The Official Atomic Medium Blog

Opera has done it once again, they put out another stunning and snappy web browser. Vastly superior to the pathetic ‘portable’ Internet Explorer that comes default with Windows Mobile smart phones and pocket PCs. It defaults to full-website view zoomed-out so you can choose where to zoom in and scroll, and all that fancy stuff. In its core, it is not much different than previous versions of Opera Mobile (7, 8, 8.65, etcetc), but it actually WORKS this time around. The bottom bar is white now, instead of black - and get this - it actually shows the entire bar in both portrait AND landscape mode! Zooming and panning is much the same, a bit smoother maybe, but it will still get interfered with if you happen to have an HTC Phone with TouchFlo installed and enabled (that cool spinny cube with favorite contacts, media options, and the 6 app launcher.) You will have to either learn to pan around TouchFlo or simply add Opera to the TouchFlo exclusions list (located in the touchflo options menus somewhere.)
Well enough about HTC devices, let us see how it stacks up to the only real contender here, Safari Mobile.

I will say, as much as I hate Apple and Safari - Safari Mobile does many things correctly. Really smooth panning and 2-finger gesture zooming is very intuitive (well many other smart phones that do not begin with the letter ‘i’ lack the hardware support for multi-touch gestures such as spreading you thumb and forefinger apart to zoom out, or pinching them together to zoom in.) I’d say that Opera is definitely ‘faster’ than Safari in menu and page loading, (or maybe my HTC 8925 is just faster than an iPhone, I can not tell which) - but Safari has a better search, better bookmarking, better zooming, and smoother scrolling (which again is somewhat a function of the iPhone touch screen, its just so much better than many other touch interfaces on the market.)

The bottom line here? If you like standard HTML/PHP/Java support and a decent web browsing experience (without all the pathetic limitations of ‘mobile browsing’) go download and try the new Opera Mobile 9.5 Beta now, for free. Maybe you really love Internet Explorer, and its pathetic jaggy scrolling, or the word ‘BETA’ scares you when its not referenced to fish. That is fine, Opera Mobile will still be there once you come around.

And remember, the new 9.5 BETA is really only meant for Windows Mobile devices that have a touch screen — good luck trying to use this thing on a Samsung Blackberry, seriously.

SEOQuake is a great extension for Firefox (now compatible with FireFox3!) that will show you almost anything you would want to know about the indexing of any website on the internet. There are a few ways to use it, you can have it show up as a sidebar-like device, a toolbar, or only shown under each website listing on a number of search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, Technorati and a few others, I am sure.) This little thing will show you the Google Page Rank, Google Index, Google Links, Google Cache Date, Yahoo Index, Yahoo Links, Yahoo Link Domain, Yahoo Directory Links, MSN Index, MSN Links, Alexa Rank, Webarchive age of the domain, the robots.txt file for the website, a link to the WhoIs info, the keyword density of any specific webpage, and a whole lot more if you chose to include SEOQuake’s own little add-ons for this Firefox Add-on. (Would that make the SEOQuake add-ons like sub-add-ons for Firefox? I think we have stumbled onto something here…)

At first it all seems a bit confusing since there is a potential for so much information to be shown at once. If you are a beginner to the whole SEO scene, its best to take it slow and only really concentrate on the Google listings for now. Then you can go and read up on Link Domains, indexing, robots.txt and other META TAG information. If you are already pretty well versed in Search Engine Optimization knowledge, feel free to go ahead and customize the individual options inside of SEOQuake to fit your personal preferences. SEOQuake is not for everyone, and it may confuse and even enrage some users because it tends to slow down your browser a bit if you have it automatically loading on each page-click. The key here is to set all the options to ‘on request’ in the SEOQuake preferences to keep your normal browsing more or less unchanged.

If you do not want the SEOQuake sidebar-device OR the toolbar, you can just choose to turn both off and have SEOQuake only show you Search Engine Optimization information when you are playing around with Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com, Technorati, or your search engine of choice. Under every single hit on the search engines will be that little SEOQuake bar that you can click on to view more in-depth information about a particular website. This way you can do some basic checking up on your close competitors and see exact why they are in front of you in the rankings (for example, on the first page of Google for a certain keyword.)

Well, I have finally made the jump to the new Firefox 3 browser. After using Firefox 2.0.0.8 for such a long time, I felt it was time to get the new one to see what all the hype was about.

It looks like Windows Vista a little bit, I still do not know whether this is good or bad, but I do not have a problem with it thus far. Although some add-ons have yet to be updated to work, most of the popular ones are now 100% compatible.

First off, the characteristic memory leak in FF2 is not altogether gone, but its impact on system performance is markedly lower now than it has ever been, even without tweaking the values found in about:config. I had roughly 12 tabs open in one window and Firefox 3 managed to stay under 100k physical and under 70k virtual memory, running on Windows XP Pro w/ SP2. Results may vary, but if you are a tab-junkie like me, and you constant keep FF running with 12 or so tabs for days on end, you will probably see it bloat to over 100K in both physical and virtual memory, but it takes much longer now – and if you minimize Firefox it will actually release more memory now, provided you do not have a bunch of active java or flash gumming up the works.

Ok, now on to a web developer point-of-view. With a few add-ons (Rankquest SEO toolbar, SEOQuake, Web Dev Tools, user agent switcher, colorzilla, measureit, firebug, google pagerank, IE Tab, linkchecker, and ShowIP) you can easily do 90% of your web debugging and testing in this browser. I have not seen a change in the way Firefox renders CSS or javascript in this new iteration, although I may not be looking hard enough yet.