PCR's notepad » Opera

Flash 11 release candidate for portable browsers

David Dernoncourt — Thu, 08 Sep 2011 07:57:00 +0000

Update: Flash 11 final is now available, with 64 bits support. Grab it there!

Adobe published a few days ago the first release candidate of Flash 11 in their labs. Amongst the key new features of this version we find the Stage 3D API (3D GPU acceleration), support for a new audio codec G.711 as well as the JPEG-XR image compression format. Also, a 64 bits version of the plugin is available, too.
This RC1 is labelled 11.0.1.129 (you may also see 11.0.r1.129), and here is the portable version of the 32 bits version (I don’t think there are any portable browsers in 64 bits at the moment, except for the latest Fx nightly, but I don’t think many people use a 64 bits nightly as their portable browser…). Edit: mkay, I forgot about Palemoon, I wasn’t exactly counting such rare forks indeed. So here’s the 64 bits portable Flash (NPSWF64_11_0_1.dll).

As usual, to install this Flash portable, unpack it into the plugin folder for your browser, which is FYI:

Firefox Portable: Data/plugins
Opera USB: program/plugins
Iron or Chrome Portable: Iron/plugins

Here is the zip containing NPSWF32.dll and flashplayer.xpt. It’s hosted on filesonic, but below you’ll also find a link to a megaupload mirror. Note that the files hosted on FileSonic vanish after 30 days without a download, so usually only the latest versions (latest stable + latest preview if newer than stable) remain online there. So for older versions you’ll want to grab the Megaupload link.

Flash 11.0.1.129 (11 RC1) for portable browsers (FileSonic)
Flash 11.0.1.129 (11 RC1) for portable browsers (MegaUpload)

Want the stable thing instead? Here it is, as I’m writing it’s Flash 10.3.

Restoring the history drop-down menu near the back button in Firefox and Opera

David Dernoncourt — Fri, 26 Aug 2011 11:58:06 +0000

I don’t know which browser started that s*** (if I had to make a bet, I’d say Chrome, as usual for this kind of c***py UI tweaks), but some months ago all browsers history buttons started looking like this:

This navigation toolbar is becoming more and more useless… Of course, the drop-down history menu is still there, accessible either by holding the left mouse button or by right clicking (I actually found out about this one pretty recently, it’s decently comfortable IMO, but not possible in Opera). Still, I liked to have a dedicated button so I looked for ways to add them back in Opera and Firefox.

In Opera, you can add/remove buttons from the navigation bar by right-clicking on it, then go to Customize => Appearance… => Buttons => Browser and drag and drop the normal back and forward buttons. To remove the buttons with no down arrow (actually, that’s just one button), right-click it, then go to Customize => Remove from toolbar.

In Firefox, you need to use an extension, for instance Backward Forward History Dropdown. Yeah, that’s a one-line solution… not too satisfying, though, the need to add yet one more extension every time they dumbly remove an important feature.

Re-sults!

Flash 10.3.183.10 for portable browsers

David Dernoncourt — Fri, 13 May 2011 17:59:07 +0000

Update: Flash 11 is now available and add 64 bits support. Grab it there!

Adobe just released yesterday a new version of their Flash Player: version 10.3 final aka 10.3.181.14 (now updated to 10.3.183.10). Apart from some new features like a real control panel, it also fixes quite a few security issues, so it’s worth upgrading as soon as possible. Note that once again there is no 64 bits version! (this looks like it will remain an eternal alpha…)

To use that Flash portable, unpack it into the plugin folder for your browser, that is (paths are relative paths, relative to the portable browser’s root directory):

Firefox Portable: Data/plugins
Opera USB: program/plugins
Iron or Chrome Portable: Iron/plugins

Flashplayer.xpt is useless, but still included because apparently some people do look for it, and it’s not really space-consuming anyway .

Here is the zip containing NPSWF32.dll and flashplayer.xpt. You can choose your preferred download host between megaupload and filesonic, however note that the files hosted on FileSonic vanish after 30 days without a download, so usually only the latest versions (latest stable + latest preview if newer than stable) remain online there. Megaupload on the other hand should have all history of my uploads.

Flash 10.3.183.10 for portable browsers (FileSonic)
Flash 10.3.183.10 for portable browsers (MegaUpload)

Older versions

If you’re interested in even older versions, here are:

version 10.3 release candidate
version 10.3 beta
version 10.2 (multiple versions on the same page)
version 10.2 preview
version 10.1 (multiple versions on the same page)

Bonus: megaupload and filesonic directories with all my Flash Portable uploads (I think). Note that the MegaUpload one also contains a few other portable things, while the FileSonic one is regularly purged of files not downloaded within the last 30 days (so usually it contains only a few most recent versions):

NB: in Windows 7, when it’s installed using the installer, Flash can be found in C:\Windows\SysWOW64\Macromed for the 32 bits version and C:\Windows\System32\Macromed for the 64 bits version.

Flash 10.3 RC for portable browsers

David Dernoncourt — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 20:23:17 +0000

Adobe just released yet another version of Flash Player. It’s still a preview, but getting close enough to final: version 10.3 Release Candidate (or more precisely, version 10.3.181.5).

To “install” that Flash portable, unpack it into the plugin folder for your browser, that is:

Firefox Portable: Data/plugins
Opera USB: program/plugins
Iron or Chrome Portable: Iron/plugins

Note that flashplayer.xpt is useless but since it seems that quite a few people arrive here looking for it I still include it (it’s barely a kilobyte anyway). This is the 32 bits version (the 64 bits version is still not released… I wonder what can be so hard about compiling in 64 bits instead of 32…).

I repeat, this is not a final version, just a release candidate. If that sounds scary you should grab the current stable version, which as of April 26, 2011 is 10.2, there.

Flash 10.3.181.5 (aka 10.3 Release Candidate) for portable browsers (FileSonic)
Flash 10.3.181.5 for portable browsers (MegaUpload)

PS: megaupload and filesonic directories with all my Flash Portable uploads (actually, only the MegaUpload one contains all my uploads, because FileSonic delete files very fast if they don’t generate enough downloads…):

April 2011 browsers benchmarks

David Dernoncourt — Sat, 02 Apr 2011 10:24:08 +0000

I’m getting better at this ^^. Here are new benchmarks with updated versions of the browsers, run at the beginning of April 2011. Compared to the previous browser speed test and its complement, this test features the final versions of Firefox 4 (instead of RC1), the final version of MSIE 9 (instead of the beta), and Safari 5.0.4 (instead of 5.0.3). I also added a combined score, which averages all the benchmarks I ran into a single score. Once again I remind you that browser speed benchmarks are meaningless, so read them only if you have some spare time to waste: you’d be better off trying those browsers yourself – except maybe Safari which IS really slow indeed .

Materials used

I used the same old hardware which is: AMD Phenom 2 X4 Mobile N930 (4x2GHz), 8 GiB DDR3 RAM, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 1 GiB VRAM.
The computer was running on Windows 7 x64 Enterprise with ATI Catalyst 11.3.
For the benchmarks, I used the current versions of:

The exact browser versions were:

SRWare Iron Portable 10.0.650.0 (should perform more or less the same as Chrome 10)
Opera 11.50 labs (build 24661)
Firefox 4.0
MSIE 9.0.8112.16421 (MSIE 9 final)
Safari 5.0.4

Results

Combined score

The formula I used to obtain this score was the sum of relative scores where higher is better plus the sum of 1/relative scores where lower is better. So, the maximum possible combined score is 5 (which would mean that the browser beat all others in all tests). Here are the combined scores:

Iron 10: 4.062
Firefox 4: 3.678
Opera 11.50 nightly: 3.396
MSIE 9: 2.942
Safari 5.0.4: 2.107

Pictures!

Here are graphs with relative scores for all benchmarks. Only one picture for easier handling

Score details

SunSpider

That’s the results I found most surprising: MSIE 9 really improved a lot compared to its beta, and is now first. Safari 5.0.4 on the contrary performs a lot worse than Safari 5.0.3. Firefox 4 improved pretty well too since its RC1. So the results are much different from a month ago: MSIE 9 beta was last, MSIE 9 final is first; Firefox 4 RC1 was next to last, Firefox 4 is second. Safari 5.0.3 was third but with a score close to the first, Safari 5.0.4 is last by a large margin… Confidence intervals are < +/- 0.8% except for Iron, with which even by running the test several times I couldn't achieve a confidence interval smaller than +/- 2.2%.
Lower is better (the score is the time in ms to complete the test, averaged over several runs)

MSIE 9: 396.5
Firefox 4.0: 415.2
SRWare Iron 10: 431.3
Opera 11.50: 438.4
Safari 5.0.4: 562.4

Futuremark Peacekeeper

Nothing really new here, except that now MSIE 9 beats Firefox 4 by a tiny margin (since the results have a rather important variability, maybe the difference isn’t significant). Higher is better.

SRWare Iron 10: 6436
Opera 11.50: 5538
Safari 5.0.4: 3616
MSIE 9: 3353
Firefox 4.0: 3159

Microsoft’s Mr Potato Gun

There are some small changes, but this test has an even greater variability than Peacekeeper… So let’s say there’s nothing new compared to both our March tests. Higher is better.

Firefox 4.0: 13747
Opera 11.50: 10471
MSIE 9: 9349
Safari 5.0.4: 2895
SRWare Iron 10: 1966

Kraken 1.0

It’s funny how Iron/Chrome beats Firefox at its own game (just about the same as Firefox beats MSIE at Mr Potato ^^). Like SunSpider, the result is the time in ms to complete the test, averaged on several runs, so lower is better

SRWare Iron 10: 11707
Firefox 4.0: 15409.4
Opera 11.50: 25352.2
MSIE 9: 26024.2
Safari 5.0.4: 37721.1

Google V8 (v6)

My only comment goes to the poor naming choice, which will be even more confusing once they reach version 8 of their “V8″ test… Like SunSpider and Kraken, Google V8 is vendor-specific, and this time there’s no surprise: Iron/Chrome indeed beats everyone else, and by a fair margin (more than twice the speed). Higher is better.

SRWare Iron 10: 5117
Firefox 4.0: 2418
Opera 11.50: 2087
Safari 5.0.4: 1635
MSIE 9: 1487

Conclusion

Did I already tell you that browser speed benchmarks are meaningless? When we average those 5 ones, the first thing that come to mind is that globally there isn’t a big difference between Iron 10 and Firefox 4 (just 9%), and even between Iron 10 and Opera 11.50 (16%). Even though within each particular benchmarks, differences between those browsers are usually rather large. MSIE 9, although a bit behind (28% lower than Iron 10), is now definitely not as lame as its previous versions… Even though it still “feels” somewhat slow in real life conditions (you know, the thing that matters, as opposed to benchmark conditions). Safari 5.0.4 really stands out: last in 2 tests, next to last in 2 other tests, and third (=second to last) in 1 test, it’s globally almost twice slower than Iron 10… Which is coherent with the way it feels in real use cases. I still use it (very) occasionally because sometimes it manages to display very badly programmed sites that no other browser seem to be able to run properly, but that’s getting rarer and rarer. Safari might be a good browser on Mac OS (I didn’t check that, but apparently that’s what Mac users often say), but on Windows it just has nothing for it.

Bonus browser benchmarks: Iron 10 and Opera 11.50

David Dernoncourt — Fri, 11 Mar 2011 17:30:17 +0000

Two days ago I posted some browser JavaScript speed test, but since I use Iron instead of Chrome I only had version 9. Since I read that Chrome claimed to have improved JavaScript speed by “60%” (sic), I thought maybe it was unfair to use version 9 instead of 10, so now that Iron 10.0.650.0 is released I can test it too . I also thought it might be a good idea to include a development snapshot of Opera 11.50 (build 24661), since version 11.01 is getting old already. The materials used are just the same as in the previous test, so go check them there if you want. I only added the new values and updated the histograms.

SunSpider

Both browsers are doing a bit worse than their previous versions… Considering that Chrome was supposed to gain 60%, that’s somewhat disappointing, even though it remains clearly better than Firefox 4 and MSIE 9.
Opera 11.50: 436 ms
Iron 10: 413.2 ms

Peacekeeper

This time, Iron improves by a few points, while Opera is doing once again not as good as previously.
Opera 11.50: 5029
Iron 10: 6481

Mr. Potato Gun

This time, it looks like somebody’s been doing their homework: Opera is 1200% faster than before, taking the second place while it used to be last. Iron is 45% faster than before (nope, that’s still not the 60% I heard about… but I guess that’s close enough(?)).
Opera 11.50: 13420
Iron 10: 2546