Newsflash: Songbird 1.1, Firefox 3.5, IE Windows 7, Firefox Fennec

Songbird 1.1

The final version of Songbird 1.1 is available for download. Songbird is an open-source customizable music player based on Mozilla’s Firefox browser.

Firefox 3.5

Rumors of a version jump for Firefox from 3.1 to 3.5 have been confirmed.

Beef about IE bundling

Google and Opera’s CEO Jon S. von Tetzchner demand that there is a choice of browsers even though Microsoft confirms there is an option to switch IE 8 off completely.

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3

Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 with native JSON support has been released last week.

Fennec

A first beta – the twelfth milestone – of Fennec a mobile browser from Mozilla has been released. As this is a very interesting user agent I will write a follow-up with detailed information.

If Browsers Were Women

Internet marketer Zee has posted a fun article with a woman a browser what he thinks a women would look like if it were a browser. Have a look!

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Web Slices in Internet Explorer 8

Web Slices are a new feature in Internet Explorer 8. With Web Slices users can add little snippets of the web to the favorites bar and monitor their updates.

Program Manager Internet Explorer Ritika Virmani of Microsoft Corp. has written two articles in the IE blog about Web Slices. In the first article he explains Activities and WebSlices in Internet Explorer 8. In the second article he takes a closer look into Web Slices and explains how to Create a dynamic Web Slice in 5 minutes.

Prototype implementation of Gazelle Web Browser

Researchers Helen J. Wang, Chris Grier, Alexander Moshchuk, Samuel T. King, Piali Choudhury and Herman Venter of Microsoft Research published a paper on The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser.

They see a need for a new kind of web browsers as the way people use the web and web browsers has changed over the past years.

Web browsers originated as applications that people used to view static web sites sequentially. As web sites evolved into dynamic web applications composing content from various web sites, browsers have become multi-principal operating environments with resources shared among mutually distrusting web site. Nevertheless, no existing browsers, including new architectures like IE 8, Google Chrome, and OP, have a multi-principal operating system construction that gives a browser-based OS the exclusive control to manage the protection of all system resources among web site principals.

Their solution is a web browser with its own kernel for a mini operating system named Gazelle.

… we introduce Gazelle, a secure web browser constructed as a multi-principal OS. Gazelle’s Browser Kernel is an operating system that exclusively manages resource protection and sharing across web site principals. This construction exposes intricate design issues that no previous work has identified, such as legacy protection of cross-origin script source, and cross-principal, cross-process display and events protection. We elaborate on these issues and provide comprehensive solutions.

Gazelle might not only what we might see as Internet Explorer 9 some time in the future but Gazelle might be a solution for existing browsers.

Our prototype implementation and evaluation experience indicates that it is realistic to turn an existing browser into a multi-principal OS that yields significantly stronger security and robustness with acceptable performance and backward compatibility.

You find a link to the research paper (PDF) at the bottom of the blog post The Multi-Principal OS Construction of the Gazelle Web Browser.

Internet Explorer 8 Release Candidate 1

Announced by the end of December 08 for the first quarter 09 the first release candidate of the new Internet Explorer is now available.

The user experience managers over at Microsoft might have had a closer look at the competitors when fine-tuning the last beta version. They improved the Search box which now reminds me of search done on Mac OS X. The Smart Address bar and the Favorites bar is similar to what can be found in newer Firefox releases. The pron modus InPrivate is now split up into two main functionalities: InPrivate Browsing and InPrivate Blocking. Among the other revised functions are Tab Groups, New Tab Page, Find on Page, Accelerators, SmartScreen Filter and Web Slices.

Find out more about the Internet Explorer 8 RC 1 in the article User Experience Changes since Beta 2 over at the IEBlog.