined search and Address bar — one place to either navigate to a website or start a search.
  5. Redesigned New Tab page — now you have quick access to the sites you visit most often, and you can also reopen closed tabs or your last browsing session, or start an InPrivate Browsing session.
  6. Integration with Windows 7 — with Snap, Pinned Sites, Jump Lists, and thumbnail preview controls, Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7 bring you the best web experience for Windows.
  7. Improved add-on management — Add-on Performance Advisor tells you if an add-on is slowing down your browser and allows you to disable or remove it, helping ensure that your browser stays fast over time.
  8. Helps control your privacy — Tracking Protection enables you to limit the browser’s communication with certain websites to help keep your information private.
  9. Keeps your downloads in order — Download Manager keeps a running list of the files you download from the Internet, notifies you if a file could be malicious, and allows you to pause and restart a download.

I tested it for a day or two and I will say there is a noticeable improvement in speed and general responsiveness. I don’t like the tabs pushed all the way over to the right of the address bar although there is a way to change that default in the settings.

I also didn’t care for their implementation of the bookmarks toolbar, it looks like it was just slapped on there last minute and looks totally out of place. My regular, everyday browser is Chrome which, in my opinion, is an almost perfect mixture of minimalism, great UX/UI, speed and fantastic extensions that work flawlessly as an extension of the browser itself so the bar was set pretty high for IE9. Needless to say as much of an improvement IE9 is over previous versions I’m back to using Chrome, although I will check out IE from time to time to see what, if any changes/improvements they make over the next few months based on feedback from users.

What do you guys think? Do any of you use IE as your primary browser? If so, have you downloaded IE9 and what did you think of all the new features?

Filed Under: Reviews, Tech Tagged With: , , , , ,

Awesome Screenshot: Screengrab Extension for Chrome

December 24, 2010 By 1 Comment

As Chrome continues to grab a larger share of the market, many users that are switching over are Firefox users that are finding out just how much they’re dependent on their plugins. A friend of mine was asking tonight whether or not she should make the switch and why. The two most common responses seemed to be:

  1. Yes, Chrome is so much faster, it’s totally worth it.
  2. No, I can’t live without my FF plugins.

For a long time I was in the second category. It wasn’t until Chrome started adding extensions that it become a viable full-time browser for me. So far there hasn’t been one plugin I used regularly on Firefox that I haven’t found a solution for on Chrome that doesn’t do the job just as well, if not better.

Awesome Screenshot is one of those extensions. Screengrab was a Firefox plugin I used reguarly and was often frustrated when I was using Chrome and the only solution I had was to either switch back to FF for the screengrab or take a Windows screenshot and fire up Photshop, neither of which were ideal solutions.

Awesome screenshot not only takes the screenshot you want it also gives you tools to annotate and crop the screenshot as well as upload it to their server to share a quick link or share it on a number of social media platforms. You can, of course, download it and host it yourself just as easily.

If you choose to upload your screenshot you’re presented with a number of other options which you can see here: http://jmsplng.me/enQOu6.

If you’re looking for a screenshot extension for Chrome, I would definitely recommend giving Awesome Screenshot a test drive. I was pleasantly surprised to find that not only did it do what I expected it to do, it did much more than that.

Filed Under: How To Tagged With: , , , , , ,

REVIEW: RockMelt Browser Rocks Your Browsing and Social Media Experience

November 8, 2010 By 14 Comments

UPDATE: I have some invites for RockMelt. If you’re interested in an invite leave a comment so I know who you are and friend me on facebook (I believe you have to be connected on Facebook to share invites for now so don’t forget that step), I will send out as many invites as I can.
–

Click for full-sized image

In the words of RockMelt, “the rumors are true”. Starting yesterday the much anticipated and seriously hyped “social-browser” was released in a private beta.

Similar to how Gmail was originally released RockMelt is giving invites to people who already have it so they can invite their friends to start using it. You only get a limited number of invites but if someone you invite downloads RockMelt they give you another one which is pretty handy.

Check out some screencaps from RockMelt:

RockMelt is built using Chromium, the open source project which Chrome is built on. If you’re a regular Chrome user then switching to RockMelt is pretty seamless. It’s sort of like Chrome on social media steroids.

With RockMelt we’ve re-thought the user experience because a browser can and should be about more than simply navigating Web pages.  Today, the browser connects you to your world. Why not build your world right into your browser?

Your friends are important to you, so we built them in. Now you’re able to chat, share that piano-playing-cat video everyone’s going to love, or just see what your friends are up to, regardless of what site you’re on. Your favorite sites are important to you, so we built them in too. Now you can access them from anywhere, without leaving the page you’re on. And RockMelt will tell you when something new happens.

Share or tweet links often? Yeah, us too. No more wading through each site’s goofy share widget or copy-pasting URLs. We built sharing directly into the browser, right next to the URL bar. Like a site or story? Click “Share” and BAM – link shared. You can use it on any site to post to Facebook or tweet about it on Twitter. It’s  just one click away. That easy.

RockMelt makes it extremely easy to update your status to any of your networks without having to navigate away from wherever you happen to be when you decide to share it and, without a doubt, they do it better than any plugin I’ve ever used that tried to replicate that feature.

RM uses small, unobtrusive sidebars, which they call “edges” that give you instant access to all of your friends and social networks at once. You have the option to show or hide one or both of the edges to completely customize your experience.

Another fantastic thing about RockMelt being built on Chromium is that you can use and install Google Chrome extensions and completely rock out your RockMelt install. It’s worked fine with all of the extensions I’ve tried so far.

This may not be the most popular thing to say, but so far, RockMelt really seems like Flock done right. Flock had some good ideas regarding integrating social media into your browsing experience but from the beginning it seemed plagued by complaints of general slowness and using a lot of CPU resources.

These of course could turn out to be famous last words but I have to say I’m extremely impressed with the first beta release of RockMelt and may even venture to say that this could be the social browser we’ve all been waiting for.

Click after the jump to watch a quick, two minute video on some of RockMelt’s features.
[Read more...]

Filed Under: Reviews, Social Media Tagged With: , , , , , ,

Chrome 2 Adds Some Serious Speed and a lot of New Features

May 22, 2009 By Leave a Comment
httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rubd9bqjS64&feature=player_embedded

I’ve had Google Chrome installed since it was still in beta way back in November (it rolled out of Beta in November as well).

From the beginning I’ve said that my two favorite things about Chrome are it’s speed and it’s clean, friendly interface. Even in beta Chrome was by far one of the fastest browsers I had ever used and now, with the release of Chrome 2, it’s even faster and more stable.

One of my early complaints with Chrome was its weak contextual menu. If you’re a blogger and you use Firefox, you’re probably very familiar with the shortcuts your contextual menu provides you. While Chrome is still not quite up to FF standards their new contextual menu is beefed up quite a bit and definitely has many more of the basic necessities.

Surprisingly, one of the most requested changes that Google received about Chrome, and which has actually been addressed in Chrome 2, is the ability to hide the thumbnails on your tabs page. Now you can have all the joy of being able to quickly navigate to some of your most visited sites without all the embarrassment of friends coworkers being able to see that said site is The Hills Gossip Fan Club Blog.

Chrome 2 also features form autofill. This one is pretty much self-explanatory.

Chrome 2 may well work its way up to becoming my default surfing/blogging browser of choice but when it comes to taking care of business, Chrome can’t hold a candle to FF with Web Developer Toolbar and Firebug. Those are pretty much essential tools when I’m working on a project, which is practically daily. It’ll be interesting to see if Google even tries to make any headway in that area of FF.

All in all, if you’re not dependent on a lot of Firefox add-ons for your job, Chrome may well be a light, fast and intuitive option for your browsing needs.

Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: , , , ,

Google Chrome is Out of Beta

December 11, 2008 By 1 Comment

This has to be some sort of record for Google which usually keeps their products in a perpetual state of beta.  Gmail was released over four years ago and it still has the beta tag attached to it.  There may, however have been very good reason why Google decided to rush Chrome out of Beta.

Here’s the announcement put on the Google Chrome help blog:

We’ve heard a lot of feedback about product bugs and feature requests and have worked hard to prioritize work on them. We’re excited to announce that with today’s fifteenth release we are taking off the “beta” label! 

But why Google, why have you rushed Chrome out of beta?

Google Chrome is not out of beta because it’s ready, but because Google wants to sign some deals with computer manufacturers like Dell that will preinstall the browser. ” The Google’s open source browser has a number of eager customers, including OEMs who can’t offer the browser until it is in full release,” mentions TechCrunch. Even German’s Federal Office for Information Security said that Google’s browser is not for general use because it’s still in beta. If that’s price to increase the adoption, then Google didn’t have to do much: just pretend that Chrome is ready for prime-time.

That’s probably a pretty good assessment of why Chrome got pushed to 1.0 so fast.  Still, I’ve been using Chrome for a while and it’s lightening fast with a super clean interface and I’m definitely looking forward to see what improvements Google make to the browser now that it’s officially out of beta and into production.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: , ,

Firefox Browser Takes 20% Market Share

November 5, 2008 By Leave a Comment

I’ve been using Firefox since 1.0 was released in 2004.  Once I got used to tabbed browsing I never looked back.  

For me, Firefox blew IE out of the water.  By the time IE finally caught up with the release of IE6 it was too late, I was already hooked.

In 2004 it seemed like IE was going to be the default web browser forever.  Netscape was, for all intents and purposes, already dead at that point and the thought of an open source browser was unheard of.

It’s hard to imagine that almost exactly four years after it’s initial release 1 in 5 people are now using Firefox.  

I have no doubt that number will continue to grow thanks to Firefox’s excellent open source community and the phenomenal number of plugins available to customize FF to fit your needs.  

If you haven’t already, you should really do yourself a favor and get Firefox.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: , ,

Note to Firefox: Please Put “Add Tab” Option Back in the Toolbar

October 16, 2008 By 2 Comments

After using Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 for a couple of days I have one request.  Please, for the love of god, add the option back to have an “Add Tab” button next to the other toolbar buttons.  I mentioned earlier that in this version they have removed this option and relocated it to actual tab bar.  It sucks.  I’m sure that left there I would eventually get used to it but why shouldn’t I at least have the option?

It’s like when IE6 came out and completely redid their design and moved the refresh button over to the right side of the address bar.  I rarely use IE and still haven’t gotten used to it’s new location.

The first thing I always do after downloading a new version of Firefox is edit the toolbar and put the “Add Tab” button in the exact same position every time.  Having it gone is just a pain and it seems silly to not give users the option to have it there if they choose.

Filed Under: Tech Tagged With: , , , ,