Firefox and Opera have both managed to clock five million downloads since release. Firefox achieved this in less than a day compared to five days taken by Opera. But, even then its a major achievement for Opera which has about 1/10th Firefox’s marketshare. In fact number of Opera users have doubled since release of v9. According to internal estimates Opera browser is being used by 20 million people on the desktop. Add this to 12 million Opera mini users and a significant number of users using it on high end mobile handsets (Opera Mobile), NintendoDS, Nintendo Wii etc and it would mean total number of Opera users is actually a lot more than you would expect.
Opera is currently holding a “Tell a friend” competition and if hoping that Opera fans would help in spreading the word. The first prize is XO OLPC Laptop (not yet released), the second prize is Nintendo Wii and the third prize is a mobile phone. More details about the contest is available here. But today is Firefox’s day and lets get back to firefox. Firefox v3 has already been downloaded more than 8 million times and the download counter is still ticking at an unbelievable rate. Earlier today Microsoft sent the Firefox team a cake (with prominent IE logo) congratulating them on the successful launch. Of course this is nothing new. Microsoft had sent over a similar when when Firefox v2 was launched. And more infamously had dropped a huge IE logo in Netscape’s lawn after Internet Explorer v4 was released (but this is definitely a lot friendlier).
Opera v9.5 (codenamed Kestrel) is finally here! It was supposed to be a minor update to Opera - a precursor to the major update Peregrine (v10), that most fans expected to be released by the end of 2007. The wait turned out to be much longer than expected and kestrel definitely turned out to be a lot more than a minor update. Let’s take a look at some of the new features :
History Search : Opera is the first browser to provide integrated History search. Opera not only stores address of web pages you have visited but also the textual content of the web page. So even if you don’t remember the url you can revisit the website by simply entering some keywords. History Search works with the normal address bar, but also has a separate full-fledged interface.
New Skin : Opera v9.5 features a brand new skin - that makes it the best looking browser (at least on Windows). Its glossy and metallic texture gives Opera a futuristic look while being easy on eyes.
Opera Link : Opera Link allows you to take your bookmarks and speed dial where ever you go. This is similar to various bookmark sync available on Firefox and other browsers, but only slightly better. It allows you to sync bookmarks not only between PCs but also between mobile phones. Opera Link is fully compatible with Opera Mobile and Opera Mini. Not only that using the web-interface you can acess Opera links from a different browser (one that doesn’t support Opera link).
Open With : Lets face it, Opera does have some website compatibility issues (a lot of times due to no fault of its own). If Opera’s rendition of a webpage doesn’t please you, you can now launch the webpage with a different browser . This is what I love about Opera. If there is a problem, they wont deny it. Instead they would do whatever they can to help their user, even if that means pointing the user towards its competitors.
DragonFly : A lot of developers use Firefox due to Firebug (which is one of the best extensions available for Fx) and a long standing compliant was lack of developer tools for Opera. With DragonFly Opera has tried to redress these complaints. Dragon Fly allows you to debug JavaScript, inspect CSS and the DOM, and view any errors. It works with webpages, as well as pages on your desktop or on remote devices like cellphones with Opera browser installed. To further enhance the functionality of Dragon Fly opera plans to release an API to allow vendors to create their own debugging tools. Dragon Fly can be accessed from Tools–>Advanced–>Debug.
Now that did not take long. After releasing the Firefox 3 release candidate 2 just a few days ago the Mozilla team decided to publish yet another release candidate that is currently directly available on the Mozilla ftp site. The Check For Updates function in Firefox is not detecting the new version yet and there is no official announcement about that version on the Mozilla homepage either.
As usual things take a while and users who download the releases directly from ftp will be the first to have the latest version up and running. Firefox 3 RC3 is available for Windows, Linux and Macintosh and all language versions. Just follow the link given above and navigate to the release that you need.
The only information available at this moment is a blog post over at Zdnet that is mentioning a bug in Firefox 3 for the Apple Macintosh that was caused by the recent update and that this release candidate is practically being created for the Mac. I’m off to install the new version and we hopefully will be able to access the release notes for Firefox 3 RC3 soon.
With web applications pushing the technology to the limits, memory leak issues have gained prominence and need to be dealt with.
What is IE Memory Leak?
To begin with let me clarify that memory leaks are not restricted to Internet Explorer but it can happen in any browser. We are talking primarily about IE as over the course of my time, I have found it to cause this issue more often than any other browser.
Memory leak is a condition where your web application keeps consuming more and more memory as you keep navigating or refreshing. This causes decrease in responsiveness of the application and in situations can crash the browser itself.
Can we predict IE memory leaks?
Justin Rogers, a Microsoft employee, discusses in detail the patterns of memory leak in his article titled Understanding and Solving Internet Explorer Leak Patterns.
How can I try out and see memory leaks?
Please read Memory Leak in Internet Explorer - revisited which has code samples for you to try out and see for yourself.
How to test for memory leaks?
Drip, a memory leak detector for Internet Explorer, is a free open source tool available for download here.
It is an executable which can be downloaded and run directly.
(you can see in the graph above for www.Microsoft.com site that IE is continuously consuming more and more memory)
Start the application and enter the URL of the site you want to monitor. Click the “Auto Refresh” button. It will keep refreshing the site and plot the memory graph at the bottom.
How to diagnose memory leak issues?
There is a screencast on Diagnosing JavaScript Memory Leaks in IE which might be useful resource to start with.