stream of bytes

I’ve hit a few discussions about “another browser” – meaning – yea, yea, we all know IE, Firefox, most of us have heard about Opera, many are waiting for Flock 1.0… But we like to want more… 🙂

So, Seamonkey? Could be, waiting for 1.5 with more new goodies, according to my lurking in bonsai.mozilla.org, it progresses pretty good.

Konqueror? Well, it’ll be interesting, but not before Q3 2007 (KDE4 for Windows current target date).

Amaya? Jokes over…

Well, I really, and I mean – REALLY – like Swift. It’s freakin fast for me. My (very amateurish) test:

1) Page load time. www.mozilla.com – Gecko 1.9a – 4,36 sec,  Opera 9.02 – 3.76, Swift 0.2 – 2,60 sec

2) Reload (without shift+reload) – Gecko 1.9a – 4,32 sec, Opera 9.02 – 3,15, Swift 0.2 – 0,95 sec. (AAAGGH!)

Swift was also the only browser that did not repaint anything beside of the area of screen that changed. Opera repainted everything and presented a white page for a second during this, and Mozilla repainted everything but the top menu.

3) jogger.pl (for the first time) – Gecko 1.9a – 3 sec, Opera 9.02 – 4 sec, Swift 0.2 – 1 sec.

It’s really crazy, it seems for me like if Swift would use some cheats on the TCP/IP stack, since Opera and Fx take more time to actually connect with the website, than Swift to download and render it. cheaters…

With Swift I had an *experience* like if I was surfing the smoothest way.

Of course, as always in such cases, the results may vary. It may work rather slow for many of you, it may crash, kill your cat or whatever. For me it works amazing, and I tested it in various environments (laptop, desktop, different providers etc.)

Kudos to the authors, whoever they are (Apple/KDE folks?)

update: did I already praised their Options menu? People tend to say that Opera and Microsoft should learn from Firefox… well, everyone should learn from Swift than – simple, clean, just neat…

Following marcoos’s blog – David Baron landed Reflow Branch and resolved bug 289480. In result – Gecko 1.9 passes Acid 2!

Gecko 1.9a1 is an exciting piece of mozilla, but I’m even more interested in what’ll show up with alpha2, with things like Reflow Branch or new metric system  (yes, the one that’ll make mozilla do the full page zoom) and others ( JavaScript 2 rings a bell? :))

According to several blog posts, Opera opens a new office in Poland. Robert Blaut suspects that the company from which new Opera employees were laid off is Simens BenQ.

First of all, congratulations to those folks! Secondly, congratulations to Opera – it’s a sign of your growth, isn’t it? 🙂

I’m wondering about those two models – Opera’s one and Mozilla’s one. Opera is employing so much more people, while Mozilla is still rather understaffed in my opinion. Opera just employed 23 people with a single move, Mozilla is carefully deliberating every step. It seems to have no relation to market share through, nor the revenue of both. I’m curious if Opera really need that many people aboard to compete with peer-production model (I can’t believe that they really need 23 people just to port a browser on to new platform, no matter what Nokia said about their sources ;p), or that they simply can afford it and prefer to prepare their human resources for something bigger.

I’m on the third day of PTI autumn conference. I spent the first day on train, second on Web 2.0 related talks, and today I’m listening to Tom DeMarco right now. Also, yesterday, Krzysztof Kowalczyk had asked me if I could join a peer-production session that he’s chairman of, and give the talk about the motivations and addictions of open source volunteers. Whoa! Sure I can 🙂

My talk was OK. I presented a few short movies from Flock planning meetings, a bit of photos from Flock HQ, bowling 2.0 movies, barcamp, SHDH, etc. My goal was to prove them that being innovative requires being chaotic. requires a bit of energetic chaos that Flock had at the day first and that made it possible to get near 1.0 now with a great product with it’s unique feature set and goals.

Ironically, the most important questions during Q&A session were the ones from polish business angels from Lewiatan, but beside of this I also made first contacts with author of grono.net (polish MySpace), author of szorty.pl (kind’of youtube) and tiver.pl (movies on demand – he promised not to use DRM!!!) and investor of merlin.pl (amazon.com like). We’ll see how far it’ll get 😉
Anyway, I’m totally impressed by Helmut V. Gläser’s talk about communication skills and issues leading to bad communication. It was very interesting, and the speaker made amazing job in playing with crowd emotions. And this is something that most speakers lacks a lot!

During the supper yesterday, I was presented to Dr. Nahum D. Gershon from MITRE, who asked for help in defining the way to activate a community around his projects, and we set up a meeting on today afternoon. I hope to be able to help 🙂

That’s all for now, getting back to my S5 presentation. Off

So, first ranking.pl results after new releases covers 24.10 – 30.10.

So, Firefox 1.x got 1.5% drop but Firefox 2.x gained 2.1%! At the same time, IE6 got 0.7% drop and IE7 gained 0.2%. Woha! 🙂

Overall, Gecko got 0.6% gain in last week, MSIE lost 0.5%.

You can find summary (pl) in their latest newsletter.

Cheers MS! The cake was good 😉

We’ve updated Flock Cardinal l10n builds to 0.7.6!

Due to the bug in auto updater in 0.7.4 you’ll probably have to update it manually. Sorry for that and thanks for your patience 🙂

We’re warming up for 1.0 now, and I’m doing all I can to get the timetable for localizers from our management stuff who’s making all possible effort to get this timetable ready 🙂