Well, they aren’t exactly new, but they have been improved from their previous versions. They are Firefox 3 Beta 4 and Safari 3.1.

I have personally downloaded Firefox 3 Beta 4 and tried it out, and it gave me a noticable speed boost. Putting Safari 3.1 and Firefox 3 browser windows side by side and comparing page loading showed that both were equally comparable in terms of rate of loading. Sometimes one browser loaded a page faster, sometimes the other browser won. The verdict is for you to determine.

Despite having Firefox 3 Beta 4, you can still start the good ‘ol Firefox 2 if you will. Please be aware that Firefox 3 Beta 4 is in development stage, and they have advocated that unless you are a developer you should not download it. (who cares anyway? it is rather stable) At this point in time, many if not all plug-ins and toolbars which work for Firefox 2 do not work on Firefox 3.

As for Safari 3.1, it is not wrong to say that this is the first workable Safari on the Windows platform. From personal experience, previous Safari versions on Windows XP have constantly crashed while surfing. This is the cheapest way to get the feel of a Mac on your Windows PC!

Internet Explorer has also launched IE8 for beta downloads, but well, IE8 fails to load many pages properly.  =S

But hey, try these 2 browsers! Anything is better than the annoying and slow Internet Explorer. To my disappointment, many government websites in Malaysia do not optimize their websites for anything other than Internet Explorer. These people are backward man… =.=

Alright haven’t found much time to blog lately (for 3-4 days already) and due to my crazy working hours… starting at 2 pm and ending at 11 pm everyday. And yes I cannot get up in the morning and usually I get up in time for lunch or for driving lessons (YES I AM ONLY LEARNING NOW). Coupled with some flu and cough lately it really spoils my mood to blog and I can’t stay up as late as I used to (need to recover mah).

Oh yes btw I am now “curi tulang”-ing at my workplace at Giant Kelana Jaya to write this blog post.

But the past few days have been rather… fun… in a different way. For the better part of yesterday and today (and tomorrow there’s another appointment) I have been spending hours at customer’s houses setting up iZZi’s internet connection since Scream-X’s connection by TM Nut have been causing them a lot of headaches. There were also problems with wireless routers and wireless USB adapters. I am rather amazed that people look at me and expect me to solve their router and internet configuration headaches. I also least expect myself to be some tech guy who knows a lot about how to configure computer stuff (but of course I did not disappoint them and solved whatever computer troubles that they had =P )

Frankly, I am just a tech-savvy user. But incidentally I want to study Electrical and Computer Engineering given my interest in comp stuff. So perhaps i can be a real tech-genius in the future managing a company of tech-geniuses.

Random - Advice for people who want to use Vista: Don’t do it. Keep your XP. Seriously. Recently-leaked e-mails between Microsoft employees show that even Microsoft employees were aware that present computers do not have enough specifications to run Vista smoothly. Read more here and here. Skeptical? Ask your friend who just bought a Vista-powered computer recently. (Unless you have 4GB RAM, your computer will be slow and bound to hang) If you have the cash, get a Mac. (which is the main reason why I am working now, to save enough for a Macbook Pro)

I want to share a browser feature called Cooliris with all you ErnSheong.com readers! Cooliris is a company founded in 2006 with the mantra “Think Beyond the Browser.” Their headquarters are in Menlo Park, California, and their team consists of seasoned developers, entrepreneurs, and Stanford computer engineers.

Enhance your browsing performance with Cooliris!
The two core products of Cooliris are (free features):

1) Cooliris

With Cooliris, you can preview images, videos and weblinks without clicking, turn on the slideshow mode for Google and Yahoo images, instantly email links, prefetch websites for faster previews, customize preview activation method and themes, as well as enable/disable previewing on custom list of sites. It works on any website, blog or forum.

2) PicLens

PicLens enables you to view photos in full screen mode, search for web images, play a slideshow of image search results and photo albums, multi-page search on Google Images and Yahoo Images, have multilingual full-screen search, as well as jump from PicLens to corresponding webpage. With a Mac, you can sit back and explore photos with the Apple® remote.

PicLens works on Social Networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5 and Friendster, Image Search Engines such as Google Images, Yahoo Images, Ask Images, Live Images and AOL Images, and Photo Sites such as Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, DeviantArt, and Smugmug.

Review: Cooliris can be quite annoying sometimes because when you hover over a link, a small Cooliris icon pops out. If you hover over it accidentally, a small window pops out, which is unwelcome especially when it is done unintentionally. But you can always turn the feature off by clicking the ‘tick’ at the bottom right of the page. PicLens is just plain cool. Very nice feel when searching images. A MUST TRY add-on to your web browser.

Source: cooliris.com

Steve Jobs unveiled Macbook Air in Macworld 2008 yesterday. It is 0.76 inches thin and has a 13.3″ screen.

Specs:
1.6GHz or 1.8GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor
4MB on-chip shared L2 cache running at full processor speed
* 800MHz frontside bus
* 2GB of 667MHz DDR2 SDRAM onboard
Storage
# 80GB 4200-rpm Parallel ATA hard disk drive2
# Optional 64GB solid-state drive

Built-in iSight camera.
A USB 2.0 port, a headphone jack, and a micro-DVI port that supports DVI, VGA, composite, and S-video output.
802.11n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR built in

Check it out: http://www.apple.com/macbookair/

THINNOVATION

BEAUTIFUL

NEAT

SLEEK

Very very cool. If only I had $$

Bought a DDR2 1GB RAM for my notebook yesterday at Digital Mall, PJ. Noticed a speed bump in my laptop performance, and this brings my total RAM to 1.24GB from the previous 512MB. =) Good to last me for another year or so before i buy a Macbook Pro for my next laptop. Now, I’m working and earning money first to buy my Macbook Pro. =)

My next laptop would definitely be a Mac.

If I ever go to the US, this could be the Macbook Pro that I will buy. Expensive but loving it! Dreaming about it! (The price is quoted in US Dollars)

Oh no, wait… I also need to get software for the Macbook Pro… which means more dollars. Might have to downgrade from the above ideal configuration to save up money for other software. Plus printer? Sigh. Money money money…