Webware

The latest Opera browser preview version may not be entirely stable, but it's definitely got its jetpack strapped on. Opera 10.5 pre-alpha, for Windows and Mac, is the first browser that's not powered by Webkit to approach JavaScript rendering speeds previously reached only by Chrome and Safari.

Opera 10.5 pre-alpha introduces Windows 7 support and a slight redesign, along with a rocketing new JavaScript engine.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

In empirical testing done on an HP desktop running an Intel Core 2 Q6600 at 2.66GHz with 4GB of RAM and Windows 7 32-bit, the pre-alpha scored 435.6 milliseconds in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. By contrast, Google Chrome 4.0.266.0, the most recent development build, notched 510.4 ms. The current stable build of Opera was more than 7.5 times slower, at 3284.4 ms.

Opera attributes this dramatic improvement to the new Carakan JavaScript engine, which they have designed from scratch to replace the Futhark engine in the stable build. Opera 10.5 also includes improvements to the Presto layout engine, and a new graphics library called Vega.

Other improvements noticeable in the pre-alpha include changing the URL address bar to include the same style of predictive smart search that Firefox and Chrome have, and the search and address bars now both remember searches, support deleting specific items, and have redesigned layouts.

The main browser interface has been redone, too. The tabs are now on top, the menu bar has been minimized behind a drop-down on the left nav, and the browser has better integration with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. On Windows 7 there's Aero Peek and Jump List support to access Speed Dial and tabs from the Taskbar. For Macs, there's a unified toolbar, native buttons and scrollbars, multitouch gestures, and Growl support. Dialog boxes are now non-modal, which you means you can now switch tabs without a pop-up commanding your browser's focus, for example. This will affect verification and authentication pop-ups, and JavaScript alerts.

There are some known problems, including a lack of printer support in the Mac version and noticeably high memory usage. Users can expect these to get addressed before the stable build of Opera 10.50 is released. The Opera 10.50 official announcement and changes can be read here, while the current stable version of Opera 10.10 is for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Even without extensions, Google Chrome's market share grew phenomenally during its first year. Now that the No. 1 most-requested feature comes baked into the Windows (beta and development) and Linux (beta and development) versions, it's time to look at some of the best extensions available for the upstart browser.

Google Chrome's extension manager.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The No. 1 extension on my list is the No. 2 most-requested feature for Chrome: RSS support. The RSS Subscription Extension allows Chrome to automatically detect RSS and Atom feeds on a page. It's not entirely clear why this isn't a default feature since it's part of every other browser, but at least now there's a way to add it.

There are a host of Google-service related extensions, all based on letting you know at a glance if there's an update for you to check in on. The Google Alerter covers Gmail, Wave, and Google Reader, although there's also individual support for them as the Gmail Checker, Google Wave Checker, and Google Reader Checker. There's a Google Calendar Checker, too.

The Google Translate extension adds a slick pop-up toolbar.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The Google Tasks extension hides your tasks behind a button that opens a list of them when clicked. The most useful Google-related extension is for Google Translate, which will offer on-the-fly translation of a site that doesn't appear in your default system language.

Expect security to be as big a subcategory of extensions for Chrome as it is for Firefox. Popular and effective secure personal password storehouse LastPass provides a safe and near-universal way to manage your passwords, making them easily accessible without compromising their integrity. LastPass also supports Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, making it an excellent one-stop solution. When Chrome's extensions get activated on the Mac version, the reasons for using LastPass will become even more compelling.

LastPass options in Chrome.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Also cross-browser, Web of Trust evaluates Web sites based on consensus. It may sound counter-intuitive to some, but it's proven in the past year to be an especially effective tool for determining whether you can trust that sketchy link you're thinking of clicking on.

UnShorten.com is one way to see what that shortened URL is hiding, but ChromeMUSE is another. This useful extension not only can shorten URLs via several different shortening services, it can also expand embedded short URLs automatically.

FlashBlock is a good way to kill Flash and Silverlight-based content. It leaves a blank spot where the ad or embedded video would've been, which you can then selectively load by clicking on it.

Despite the name, AdBlock+ should be avoided. It's not made by the same publishers who manage AdBlock Plus, the popular and effective ad-blocker for Firefox. This is actually a fairly serious problem with Chrome's extensions, where unknown entities are appropriating identical or similar names to well-known and trusted Firefox add-ons for what amount to nefarious purposes. So far, the ad-blocking extension that most users seem to be trusting in Chrome is AdBlock, but don't be surprised if it causes more problems than it solves until there's more consensus on these name-squatters.

AniWeather offers an animated weather pop-up.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

On that note, there are some excellent Firefox add-ons that have been ported successfully to Chrome. Bookmark synchronizer Xmarks has a beta version for Chrome, as does IE Tab for viewing rendering sites with Internet Explorer's engine within Chrome, and the resource-heavy but still-fun way to view visual media Cooliris.

Facebook for Chrome simplifies Facebook access, putting news feed and status updating in your toolbar. YouTube Downloader grabs Flash video embeds and saves them to your hard drive but interestingly doesn't come from Google itself. AniWeather is another, providing those without windows an excellent way to see what meteorological events are going on outdoors. iMacros will run Greasemonkey scripts and allows users to create their own solutions for repetitive data entry and tasks. The one I can't live without is another name-squatter, AutoCopy. It will copy any text to your clipboard when you highlight it. Unlike the Firefox version, it doesn't open any options when you finish highlighting, so it's a bit hard to tell if it's working as it should.

TooManyTabs cleverly secrets away tabs you want to keep handy but out of your active memory.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

TooManyTabs isn't TabMixPlus for Chrome, but it does something that TabMixPlus can't because Firefox doesn't yet support it. TooManyTabs manipulates Chrome's tab process isolation in a useful way, so you can move tabs to a holding dock where they're no longer eating memory, but they're still easily accessible. Click on the toolbar button and it opens up a window that displays your active tabs. Arrows next to each one let you move it to the nonfunctional area. A helpful indicator on the toolbar button tells you how many active tabs you've got. Conspicuously missing is drag-and-drop, so hopefully that's coming.

Aviary Screen Capture is another extension that offers Chrome-only features. It lets you take a screenshot of any Web site you're looking at and then automatically opens it in Aviary's image-editing Web suite to streamline your work flow.

The lack of a status bar in Chrome means that the management icons for extensions, if they have them, get added to the navigation bar, something that may annoy users who prefer Firefox's greater level of extension-placement customization. However, it's definitely a more visible placement, and may encourage users to keep their installed extensions to a utilitarian minimum.

More extensions can be downloaded from Google's site or Download.com.

Currently, extension support hasn't been activated in the Chrome for Mac, but that's expected no later than January 2010. There's also some notable popular Firefox extensions that aren't in Chrome yet, such as FoxyTunes. If I've skipped a favorite Chrome extension of yours, or if there's one for Firefox that you're dying to get in Chrome, tell me about it in the comments below.

It's not fully baked yet, but Google Chrome for Mac reaches a major milestone with the release of an official beta version. More stable than the development version, this Chrome beta brings rocket-powered browsing to Apple's computers--but it still lacks some key features.

And just how does it compare with Safari? Watch and find out, and also check out our hands-on review of Google's next move forward for Macs.

Mozilla Messaging pushed the stable release of Thunderbird 3 out of the nest on Tuesday, and there's a lot to like in case you haven't been following the beta development of this Outlook alternative. The long-overdue Thunderbird 3 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it introduces several hefty new features and some long-needed improvements, including an overhauled search and message indexing, tab support, and a revamped setup wizard that's designed to make new account setup quick and painless.

One feature that isn't included is the calendaring add-on, Lightning. Originally, Mozilla had planned to bake the extension into the program, but decided back in February 2009 to change course and leave it up to users to download. Although Thunderbird natively comes with Microsoft Exchange support, there's no calendar and therefore no meeting support in the default Thunderbird installation. Along with Lightning, there's an essential Google Calendar add-on for Lightning that gives Google users calendar support in Lightning. Currently, the only version of Lightning that works in Thunderbird 3 is the nightly build, available here.

Even without Lightning, Thunderbird makes for an excellent desktop-based e-mail client. Beyond Outlook replacement, it also makes a savvy offline or local-storage tool for the various Web mail providers. Gmail integration has existed in Thunderbird for a while, but improvements in version 3 include better recognition and integration of Gmail's special folders. These include Sent and Trash, and the non-English versions of Gmail. The All Mail option in Gmail defaults in Thunderbird to the Archives folder.

Thunderbird 3's new search results pane.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Undeniably, the killer feature in Thunderbird 3 is the search. The most obvious competitor, Microsoft Outlook, doesn't offer anything that comes close to the level of granular control that Mozilla has given Thunderbird users. The new search bar is dominant at the top of the interface, and is set by default to search all messages. When you search, a new tab will open with your results organized as shown in the screenshot above. Filters based on e-mail addresses, folders, and tags appear on the left, while the majority of the window is given over to displaying summaries of the e-mails that meet your criteria. There's also a timeline bar graph at the top of the results. Click it, and then mouse over any of the subcategories to see how they occurred over time.

You can change the search box to one of several filters, including Subject, From, Recipient, To, CC, and Message Body. Frustratingly, you can't filter by Tag. You can also save any of these filtered searches as a virtual folder. Editors' note: The previous two paragraphs have been rewritten for clarity.

The new search bar drops down with options, but also can do predictive on-the-fly queries similar to the URL bar in Firefox 3.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

There is one drawback to the search: the first time it indexes your messages, you're potentially in for a long, long wait. In testing, this depended entirely on the number of messages in your folders. High volume accounts, whether locally archived or all on a server, should probably set their indexing to run overnight. After the first indexing, each new e-mail is added as it comes in.

E-mails open by default into new tabs, making the e-mail reading experience far more similar to the Web-browsing one. This can be toggled under the Advanced section of the Options, under the Reading and Display tab. The hot keys for the e-mail tabs have been mapped the same as in Firefox, so middle-click an e-mail to open it in a new tab but retain your focus on the current tab. The CTRL+Tab hot key combo will cycle through your tabs, and there's an open tab button on the right side of the tab bar to help manage your tabs.

There's a new activity manager that records all interactions between your e-mail provider and Thunderbird, making it easier to track down errors when you send or receive mail. There's also an entirely new system for archiving messages based on Gmail's "archive and forget it" method. The new version offers the traditional multiple-folder-based solution, as well as the new dumping-ground style, which can be activated via the "A" hot key. Thunderbird 3 supports Firefox personas, too, further reinforcing their shared architecture.

Thunderbird 3 beta 4 introduces tighter folder integration for Gmail users.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Other changes include major code improvements. The setup wizard now looks to mozillamessaging.com for additional information on how to configure the account. This changes how new Web mail accounts are created. Mozilla has said that only the domain name from your e-mail address gets sent to Mozilla's servers, and that the entire process falls under the Mozilla's privacy policy. Nevertheless, it's a move that's likely to cause some concern among privacy advocates.

The compact header mode has been deleted, which is sure to annoy those who like using Thunderbird on smaller-form computers like Netbooks. Windows users should see Thunderbird results appearing in federated searches in Windows Vista and Windows 7, while Mac users will find Growl notification support for new e-mails, integration with Spotlight and the Mac OS X address book, and support for Mail.app. The full changelog for Thunderbird 3 can be read here.

Thunderbird 3 rates as a top-notch e-mail client, and it's definitely the best freeware one around. It will require some fidgeting to get it to be usable in a corporate environment, but it's far more scalable to user needs than anything else currently available.

Google released the first beta build of its Chrome browser for Mac and Linux earlier today, and it's hard not to be impressed when putting the Mac version through its paces. Chrome for Mac still lacks some of the key features that are currently available in the Windows beta, but this is a browser that most people should feel comfortable using.

As expected, Chrome on the Mac is still far superior to Firefox and even its WebKit cousin Safari when it comes to JavaScript rendering. Using the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, Chrome came in 1.8 times faster than Firefox by scoring 738.8 milliseconds. Safari notched 1,155.8 ms, while Firefox 3.6 beta 4 completed it in 1,330 ms. This is semicasual testing, but it does provide a ballpark from which we can see the gross differences between the browser's JavaScript rendering capability.

Chrome for Mac also starts up fast, by which I mean the point from clicking the browser icon on the dock to when Google's search page has finished loading. On Chrome it took less than 2 seconds, while Firefox took slightly more than 2 seconds, and Safari was just less than 3 seconds.

Google Chrome beta on the Mac won't look new if you've been using the dev build.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Although Chrome's first non-beta for Macs is expected within the month, currently the beta doesn't have all the features of its Windows-based sibling. Most notably missing is extension support, which had been in the developer's build but was recently disabled. The timing of this is somewhat unfortunate, considering that Google just officially launched the Chrome extensions gallery. It also lacks bookmark syncing, the bookmark manager, and the cookie manager.

When firing up a site, Chrome will occasionally show nothing but white space until the page is finished loading. In several hours of hands-on use, this was the only experiential flaw encountered--although the beta could easily be hiding more.

Even with these drawbacks, Google Chrome beta makes for an excellent quick-use browser on the Mac, and can be more or less used with confidence on a regular basis, if not as a go-to browser.

You wouldn't necessarily expect it, but Avast and Google Chrome might be the next peanut butter-and-jelly combo in the software world. Google's nascent browser has paired with one of the most popular free security programs in the world so that when users run the Avast installer on a computer that has neither Chrome nor Avast, they'll be offered a chance to install Chrome simultaneously. This is the first such bundling for Avast in its 21-year existence.

The Chrome installation window in the Avast installer is cleverly polite.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

The Chrome option in the Avast installer does two things differently from the more familiar opt-out user experience that many programs provide in an installer in exchange for financial sponsorship. For one thing, the Chrome window only turns up if you don't already have it installed, but more importantly, it forces users to actively choose installation. Neither the "yes, install" nor the "no, don't install" radio buttons are checked by default. Of course, users are forced to check off "no" if they don't want it, but this should dramatically cut down on the incidence of accidental installations that tend to plague otherwise-similar piggybacking installs.

The Avast/Chrome combo may strike some as an odd couple, or at least more beneficial for Avast than for Chrome, but keep in mind that Avast has more than double the users that Chrome does. Google's Vice President of Product Management Sundar Pichai said Chrome had more than 40 million users at the Chrome OS press conference at the end of October, and the end of November saw NetApplications peg Chrome at 3.93 percent of the browser market, a 0.35 percentage point increase. Meanwhile, on Avast's Web site, the Czech Republic-based security vendor is preparing to fly its 100 millionth user to Prague on an expenses-paid trip.

A Google spokesman indicated that other deals might be in the works. "Users' response to Google Chrome has been outstanding, and we're continuing to explore ways to make Chrome accessible to even more people. This could potentially include distribution via a number of channels, such as the distribution we are currently doing with Avast."

CNET News staff writer Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.

Amid promises to "reinvent the Web," the browser Opera debuted a new beta feature earlier this year called Unite that has been deemed stable enough to offer to all users. Opera's own hype aside, the Unite service provides people with the capability to serve files, host and stream music, and send messages to each other from inside the browser itself--a feature that is unique among the big five browsers. Opera 10.10 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Much like Opera's built-in e-mail client, Unite is basically a cloud-based, customizable server that includes multiple services, but its open API allows you to write and share your own services. The initial offering includes the default Unite Home, which is the Opera Unite Web page that is given to each user, a media player for creating your own publicly available music stream, the "fridge" for a Facebook-style message wall, an instant messenger with a public/private toggle, a photo sharing app, and file serving and Web hosting capabilities.

Besides including Unite, Opera 10.10 also includes an array of bug fixes, mostly aimed at smoothing out the Unite experience, tweaking mail, news, and chat features, and fixing three security problems. Two are relatively minor, one concerning an error message leak and the other a buffer overflow. The third error Opera is refusing to disclose at this time, but stated that it was discovered by the Google Security Team's Chris Evans. The full changelog for Opera 10.10 is available.

As I've tested Unite over the past few months, it's generally been a stable experience, with a few hiccups to be expected by the beta. However, it hasn't exactly set the browsing world on fire, either, and its target audience is still hard to define. Do you have an opinion on Unite? Let me know in the comments.

Mozilla's homegrown tool for synchronizing Firefox across computers and devices graduates to beta and introduces incremental syncing and a more streamlined, less obtrusive experience. Mozilla Weave 1.0 beta 1 looks and feels far more polished than its predecessors.

Weave integrates smoothly into the Firefox options pane.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

It does away with the "about:weave" access to the add-on's configuration pane, better handles Firefox preference integration when syncing for the first time, adds an automatic on-demand sync for when changes are detected and should more comprehensively sync history. This first beta also fixes a problem that the previous Weave v0.8 had when connecting via Fennec 1.0 beta 5.

However, Weave still has numerous problems. It conflicts with many add-ons, including AdBlock Plus, one of Firefox's most popular. The new incremental sync transfers data in chunks, so you can still use the browser, but it also prioritizes the first sync based on "interestingness." This amounts to syncing the data that you use most first, but it means that an initial sync could take hours depending on how much data you have. Weave is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux users.

Someone told me recently that they had 22 different log-in IDs. My first thought was, you must get out more. My second thought was, how do you remember 22 different Web services, let alone log-in IDs and passwords?

The answer, of course, is a password manager. These days, I see PC security as a form of insurance. The more you have to risk, the more you should spend to protect it. Anyone who banks or otherwise transacts online will find the investment in a password and personal-data manager worthwhile. Fortunately, if your password-management needs are meager, the protection doesn't have to cost you anything.

Siber Systems recently announced the beta version of RoboForm Online that lets RoboForm users store their log-in data securely online. Just log into the service from any browser and get fast access to the IDs you've saved on your PC. With just one you're logged into your favorite Web sites.

Log into the RoboForm Online service to access your favorite Web services with a single click.

(Credit: Siber Systems)

The first time you use the program, you're prompted to enter a master password. You can change the master password via the program's Options drop-down menu and selecting Security settings, but if you forget a master password, you have to delete all the password-protected files and start over.

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