If you have a mac it's up, no seeds yet they're "doing some final checks"

PwnageTool_3.0.dmg (download torrent) - TPB

Check here for quickpwn or windows versions I guess, which will probably be posted shortly.
iphonedev - TPB

I literally just looked and there are suddenly 2000+ seeders soon to be 5000, and more than 3000 downloads already. I wonder if this will break some kind of torrenting record.. or what the current record is.. probably held by Ubuntu and I know more people have iPhones than use Ubuntu. Wait no I don't I just made that up. But searching for torrent record just brings up torrents themselves and not records so..

If you've been waiting for the latest Jailbreak[http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/124232620/big-week] you might want to check out their Twitter[http://twitter.com/iphone_dev] where they just posted their analytics showing the burst in traffic since the os release. It's not a sample of the general population, but of the kind of people who would camp out in front of stores when a new phone comes out if they weren't so lazy. Also really cool is seeing Intense Debate in action on their blog, the comment system made by Automattic(the same people behind Wordpress). Earlier today the comment system went down for a while probably from the extra 3.5 million pageviews. Anyway here's the screencaps that were posted, notice 990,000 windows users and only 340,000 IE users. Also that 200,000 of the Safari users are on their iphone, so Firefox is the dominant browser here.. Over the last day or two I've been there a bunch of times, in Firefox, Safari, and Opera.. I don't know why, I just happened to have them open and using them for different things. I wonder if I'm the only one though.

Microsoft is getting disparate and desperate, offering a chance at $10,0000 if you use their browser for a few weeks and twitter about it. Check out the contest  Ten Grand is Buried Here | Microsoft Australia. I think it's funny that they don't have anything legitimate to promote their browser so instead they say "our fastest browser yet" and "old Firefox" even though 3.5 is being release in a couple weeks and 3.0 being released a year ago is and was still faster, more secure/standards compliant, etc. than IE. At any rate, since desperation amuses me, I'm posting a bunch of screencaps too so you can see what the above link shows you if you visit it in different browsers. It's kinda sad seeing a massive corporation reduced to throwing money at user contests(instead of at their own staff to make the product better) and childish insults at the competition. But then again the company made its bones by riffing off the competition and locking in deals with oems. The ideal of which is riffing off the wii to make natal which is great,  and then there's the other darker side rearing its head in the online space where they've locked themselves into a corner where all they have is childishness and flailing jabs at the competition. The people have spoken, market share fluctuations are accelerating in their competitors favour.  As more demographics cross over the 50% market share line expect to see a lot more money and name calling from them.

Firefox

Safari

Chrome

Opera

I don't think it's gonna have much impact, just like a really ugly chick playing hard to get and then when you turn her down she tells you she'll only date you if you wear a different shirt every day and IF you're willing to do that you have a 1 in 50,000,000 chance of winning some money. Come on. Especially when there's 4 really hot chicks that put out and know what they're doing just around the corner, and soon in the case of Chrome pre-installed everywhere.

If you browse around MSN there are just tons of ads trying to get you to use their services. Silverlight is total shit, one developer I've spoken to really like it, but it's just not viable, and he was a snob, even the implementations used on live msn sites to promote their products have pixelated poorly made graphics and are slow, it just looks really unappealing. But they're pushing it becasue they want to dominate rich media. Never gonna happen. I read somewhere they're now offering free POP access to Hotmail or Windows Live Mail or whatever the hell they're calling it now(how can they build up so much resentment from their users that they have to rebrand all of their products every few months). Previously it only worked in Outlook Express and a few random email programs that had to pay for the right. But that's so behind, I've got Gmail smtp access for free for moths now, and if Gmail wasn't doing it for me anymore I could just export everything, mail-contacts-calendar-documents, to any conceivable format and move, for that reason I and anyone else that uses Google services does so because their services are awesome. My grandfather tried to leave hotmail about a year ago to gmail but had to keep the hotmail calendar cause it's just not worth retyping his entire calendar, so he's locked in and hates them for it, no matter what they call themselves. Just like enabling free pop access they will have to open up their services but it'll be too late. Even if they somehow magically build usefull open tools by the time they're forced to do it, even blind consumers who just use whatever their computer come with will just hate them so much for all the abuse. It looks like they don't understand that most of their users are from the boom from 1999-2003ish who are just locked into their services and are turning against them. They're user base just isn't growing proportionlly to the rate of internet users. And it bleeds into their other businesses. They want to be in home automation with Micorosft surface and walls covered in wallpaper that's really interactive computer screens and project natal. I personally wouldn't get natal just because it's a camera with a dedicated internet connection built by Microsoft a shady manipulating untrustworthy company that sits in your living room constantly pointed at you while you watch tv and react to commercials. You need trust to enter someone's home like that, and trust has to be earned not bought.

Firefox has silently uploaded a release candidate for their upcoming version. Get it here: http://releases.mozilla.org/pub/mozilla.org/firefox/releases/3.5rc1/

I thought I'd run a few tests to see if it's faster than Safari 4 which from all the hype, it's supposed to be. Here are the results, if you wanna run the tests on your own systems let me know what kind of scores you get.

Sunspider is a Javascript benchmark created by WebKit, so Safari 4's Squirrelfish should be designed for the most part to do really well on this benchmark, with that said, the results I got suggest that apart from any possible bias Safari 4 is still quite a bit faster than the Firefox RC. Run the SunSpider benchmark yourself here: http://www2.webkit.org/perf/sunspider-0.9/sunspider.html Check out my results below.

Firefox RC - score: 1788.0ms +/- 0.6%

Safari 4  1046.4ms +/- 4.2%

Next up I ran the V8 benchmark, which is what Chrome's Javascript renderer V8 is tuned to. Try it yourself here: http://v8.googlecode.com/svn/data/benchmarks/v4/run.html Every time I ran it I got different results, here are the highest for each browser, Safari again fairs much better(note a higher score on this one is better)..

Firefox 217

Safari 1215

The final benchmark I ran is the one I blogged about earlier in this post. Run it yourself here: http://people.mozilla.com/~schrep/image12.html. I got the same results, that Firefox is about 3 times faster than Safari at rendering the image contrast and brightness. So what is it that makes Safari perform so much better in the more traditional benchmarks, and Firefox perform so much better in this one?

Safari's Squirrelfish converts javascript into byte code which is interpreted by a software virtual machine, much like Adobe Flash is today. Firefox's Tracemonkey converts javascript into machine code which is interpreted by the hardware(more or less). In theory machine code runs several times faster than byte code, but machine code would take longer to compile. So traditional benchmarks which load one test after another are completed faster in Safari, on the other hand the image rendering benchmark in which the entire application is loaded before starting Firefox does better.

To put this theory to the test I loaded Google documents, I copied 500 paragraphs of Lorem Ipsum(a massive latin text designers use for general prototyping as it reflects the average word and paragraph size of typical text) into a fresh new document. I then saved it started the test by asking it to check spelling. Because it's all latin most of the words would be spelled incorrectly when using an english spell check. I used a stop watch to time it so it may be off by up to 1 second. Here are the results:

Firefox: 27.5 seconds

Safari: 13.2 seconds

The theory doesn't hold up, Safari was twice as fast at spell checking. Ok but then what is it that makes Firefox perform better than Safari in that one test? Next I tried a slightly more subjective approach by running a few chrome experiments. It's hard to get raw numbers for these, so bare with me. Also note I'm running the tests on a Macbook with integrated graphics and 2GB of memory(but all on one side, the other side is empty cause I'm an idiot).

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/lorenz-84/

Firefox: Medium - jittery,  lost frames

Safari: Fast -  realtime

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/js-fireworks/

Firefox: Fast - realtime, slows down when screwing with the gravity control

Safari: Faster  - realtime, no slowdowns at all

http://www.chromeexperiments.com/detail/monster/

Firefox: Slow - jittery, lost frames, too slow to sit and watch the whole thing

Safari: medium - jittery, lost frames, but watchable. not smooth but ok

Still across the board Safari is faster than Firefox in some cases a lot faster, except for that one image rendering benchmark I did the other day where Firefox excels. Why? I don't know, and the Google searches I'm  doing don't know either. Perhaps it's as simple as the tests designed for Webkit just favor Webkit and the one by Mozilla favors Mozilla. What's clear is that Javascript benchmarking isn't as straightforward as commonly thought.

I was watching some of the Google I/O stuff on YouTube and  clicked over to this Google Chrome ad. It looks incredible, I've never seen anything so cool for a piece of software.

Firefox ads look like they'll be pretty awesome too and with 3.5 scheduled to hold the fastest browser title for a while they have a lot to promote. Check out the Firefox ad below, not as cool special effects as the Chrome ad but still really really cool..

And then there's IE8, targeted at the mentally unstable. As we all know those are the only people that would actually switch to IE, anyone else that uses it does so because it came with their computer,  and they haven't seen the above two ads or tried other browsers.

Opera filed an anti-trust complaint against Microsoft saying they abuse their operating system's dominance by bundling Internet Explorer, the average user just uses Internet Explorer and never even tries Firefox, Opera, Safari, Chrome, or any of the other alternatives. Well It's official now, there will be a special version of Windows 7 available in the European Union that doesn't come with the infamous Internet Explorer browser. Over the last 6 months Microsoft has lost 5% of the browser market to Firefox, and only 5%  went from IE 7 to IE 8. There are quite a few people who still use IE 6 that are due for a new pc, and the people dying to upgrade their OS that recently got stuck with Vista will be getting Windows 7. Microsoft will lose the vast majority of its browser share in the European Union. In the rest of the world Google still has plans to trump Microsoft in OEM deals to package Chrome instead of IE with new PCs, but even if they don't more than 90% of internet users use Google for search, when Google starts seriously pushing Chrome, Internet Explorer will be obliterated. Currently half the users upgrading from IE go to Firefox, when Chrome actually enters the arena it'll surely scoop up even more. From what I've seen there are a lot more IE users asking me questions about Chrome than Firefox users. With the surge of computer sales that Windows 7 is gonna generate and Chrome betas just recently being released for Mac and Linux it looks like the race is revving up. Microsoft is leaving out native email and productivity apps for simply tying in their windows live service with the operating system. They're doing that to release sooner and beat Google to the punch. In the same vain Microsoft just launched Bing, what some say is their final attempt at competing with Google for search. Word on the internet street is people try Bing, check the search results with Google and then go back to Google. That doesn't say much about the quality, it's not about quality, it's about trust and familiarity. Google = Search. With YouTube, Gmail, Translate, and soon Google Wave Google is at the center of the vast majority of web diets. Still, Microsoft is pushing Bing really hard trying to grab a few %s market share, trying to grab some of the search market as it directly ties into browser market. Things are gonna get interesting,

I expect the w3c schools browser market share breakdown to see IE drop below 10% over the next year(by July 2010) to Firefox and Chrome where Safari and IE will be about even. As for the general population every website has different statistics for browser shares some show IE has 90% others show 60% and still others show less than 5%. So it's hard to use any of that as a measure, but IE is going to take a significant hit. With all these percentages though it's easy to loose sight of the fact that they represent more than 1.5 billion people currently on the internet, a number that grows by about 10 million new users every month.

Tracemonkey is a new addition to Firefox and it'll be in 3.5. What it does is compile Javascript into machine code, which speeds up Javascript remarkably. Now I recently tried Safari 4 and was blown away by how fast it was in the Javascript department. Well head over to http://hacks.mozilla.org/2009/06/tracemonkey-demo/ and test the image rendering demo in Safari 4 compared to the current Firefox(3) and the video demo of the latest Firefox(3.5) soon to be released.

Firefox 3: ~1.2 seconds

Safari 4: ~0.3 seconds

Firefox 3.5: ~0.1 seconds

Up till now Adobe flash was faster than Javascript in the browser because Flash/Actionscript is compiled into bytecode. Bytecode is fast and is run in the flash virtual machine. Mozilla and Adobe have been collaborating on a project called Tamarin, and working toward the next version of Ecmascript, the standard both Actionscript and Javascript implement, one of the products of that collaboration aside from both technologies being able to compile into machine code(a language-set interpreted natively by the hardware) is Tracemonkey.

The good news is because All the major players are contributing to Tamarin and because it's gonna be open source. All major browsers will have it implemented in the near future. It also means that Flex/AIR apps will run faster, and that all the major players including Microsoft(what!?  :D) are intending to implement open standards. One step closer to a MUCH faster web, where you choose a browser based on features, and not whether or not your favourite site is broken in the others. Which will mean much more innovation in browser features and possibly spawning off into browser only OSs. Then again maybe it'll stop somewhere around Jolicloud http://www.jolicloud.com/

Chrome for mac and linux is also out, but it's like an alpha so there's nothing to say about it.

Safari 4 is FAST. I've been playing with the Firefox 3.5 beta 4 for about a week or two now, personas are really great and obviously I can't live without things like, session manager, Firebug, yslow, live http headers, and most importantly the Awesome Bar. But Safari 4 is so FAST. Fast as in, the Javascript on a page, even a really intense page is almost instantly interpreted and run, and the structure of the page is rendered long before images even begin to load.. over broadband.. I usually find Safari frustrating to use because you can't search from the Address bar like every other browser can. Firefox has the Awesome Bar, which among other things typing in keywords or sentences uses Google's "I'm feeling lucky" search, on Safari doing that you get an error. The debug, html/css/javascript/network monitoring tools in Safari weren't as interactive as Firebug, although they are much improved now and visually much more appealing. On top of that there's a bunch of developer extras in Safari like the Activity Monitor, the ability to change the user agent which let you impersonate other browsers (a valuable feature that Opera actually implemented years ago). You can disable various aspects of a page like cache, images, scripts, etc. easily, Debugging and Profiling Javascript built in which I guess is standard now, and the web inspector supports monitoring and debugging new stuff in html 5 like html databases.

Now that it's finally using the new Webkit builds it fully passes the Acid 3 test. Also the latest trend in browsers (started by Google Chrome) is individual threads for tabs, Firefox is implementing it in their latest beta and Safari 4 too has mechanisms for protecting other tabs from that one rogue site that burns a hole in your cpozone. Safari looks a lot better than it did in betas visually, especially when you peel tabs off a window to create a new window or do the reverse. Another cool thing about Safari on Mac is web clips. You can clip out a part of a website and stick it in the dashboard where that clips stays live. And the new top sites page gives you live previews of your favourite and most visited sites like Google Chrome and a number of Firefox plugins, and being able to search across all the text of all the web pages in my history and scroll through the history or search results in coverflow is a nice touch too.

Above everything else Safari's brute speed over any other browser out there makes me want to use it, so I went looking for some plugins to make the experience as usable as Firefox. I realize that the new Firefox is coming out soon and will be much faster than the beta but Safari is just so fast.

The first plugin is Inquisitor, super enhanced search. The latest version is even better than what I remember, and it looks like they have an iphone app and plugins for Firefox and IE. Check out Inquisitor http://www.inquisitorx.com/safari/index_en.php

The second plugin is, well there are a bunch that let you search from the address bar, but none support Safari 4 yet, soo.. what do I do now? I guess I'll just wait for the Firefox 3.5 RC to hit next week, rumoured to be ~250% faster than it was and put it in the same league as Chrome and Safari 4. Here's hoping. Actually go check out Mozilla's 'Show us your speed' campaign http://www.mozilla.com/en-US/firefox/fastest/ .

As a developer I'm familiar with staying up for 30 hours at a time, I've been known to go up to a week without sleep or longer surviving on short naps. I recognize that sometimes things look like a good idea in that state and I try not to make those statements and realizations public until I have a chance to review it in the light of full consciousness.

Reading the latest post on the Daily Motion blog [link] I'm left with the tangible warm feeling you get when you see someone else in that state of mind. DailyMotion.com for anyone that doesn't know is an alternative to YouTube. Now don't get me wrong there's a steep drop off there but they are nevertheless an alternative.

The  spec for the next version of HTML calls for a <video> tag. It means that instead of using flash to load video, or some other plugin like DivX, you can just embed the video on your website like an image and have it play natively in the browser. This requires that browsers implement the HTML 5 specification. There are a number of issues with adopting the <video> tag at this stage before any browsers even support it.

Let's face it, even though the majority of developers no longer user Internet Explorer,  and ALL of them consider it a scornful misadventure in market dominance, the majority of users still use it. With Windows 7 potentially being functional (While screenshots and beta testers are raving about it, I'm still sceptical as Vista received the same acclaim pre-release), and while Google is positioning Chrome to take a hefty piece of the pie, albeit slowly, Microsoft will still hold a significant slice themselves. Microsoft has made clear their devotion to implementing HTML 5 standards in IE8 but they haven't even started those yet and IE8 is out and available for download. They will only implement it in one scenario. That is if they find a way for it to leverage their position in the online space(not likely). It's not likely both because the <video> tag will be open source it literally means implementing it in IE8,9, or 10 would be giving up their proprietary leverage, and they're clearly interested in proprietary leverage with Silverlight(Microsoft's version of Flash). Microsoft doesn't give a shit about open standards or advancing the web and they'll continue to exploit their market share for as long as possible if it means holding onto their dominance. After all, we are reaching a point where the average user can be satisfied with linux, and once that happens Microsoft will have to actually be better than the competition to remain a player in the online space. They are definitely not going to accelerate that process.

Also to be noted is the quality of video that can be played with the <video> tag. It's simple, at this stage, the quality and formats are complete and utter shit. Jittery low-fi shit. In an age of broadband where YouTube just added an HD button Daily Motion just made a move in favour of open source technology that hasn't been implemented anywhere except a few betas. Sure if they don't need to use flash they probably don't need to use FMS and can switch to lighter cheaper hardware. Going completely open source like that will save them a lot on proprietary software. It's insane to make the switch now. In the middle of what is likely or at least close to the climax of the browser wars the guys over at DailyMotion are all idealistic walking around with peace symbols around their necks claiming that they want to implement the constitution which is not even in it's first draft and there's 4 countries that appose that very constitution and they're all armed with a full nuclear arsenal.

And the same goes for the HTML spec for canvas. Both Microsoft and Adobe stand to lose if video and canvas are implemented in Internet Explorer, but even if it was implemented tomorrow, Adobe is leaps ahead of where the open source alternatives are especially with their desktop and server products AIR and FMS and the popular flv format.

The moral?

Make critical business and tech decisions after a full nights rest. DailyMotion... you can't be fucking serious...