The PC Report

If you have poor quality internet you might run into trouble when you attempt to download large files. Almost any time I download a file larger than 50 MB the download will get cut off and tell me the connection to the server has failed. If I click retry it tries to download the entire file again.

I thought everyone knew how to resume a broken download but it amazed my friend when he saw me do it so now I’m sharing this with everyone here.

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Opera Software has just announced that their latest version of their browser is ready for consumption. Opera 10.50 now touts itself as Windows’ fastest web browser, and some of the performance benefits seen come from a brand new JavaScript engine called Carakan and a new graphics engine called Vega. Opera now also supports HTML5 and CSS3 for the latest in web technology support.

You may notice from the image above that the Opera interface has changed for the better. There is now full Windows 7 integration including Aero Glass, Aero Peek and separate taskbar entries for each tab which comes in handy. They have also chucked tabs on the top, similar to Google Chrome, and there is also the option to have large tab previews as seen above.

Opera 10.50 is now available from the Opera website to download, or for EU users you can grab it from the browser ballot. You can head below to see our Sunspider JavaScript benchmark results in Opera 10.50

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Remember the browser ballot screen for EU Windows 7 machines that has caused Microsoft so much trouble? Today we all get to see what the browser ballot screen will look like when it hits countries across Europe starting with the UK, Belgium and France next week and then spreading throughout the rest on March 1. The top 5 browsers on the screen (Chrome, Firefox, IE, Safari and Opera) will be randomized to be fair, as well as the next 7 browsers.

If you live in the EU, and you’re running Internet Explorer, you will be alerted that there is “an important choice to make” and you will be redirected to the browser ballot screen where you can choose a new browser to download or stick with IE. Hopefully the browser ballot screen will inform more people of the other browsers available out there and give them some much need market share out of IE’s chunk.

I find myself using this really simple add-on for Firefox all the time. Basically what it does is when you highlight text in a passage/title/link/whatever, then drag and drop it anywhere, it will search Google in a new tab for the highlighted text. It also works with unlinked URLs – just highlight an unlinked URL such as google.com, drag & drop it and it will automatically go to the URL – and photos – just drag & drop to download the image (you can disable that if you like).

You’ll find yourself using it a lot if you’re a Firefox user, so head over to the QuickDrag add-on page now to download it.

Of course, not much fresh news here for those who are already using Google Chrome 4.0 via the beta channel, but Chrome 4.0 for Windows has finally gone stable; sorry Linux users, you’re stuck with the beta channel for just a bit longer. The major change for Chrome 4.0 is support for the extension framework, which should rival Firefox’s Add-ons and create more competition between the two browsers.

Currently, there are over 1,500 extensions available for Chrome, including ad blockers, several Google product enhancement tools and a lot of extensions that are available on Firefox already. Also new in Chrome 4.0 is bookmark sync, which synchronises your bookmarks across your different machines so you don’t have to create them on each machine – to use bookmark sync you’ll need a Google account which, as a Chrome user, you should have already.

Head over to Google’s Chrome page to download the browser if you feel like adopting it right now, or you can update to 4.0 from within Chrome.

There have been several betas and release candidates, but Firefox 3.6 is now finally ready for the general public to update to. For current users you will be happy to know that 3.6 is 20% faster than 3.5 thanks to better JavaScript performance, start-up times and responsiveness. A new feature called Personas has also been included, which is simple browser theming with a single click and no restart.

To download/upgrade to the latest version of Firefox, head over to the Mozilla website to grab it. The full list of updates can be found below:

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Today it appears as if Mozilla has decided to completely change the way they release new versions of Firefox. They have removed Firefox 3.7 from the development schedule and added a completely new process in its place. Updates will be released more frequently which add new features and security; these updates will be released every “four to six weeks” rather than with the bigger updates. Major releases, such as Firefox 4.0 due for release at the end of the year, will be rarer.

Director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, thought that the old way of releasing updates was too slow and when many features were released at the same time, show-stopping bugs were more likely to appear. With the new process bugs will be less likely and we will get new features much faster, such as the new updated “Lorentz” which will put add-ons in a separate process to reduce the chance of a crash.

If you’re wondering where the next Firefox disappeared to, Firefox 3.7 will become just another normal update in the new 4-6 week update schedule. Firefox 3.6 is on-schedule and will be released sometime in the next week or so.

Chrome lovers rejoice! Google’s Chrome web browser has managed to shove Apple’s Safari away from the prized third spot in browser market share and claim it with a total market share of 4.63%, beating Safari’s 4.46%. Of course, the gain has to come at the expense of another browser, and that browser happens to be Microsoft’s Internet Explorer which is continuing to fall down the ranks at 0.92% per month.

IE still stands firmly at the top with a 62.7% market share, but projections show that this could go as low as 50% by May, with other browsers (mainly Firefox and Chrome) picking up the crowds leaving IE. Hopefully some of this drop will come out of the IE6 users, which apparently still make up 21% of all market share.

Net Applications, the company that brings us these statistics, monitors traffic from approximately 40,000 websites which generate a total of 160 million unique visitors per month. The statistics from them should be rather solid.

We’ve seen a few mockups for the Firefox 4.0 user interface re-vamp before in July, and now we’re getting some more. These latest shots come from Mozilla dev Stephen Horlander’s personal blog where he shares heaps of info regarding the latest changes to the Firefox UI. He does mention, though, that these changes will likely be present in Firefox 4.0 and that no UI re-vamp will occur in Firefox 3.7.

It appears as though Mozilla is taking cues from both the Ribbon interface we see in Windows applications such as Wordpad, Paint and Office 2007/2010 as well as Google’s Chrome browser. One thing does stand out in the new screenshots is the application button, which is said to replace the menu toolbar that fills up space on older Firefox versions. This application button is being tested in many locations (below).

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Ah, it’s so nice to see Internet Explorer finally de-crowned as the world’s most popular browser. In the latest statistics provided by StatCounter Global Statistics we are seeing a very slight margin to Firefox 3.5 over Internet Explorer 7, a great milestone for Mozilla. Of course, these stats count each version of the browser separately and when you add all the Microsoft browsers together IE still comes out on top, but hey, it’s still a milestone for Firefox.