IE 7 VS FF 2: The Review

Hi guys we the crew from tech hype are back from a harrowing 3 hours spent with either new browser in the latest installment of the decade long browser wars, and here we are with a review of both browsers. We, however, have been pampered by the firefox for quite some time, so you might find us slightly biased. More of that later...


VS

The Lowdown:
Criteria:
Ease/time of Installation(we come are updating both browsers previous version)
Style
Ease Of Use(Focusing on tabs)
Features
Loading Time

Time for..... FIREFOX
We have to honestly admit, we have been loyal users of Firefox since we found it at 1.0 way back.
Installation
Quick, simple easy, hassle free. The file size is a small 5.6 mb, and it comes as it is, without any downloading from the net for firefox. We cleared the installation rather fast, in about 30 secs, and because we used firefox before, it also helped us search for and install updates to the add-ons we have in Firefox.The whole thing took less than 3 mins, and we were clear.

Style
Now, style is one thing you cant exactly rate here, because your options from themes online are humongous. As such, for now we'll only be considering the default theme, which is pretty good looking by itself. The buttons look chic and stylish, and it is a clean grey. The drag and drop customization process makes it easy for us to decide where exactly do we want to find a button. Customization is easy, but you cant change the places of buttons. overall,

Ease Of Use
Where in the past when you had too many tabs open in your Firefox browser and there was only a delete tab button at the right-end of the tab tool bar, now every tab comes with a delete button, and you can have as many tabs as you want for there are scroll arrows to help you navigate your list of tabs. There is also a new drop down menu for you to access any tab immediately. Of course, we love these improvements, as now we dont have any more ~10pz wide tabs anymore.

Searching is made for convenient, for now it also suggests search terms while you are typing it in. The options menu is also easy to navigate. Firefox will also detect when a Web site has a search engine that can be installed, and will install it for you with a single click in the drop-down menu, which makes it quite easy as compared to before, where you had to hunt down a single engine on the mozilla website.

Features
Ah... this is the part where we love mozilla. You need a feature? There are extensions for most of the things.(Dont say I never warn you, some of them can be quite addictive).

OF course, there are already quite a load of features in Firefox, but we will only elaborate on the newer ones.

First of all, one of the things I really love, in fact it's helping me as I type this post is the spell checker. You can click on the screenshot on the left to see how it works. Don't expect too much, it still doesn't beat copy and pasting an article into Microsoft Words to check for grammar and spelling mistakes, as you can see in the screenshot. It is able to spot spelling mistakes of one or at most, 2 letters. Of course, it's still very useful for things such as blog and forum posts, where quick typing tend to swap/add one or two letters. Of course, it has it's flaws too, I do my blogging in edit-html mode, so it has to stop highlighting my HTML code!

We also fell in love with the session restore. With this, if m feeling sleeping I could always shut down my computer now to save power, then turn it on again the next morning and everything in firefox will still be there. The live titles and bookmarks helps you to stay onto of developments in the world, too.

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Internet Explorer 7: Playing Catch-up
Been years since I'd used it, back then I was sick of all the spyware that were attacking IE so I just made a switch.. well I can't exactly say "home sweet home"

Installation
The file's bigger at around 17 mb, plus it takes quite long to fetch downloads from the internet and install.But at least it remains easy.

Style

At first glance the new UI seems nicer, but unusual. You have got the refresh and stop button separated from the cool-looking back/forward buttons, but once you dive in you realize it's about the same with firefox.Customization is easly, but you cant change the places of buttons. Overall, it appears nice and compact.

Ease of Use
First of all, lets concentrate on tabs. Its about the same with firefox, individual delete buttons, scrolling tab-bar, drop down menu....only that Internet Explorer added in a quick tabs pages, ala Microsoft Powerpoint slides summary, which makes it visually easier to hunt for a certain page.

Microsoft also added in a web search bar, surprise surprise, also at the top right hand corner of the browser.

Now, comes the living hell. Microsoft concentrated all the option/ drop down menus in one spot. Spread over many small buttons. Luckily, with abit fo customization, we made it alot neater, but we still consider that area as an rubbish dump.

Features
Surprise surprise, IExplorer has now an online add-on section. Well, better late than never......

One very handy tool for students and researchers alike is the research sidebar, which allows you to search dictionaries, thesaurus, or financial sites. The RSS feature works well, and the much-hyped about printing feature allows you to control page shrinkage and margins for printing, which really helps to conserve paper.

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Overall:
Both browsers' security features have improved, such as anti-phishing and pop-up blockers. Of course, both needs your consent for downloads, so now we can't exactly judge on security until more threats surface.

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Judging:
Installation:
Firefox: 18/20 IE: 14/20
Firefox wins this , due to the fast installation and the auto-upgrade for third party plug-ins/ extensions.

Style
Firefox: 17/20 Internet Explorer: 15/20
Of course, we have to give more points to firefox due to a huge library of styles, but in comparison of the individual browser's interface we still prefer the larger, easier to access and customize interface of firefox over Internet's explorer compact, but crowded interface. As for the themes, the button design in Internet Explorer is nicer, but the layout is much better in Firefox.

Ease Of Use
Firefox: 18/20 Internet Explorer: 17/20
Firefox is loved for it's search suggestion, while IE stays close with it's nice addition of the quick tabs. (note: some parts of the style and ease of use are quite interchangeable, so we have decided to shift the grading part of the interface navigation over to style)

Features
Firefox: 18/20 Internet Explorer: 16/20
The spelling checker is a very welcome too, whereas it is available for IE as an add-on, but with most users not bothering with the add-on part of IE, firefox trumps out here. Plus, the session restore is handy for those odd power outages.

And the last one... loading time.
Surprise surprise, IE actually loads web pages faster than in Firefox, or sometimes both are close.

Kong-Hq.com- Another site ran by me, it features javascript redirects and it very image heavy, and is powered by a CMS(content management system)
Firefox: 16 Seconds
IE: 10 Seconds

Youtube, one image heavy site.
IE & FF: 6 seconds

Tech Hype
FF: 5 Secs
IE: 6 Secs

Digg, A very popular website with heavy SQL access.
FF: 18 Secs
IE 16 secs

Miniclip, a popular games site, media content heavy
FF & IE: 14 Secs

Cybernations, a popular online text game site, the page we are loading has a Google maps app on it.
FF: 10
IE: 7

Loading time marks:
FF: 6/10
IE:8/10
(Note: all webpages loaded at around 7.45am GMT from Singapore 1.5 Mbps access)
We're joking, one left.
Well, we are sad to say that IE loses out on one of the most important things, and that is user experience. For me, I tend to like customizing things such as themes. Also, what hurts the user experience the most is the new interface for IE. It really makes me hunt for what I want, and the easy access Firefox has spoilt me with really makes IE somewhat of an eyesore.

FireFox: 8/10
IE: 6/10

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Conclusion
Overall marks:
Firefox:86/100
Internet Explorer:76/100

Well, so in the end, we at the tech hype crew would still prefer to stick with Firefox. Microsoft did a really good job of catching up, but we were really won over by the firefox's new features, and also we were turned off by the new GUI of IE. Give it time, and IE will improve, especially with the online add ons. For now, we shall stick with what open-source has gave us for Christmas, and from our point of view, firefox has trumped IE in this latest installment of the browser wars.

The next post here will be a review of the blogger in beta. Stay tuned.

To Download Firefox, Click Here
To Download IE 7, Click Here

Spotted: Smash My Head

While working on our IE 7 vs FF2 article, we ran into this.
Of course, I've been surfing goo-tube to waste time..... some people simply have too much money....So we decided to do a tect parody of it. Anyone can turn it into a video/ podcast for us?





Please watch the two movies above before proceeding down



Well, since they have so much money, so now lets go smash something that probably also doesn't matter to them.... their head.

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(scene= Outside mental hospital)
S'mee, dickhead! Hello!

(walks to nearby ICC unit)

Todays, as part of our smashyhead.com, we will be going to a hospital's head surgery unit, where I will get my head smashed, and record it down so that I can earn some advertising money and donations online! People like the jealous looks on people faces when they see something that they want smashed right in front of their eyes! Here we go!

(Dickhead walks struts into the head surgery ward, where there is a terribly long queue, looking arrogant.)
Here we go!
SMASHMYHEAD.COM!
(looney mario tune starts)
(Dickhead throws himself headfirst into the ward floor)

-------+ from this part onwards the sound has been edited out to avoid too much disgust from your part, and replaced with mario sounds effect +-------

(friend whips out jackhammer)

(Sound effect of mario collecting a coin plays)

(Sound effect of mario collecting a coin plays)

(Sound effect of mario collecting a coin plays)

SSSsmmmmmaaarrsasshhhhh mmmmauiii hhhhheeaaddddd dddoooott cccaaaallmmm!!


(Sound effect of mario collecting a coin plays)

(Sound effect of mario collecting a coin plays)

(Sound effect of mario collecting a coin plays)

(Friends jumps and stamps on dickhead's head)

(gives up)

Final result: a head that looks like the ps3. We would've picked the Wii, but I think that will be too much gore.(PRob because his head's too thick)

(Another stupid mario sound, this time the end of a level, plays)

(Jubilant cheers everywhere)

(not a grim/sad face)

SSSSSmmasgh maaaaiiii weeeee hhhaaattte dooottt calmmm!! Vvviidaaaeeooo uuupppp tttonnniiikkeeee! Chhiiiaaakkk iiittt ooouuuuttt!

(camera blackens)

Passer-by comments: We spent a whole 5 mins looking at this guy, and we can tell you, he's nuts. Seriously dumb. He needs his genes to get out of he gene pool, fast. So please ladies, find him, do humanity favour, make sure his sperm doesn't go into a sperm back or anywhere else.


(off camera comment from friend with jackhammer to camera crew: How much do ya think this'll sell on ebay?)

Watch out for our firefox vs Ie article: Coming up next.

Flashly Control Rods

It has been decades since nuclear power plants have been invented and control rods invented to lower the speed of atomic reactions in the nuclear power plant. Today, Jim Allchin from the microsoft beta team announces Window ReadyBoost, where you can basically use thumbdrives, sd cards, compactflash or other flash memory to increase your computer RAM. 4GB for <100$ in ram? Count me in.
ReadyBoost FAQ
ReadyBoost Installation

In to the depth of the lab: Microsoft PhotoSynth

Recently we began to take an interest into the labs areas of those leading internet search players, namely microsoft, yahoo, and google. And some of them are actually quite interesting and may shape our future, so the team at tech hype decided to have a bit of fun screwing around with them. The result: Blog posts on some of the weirdest technology in the making.
Today we shall focus on: Microsoft's Lab.

Microsoft Live Labs
For one of the industry leader in computing, Microsoft's lab seem quite vacant. As compared to google's >20 plus developing technologies, microsoft only has...... 3 =P. Well, at least it makes our jobs easier =D

The first one, the only one we can try out and the most interesting one is:
http://labs.live.com/CategoryView.aspx?category=nav_Projects -
Photosynth takes a large collection of photos of a place or object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays them in a reconstructed 3-Dimensional space. With Photosynth you can:

* walk or fly through a scene to see photos from any angle;
* seamlessly zoom in or out of a photograph even if it's gigapixels in size;
* see where pictures were taken in relation to one another;
* find similar photos to the one you’re currently viewing;
* explore a custom tour or see where you’ve been; or
* send a collection to a friend.

The demo well, not exactly mind-blowing, because it requires IE 6/7 (wadaya know? It's microsoft!) and it took quite long to load on my primitive computer. But one you take it for a spin, the fun begins....

I won't say much, I'd leave the wonderful exploration to yourselves. For those who are unlucky enough not to have a decent graphics card, lets just say that I was playing around with it for an entire morning. That's how potent this technology gets (to us geeks anyway) It's like, 3D modelling without all the hard work, just photographs. If Microsoft decides to expand on this idea, in the future...... how about playing counter-strike in yourself with a few full self potrait photographs? (Hopefully dressed, else.....). Heck, you can even turn your room into a counter-strike map with abit more photographs! Or if your thoughts tend to stray, like mine always does, how about a real time 3-D exploration of a certain part of the anatomy of Michelangelo?

Pssh. Enough from me. Just click on the logo to get started toying.

The other two in microsoft labs are still in what you'd call early- beta, so we shall just run a brief description of them:


The description of SeaDragon is still rather vague, so right now we only have what microsoft promises it will deliever:

Seadragon is an incubation project resulting from the acquisition of Seadragon Software in February. Its aim is nothing less than to change the way we use screens, from wall-sized displays to mobile devices, so that visual information can be smoothly browsed regardless of the amount of data involved or the bandwidth of the network.
1. Speed of navigation is independent of the size or number of objects.
2. Performance depends only on the ratio of bandwidth to pixels on the screen.
3. Transitions are smooth as butter.
4. Scaling is near perfect and rapid for screens of any resolution.

Sounds interesting, but we cant exactly do a blog post based on promises. We'll keep ya guys updated.

The last one they have in development, the entity extraction engine, is based on integrated programs with web info, such as a "smart copy+paste" of a address into a contact book. This looks interesting, so we'll wait a while more before forming an opinion. One thing I'd wish it'd do is to allow me scan a wab page off amazon/ some publisher's website and turn it into apa citation inside my microsoft word. That'll be great.

Tommorrow, we bring you a review of the latest browser wars, Firefox 2 Vs IE 7, plus we'll be screwing around with the stuff from the in-development technologys of Yahoo! Stay tuned!(dont forget to link us)

Welcome!

Welcome everybody!

Well this is a blog that I just started as I got a little bit too interested in new technology. So soon we will have a bit more content around here. In the meantime if you'd like to please link to us, you can use the image on the left. I'd be glad to swap links , so if you're interested email me with the link on the left. Thanks, and stay tuned!