Mozilla did quite well in the web browsing industry to compete with Internet Explorer,Google Chrome,Safari and Opera,maintaining the second position for years.However,it could not be easy to stay with it now as Google Chrome has a faster upgrade cycle that leads the applications of new technologies and it’s getting more and more market share now.Finally Mozilla decides to move faster too,making out a new version of Firefox in every 6 weeks.Firefox 5 is the first.

In terms of the look,I don’t think Firefox 5 has any significant differences to the previous versions.Well,some improvements are added in this new version.

• Support CSS animation.
• DO-NOT-TRACK technology,allow users to set if they’re willing to be tracked by some websites or not.
• Canvas Draw technology,load rich media pages faster.
• For Android version,support Web Open Font Format.
• Also for Android version,scroll page will be much smoother.

If you’re using Firefox,you could go to ‘about Firefox’ to update it;if you’re not,you also could get it here.

I wish you like it.

Well,it may not be so surprised as Lady Gaga had visited Google HQ weeks ago and now she makes a piece of commercial for Chrome.The video is still full of Gaga style,funky punky feelings all around.I bet Gaga fans will love it so much.

All right,after viewing it,Gaga fans wanna switch to Google Chrome or not?!

Frankly speaking,I’m on Chrome side.

Angry birds don’t want you to wait until so angry.

As per scheduled,Angry birds just released the latest update on its Rio version.Let’s enjoy the gameplay trailer first:

Is that great?You could get it from Android Market now or just scan the QR code.I think most Angry Birds fans will be quite busy to play with it in the coming weekend.Count me in!

Android market is growing rapidly.In the latest Google I/O 2011,a group of figures were declared:over 200,000 apps supporting over 300 Android devices,4.5 billion applications installed to date.

Everybody knows that getting such a great result is not easy as Android market has a very strong competitor-Apple App Store.So Android market will be keeping on the way to innovate and the latest movements are introducing 5 new features of the market.

• New top app charts
• Editors’ Choice
  
• Top Developers
  
• Better related apps
  
• Trending apps
  

Users now can have clearer categories to find out what they want or maybe just try some new stuff recommended easily.The changes is only available at http://market.android.com currently and later on,it will also be available to Android Market on phones and tablets.

That is awesome.It’s actually making life easier,agree?

In Malaysia,DiGi is the first mobile service provider to announce white iPhone4 would be available in the market,even open to public to register for interest.However,it’s not the first one could have stocks to sell,Maxis wins this time!

Maxis remains the existing plans for white iPhone 4 too,so nothing special to share here.

Meanwhile,Apple announced last night that the latest iOS 4.3.3 is available to download.

As you can see that it’s mainly dealing with the ‘track’ issue that causes Apple some troubles recently.The simplest way to update it in your iPhone is going through iTunes.The update file will top up to around 700MB,so it’ll definitely take some time to finish.Maybe you can do it before your bedtime.

Fring is good at mobile communication service and now it goes further.Fring announced that from now on,all Fring users could start to enjoy free group calls connecting up to four person.The group calls can work on 3G/4G/WiFi and the app is available on iPhone and Android fringsters.

Fring applies proprietary DVQ™ technology which is able to deliver the highest quality video for all four participants.If you wanna try it,just download it from Apple’s App Store,Android Market or directly download it from m.fring.com . It’s free to use!

There are many web browsers out there.People may always confuse which one is suitable for their daily use.For me,I always use Google Chrome and Opera.The former one is light weight,loading fast and having quite good compatibility with most websites;the latter one is loading even faster because of the function called Opera Turbo,but sometimes not compatible to some websites.Hence,I always use Opera when I’m in a shared,busy network such as in Starbucks.

Opera has turned into 11th edition.Through years of  improvements ,it has been much better than before.It now can supports widgets and add-ons,and also provides Opera Link for synchronizing bookmarks,type history,notes etc. and Opera Unite for sharing files in the cloud under the same account,working as media player,photo sharing service and web server etc.

In Opera 11.10,the Opera develop team makes great movements on enhancing the performance.Here are the great points on the latest version:

• Lightening fast
• Safe and secure
• Smart features

Let’s watch the official clip to know it better:

If you feel it good,just click the link to try it.You’ll know if it’s really good.

After months of testing and improvements,Firefox 4 finally landed right after Internet Explorer 9 came to the world.

I was a fan of Firefox for many years.However,one year ago I started to use Google Chrome as it performs better than Firefox,of course better than IE too.

Since Internet Explorer,Firefox and Google Chrome have new versions coming out,I decided to test all by myself.I know that many pro bloggers have done the tests recently,but only with marks.Sometimes,score can’t mean for everything.Well,I’m right this time.
Upon the results from other sources,IE9 has the best result,followed by Google Chrome 10 and Firefox4 because IE9 is able to fully utilize the function called hardware acceleration,but others can only do it partially.This function can help to render those complicated websites faster than ever.

I did the test on my HP laptop bought 1.5 years ago with Intel Pentium U4100 dual-core 1.3Ghz processor,on-board graphic chip,4Gb DDR3 RAM,Seagate hybrid 2.5 inch 500GB hard disk,running Windows 7 64bit Home and working with Adobe Flash 10.2.

I opened hardware acceleration function in all those three browsers and then played a popular flash game in Facebook-Zuma Blitz.Cut the words short,the real experience is not equal to the results compared to the scores:in Google Chrome,I can play it smoothly;in IE9,it became halted when balls were blowing up;in Firefox 4,I can’t even see how the balls were flying.

Well,I think I’ll still stay with Google Chrome as no one can beat it currently.Will IE10 or Firefox5 beat Chrome at that time?I’ll wait and see.

More and more web browsers come out to compete the market shares recently.IE,of course,is still at the top of the market.However,it is chased by Firefox which is capable to have multiple choices of add-ons and Chrome which has a light interface.

IE 9 beta is innovating to integrate lots of applications to support the latest technology and standard such as HTML5.The test results show that IE9 beta get better marks compared to Firefox 3.6 and Chrome in some parts.Many testers think Microsoft now is putting their best efforts on this product to maintain the king seat.I believe that will be a real tough battle because Firefox and Chrome are moving quickly enough to fight with IE with their advantages.IE9 beta should be more stable and much faster in order to keep the exiting users.

Ok,let’s get to know what’s new in the new version of IE.

The interface of IE9 beta is quite simple.That means we can have more spaces to show the contents of websites.

Microsoft is providing a test-drive page to let you try out the performance of your current browser and IE9 beta.Is that fair?I don’t know.Maybe we just treat it like a quick reference.

Are you interested to get it now?You can visit the official website to download it in your own language.I wish you will have a great experience on it.

Firefox 4.0 beta 2 just released yesterday.It built up a lot of improvements on the outline and enhanced the overall performance in order to face the competitions from the coming IE9 and Google Chrome.

The following long lists are the things done by the engineers in this latest version.

• Firefox 4 Beta 2 is available in 24 languages.
• Tabs are now on top by default on Windows and OSX - Linux will be changing when the theme has been modified to support the change.
• You can turn any tab into an "App Tab" by right-clicking on it and selecting "Make into App Tab" from the context menu.
• Web developers can animate content using CSS Transitions.
• Responsiveness and scrolling improvements from the new retained layers layout system.
• JavaScript speed improvements due to engine optimizations.
• Changes to how XPCOM components are registered in order to help startup time and process separation.
• See the complete changelist from the previous beta.

As well as these features from previous Firefox 4 Betas:

• You can search for and switch to already open tabs in the Smart Location Bar
• New Addons Manager and extension management API (UI will be changed before final release)
• Significant API improvements are available for JS-ctypes, a foreign function interface for extensions.
• The stop and reload buttons have been merged into a single button on Windows, Mac and Linux.
• The Bookmarks Toolbar has been replaced with a Bookmarks Button by default (you can switch it back if you’d like).
• Crash protection for Windows, Linux, and Mac when there is a crash in the Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime or Microsoft Silverlight plugins.
• CSS Transitions are partially supported.
• Full WebGL support is included but disabled by default at this time.
• Core Animation rendering model for plugins on Mac OS X. Plugins which also support this rendering model can now draw faster and more efficiently.
• Native support for the HD HTML5 WebM video format.
• An experimental Direct2D rendering backend is available on Windows, turned off by default.
• Web developers can use Websockets for a low complexity, low latency, bidirectional communications API.
• Web developers can update the URL field without reloading the page using HTML History APIs.
• More responsive page rendering using lazy frame construction.
• Link history lookup is done asynchronously to provide better responsiveness during pageload.
• CSS :visited selectors have been changed to block websites from being able to check a user’s browsing history.
• New HTML5 parser.
• Support for more HTML5 form controls.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

However,what I like here is the new feature-App Tab.You can see how it works in my pics:

I always open Google Reader and Facebook when I’m surfing Internet.The normal tab occupies unnecessary spaces.Well,now I can just simply make a right click on the tab and select to ‘make into App Tab’ and it then is reduced to a lovely size.It’s nice,isn’t it?

The bad thing is most of my existing add-ons are not yet supported.I think the developers will catch their work up.I just hope it won’t be too long.

If you wanna try this new Firefox,please get it here and install it.You will have a fresh experience.

If you are an Android phone user,I bet you know what I’m talking about.Since last month,Android 2.2(code name:Froyo) was introduced by Android team and in the past several weeks,some Nexus One users had reported they got some different patches of Froyo.

Some insiders of Google told that they were still doing the testing and bug-fixing and so only app developers and some press were given to try the new version first.However,today has a different story.In the early morning,I had got some information over the Internet that some builds for all Nexus One phones were found in the Google server and the direct links were exposed very quickly.I’m the one who downloaded and installed Froyo manually in my Nexus One by referring the instructions from the comments in Engadget.

One hour after I installed Froyo in my device,I caught an article from Google Nexus One board declared Froyo is starting to OTA to all Nexus One users from today.Most Nexus One users will receive the notification of upgrade by the end of this week.

So if you are so patient,you could wait for some more days to get the automatic upgrade;if you are just like me,you can download and install it manually to enjoy the power of Froyo first.

For Build number ERE27:http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-ota-42745.dc39ca1f.zip

For Build number EPE54B:http://android.clients.google.com/packages/passion/signed-passion-FRF85B-from-EPE54B.75b107d6.zip

Please follow the steps to get Froyo correctly running in your device:

1.Rename the downloaed file to update.zip
2.Put it at the root of your SD-Card and then turn off the phone.
3.Hold down the volume button and then press the power on button, it should go into a boot screen. Wait for a few seconds for it to load up proper and then select "Recovery" with the volume down/up button and press the power button.
4.Once you see an android holding a sign with an exclamation mark push volume down+ volume up + power button _at the same time_.
5.Select "apply sdcard:update.zip"(or something similiar) with the trackball and press it.
6.After the update is finished select "reboot system now" with the trackball and press it.
7.Wait for it to reboot, it can take a long time mind you.

(Thanks the reader afinite in Engadget for the detailed information.)

Windows Live Essentials Wave 4 beta just released 7 hours ago and I’m applying it in my laptop already.Windows Live Messenger is the most popular software for me,so I decided to try that first.

The default view has rich contents there,including ‘highlights’,’photos’,’status’ etc.It’s a real mixture of social network tool and instant message software.

It also has a traditional view aka a compact view to slim the windows.

Once you open a chatting window,you can find nothing changed except a bar with some functions.

So from now on,if you want to disappear to some of your friends,you can set to appear offline to the person whilst other people can still see you there.
Here are my rough comments on the very new Windows Live Messenger beta and I think I should take more time to dig out more knowledge on this.You guys could download and install this new stuff to try it out too.It may make you look cool,huh? 

Get it here…

(BTW,I edited this article on the latest Windows Live Writer beta,the experience is much better than the old version.Thumb up!!!)

What is QR code?

According to Wikipedia,a matrix code (or two-dimensional bar code) created by Japanese corporation Denso-Wave in 1994. The "QR" is derived from "Quick Response", as the creator intended the code to allow its contents to be decoded at high speed.

QR Codes are common in Japan, where they are currently the most popular type of two dimensional codes. Moreover, most current Japanese mobile phones can read this code with their camera.

I find that is a very interesting tool.In fact,if all products have QR code,we could use our smartphone with QR scanner to get enough information with just one click or something.

You could find a lot of QR code generator online,so you’re able to create a QR code to match any stuff you have,including your blog.

This is the QR code for my blog:

If you have Google Goggles or Barcode scanner in your mobile phone,just try to snap the QR code and see what you get.Is that great?

Firefox 3.6 comes out after 2 release candidates.The new Firefox is built on the Gecko 1.9.2 platform which is enhanced and providing some new features for the users:

Hurry up!Please click there to get the latest Firefox in order to enjoy a fresh experience on browsing the websites.I bet you will never regret.

HD(High definition) is everywhere now and Skype is turning into HD group too.The latest Skype Beta allows the users to make HD-quality calls to each other.That means the video conversation will be much clearer than ever before,just like talking in front of a table.However,some requirements need to meet in order to make the HD-quality call work:

• a high-speed broadband connection (we recommend sustained 1 Mbps symmetrical bandwidth or higher)
• a new HD webcam
• a PC with a 1.8 GHz dual-core processor
• Skype 4.2 Beta for Windows

Well,I’m now testing this new version.It’s working fine with Windows 7 and performing better than the previous versions which I used,especially on utilisation of bandwidth and quality of voice and video calls.I’m willing to try a HD-quality video call too,but I don’t fit the first two requirements.Skype will launch a series of HD webcams later in this year which has video encoding and processing onboard that optimizes the HD video.So the only issue is on the connection as in Malaysia,the largest ISP-TM only provides ADSL service to residential consumers that only has maximum 512Kbps for upload.I hope I could have a faster connection soon.

You could get more details for Skype here.

Firefox Beta 3.6 had come out for several weeks.In fact I had tried it when it firstly launched,but I don’t feel so comfortable on it because quite a lot of add-ons were not compatible and I even met some crashes in one-hour usage.

However,with the help of thousands of beta users,it has been going to run properly and most of functions could work well.Firefox also introduced Add-on Compatibility Reporter which could mention the author of add-ons for any compatibility issues.You could check up the details of the Beta of Firefox 3.6 / Gecko 1.9.2 introducing several new features for users to evaluate:

• (New in this update) A change to how third-party software integrates with Firefox to increase stability.
• (New in this update) The ability to run scripts asynchronously to speed up page load times.
• A mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox.
• Users can now change their browser’s appearance with a single click, with built in support for Personas.
• Firefox 3.6 will alert users about out of date plugins to keep them safe.
• Open, native video can now be displayed full screen, and supports poster frames.
• Support for the WOFF font format.
• Improved JavaScript performance, overall browser responsiveness and startup time.
• Support for new CSS, DOM and HTML5 web technologies.

I’m going to try that again soon.If you want to try it,please go here to download and install it.I hope you will like it too.

It’s 5 years for me to use Firefox too.I remembered that I just wanted to try it at that time and amazingly I’m never going to drop it since then.Compared to IE,Firefox is of better performance,rich facilities and more securities.Of course,now we have some other good browsers to choose such as Safari,Google Chrome and so on.Anyway,Firefox did all greatly and I do wish it could last long with all pros.

Happy Birthday,Firefox.

I went to Lowyat Plaza buying a piece of Windows 7 Home Premium(32bit+64bit DVD) at RM469 yesterday.As I’m going to buy a new computer in the near month,so I need to have one more copy of Windows to install on that PC.

RM469 is still a promotional price and the official retail price is RM525.I installed this brand new operating system into my 4-year-old Lenovo laptop.It took approximately 30 minutes from reassigning the hard disk to completing the installation.Window 7 can recognize most drivers for the hardware,so it saved quite a lot of time on this part.

The only issue I met is for the audio driver.The Windows driver can make it work and so I spent several hours to look for a latest driver which is compatible to Windows 7.However,I was not so lucky.After all,I decided to use Vista driver and manually installed it and it worked half of the function-I could get sounds from speakers,but my internal microphone didn’t work.

Anyway,Windows 7 is really faster a lot than Windows Vista and better on arranging the resources too.Now I’m going to solve the microphone problem.I wish I could work it out.Or anyone wanna help me?

Officially Windows 7 released on October 23rd worldwide.However,I couldn’t find the track of Windows 7 on that day.Well,finally I get the news saying Windows 7 was in town on November 2nd,7-day late to land in Malaysia.

The prices for Windows 7 in Malaysia are labeled at US dollar and so we have to exchange them into Ringgit Malaysia by the given exchange rate US$1 = RM3.75.

*Note:The above prices are for full pack(retail version).

I know Windows 7 is of good performance and better security,but it’s still quite expensive.I’m now waiting for PC fair where may provide some promotions.

I’m a Kaspersky fan.I have used its products for more than 10 years.Even though the products are always quite expensive,I still keep using it because I believe it could provide the best protection for my computers.It definitely did the job well in my computers in the past several years.However,recently after I upgraded to the latest Kaspersky Internet Security 2010,I found sometimes normal Internet connections were blocked and the software crashed with Windows Vista in many times.So I decided to try Nod32,another top antivirus software in the world.

It seems that ESET Nod32 is a bit more expensive than Kaspersky.Well,if a little extra could make some improvements in terms of performance and compatibility,I’m willing to pay it.The fact didn’t make me regret.Nod32 starts up faster than Kaspersky and occupies less system resources.

So I think I will only try Kaspersky again only it could be much slim.