Archive for March, 2008

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March End-of-the-Month Wrap Up

Monday, March 31st, 2008

Today marks the end of March, and the start of April.  March had some amazing things happen in it this year, and here’s the post where I get to tell you about them.

WordPress

WordPress 2.5 was released this month, and it has tons of updates, mostly on the admin pages.  It even made the slow blog I have (sometimes taking over a minute to load a single page) faster with the addition of the (already installed on my blog) WP Super Cache plugin.

RuneScape

Jagex fixed up summoning.  This might not be big news for you non-RuneScapers out there, but this is one of the best updates of the year.  Amongst the top features of this update are the ability to gain experience from combat done by your summoned familiars, a longer amount Visit the blog to read more of March End-of-the-Month Wrap Up

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Posted in Looking Back..., Ramblings | 2 Comments »

Browser Warz-Part 3: Things just got interesting.

Thursday, March 27th, 2008

In all of the previous Browser Warz competitions, there were only 4 competitors.  Now, there are 26.  Now, I hope you’re thinking “26 browsers on one computer? This guy must be crazy!”, because I am.

However, unlike the other Browser Warz competitions, the browsers in this competition will be facing other versions of their own kind before going on to face the winners of each individual competition.

There are 4 things that the browsers will be scored on in this leg of the competition:

  • CSS errors (Is the purple header there?  Does the body of the page match up with the header?  Is the footer matching?  Are the horizontal rules hidden?)
  • JavaScript errors (Are there any?  How bad are they?)
  • Speed of the 3 tests (How fast were each of the three tests?  How long did it take 5 repeats of each test to occur?)
  • Total time taken on the tests (How many seconds did it take?)

The 26 browsers are split up into 5 categories:

  • Internet Explorer icon for Browser Warz Internet Explorer (7 browsers, page 2)
  • Firefox icon for Browser Warz Firefox (4 browsers, page 3)
  • Opera icon for Browser Warz Opera (6 browsers, page 4)
  • Netscape icon for Browser Warz Netscape (7 browsers, page 5)
  • “Other” icon for Browser WarzOther (2 browsers, page 6)

This competition, because it is so long, is divided into pages to reduce loading time. Visit the blog to read more of Browser Warz-Part 3: Things just got interesting.

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Posted in Browser Warz, In-Depth | 2 Comments »

Browser Warz-Part 2: Safari wins

Tuesday, March 25th, 2008

The test:

To pass test 2, the browser has to:

  1. Correctly render the page from last time, except not gzipped.
  2. Read base64 encoded data and parse it as JavaScript.
  3. Do 10 million empty loops, 5 million Math.random() calls, and 500 thousand empty eval() calls as soon as the page loads.
  4. Respond to a double click event.
  5. Ask for permission to do memory-intensive scripts.
  6. Do 250 million empty loops, 125 million Math.random() calls, and 12.5 million empty eval() calls in under 10 minutes.
  7. Not crash during the time that it does step 3, although not responding for up to 5 minutes at a time is ok.

The results:

Safari went the fastest:  256.564 seconds (4.276 minutes)
Safari-Browser Warz test 2

Next in speed was Opera, with a time of 275.92 seconds (4.599 Visit the blog to read more of Browser Warz-Part 2: Safari wins

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Posted in Browser Warz | 2 Comments »

Browser Warz-Part 1: Safari worse than IE?

Monday, March 24th, 2008

I like testing my browsers to see how standards compliant they are.  As you know from my previous entries, Internet Explorer is definitely NOT standards compliant.  However, I could not have predicted that Safari would fail the test worse than IE.

And now, the rules:

  • No “Browser Warz” tests will be based on looks, it must be blatantly obvious if a browser has passed the test.
  • All four browsers (IE, Firefox, Opera, and Safari) will be used in either the latest released version or the latest beta available to the general public, depending on the test.
  • No browser-specific code will be used.
  • Every test will be available for download.
  • Every test will be completely standards compliant.

Browser Warz test one tests the following: