Chrome Extension Gallery Main Page
One of the most interesting thing about Chrome Extension gallery, when Google unveiled it few months ago, was the fact that they were showing the most popular (read: most downloaded) extension right on the front page. This is interesting because two of the most popular all time extensions are also ad blocking extensions. Google’s main revenue source, as you might know, is online advertisements.
At the end of last year one of those Ad blocking extensions (AdThwart) became the most popular chrome extensions, so naturally it was on the top of the list on the front page. I checked back few days later to see that AdThwart magically went down from number one to number three most downloaded and all the download count was much lower than it originally showed. (Yes, I was actually interested in popular extension download count.)
I can only speculate here than Google was not comfortable with the idea of an ad blocking extension being the most popular extension, so they manually adjusted it. Even so, AdThwart was still in the top six on the front page, until yesterday. I know this because I check the gallery now and then for try out something new and I was there last night and I saw it right in the front page in the same order as they show in the Most Popular list.
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Every time Apple releases a new line of product it creates a lot of buzz, both positive and negative. So, it is no surprise that when Apple announced iPad last week the usual Apple fanboy was raving about it and Apple haters (or potential competition to iPad) was denouncing it. In the midst of all those bickering between the two groups what was missing was an objective look at both the positive and the negative sides of iPad.
I will try to give my take on iPad from a neutral point of view. My experience with apple products comes from Macbook, which I extensively use everyday and iPhone, which I have been using for almost 2 years now. But I am not an Apple only product user. Before moving to Macbook for most of my development work, I have been a long time Linux user and I still use Linux based distros quite often. Also I am one of the early adopters on Windows 7 (and used almost every single windows version ever released) since the Release Candidates. The point of sharing my experience with computer products and OS is to let you know that I am not an Apple fanboy by any stretch of imagination. Personally I feel that fanboyism for any consumer product is silly and stupid.
Having said that, I can see a lot of positives of Apple iPad platform and I am hoping to share it with you from a neutral point of view by addressing some of the negatives that have been pointed out by early reviewers.
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Most of us know that Opera has been at the forefront of Browser innovation for the longest time, yet remains at the bottom of pile when it comes to desktop browser market share. Its a sad story and even the best of us have a hard time figuring out why this is so. But this doesn’t stop Opera from making major innovations and changes with each new release.
With Opera 10.5 Alpha (Evenes), released today, comes a brand new JavaScript Engine (Carakan) written from scratch, and some major UI changes.
You can read more about the UI changes from Opera Blog, we will focus on the new JavaScript Engine performance.
Before this release Opera had one of the slowest JavaScript engine, after IE8, by a wide margin. Compare to the last release the JavaScript performance improvements done in this release is quite stunning. Webkit (used by Safari and Chrome) has been, for the longest time, de facto JavaScript engine in terms of performance but the latest Opera Alpha JS even beats the webkit nightly builds. But so does the Chrome dev builds. A lot of users might not know this; even though Chrome uses webkit as their rendering engine they have done a lot of JS performance of their own, which is why Chrome outperforms webkit nightly in the latest builds (read more here and here).
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You know that the guys at Microsoft has done something right when there is a Mac app to emulate Windows 7 UX. Cinch is an OSX app that emulates Windows 7 application resize feature when you drag an application window to the edge of the screen. Its one of those feature that you didn’t know could be so intuitive and useful before you used it.
You can try Cinch for yourself for free for limited time but will cost you $7 to buy it.
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On the latest StatCouter data, Firefox 3.5 has just crossed the worldwide browser market share barely crossing both IE7 and IE8, standing at almost ~22% market share.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats – Browser Version Market Share
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