Mozilla Firefox (otherwise known as just Firefox) is a free open source internet browser originally developed by Mozilla Foundation. Currently Firefox is available for 3 major operating systems, namely Windows, Mac OS X and Linux, as well as several other UNIX-like operating systems.
Server2Go is a 'donationware' by German-based Server2Go software group. It comprised of a complete WAMP server-stack package (Apache web server plus additional PHP, MySQL and Perl components) that runs natively from virtually any portable media (USB drives, memory card, etc.) as well as write-protected media like CD-ROM, without the need of installation.
The idea of having a complete portable web server configuration is for instance, to allow one to make a live presentation of how a newly developed PHP web without the need for a remote server and internet connection for that purpose. It sure sounds interesting and we already have a set of tests to see what this software package can do.
One of us here is running his own blog and forum on his PC for our LAN. He is using another web server package, XAMPP, and it does the same work as Server2Go, albeit it has to be installed locally on the machine. So we decided to perform a head2head comparison between the package and following is the result. For this test, we are using the complete Server2Go (for Windows) package, complete with Perl. The package comes in a 45MB .exe file.
First we need to turn off the Apache and MySQL service on the PC to avoid any conflict. Then we started with extracting all files to the local folder but inspite this we are going to treat it as if it is running in a write protected environment. Unexpectedly, our first complaint comes right before the extraction completed. It was painstakingly long and we remember installing XAMPP was a hell faster than this. We noticed that most of the extraction time was for extracting Perl files (which is not present in XAMP package actually) but we don't think it should take that long. The extraction finished only after a couple of cups of coffee and there are about 300MB of files successfully extracted.
Then comes the most tricky part. Just like XAMPP, our package of Server2Go also comes with both Apache and MySQl but unlike XAMPP, there is no control panel to play with. There is neither explanation nor user manual to begin with so we have to figure out how things work only after running and stopping the server for several times.
Everything lies in the settings file (pms_config.ini). We had to play with several different sets of configurations before we can get the server to run as we intended. However the setting explanation in this file is quite confusing because of the English language the developer are using. We are not saying that their English is bad. In fact we do understand how things are going on with them since English is also not our first language here but they should have done something to make it more straight forward.
By default, we have to say that server works only as a server and you can't use it to test your new PHP apps without configuring it to work together, unless you developed the PHP page right for the package (which kills the purpose of developing PHP apps offline). For example, we tried installing Wordpress and it simply refuses to proceed. Then we change the Apache HTTP port in the settings file to 80 (default is 4001) and things finally work (but still not as expected).
The default settings are really sucks in most ways. Since it does not have any control panel, it has to start with a browser by default. To make it worse, default browser was Internet Explorer! We changed it to our favorite Firefox but only to reveal more annoying default configurations; for example the server stopped when the browser is closed (when in the case we were switching to browse through Firefox). We changed the settings, as well as enabling the system tray icon to allow access to the server even after the browser is closed, without having to go to the Task Manager. My, they should have made the system tray icon enabled by default then when they don't have any control panel at all. Not only that, no matter what settings we are using, all the newly built MySQl databases as well as their newly entered data will be deleted when the server stops. This is ridiculous and we still can't figure out how to solve this.
Finally, we decided to give up on it and choose to stick with the proven-good XAMPP. Server2Go is actually nice and simple but those tricky settings and bad default configurations are major turn-off for most of us here. It is supposed to be user friendly but we find it is far from it. We can hardly recommend it but you may have a try if you think we made as mistake. Our final words:
Pros:
+ Simple
+ Portable
Cons:
- Tricky settings
- Bad defaults
Download Server2Go for free here:
http://www.server2go-web.de/download/download.html
Flock is a free open-source Firefox-based web browser developed by Flock Inc for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux. Just like any other Mozilla-derived software which is always named after animal-centric words, Flock is probably named either after the word that represent a group of birds or perhaps after a genus of flower plants. As an open source software, it is mainly licensed under GPL, while some other components of it are separately licensed under LGPL+MPL.
Flock is currently at version 2.5. What distinguishes Flock from the original Firefox browser is it integrates social networking and Web 2.0 technology into its user interface. Flock supports all common social networking and media services including Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Mail, MySpace, AOL Mail, Digg, Facebook, Youtube, Photobucket, Picasa, Blogger, LiveJournal, Typepad, etc. With these services built-in interface, Flock users can track updates from friends: profiles, uploaded photos, and more, as long as the service are supported. This is a very convenient feature especially for those who are regularly using these services.
Just like the original Firefox browser, Flock shares many of Firefox's user-configurable optimizations, provided that the user know how to deal with the "about:config" settings editor, though this is not really advised as it might rendere Flock unusable should any misconfigurations happen. However, users always have other options as Flock also supports 3rd party add-ons, just like Firefox. On top of that, Flock supports numbers of Firefox extensions. We tested Flock with all Firefox-recommended extensions and all of them works without a glitch. Our advise: only use Firefox extensions that modify the core settings, not the interface. If you're unsure on what you're doing, you can always ask the Flock developer community.
Since its first release to the public in 2007, Flock has gained many awards due to its usability and functionality. Frankly speaking, we are agreed because we can hardly find anything that turn us off about this browser. So far, we found there is no other way that makes the Web 2.0 user experience very smooth and exciting. It really deserves those awards. If we are really going to give an award to this browser, we could give it "Editor's Choice" or "Editor's Power Award" or "Editor's Platinum Award" or something like that. Enough about the award thingy, we can say from our desk that this browser is 100% recommended. Just hope that Flock can retain this reputation for the future releases.
Download Flock for free here:
http://flock.com/download/
Safari is a free web browser for both Mac and Windows PC. It is developed by Apple Inc. and is currently in its 4th version. THe browser is made based on Apple's own WebKit webpage rendering engine, of which was developed based on Konqueror's KHTML (in the form of WebCore) and KJS (in the form of JSC). Since both KHTML and KJS are open-source, WebKit also has been made open-source as well (under GNU Lesser GPL), allowing 3rd-party software developer to use it for instance, to develop another brand new browser, just like in the case when Netscape source-code was made open-source thus gave birth to Mozilla Firefox. However, some parts like the GUI elements of the software continue to remain as Apple's proprietary.
For most people, Safari is just yet another web browser. This is true to some extent though, as it shares common notable features with other modern browsers such as tabbed browsing, built-in pop-up blocker, integrated major search engines, spell checker, auto web form filler, feed reader and many more. However, Safari do have some "Safari-only" features like the "Keychain" password manager, Web-Inspector (a DOM Inspector-like utility), iPhoto integration as well as Apple Dashboard integration, where most of them are like some sort of rebadged similar features often found in other major browsers like Mozilla Firefox and Opera. They also usually only benefits Apple-esque web.
The first public release was in 2003, where it was only made available on Mac OS X. A Windows-ported version was only released in 2007. On that time, Safari is already in it's 3rd version. From various unofficial sources on the net, it appears that Windows users has been requesting for a Windows version of Safari, although those requests are made solely for the purpose of "satisfying the geek thirst". In real world application though, performance wise, Safari itself has never been a better browser actually, as it is always at average with other browsers.
The most notable controversy about Apple Safari is Apple's official web browser comparison chart which was publicly displayed on the company's corporate website sometime back in 2004. On that time, Safari was compared with other browsers with the fast browser reputation like Opera and Mozilla Firefox, of which both were already in their 8th and 2nd version respectively. However, surprisingly, Apple used Opera 7 and Firefox 1.5 to make the comparison. This biased and doubtful comparison was seriously offending that it resulted some European and Asian countries banned the advertisement of the software. Some long time Windows users admitted that this was expected because for them, "this is not the first time Apple tells us a lie". Even the more recent comparison still compares Safari with Firefox 2, as if Firefox 3 does not exist. A group of Firefox fans have been mocking about this on the net but there is no official respond from Apple so far (probably because they are eating back their words?). To make it worst, Apple still self-proclaimed Safari as "the world's fastest browser" although they are constantly being confronted by professionals for such false claim. In fact, even the Apple official website sometimes may took ages to be fully loaded when browsed through Safari, especially on first visit (upon first install or cleaned cache/cookies) while Firefox or Opera never really have this problem when visiting there.
Since version 4, Apple has included major changes and revamped around 25% of the interface of the software. It now somehow resembles the Mobile Safari, the iPhone version of Safari. It also support native Windows look for Windows version. There is also a 'CoverFlow' (like the one found in the iTunes) for browsing the history and bookmarks. The JSC engine also has been superseded by SquirrelFish, a new JavaScript engine. Apple, just like Google on Chrome, emphasize heavily on speeding up the JavaScript execution process. Both Google and Apple claimed that this greatly speeds up internet browsing experience, though this will only has significant impact if the website is heavily scripted with JavaScript (which only a fractionof websites do).
Still, despite in version 4, Apple still stubborn (or stupid) enough not to include a pulldown menu button in the addressbar, where this feature has been proven extremely useful in all other browsers. With this feature, user does not need to retype addresses or opening the history just to browsethe previously visited website. Not only that, Safari shares the same flaw with Google Chrome, where it can only recognize the first few letters of a typed URL in the address bar in order to suggest the previously opened URLs. Firefox and Opera are much better in this, where both browsers will suggest any previously visited URLs if the user only typing the 2nd level domain of a URL or even the sub-page URL.
Safari still have lots of rooms for improvements, and it would be better if they (Apple) would consider to tend to any kind of complaints regarding this browser. No, we are not asking them to make Safari as "another Firefox" but just want them to properly implement 'proven-useful' features. It is pointless to be different where in fact you are just being bad.
Download Safari for free here:
http://www.apple.com/safari/download/
Since September last year, Google has released a brand new web browser to compete head to head with other rivals in the browser war. Named Chrome, the browser is made open-source, making it playing on an even field with Firefox. As of time of writing, no OS X and Linux version is available, however, being open-source, we can expect them real soon. OS X user should not complain much though. Even their good 'toyware' like iTunes and Safari took years to be ported to Windows. Not to mention the mouthwatering GarageBand that every Windows users can only dream of.
Every second people write something new about Chrome in their blog or website, with numbers of followers and fans keeps growing everyday. We already heard something like "Chrome is the new Firefox" or "Today is the day for Chrome".
Is Chrome really a new Firefox? Unlike Firefox, Chrome's interface for now is not really customizable despite the neat, clean and user friendly appearance. User will be found to be unable to place the navbar buttons to their liking. Some people also prefer the status bar to be shown at the bottom of the browser window. It is useful to display the loading progress as well as some other information. In Chrome, there is no way to show the status bar, except the autohide tooltip that displays the URL upon mouse hover on links. The built-in task manager is indeed cool, but only if it works as intended. It is supposed to avoid browser crashes since tabs are running as separate tasks. However, from the 'crash test' session. any attempt to close unresponsive tabs will definitely close the browser too.
The default start page looks pretty much similar to Opera, except instead of 'Speed Dialing', it shows thumbnails of recently closed or most visited sites. Bookmarks and history search also shares the same page. Bookmarking however may become a bit tricky process in Chrome, unless you are familiar with the Ctrl+D shortcut key. You have to open a blank (start) page first by opening a new tab. Then, to bookmark a tab, you have to drag it to the bookmark bar located on top of the start page. Seems easy but it skips the usual step to manage the bookmarks as found in other browsers. Bookmarking should have been easier via right-clicking rather than go through these hassle.
CSS radius border element also not smoothly rendered. They look choppy, perhaps due to no antialiasing? Anyway, pages load really fast in Chrome, fast enough to make it faster than other browsers, if not the fastest. Tabs can be converted into separate windows or vice versa, which is very nice. Download progress by default are displayed in a 'bottombar' on the page users are downloading from, and can be closed without interrupting it. Just like Opera, downloads are shown in a tab, but too bad it offers too few controls. However, it is interesting to be able to search for your particular download should you lost in the list. Google really have incorporated their powerful search ability into this peace of software.
Speaking of download, installation of Chrome is the most non-friendly ever since there is no official offline installer available, just like Yahoo! Messenger. This is really troublesome for users behind proxy and firewall. 'Unofficial' offline installer is available but even if the users managed to install it, they still need the installed GoogleUpdate to update Chrome. Therefore, users behind proxy-firewall will need to constantly look for more updated Chrome offline installer elsewhere.
I personally have started using Chrome since September last year, thanks for the info I got from reading the CHIP Malaysia magazine. Chrome is not really a new browser. It is based on the existing open-source project named Chromium (http://chromium.sourceforge.net/) which has been around for quite some time. In other words, Chromium is like Linux where anybody who know programming may alter or modify the original codes and then claiming that it is theirs. Nothing bad is happening here since being open-source means it is legal (or rather encouraged) to do such thing to the existing codes. That is what explained in GPL since the first version of that license.
Having using Chrome for about half-a-year, I came to conclusion that it is still immature compared to another open-source browser, none other but the much loved Mozilla Firefox. One major issue is the unavailability of standalone offline installer. Google has explained why they don't provide the offline installer but in this new age of internet, such excuse is... NOT EXCUSABLE. Other browsers like Firefox, Opera, Safari and even IE don't have any problem with offline installer so why bother to be different in this case? Anyway, Google DO provide the downloadable offline installer, that is if you know the trick of how to reveal it via your browser (any browser).
Since the official version 1.x, Chrome default installer has offered proxy support which was unavailable prior to that version. It was also why Chrome received much criticism in the past months for being failed to include such support, which many software developers think as "a mistake that should have not been committed by an experienced entity like Google". Proxy support is very important, especially for office workers where the connections are always behind the proxy+firewall.
Chrome installation is one of the most annoying software installation routine I've ever encountered. Even compiling and installing Linux's software packages are far easier than this. The previous versions (prior to the official version 1.x) need to be installed online and I who are behind proxy all this time felt left out. Luckily I managed to figure it out on how to trick the browser I was using (Firefox) to download the offline installer and thus overcame the obstacle. According to Google, it is illegal to offer the offline installer or reveal the trick to download the offline installer, but even I want to have a piece of the cake too, can't I? That's how 'difficult' it was to install Chrome. Pretty annoying ain't it? The only fast thing about Chrome is, like what you said, is the execution of Java/Javascript apps. The rest is still on par, if not better than Firefox or Safari. Opera is still the king of the hill in terms of loading speed though. In terms of user-customizability, I still highly recommend Firefox. Even a long-time IE user will still feel at home with Firefox upon the first switch, despite its clean and uncluttered interface. On top of that, user can even alter the placement of the navigation buttons/icons. More than that, Firefox was made customizable with tons of plugins ever since its very first version. That said, Chrome is almost nothing compared to Firefox in that term. I am not totally against Chrome though. Being an open source software, it would be just a matter of time for Chrome to improve, but no matter how things are about it, Chrome seriously need to be improved right away, if not very soon in order to steal the heart of loyal Firefox fans. That is why I still use Chrome and Firefox side by side until right now.
Get Chrome for free here:
http://www.google.com/chrome
We have reviewed the Flock browser before and now we feel it is time to review the mother of all Firefox-based browsers, the original Mozilla Firefox browser. We have been a long time Firefox user, ever since it's initial release in November 2009. Currently Firefox is in the version 3.5, with the version 3.5.3 being the latest stable release by the time of writing this article.
The current Firefox is originally descended from the Mozilla Application Suite, which was born upon the release of the source code of the Gecko web rendering engine used in the legendary Netscape browser. Even today Firefox still uses the engine since it complies to most current web standards. In fact, Firefox also implemented some of the features that would eventually become standards.
Firefox is among the first few browsers that features tabbed-browsing, which has been around since its very first version. Actually tabbed-browsing feature was available in Mozilla Application suite as an extension and with the advent of Firefox, the feature is made built-in for the people who developed it think that this is a must in any web browser. Indeed it is a must and it is hard to imagine any modern web browser without it.
Simply put, it is also hard to write an article covering all Firefox features, for it will span thousands of words. Therefore we will highlight only a few of notable features that sets Firefox apart from the rest of other browsers. Firefox has the reputation of being one of the safest browser available. New updates constantly available thanks to the ever increasing supports and contributions from the Firefox developer community. If only Linux can be updated in a similar manner we believe many people would embrace it too.
Other most notable feature on Firefox is its page loading speed. By default it is already fast enough to beat many other major browsers in page rendering and with a little tweak it can be the fastest of all. Yes, user-customizability is another Firefox's killer feature. So far, apart from Firefox derived browsers, we never seen any browser as highly customizable as this one. There are tons of plug-ins (extensions) to extend it functionality plus loads more themes to replace the default look and fell, if that is what you are into. Not to mention that power user may delve into its internal configurations for some extras, just like what people are doing with Windows Registry.
At this moment we have almost no complain for Firefox except for its one band reputation; being the memory hog. Yes, one running Firefox instance with certain amount of extensions installed may hog your system memory up to 100MB, even without displaying any page, hampering your PC performance. Even after closing it Firefox does not instantly give up the memory and may take some time to clear everything before it is completely 'shut down'. This is getting worse by the fact that Firefox runs only on single processing thread, though multi-threaded version has been planned for the future. Luckily since Firefox is highly customizable, there are tweaks to compensate this problem if you really need to get rid of them. Our advice is, only install the extensions you really use and Firefox will work just fine. Spread Firefox!
Download Firefox for free here:
http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/personal.html