Tag: FAST

You may not be checking in on AreWeFastYet.com all that often. You may even have not known it existed until just now. Whatever the case may be, there's a very good reason to pay attention to Mozilla's Firefox 4 performance gauge. In tonight's test run, Firefox's SpiderMonkey and the JIT tandem of JägerMonkey and TraceMonkey finally beat Google Chrome's V8 engine in a SunSpider benchmark ...

Firefox 4 shutdown is already almost instant, but Mozilla has had their sights set on faster start-up times for quite a while. Over the summer, a pair of Mozilla interns looked at simple tweaks which would make Firefox appear faster. It now looks as if at least one of the suggested changes will make its way in to Firefox 4. Thanks to what Mozilla is calling Cascaded Session Restore, the ...

Over at the Chromium blog, there's some good news for Chrome fans... Which is simultaneously bad news for those of you who already think they're getting a little silly with the version numbers. Starting now, Google plans to push a new stable version of Chrome every six weeks. Yes, you read that correctly. Six weeks. That's not set in stone, of course -- build issues and bugs could delay a ...

Before you ask: no, the third developer preview of Internet Explorer 9 doesn't have any window chrome yet. It's still the same skeleton you've seen in the two previous releases. That said, it's clear that Microsoft is serious about delivering a competitive browser. IE9 preview 3 has turned in better SunSpider and Acid3 results, and its hardware acceleration features really shine. The new ...

Pathillogical is an existing Flash game that recently got an upgrade; it added a new level pack that contains the best user-created levels. In the game, you control an arrow that can go in a single direction until it hits something. You set it to go up, down, left, or right; if it doesn't hit anything on the way, it falls off the board and you lose. If it does hit something, it can do one of ...

Techy types like the typical Download Squad reader are just fine with manually tweaking our systems and using utilities that less savvy folks would cringe at. For them, it's not always such an easy task to find an easy-to-use program which actually does what it promises. One newly launched app which is perfect for neophytes is Soluto. Just launched at TC Disrupt, Soluto calls itself ...

If you own a Mac and have been waiting for a final build before trying out "the world's fastest browser," now's your chance. Opera has released version 10.52 for Mac -- for both current Intel systems and older, non-Intel machines. What does Opera 10.5 have going for it? Well, there's that speedy Carakan JavaScript engine, Opera Unite (a handy tool for less technically-apt users to share files, ...

Yes, it's here! Yes, it's faster than Google Chrome! Well, truth is Opera 10.5 has been faster than Google Chrome ever since the Carakan engine was bolted on in December 2009...But the bottom line is that Opera 10.5 is shaping up to be a very compelling browser. One big change I'm particularly happy about is that Google Reader is now fully functional out-of-the-box. In past versions Opera ...

When you're running a Virtual Machine, you don't always need all the trimmings--usually your goal is to get a particular set of tasks done, and a full-fledged install of Windows has a lot that gets in the way of that and can slow you down. Jeff Atwood has a great tutorial at his blog about creating smaller virtual machines. He says that since Microsoft made the Windows version of Virtual PC free, ...

Every one of use uses DNS every time we connect to the internet, yet it's been decades since anyone has made any improvements to the end-user experience. In case you're scratching your head (or saying, "DNS? Isn't that the thing that happens when Internet Explorer can't connect?"), DNS is the system that, among other things, translates the addresses you type into your browser into the IP numbers ...

I haven't tried it out to see if it works yet, but it looks promising: User Profile Hive Cleanup Service is a free  utility from Microsoft that's supposed to speed up Windows XP shutdown times considerably. The article at IntelliAdmin says the biggest culprit for slow shutdowns "is a problem unloading the current user's profile," and what the User Profile Hive Cleanup Service does is in the ...

Is it possible to build a profitable web startup in seven days on a budget of $500? Jason L. Baptiste and Brian Breslin think so. On Saturday Breslin, CEO of Viral Ventures (which owns uGather.com) and Baptiste, CEO of Miami web design firm Infinimedia, set out to build WeblogWire from scratch in a week, and in true Web 2.0 style they're blogging as they go. WeblogWire will be "a system that would ...

The standard del.icio.us bookmarklet is great—I especially like the auto-complete for tags—but sometimes it can be slow to load, which is a pain if you just want to slap a few new tags on a bookmark. John Resig has created the solution: the Super-Fast Delicious Bookmarklet. Once you've installed it—which is only slightly more involved than your usual bookmarklet—you can now ...