No, it's not Explorer. Originally, Microsoft wanted to order browsers from left to right in order of market share. That meant Explorer was going to go first, then Firefox, then Safari, Opera, and Google's Chrome. The EU objected, so Microsoft complied and offered a very reasonable solution: Alphabetical order.

That puts Apple Safari in the number one position, followed by Google Chrome, Microsoft Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera. Looks good enough to me, but Jenny Boriss—a Firefox user experience designer—disagrees:

This ordering is about the worst option possible. Microsoft wrote in their proposal that 'nothing in the design and implementation of the Ballot Screen and the presentation of competing web browsers will express a bias for a Microsoft web browser or any other web browser,' but this is exactly what the current design does. Windows users presented with the current design will tend to make only two choices: IE because they are familiar with it, or Safari because it is the first item.

The disproportionate advantage to Safari is what really makes this design poor," she said, citing several studies that claim first position in a ballot gives an advantage, in part because Western voters scan from upper left to lower right when they read.

She goes on and on and on about this, but her basic message is: If Firefox is not first, this design is BAD. She timidly proposes a random order every time the selection screen opens, but she argues that this is bad because "unfortunately does not provide users with any information about what browsers are preferred" (according to who, Jenny? Maybe user would prefer Safari over Firefox—I know I do. Or maybe they would prefer Chrome if they could try it, as it seems to be a lot faster than Firefox).

Then she shows her true colors, proposing the order according to market share—what Microsoft proposed—but excluding Explorer from that ordering and leaving it to the last position. Wouldn't that be unfairly helping Firefox and putting Safari, Chrome, and Opera in a bad position? And why discriminate Microsoft Explorer too?

Finally, she also proposes probability ordering by market share excluding Internet Explorer, which again gives Firefox the advantage over the rest 50% of the time.

In other words, Microsoft and the EU should help Firefox to become the new monopolistic browser, no matter what. Jenny, please: Stop. Saying. Words. [Boriss' Blog via Computer World]

Peter-Paul Koch at Quirksmode devised a battery of rendering tests to see how different WebKit browsers measure up, and ran everything from desktop Safari 4 to the Pre's browser to S60V5 through a CSS and Javascript compatibility course. Evidently, some WebKit browsers are barely WebKit browsers at all—especially on mobile. Some surprises? Android browsers aren't so hot, nor is the Pre's. And Nokia, which has had WebKit browsers forever, can't seem to make a good one.

There are really two culprits here: older versions of WebKit, which cripple browsers like S60v3's; and developers' need to pare their software down to make it run smoothly on mobile devices. In other words, some of these browsers have been stripped of HTML, CSS and Javascript rendering capabilities on purpose.

What'd be really interesting is if the above chart reflected speed and performance measurements too, because as (apparently) bad as the Android G1's browser is at rendering obscure CSS elements, actually using it is a far sight more enjoyable than struggling with the unconscionably slow Iris on Windows Mobile. Full methodology and test list at [Quirksmode via IntoMobile]

Seeing as most of the time spent on a laptop is spent online, AnandTech ran exhuastive tests on Windows machines, Intel and AMD, netbook and notebook, to see if switching browsers makes any difference in battery life. And hey, it does! In some tests, there was a 30% advantage between the worst browser—always Safari—and the best—Internet Explorer 8. Seriously.

In fact, Microsoft's browser came in front across the board, even inching out Firefox with Adblock by a few percent. It's hard to say why IE8 is so power-thrifty, but the most processor-intensive operations a browser does outside of running Flash content are in rendering Javascript, which IE8 kind of sucks at. So, mystery solved, maybe! Firefox, Chrome and to a lesser extent Opera held up fine, but depending on what kind of laptop you're running, and how willing you are to ditch your browser, there are quite a few sweet battery minutes up for grabs here. Full breakdown at [AnandTech]

These numbers are based on Javascript benchmarks, which don't give a total view of a browser's speed but do tell us how adept a browser is at dealing with intensive code. Chromium scored 657ms on the test to Safari's 886ms. Firefox scored 1,508ms and Opera 10 Beta 3 (my personal browser of choice) lagged way behind with 5,958ms. Keeping in mind that Chromium is pre-alpha and thus better seen as a fun dev project than an actual candidate for a primary browser, we're pretty excited. Once Google irons out the bugs and gets some damn extensions, Chrome on Mac is going to be a stiff challenger to Firefox. [CNET]

http://help.benm.at/help.php

Then scroll down to the Tethering & Internet Settings, then choosing your country and provider. This works for both AT&T and T-Mobile, and will let you install the appropriate configuration.

Now go to your settings and enable tethering. Check the video walkthrough above to help you configure tethering.

We've been testing this for about a day and it's been working quite well. Just be careful though, that AT&T doesn't officially sponsor this and might charge you extra for using tethering while you're not supposed to. So, keep an eye out so you're not shafted at the end of the month.

And if this disables visual voicemail on your phone, just go and reset your network settings, and it should be fixed. If that doesn't work, try updating your phone with an older version of the AT&T carrier settings.

The method is an update of what we showed before, but with a method to get MMS and Visual Voicemail working.

Apple Releases Safari 4 - The World's Fastest & Most Innovative Browser

SAN FRANCISCO, June 8 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple® today released Safari® 4, the world's fastest and most innovative web browser. Available for Mac® and Windows PCs and introduced as a beta in February of this year, Safari 4 features the Nitro engine which runs JavaScript up to 4.5 times faster than Safari 3.* Safari 4 makes browsing more intuitive and enjoyable with innovative features, such as Top Sites, Full History Search and Cover Flow®, and support for modern web standards like HTML 5 and advanced CSS Effects.

"The successful beta release helped us fine tune Safari 4 into an even better, faster version that customers are going to love," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Safari is enjoyed by 70 million users worldwide and with its blazing fast speed, innovative features and support for modern web standards, it's the best browser on any platform."

Safari 4 is built on the world's most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript nearly eight times faster than IE 8 and more than four times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages more than three times faster than IE 8 and three times faster than Firefox 3.*

Starting with the development of the open source WebKit browser engine, Apple has been leading the industry in defining and implementing innovative web standards. Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies and support for advanced CSS Effects, enabling an entirely new class of web applications that feature rich media, graphics and fonts. Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project's Acid3 test, which examines how well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG standards that are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.

Safari 4 includes Top Sites, for an incredible visual preview of frequently visited and favorite pages; Full History Search, to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages; and Cover Flow, to easily flip through web history or bookmarks. Other innovative features include Smart Address Fields for automatically completing web addresses from an easy to read list of suggestions; Search Fields, to fine tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches; and Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site's layout and text.

In Mac OS® X Snow Leopard™, available later this year, Safari runs as a 64-bit application, boosting the performance of the Nitro JavaScript engine by up to 50 percent.** Snow Leopard makes Safari more resistant to crashes by running plug-ins in a separate process, so even if a plug-in crashes, Safari continues to run and the user simply has to reload the affected page.

Pricing & Availability
Safari 4 is available for both Mac OS X and Windows as a free download atwww.apple.com/safari. Safari 4 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard® v10.5.7 or Mac OS X Tiger® v10.4.11 and Security Update 2009-002, a minimum 256MB of memory and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire®. Safari 4 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more information on Safari 4 can be found at www.apple.com/safari.

*Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. All testing conducted on an iMac® 2.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo system running Windows Vista, with 2GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmark based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test. HTML benchmark based on VeriTest's iBench Version 5.0 using default settings.

**Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection and other factors. Testing conducted by Apple in May 2009 comparing prerelease Mac OS X Snow Leopard v10.6 with shipping Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.7. Testing was conducted on a shipping MacBook® 2.0 GHz system and a shipping iMac 2.66 GHz system, both configured with 2GB of RAM. JavaScript benchmarks based on the SunSpider Performance test comparing Safari running in both 32-bit and 64-bit modes.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

[Giz Liveblog]

Security researcher Charlie Miller hacked Safari in just 10 seconds, then used a remote-execution exploit to take over the up-to-date MacBook and make it do his dirty bidding. Firefox and Internet Explorer 8 (which you can download at noon today) fell within a few hours to Nils, a master's student who busted all three browsers wide open. They each won $5000. Day 2 will offer more $5000 prizes for discovering new bugs in Firefox, Chrome and Safari.

Mobile phone OS's will also be part of the event, with $10,000 for cracking any of the five majors: iPhone, BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Android. Care to take bets on which one will go down first? [Pocket Lint]

A little background: OmniWeb is based on a slightly modified version of WebKit, but used to differentiate itself from other browsers with novel features. Ad blocking, tab previews, saved browsing sessions, inbuilt RSS reading, single-windows browsing and per-site preferences could once justify OmniWeb's price, but now most of these features, and plenty more, can be found in free browsers. That's not to say that OmniWeb isn't a good browser, but it'll have a extremely hard time facing up against our increasingly capable choices in free software—especially the fantastic Safari 4.

The Omni Group is also setting a few more applications free, but OmniWeb is the by far the juiciest. [Cult of Mac]

Windows
On Windows, if you've never used Safari but used Chrome or Opera, it'll actually feel a lot like that, with the overhead tabs, Speed Dial, and even a few Chrome icons. After years of shunning standard Windows UI elements—which seemed especially dicky in a way, given how anal Apple can be about standardized UI themselves—Apple is actually playing nice. It's got the usual minimize, maximize and exit buttons, standard fonts and even real Windows shortcuts like Ctrl+Tab to cycle through tabs, so it actually mostly feels like it belongs on Windows now. Well, except for placing the X to kill tabs on the left side, which is annoying 'cause on Windows it should be on the right.

I'm still not quite sure how I feel about the pitch black look of the top tabs in Windows when the window is maximized if your default window color is one of the darker shades—yeah, it matches, but I think Chrome's approach, with blue tabs set down a little bit that are easy to distinguish, works a little better. Overall, I think I prefer the tabs on top, at least in Windows. What I love for sure is that there's an actual arrow on the right side which you grab to tear off the tab into a new window—which results in a cool little pop-out animation, like it was a squished up sponge or something—because I'm always accidentally tearing off tabs in Firefox when I just wanted to move it down the line.

Speed is actually not incredibly important in a way—loading sites like ESPN, the New York Times and Slate against Firefox 3.0.6 and Chrome 1.0.154, honestly, they're all pretty damn quick, averaging around 3 seconds, though on super-Javascript heavy pages Safari 4 and Chrome, both based on Webkit, perceptibly edge out Firefox.

Top Sites is pretty slow to load the first time you fire up Safari 4, but then it's instant. You can't manually add sites—it's automagical—and once you delete 'em they're gone. A star pops up in the top right corner when there's something new at that page, which is a nice touch. Cover Flow moves smoothly, at first, but can get jerky if trying to move through a ton of sites at once. I hate how it replaces what ever site you're looking at if you just click the icon—you have to make a icon or middle-click so it does load over whatever you're lookin' at.

The smart search bar brings up suggestions from Google much faster than Firefox does, but the actual address bar is nowhere near as brilliant. It only pulls suggestions using the main part of the URL (before .com or .net or whatever), not from anything after a slash, or even the page's title. For instance, if you start typing "giz" and you've been to Gizmodo, it'll bring up Gizmodo. But typing Safari, even if you've been to Apple's Safari pages, won't bring up anything since it's not safari.com. As some have noted, the blue progress is gone, which is annoying, but I didn't notice it initially if that tells you anything.

Full search history seems like the crowning navigational jewel here. It actually searches the text of websites you've visited, and even with fifty or so pages in my history so far, it's really fast and works well. I just wish it made it more clear where on the page the text was located before you click, and how many instances there were, though otherwise the use of Cover Flow is nice.

It gobbles resources in Windows: With 14 tabs open, it ate over 400MB of RAM.

Overall, I think it's a lot more Windows-friendly than the initial Windows versions of Safari, and its excellent performance (if your system can stand up to its resource consumption) actually makes it worth taking a look at again if you didn't like it originally (I sure as hell didn't). It doesn't have the Mr. Fantastic-style extendability of Firefox and it's not quite as stripped down as Chrome, but it tries to balance between feature rich and clean, and doesn't do a bad job.

Mac
Despite its Windows improvements, the new UI does look much better on OS X overall—the new tabs on top look works really well, I think, though its break with a more standard OS X layout might vastly annoy some people. Also History and Cover Flow look and feel more natural on Mac too.

Another Mac perk: Multitouch zooming, which lets you manipulate the new full-page zoom with iPhone pinch gestures. It's not silky smooth, but definitely slick—it's actually a lot like browsing a page on the iPhone, especially if you're using two-finger scroll to pan and stuff.

Speed difference between Safari 4 and Firefox is a bit more noticeable in OS X. It doesn't kill Firefox, but there's definitely a difference. Cover Flow runs more smoothly, from what I'm seeing, without the jerkiness I got on Windows sometimes, though full history search isn't any quicker—but that's still plenty fast. It does use resources more efficiently in OS X than in Windows: Those same 14 tabs only ate about 230MB of memory.

While it's hard to speak to stability yet and whether or not you should use it as your main browser, it seems okay so far and the new features and UI make it worth grabbing, even if you wanna hang on to a more stable build of Safari or Firefox in the meantime.

Top Sites sounds like Chrome and Opera's home page, with your most frequently visited websites in a wall of previews. The new Tabs on Top layout seems pretty Chrome-y too. It's also got full history search, and you can use Cover Flow to search through it and bookmarks. Firefox-y features come in the form of a smart address bar and smart search field. And hey, they're apparently a new Windows native look with standard Windows UI elements, whooooa—it's what you see in the shot above. It even uses Ctrl+Tab to move between tabs now, holy balls, even if the tabs are hard to distinguish with the black rim (to me, anyway).

The new features page is live, for the full rundown, if a little borked. Interestingly, it's the first browser to pass the Acid3 test.

Oh, and it's not just you if it's really slow to start up. Here's a shot of it in Leopard, with the new tabbed layout lookin' good:

Apple Announces Safari 4 - The World's Fastest & Most Innovative Browser

New Nitro Engine Runs JavaScript More Than Four Times Faster

CUPERTINO, Calif., Feb. 24 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Apple(R) today announced the public beta of Safari(R) 4, the world's fastest and most innovative web browser for Mac(R) and Windows PCs. The Nitro engine in Safari 4 runs JavaScript 4.2 times faster than Safari 3.* Innovative new features that make browsing more intuitive and enjoyable include Top Sites, for a stunning visual preview of frequently visited pages; Full History Search, to search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages; Cover Flow(R), to easily flip through web history or bookmarks; and Tabs on Top, to make tabbed browsing easier and more intuitive.

"Apple created Safari to bring innovation, speed and open standards back into web browsers, and today it takes another big step forward," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Product Marketing. "Safari 4 is the fastest and most efficient browser for Mac and Windows, with great integration of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards that enables the next generation of interactive web applications."

Safari 4 is built on the world's most advanced browser technologies including the new Nitro JavaScript engine that executes JavaScript up to 30 times faster than IE 7 and more than three times faster than Firefox 3. Safari quickly loads HTML web pages three times faster than IE 7 and almost three times faster than Firefox 3.*

Apple is leading the industry in defining and implementing innovative web standards such as HTML 5 and CSS 3 for an entirely new class of web applications that feature rich media, graphics and fonts. Safari 4 includes HTML 5 support for offline technologies so web-based applications can store information locally without an Internet connection, and is the first browser to support advanced CSS Effects that enable highly polished web graphics using reflections, gradients and precision masks. Safari 4 is the first browser to pass the Web Standards Project's Acid3 test, which examines how well a browser adheres to CSS, JavaScript, XML and SVG web standards that are specifically designed for dynamic web applications.

Safari for Mac, Windows, iPhone(TM) and iPod(R) touch are all built on Apple's WebKit, the world's fastest and most advanced browser engine. Apple developed WebKit as an open source project to create the world's best browser engine and to advance the adoption of modern web standards. Most recently, WebKit led the introduction of HTML 5 and CSS 3 web standards and is known for its fast, modern code-base. The industry's newest browsers are based on WebKit including Google Chrome, the Google Android browser, the Nokia Series 60 browser and Palm webOS.

Innovative new features in Safari 4 include:

— Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a stunning wall of

previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;

— Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they've seen before;

— Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes(R);

— Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;

— Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;

— Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;

— Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site's layout and text;

— built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and

— a new Windows-native look in Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.

Pricing & Availability

Safari 4 is a public beta for both Mac OS(R) X and Windows and is available immediately as a free download at http://www.apple.com/safari.

Safari 4 for Mac OS X requires Mac OS X Leopard(R) version 10.5.6 and Security Update 2009-001 or Mac OS X Tiger(R) version 10.4.11, a minimum 256MB of memory, and is designed to run on any Intel-based Mac or a Mac with a PowerPC G5, G4 or G3 processor and built-in FireWire(R). Safari 4 for Windows requires Windows XP SP2 or Windows Vista, a minimum 256MB of memory and a system with at least a 500 MHz Intel Pentium processor. Full system requirements and more information on Safari 4 can be found at http://www.apple.com/safari.

* Performance will vary based on system configuration, network connection

and other factors. All testing conducted on an iMac(R) 2.8 GHz Intel

Core 2 Duo system running Windows Vista, with 2GB of RAM. JavaScript

benchmark based on the SunSpider JavaScript Performance test. HTML

benchmark based on VeriTest's iBench Version 5.0 using default settings.

Apple ignited the personal computer revolution in the 1970s with the Apple II and reinvented the personal computer in the 1980s with the Macintosh. Today, Apple continues to lead the industry in innovation with its award-winning computers, OS X operating system and iLife and professional applications. Apple is also spearheading the digital media revolution with its iPod portable music and video players and iTunes online store, and has entered the mobile phone market with its revolutionary iPhone.

(C) 2009 Apple Inc. All rights reserved. Apple, the Apple logo, Mac, Mac OS, Macintosh, Safari, Cover Flow, iPhone, iPod, iTunes, Leopard, Tiger, FireWire and iMac are trademarks of Apple. Other company and product names may be trademarks of their respective owners.

[Apple]

The system utilizes a ceiling-mounted laser pointer, an I/O bridge with servo module, two servos, a webcam, an X10 module and a buzzer. When the buzzer sounds, the dog is alerted that it is time to play. Using the iPhone, the user can turn the lights on and off and move the laser around the room for the dog to chase. When you have finished damaging your dog's mind, the buzzer can be sounded a second time to indicate that playtime is over.

LaserPup's creator hopes to develop an app that makes it possible to use the iPhone's accelerometer as the control. He also provided detailed instructions on how to set something like this up for yourself—although, I wouldn't suggest it if you want to prevent a doggie mental disorder. [LaserPup via Make]

Magellan, Garmin and plenty of other companies have outdoor GPS, but Lowrance's focus here was building one set of devices that could be used in all kinds of activities including hiking, hunting, off-roading, skiing, and of course boating. The key is map openness: On land, it can use maps from Accuterra, Navionics and others. On the water, it takes Navionics, Fishing Hotspots and more. And for in-car use, you can load up a Navteq database. Needless to say, the openness is extended to community maps and trail guides in the Open GPX format.

The tech specs of the Endura line are similar (or better) than most of the competition: All three are waterproof to the IPX7 standard. They have rubber "armoring," take AAs (so you don't have to charge up in the jungle) and MicroSD cards up to 32GB, and have "attach points" so you can clip it to your jacket. Most important, the touchscreen is capable of use with gloves on or off, so you don't have to freeze your fingers off trying to get back to base camp.

The top of the line Sierra ($550) comes not only "fully loaded" with a lot of map content, but it has a barometric altimeter and a 3D compass, plus 4GB built-in memory for your maps or even music, pics and video—not that you'd waste your storage on that stuff. The step-down Safari ($385) can play MP3s and, like the Sierra, has headphone jack and a speaker. The basic Outback ($230) has none of those frills, but similar software for doing most of the basic navi stuff. These guys are due out in May, just in time for the weather to get nice. [Lowrance]

The Virtual Keyboard Interface is a free script to download and adds one of 22 clickable keyboards for the typing of your deepest, darkest secrets. You just double click any text entry box and the keyboard will pop up automagically in IE, Chrome, Safari or Firefox. Enjoy it, you sad, scary people. [userscripts via LifeHacker]

As you saw in the demo video, Pastebud works via two Javascript bookmarklets that you save to your Safari browser (and edit slightly). The COPY bookmark translates whatever page you're currently looking at into a text-only version, where you can highlight your desired text. This can then be moved directly to an email, or saved to your virtual clipboard (stored on Pastebud's servers, but anonymously and only for five minutes, they claim).

Pasting text back into another web form via the PASTE bookmarklet is easy—after tapping it, a green box labeled PASTE HERE is overlaid onto any open form field. Tapping that drops in your clipboard's contents, preserving any HTML that was there if the form supports it.

But, of course, there are some drawbacks. While pasting to and from different Safari windows and emails covers a lot of one's copying and pasting needs, it's not anywhere close to the convenience a system-wide solution would bring. You still can't paste the URL to the cute kitten photo you're looking at onto your Wall via the Facebook app, for instance. For things like this, being able to access Safari's URL bar would be nice, since natively, you can only export your current URL via Mail.

Also, the free version inserts a small one-line ad for Pastebud; $5 turns this off, and also eliminates the popup that appears whenever you paste. $5 isn't too bad though, for something that's ultimately pretty convenient. If you're betting on Apple's year-plus delay on coming up with a copy and paste solution carrying on, it's not a bad investment. Check out Lifehacker as well for more impressions: [Pastebud, Lifehacker]

The wording is vague, and whether or not this holds up will remains to be seen, but the claim is probably not centered around the reformatting of web pages, as described elsewhere in the patent and below.

The patent abstract is as follows:

A method and apparatus of simplified navigation. A web page is provided having a link to a sister site. The sister site facilitates simplified navigation. Pages from the sister site are served responsive to actuation of the sister site link. In one embodiment, the sister site includes matrix pages to permit matrix navigation.

Further reading, along with the patent's crappy mockup (above), helped confirm what looked obvious from the above description: Gottfurcht is suing Apple because they think they hold a patent on the entire mobile web. Never mind the fact that the iPhone was touted as the first phone not to need mobile-optimized websites — even if the iPhone only visited stripped-down WAP sites, that would have almost nothing to do with the iPhone itself. [Reuters and The Register]

Ballmer not trashing open source? Or anything at all? In the span of several sentence? Whoooa. It sounds like something between a throwaway line and a more significant proclamation. In other words, don't expect Internet Explorer 9 to use WebKit, but it sounds like Ballmer's looking at open source at least a little bit differently than he used to. And hell, maybe one day we will see WebKit in Internet Explorer. [Cnet]

We've posted our first impressions of Google Chrome, and after extended use most of them have held up. Chrome is fast, feature-rich and stable, not to mention highly usable. But Google's in-house innovations (the multi-threaded engine, Javascript handling and task manager, mainly) make up a tiny portion of the user experience. The rest of the interface features, usage mechanics and touted features have clear and very public parentage—in one of Chrome's four largest competitors.

Now, that's not to say that Google has explicitly "stolen" anything from IE, Firefox, Opera or Safari. They have, as of now, acknowledged that they owe a great debt to some of the other large players in the browser market. After all, they're using Safari's WebKit engine, receive billions of revenue-pumping referrals from Firefox's Google search bar, and have open-sourced much of Chrome. For most users, though, these gestures and acknowledgments will go unnoticed, and features previously incorporated into other popular browsers will be seen first on Google's. I've put together a list of some of Chrome's most interesting features, including the mainstream browsers that "inspired" them.

Feature: Incognito Mode
Who already has it: Safari, IE 8, Firefox w/ extension

Google has cleverly named and advertised this feature as a privacy and safety tool, but we know exactly what it's for. Porn Mode, as we've been calling it, is becoming de rigueur for any browser that may be used by men, which is to say, all of them except this one. It made a recent appearance in a new IE 8 beta, but it finds its roots in Safari, circa 2005, when it was called "Private Browsing." Naturally, Chrome's implementation is a bit more complete, with more complex cache and history management, as well as the ability to have normal and "Incognito" windows running at the same time.

Feature: Smart Address Bar
Who already has it: Firefox, IE 8

When Firefox 3 dropped, there was much fanfare around its so-called "Awesome Bar" which, as it turns out, is pretty awesome. Strictly speaking, Chrome's address bar is slightly smarter than Firefox's, but I would argue less useful for power users who often need to dig up specific pages out of piles and piles from the same domain. Google has also modified the concept by merging the search and address bars into one, but most other browsers have included search functionality (by default or with modifiers) in their address bars for years.

Feature: Custom Panel Start Page
Who already has it: Opera, Firefox w/ extension

This feature is perhaps the most controversial, as Opera is a commercial, closed-source browser from which Google looks to have essentially lifted one of its most advertised features. Over a year ago, Opera introduced Speed Dial, which allowed users to build customized, panel-based pages that showed up whenever a tab was created. The large thumbnails provided easy, quick navigation to oft-visited pages and were a refreshing substitute for layers and layers of menus to access favorites. Chrome's home page is dynamically generated, but clearly took conceptual and aesthetic cues from Opera.

Feature: Tab detachment/attachment
Who already has it: Opera and Safari

Chrome, to complement its separate processes for each tab, allows for easy dragging and dropping from one window to another. In other words, you can rip a tab from its parent window to become its own, then drag it back without loss of data. This makes isolating important tabs as well as maintaining single-window mode both much easier, but —you guessed it —neither feature is new. Safari includes a tear-away feature by default, complete with a snazzy animation. Opera can handle tear-aways AND reattachments, in a nearly identical manner as Chrome.

Feature: Resizable Text Boxes
Who already has it: Safari, Firefox w/ Extension

These are fantastic for anyone who creates content, whether it be full-on news stories or the odd racist blog comment. Google's version in Chrome is functionally identical to Safari's earlier version of the feature, which was recently added with version 3.

Feature: Domain Highlighting
Who already has it: IE 8

Seriously. Internet Explorer 8 isn't even out yet and Chrome has managed to crib a feature from it. When the beta was put up for download last week, we noticed that the root domain name was always highlighted, which helps users keep track of what site they're on to avoid phishing attacks with syntactically confusing URLs. Sure enough, this showed up in Chrome a week later, though there's no telling who was working on it first.

Feature: Pseudo Full screen
Where it came from: Safari

Windows browsers have often included "full screen" modes, which hide interface elements to give as much screen space as possible to content. Chrome finds a happy middle ground between everything-goes full screen and normal maximized mode with its partially, uhh, chromeless look. When maximized, the side and bottom window chrome disappears, but the top navigation and tab elements remain. This feature was found as a default first, strangely, in Safari for Windows. Sure, Safari in Windows kinda sucks (balls, and lots of them), but the slick maximized state stood out as an outstanding feature. Chrome is a marginally more attractive browser, so again, their implementation is an improvement.

As I said before, Google has taken time to acknowledge the debt it owes to other browser projects, but that will be little comfort to the Firefox, Opera, Safari and IE teams if Chrome rises to success on their features. Google has taken the best ideas from the best products, given them a new name, some new guts and a PR monsoon. And, no matter how you feel about it, they've done it well.

Google has taken many (though definitely not all) of the most compelling features from disparate sources and united them in a pretty solid package. This all-in-one approach is much like the one that Opera has taken in the past, with some success. Where Chrome trounces its competition, however, is in polish. I don't mean to say that Chrome is without bugs or room for improvement, but the user experience is fast, simple and intuitive from the start. Each of the features culled from other browsers has been refined to be more obvious, easier to use and more effective in Chrome, which—questionable ethical implications aside—is all that really matters to the end user. [Chrome on Giz]