Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

I figured I’d blog my initial thoughts on Google chrome. Rather than a hard to read essay, I figured bullet points are easier to read/scan, so that’s what I’ll do.
Announcement

Another One Bites the Dust - The classic Queen song was played both before and after the presentation. I can’t help to think this [...]

I’ve mentioned the long fabled Google browser for ages now “googlefox” as it began. Some more interesting news came today regarding “Google Chrome“.
Some of the features touted by the comic include:

faster - mentioned throughout via new js virtual machine (might be SquirrelFish) that’s potentially embeddable into other applications and using WebKit. [...]

Mike Shaver has an awesome blog post on work to speed up JavaScript. Granted Firefox 3.0 is pretty fast already, 4.0 is shaping up to put 3.0 to shame. For those who don’t want to read it all, here’s what you really should know:

The goal of the TraceMonkey project — which is still [...]

There’s an announcement on the Safari blog about SquirrelFish, their new JS interpreter. To sum it up:

SquirrelFish is a register-based, direct-threaded, high-level bytecode engine, with a sliding register window calling convention. It lazily generates bytecodes from a syntax tree, using a simple one-pass compiler with built-in copy propagation.

Some performance data can be found here, [...]

Google announced the project lists for Summer Of Code 2008. Some of the more interesting projects from my perspective:
Adium

Data Detectors for Adium

Dojo Foundation

Native cryptography API for Google Gears
Dojo-Charting improvements
Dojo GFX Enhancement

FFmpeg

AAC-LC Encoder
MLP/TrueHD encoder
Apple Lossless Encoder for FFmpeg

Gallery

Facebook / Flickr Style Image Region Based Tagging

Inkscape

SVG Fonts

Joomla!

Multi-DB support, and Database abstraction layer implementation for Joomla!

The Mozilla [...]

Looks like Apple will be switching Safari to use GDI for font rendering on Windows in the future. Not such a bad thing. The CoreGraphics antialiasing looks good on a Mac, but does look strange on Windows. I think this will please more Windows users who expect Safari to be a good [...]

The Acid3 test is out. Ironic that this one comes towards the end of a Gecko development cycle (just like Acid2), meaning it will likely be a while (Mozilla2, the basis of what will likely be Firefox 4.0) until Acid3 compliance is met.
Seems like the WebKit guys are well on their way.
By the time [...]

Vlad wrote about his work on improving Mac OS X performance (which is awesome by the way), and his findings from looking at WebKit code. To summarize WebKit utilizes some undocumented API’s (ironically from the same company that makes Mac OS X ) that give it an advantage over other software which can’t [...]

As Robert O’Callahan, John Resig, Anne van Kesteren all point out, this idea of using a meta tag to select a rendering engine is bad. Here are my personal thoughts on the issue. Not as a browser developer but as a web developer.
Essentially the argument by the IE team is this: Rather than [...]

There’s an interesting blog post on Open Source and recessions worth reading. Essentially the question is this: Does a recession have a negative impact on open source?
I’d say the answer is somewhat more complex than a simple yes/no. There are many different types of projects out there with entirely different circumstances. However [...]