Dooble – Secure and Open Source Web Browser

Dooble is a secure and Open Source web browser that claims to provide solid performance, stability, and cross-platform functionality.

Its most important goals are to safeguard the privacy of its users with a group of integrated privacy features of the browser: search engine, secure messenger, and e-mail client.

The installer also provides a means of installing the Dooble browser component. The website states the rendering engine is fast compared to Firefox‘ one which is slow and Opera’s which has middle rendering speed.

Dooble is available for popular operating systems Windows, OS X and GNU/Linux.

Visit the dooble website for more information on this new safe browser.

SRWare Iron 3 – Like Chrome without Google

The German company SRWare uses the sources Google offers of its Chromium browser to compile a clone of Chrome but with quiet a few modifications. The new browser is called Iron.

Iron gets rid of the unique client id, timestamp, suggest, alternate error pages, error reporting, RLZ tracking, Google updater and URL tracker. But it not only throwing things away it also adds features and updates stuff in the core. Iron uses the newest Webkit engine, adds an easily configurable adblocker and an option to alter the user-agent string permanently.

The Iron Browser is available for free as Open-Source for the Windows OS (Vista, XP) over here.

Firefox 3.6 – First alpha released

Despite the fact I am personally still using Firefox 3.0x Mozilla already released a first alpha version of Firefox 3.6. It is intended for developers only.

The first developer milestone of the next release of Firefox – code named Namoroka Alpha 1 – is now available for download. Namoroka is built on pre-release version of the Gecko 1.9.2 platform, which forms the core of rich internet applications such as Firefox. Please note that this release is intended for developers and testers only.

The Alpha of Namoroka / Gecko 1.9.2 introduces several new features:

• Compositor (Phase 1), which moves Gecko to using one native widget per top-level content document. See this blog post or bug 374980 for more details.
• A new focus model, described here and tracked in bug 178324
• The chromedir attribute has been replaced with a pseudoclass
• Several new CSS3 properties including background size and gradients for background images
• Speed improvements to the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine
• Startup and responsiveness improvements throughout the application

The final version of Firefox 3.6 is supposed to hit the download shelves within a few month as spokesman Chris Blizzard of Mozilla promises in the blog post Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 – web developer changes.

Chrome 3 Beta version available

Google employee Fiona Chong of the Google Chrome team announced the immediate release of Google Chrome 3 beta. Its main advantage is the speed improvement in its JavaScript core.

As always, we continue to focus on speed, and this beta release shows over 30% improvement on both the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over our current stable channel release. We’ve also improved two of the most loved and most used features of Google Chrome: the New Tab page and the Omnibox. Plus, we decided to add a little bit of style by allowing you to deck out your browser with colors, patterns, and images.

Read the blog post A New Beta: Why slow down when you can speed up? for all news on the new beta version of the Chrome browser.

Uzbl

Ever dreamt of a browser so slim like Vim? A browser you could incorporate into your own *nix projects? Now you got a choice. Uzbl. Uzbl is a browser that adheres to the unix philosophy.

You have to extend pretty much everything to add the features you need. It is done by writing scripts that extend the core.

Uzbl is a lightweight webkit browser following the UNIX philosophy – to do one thing and do it well.

• very minimal graphical interface. You only see what you need
• what is not browsing, is not in uzbl. Things like url changing, loading/saving of bookmarks, saving history, downloads, are handled through external scripts that you write
• controllable through various means such as fifo and socket files, stdin, keyboard and more
  advanced, customizable keyboard interface with support for modes, modkeys, multichars, variables (keywords) etc. (eg you
• can tweak the interface to be vim-like, emacs-like or any-other-program-like)
• focus on plaintext storage for your data and configs in simple, parseable formats
• Uzbl keeps it simple, and puts you in charge.

Source: The Uzbl project website

Uzbl is open source. So next time you need a webbrowser component in one of your projects remember Uzbl before hacking anything yourself.

Google Chrome available for Linux and Mac OS X

Early builds of Chrome for Mac and Linux are available on Googles Chromium blog.

The blog post says the releases are only aimed at developers because they are incomplete, unpredictable and the software might crash.

Most of the features known for the Windows build are available which the exception of flash video, privacy settings and printing facilities. Google has promised that a beta release will be available in the foreseeable future.

There is also a version of the iron browser available which has no unique id and is not sending requests to Google search for faster search results.

Taskfox extends Firefox’ Awesome bar

If you ever wondered how mondern web browers could be improved watch this video and you’ll see!

Taskfox Prototype from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.

I found this video at the end of an interesting article on The Future of Firefox: No Tabs, Built-In Ubiquity on the ReadWriteWeb.

Video of Chrome Experiments

Have you ever wonderer what your browser is capable of doing using just JavaScript? The website Chrome Experiments bundles a lot of interactive JavaScript experiments you can test right in your browser. See some of them for yourself in the following video.

Go to Chrome Experiments to test some of the JavaScript stuff yourself. And you don’t need the Chrome browser to run them.

Personas – Customize your Firefox

If the standard look and feel of your Firefox browser is too boring for you maybe you want to try the new Personas for Firefox. Personas is a free add-on just released from the Mozilla labs. It is a Mozilla Labs experiment. Just surf to getPersonas.com, download the free add-on, restart your browser and choose from a selection of totally different looking skins.

After the restart you’ll find a small fox icon in the lower left corner of your browser. Klick on it to open a menu from which you can choose skins by popularity, age, category and from the ones you recently tested. You can also easily go back to the standard look and feel which you are used to.

Personas are lightweight, easy-to-install and easy-to-change “skins” for your Firefox web browser.

Among the most popular skins are a California sunset, Yosemite, Niagara Falls, Hanami, Fireflies, Minefields and the Firefox Robot of the upcoming Firefox 3.5 which I chose. You can preview a new skin just by rolling over the menu entry. The skin changes almost instantly without selection, restarting or any other hassle. Great way to do themeing!

Version jump from Firefox 3.1 to Firefox 3.5

German news source Golem.de reports (German) that the next release of Firefox might be numbered Firefox 3.5. They cite the Firefox3.1 StatusMeetings on 2009-03-04.

Need to do some testing to find any weirdness with 3.1 -> 3.5 version change.

The reason for the jump is the amount of changes. The next pre-release (beta) of Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 is scheduled for 12th of March 2009.