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Posts Tagged ‘tabs’

Regular readers will know that my browser of choice has long been Camino. It’s that other browser built under the brand of Firefox-makers Mozilla, that runs on the Mac platform and is entirely open-source and volunteer-built. I love it because it’s much lighter and faster than Firefox is, while being extremely compatible with just about all sites on the web. And today, version 2.0 has just launched.

Version 2 has been beta testing for several months now, and a release candidate was unveiled a couple weeks ago. For a while, there was some concern that its release would get pushed indefinitely since the lead on it, Mike Pinkerton, also happens to be the guy helping Google build Chrome for Mac. But, “Mike is still involved in overseeing changes that land, planning features, and overall guidance for the project. While his day job may be Chromium, he continues to lead the Camino Project in his spare time,” Samuel Sidler, Camino’s team coordinator tells us.

And that spare time is apparently enough, as not only is Camino 2 here, but it’s being released ahead of even a beta version of Chrome for Mac (which should be coming in a few weeks).

Camino uses the same Gekko 1.9 rendering engine that Firefox 3 uses, which ensures that the majority of the web looks great in it. But the Camino browser maintains more of a Mac-style since it was built as Mac-only from the ground up, whereas Firefox was not. One great looking feature is the Tab Overview page, which shows a nice visual representation of the tabs you have open (pic below). Camino also has a built-in option to block web ads.

One downside of the browser is that Firefox plug-in lovers are out of luck with Camino. But I don’t consider that to be a big downside, since it keeps the browsing experience very fast. Download Camino 2 here.

So what’s new in Camino 2? Here’s a rundown:

Improved tabbed browsing

The Tab Overview feature displays a grid of thumbnails of the tabs in the current window.

Tabs can be rearranged by dragging and dropping.

Command-click now defaults to opening links in new tabs instead of new windows.

New security features

Camino now supports the Google Safe Browsing service to provide warnings about many potentially malicious websites.

Camino now displays error pages for secure web pages using invalid or untrusted certificates.

Full content zoom

Camino now has support for making the entire contents of a web page bigger or smaller.

Download notifications

If Growl is installed, Camino will generate notifications when downloads begin and finish.

On Mac OS X 10.5 and higher, Camino will bounce the downloads folder in the Dock when a download finishes.

Recently closed pages

The History menu now contains a sub-menu listing the last 20 closed web pages.

Improved support for Full Keyboard Access

When Full Keyboard Access is enabled, tabbing now moves correctly through the entire browser window.

Enhanced annoyance blocking

Camino now includes an exceptions list to allow disabling “Block Flash animations” on a per-site basis and an “Allow Flash From This Site” contextual menu item to ease adding sites to the exceptions list.

New AppleScript capabilities

AppleScripts can now obtain the HTML source or text of an entire web page or of a selection.

Added AppleScript support for setting the active tab in each browser window.

Web content support

Camino now uses version 1.9.0 of Mozilla’s Gecko rendering engine, which contains thousands of bug fixes, better web plug-in compatibility and performance, enhanced support for web standards, and new technologies like JavaScript 1.8.

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Over the past few years, tabs have become one of those must-have features in a web browser. The mobile web is a bit different obviously, because the screen is so small, but some mobile browsers like mobile Safari give you the option to have multiple windows in which to browse. But let’s be honest, multiple windows are a pain, we want tabs. And with Nightglow, a new browser for the iPhone, you can get them.

Nightglow allows you have have up to four tabs open at any given time. They reside in the upper left (or right, if you change the settings) side of the window and each page is distinguished by its favicon. Tapping on that icon will quickly switch you from page to page. The method is a lot faster than using Safari’s page-switching option. But with this speed there’s a downside: Overall system speed — Nightglow is a resource hog.

I’ve been testing the app out today and a number of times I’ve gotten the system resource warning message. The only other apps that have triggered that in my iPhone before have been huge games like SimCity.

Something else which is slightly annoying is that unlike other third-party quasi-browsers on the iPhone (I call them this because they are really just new wrappers for the Safari browser), Nightglow cannot rotate the screen when you rotate your iPhone or iPod touch. Actually, that’s a point of debate right now at the TechCrunch office right now. Some of us love that auto-rotate feature, others of us hate it. I hate it because it makes browsing while lying in bed a pain. And Nightglow actually touts not rotating as a feature.

Nightglow also features an easy way to dim and brighten your screen, has options for finger gestures and has fairly nice way to easily search YouTube, Wikipedia and Google. Another nice feature is that Nightglow remembers the pages you last had opened in the tabs.

If you’re addicted to tabbed browsing, you should definitely check out Nightglow. I suspect that with subsequent releases they’ll fix the performance issues. I’m not a huge fan of the UI either beyond the tabs, but that’s just a matter of taste.

Nightglow, which was made by Synthereal Co., LTD, a Japanese development company, is available now in the App Store for an introductory price of $0.99. After that, it will be $2.99. Find it here. And watch more about it in the video below.

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I’ve made no secret of my dissatisfaction with the iPhone’s built-in mail client, which omits basic features like search that makes navigating through any sizable inbox nearly impossible. Things are going to get much better with the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update this summer, which includes some search functionality, but there’s still plenty of room for improvement. ‘All My Mail‘, a new application from Attassa, is a step in the right direction. The application is comparable to a stripped down, mobile version of Xobni, and is now available on the iPhone App Store.

After scanning through your inboxes, the application analyzes your Email messages and breaks them into conversation threads, similar to those found in the Gmail web interface. It also uses the Email addresses you typically interact with to generate a comprehensive address book (it can identify when the same person uses multiple Email addresses, and groups them accordingly). Whenever you click on one of these contacts, the application presents every Email thread you’ve had with that person, as well as related contacts. There’s also a very useful feature that allows you to look only at the attachments you’ve exchanged with other contacts, which is great when you’re looking for a particular file but can’t remember when exactly someone sent it to you.

At launch the application works with Gmail and AOL webmail accounts, as well as any Outlook accounts (you have to install a special plugin). Support for more services is on the way. A free version supports a single inbox, while the premium version (which is $4.99 plus a subscription fee) allows for an unlimited number of inboxes. For you privacy buffs, Attassa says that it does not store entire copies messages on its server, but that it does store encrypted meta information and snippets about each message. The company could theoretically look at this data, so it might be unwise to use it for highly confidential information, but this is really a risk with any startup service.

Attassa is charging $20 per year for the service (the first three months are included in the application’s $4.99 sale price). That’s obviously fairly inexpensive, but I’m not sure I’d be willing to pay it unless I could count on All My Mail as my default mail client - and it isn’t quite there yet. For one, you can’t compose a new message (though you can reply to them), and it’s frustrating to have to switch between multiple mail programs depending on what you’re trying to do. The company says that this will change as soon as the iPhone 3.0 update is released. I’d also like to see a more comprehensive search, similar to the impressive full-text search that was just released by ReMail last week (again, Attassa says search is coming in a future update). That said, All My Mail is definitely a very welcome addition to the iPhone’s otherwise anemic mail functionality, and we’ll be keeping an eye out for its future updates.

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