So I decided to put them to the test. I installed Internet Explorer (7), Firefox (2.0.0.13), Safari (3.1) and Opera (9.26) onto a Windows Vista SP1 PC (dell 755, 1gig ram 2ghz proc) and came up with a few of simple tests:

• How the perform at the ACID3 test
• How much memory they take up when first loaded
• How long it takes to render the main page of a bunch of site (microsoft.com, apple.com etc.)
• Of those sites, did they all look and act as they should

The object of these tests is’nt to find the best browser, it is just to see how they stack up against each other. Everyone’s taste is always different and the ‘best’ performing browser might not be for everyone.

Up First… The ACID3 Test

The ACID3 (http://acid3.acidtests.org) test tries to render a page to test different web standards of the browser. The previous ACID test was more about CSS compliance, where as this once tests for more things that would effect the rendering of web2 kind of site. The ACID2 test also did not have a score to rate the compliance, so its hard to express the results. You can run the ACID2 test here

So, as you can see from the results, the most compliant browser of the lot was Safari, but i suppose that’s to be expected as it is the most (feature wise) recently updated browser.

Next… Memory Usage on Start

Next up, how much memory does each browser use on start up. For this test Firefox is running as a new install so there are no extensions in there to slow it down.

Here Internet Explorer is the clear winner, but i think that is to be expected as it is tried into other windows components (like explorer.exe) so much. Opera was the last performer in this test, but if you start to load Firefox with some extensions over time that will probably end up the worst memory hog. In the new version of Firefox they have done a lot of work to plug all of the memory leaks.

Last… Page Loading times

Next up we will time how long it takes to render pages in each of the browsers. I will clear the cashe and history of each browser before going onto the site. To time the load times of the pages I will use the stopwatch service at numion.com You can just enter a url and it will re-direct you to it, and time how long it takes the page to load. Hopefully these are a good cross section of sites.

Again, the results show that Safari comes top again. I must admit I haven’t used it in the past, but the page load times are very impressive. On the bottom end of the scale Firefox seemed to perform the worst of the bunch, that came as quite a surprise to me.

So, what have we learnt?

Personally, quite a bit. I use Firefox day in day out, and I didn’t release the other browsers were that much faster than it, especially Safari. I was quite unimpressed with Opera, it looked and felt to me like Internet Explorer with a more cluttered interface. That said I still prefer Firefox over the others. Its easy to use, and its plugin system means it will always have the functions I want (even if some do come with a performance penalty)

I can understand why Apple are making a dig deal out of safari though, its speed alone makes it worth while, and it also has a couple of features (such as snapback) that the others don’t possess. That said I don’t know how it stable it is, but some things I have read online say that this version is fine.

Reading through the docs, looks like the main new thing with this version is improved compliance. Finally, it might be possible to create a website that looks (and behaviors)  the same in all the Major browsers, without having to put in a lot of extra code and css. Only question I have is why the hell has it taken them so long (and were they scared by the impending release of Firefox 3?)

However, not to jump on the Microsoft bashing bandwagon to much, there are a couple of cool new features in there that might prove to be useful. You can read more about them at Readiness Toolkit page, but they are:

•  Activities – Now when you click on the IE8 page menu, you get a list of activities you can perform on that page. These include thing like sharing it on Facebook, Digging the page, Translating the page, blogging the page etc. There is a framework for this that allows you to create your own ‘activities’, so you are not limited to what they want.
• Webslices – This for me is the most interesting new function. You can add some code to your websites so that the user can subscribe directly to content on your page. Its kind of like a better version of RSS integration with the browser. You can do things like subscribe to Friend status’s on Facebook, when you hit the webslice (it lives in the favorites bar) a drop down appears with pics of your recently updated friends, there status and the time of the status. I am going to try and code a simple one for this website hopfully this week, and ill post my findings up.

Something else that occurs to me is that are they trying to take on traditional RSS feeds with there webslice function, and how long will it be until there is a Firefox extension that will emulate it?

Recently I have been made aware of a network management package from Packettrap.com. The idea behind the software is it will provide you a central interface and reporting service for all your network management and diagnostic needs. The free version includes the following services:

• Overview dashboard
• An enhanced ping
• Graphical ping (it shows the info on a graph)
• Trace route
• TFTP server
• MAC address scan
• WHOIS tool
• Various other features, see them on their site

The main idea behind the software is that you can do all of your normal networking tasks from one place. A fine idea, but how well does it work?

The Tools

When you first open (after registering it) Packettrap, you will be presented with the tools window, like below

Some of the tools you will probably already use (ping, trace route) and some you might not of seen before (WMI scan, MAC scan). Most of the tools are just graphical versions of the ones you probably already use at the command line.

The scanning tools have some useful extras you dont get in the inbuilt Windows ones, such as the ability to ping over a range of machines, and its good to have them all these tools in the same place.

The inclusion of the tool to help manage Cisco network devices is also a good touch, it lets you open device config files and do things like compare two, very useful if the configs have altered and you want to know what has changed.

There are a couple of drawbacks with it though.

When you download it, after 30 days a couple of the tools stop working unless you register for the full product. This includes the syslog server (you can get one for free as i mentioned in my article about account lockouts), and the Cisco tools (you can use another product from Kiwi Enterprise called CatTools).

You don’t seem to be able to customize the tools in the window. It would be nice if you could add/remove ones, so you could be up a collection of applications that are relevant to you.

The Dashboard

One of the main parts of the software is a dashboard. It lets you monitor various states of individual network devices, or groups of devices. As with most monitoring software, you will need to be running SNMP on the devices if you want to get the more detailed information out of them.

The dashboard lets you add various tab, and on each tab you can customise the what you want to see, so for instance you could have a tab with reachability tests, and on another you could be monitoring server disk space. This is a very good feature but you only get one tab in the free version.

Again, there are a couple of drawbacks to the dashboard. The most obvious one is that if one of the services you are monitoring goes down (or reaches a certain threshold) , you only know by looking at the software. There does not seem to be the option to send you an email alert, pager alert etc. This I think is quite a big deal, as you probably wont sit there looking at the dashboard all day.

Another drawback is the lack of ability to create your own ‘gadgets’ as they call them. You are stuck with the pre-configured ones. While it might be quite complex to add your own, I think it is a necessary feature.

You also cant monitor individual applications and services, this would be a very useful tool if you could (for instance) see if the IIS worker process has died on a server.

Is it worth using?

Good question. The tools are useful if you are going to live with the application open all the time, although as I mentioned before not being able to add your own tools probably means you wont. And most of the tools you will probably already own, or use the built in windows ones.

The dashboard is quite cool, but again the lack of ability to customize it with your own ‘gadgets’, or have it send you email alerts is a bit of a let down.

Its certainly worth a download though, as some of its tools might be new to you, and if you haven’t already got something in place the dashboard is a good idea. Get it at http://www.packettrap.com/product/index.aspx?pid=free

What else is there?

By far the best (in my opinion) similar tool to this goes by the strange name of Just for fun network monitoring system(JFFNMS). You can download it from http://www.jffnms.org and see a demo at http://jffnms.enc.com.au

While it is extremely powerful software, it is a bit painful to get working (you’ll probably need a *nix guru) and there hasn’t been an update to it in quite a long time. That said there is an active community and the developer is very helpful.

It has very good alert management, will talk to any device you can think of, is very good for monitoring and reporting trends, and has a web interface (until you have to get your hands dirty with a bit of code). It would also look very cool if you put the hosts and events page on a big TV on the wall of your office!

Explorer.exe, the shell we spend most of our lives using. Normally (remember this qualifier) it tends to be quite stable, but yesterday a colleague of mine started to have strange problems with it on his XP SP2 machine.

If you clicked on Start -> Run and started to type in the UNC path to a server (as you do 100 times a day) after the two slashes ‘\\’ explorer would inexplicably crash and restart. As is the case with such thing, there didn’t seem to be a logical explanation as to what was going on.

The only new software that we had been recently messing about with was from http://portableapps.com and as that gets installed onto a portable drive (thats kind of its point) we are pretty sure it wasn’t that.

When I got back in the following day, it was working again. What was the solution? Well, clearing up the History and Cache on the machine. That was it. There must have been something the the most recently used list of run, that was causing the problem. As it only occurred after typing in the leading slashes, it must have been a computer name. Unfortunately as the list was cleared we have no idea what the hell caused it.

This what what was logged into the event log on the pc:

We had a Google around for the error but didn’t really come up with anything, so if all else fails, delete your history and clear your cache!

As you’d expect, it’s not got very much new functionality (you need vista for that). It seams mainly to be a roll up of all the fixes since SP2, there are however a couple of new bits that might be useful in the enterprise:

• Black Hole Router detection (routers that are silently dropping packets)
• Network Access protection (NAP) support (quite a cool idea, never heard of it before)
• Ability to run a Windows install without entering the product key. It will prompt later as part of the genuine advantage stuff (you would have to be installing of an image with SP3 on it to do this)

I’ve not downloaded it yet, so I don’t know personally how well it works, but if you have a look on http://exo-blog.blogspot.com/2007/11/update-re-testing-vista-w2gb-ram-office.html there is a suggestion that it might actually make things run a bit faster, but ill believe this when I see it.

If you are not part of the Microsoft universe, on Friday (the 11th) there is a new version of the KDE desktop manager being released. It will be version 4 and has some cool new features, check out http://www.kde.org/ for more info.

There is a rather nifty piece of open source software called Ghostscript, that allows you to do various cool things with postscript files.

Working at a newspaper we use postscript files a lot, so I have used Ghostscript for various purposes in the past, along with the printer port redirection application Redmon. Redmon lets you create a new printer port, then re-directs the output of the printer to where ever you want. Using this you can call Ghostscript and create a PDF printer. There’s a good how to of this at http://www.stat.tamu.edu/~henrik/GSWriter/GSWriter.html

If you follow this walk through, it will work fine for most situations. The only problem is it prompts for a file name after every file is printed, so if you have a process that generates a lot of print files one after each other, you want it to name the files on its own. This was the situation I was in.

We have a process that runs on an account system that creates 100′s of separate print files. Instead of printing them all out, we wanted to save a copy of them to pdf, print the pdf’s using Batch Print Pro then save the pdf’s in case they needed to be re-used. By doing this we would save on network bandwidth by sending the print file to the remote site (a 80k pdf instead of a 1.5mb+ print spool file), and if the file needs to be sent out again the process in the accounts system wouldn’t have to be run again, the file could just be re-printed.

In order to do this, we create a printer with a redmon port, then re-direct the output of the printer to a vbscript. Within the script the following happens:

• The path to the temporary postscript file that is created as the job is printed is pased to the script as an argument
• A variable to hold the output name and path is created. The output file name is based on the document name (groveled out of the temp postscript document) and a random number to stop duplicate files being produced.
• The ps2pdf batch file is then called using a shell command. This is a batch file shipped with Ghostscipt that (surprisingly) converts postscript files to pdf’s. You pass the batch file an input file (in this case the temp postscript file) and an output file.

The setup of the Redmon port looks like this:

Theres a couple of things to check if your having problems:

• If your output is coming out in mono, make sure you are using a colour printer driver!
• If you are printing a crystal report (like I was) and it’s coming out mono even if you are using a colour printer driver, open the report in crystal and go to File -> Print -> Printer. If this is set to a mono printer it will still print in mono. Change it to a colour printer and it should be fine
• As always, make sure the directory’s you are writing to are open to the users who will need them.
• Make sure the Ghostscript bin and lib folders are in your %path% variable, or when you call the batch file from the script it wont be able to find everything it needs.

There is no mention of new features or anything yet, but keep checking back as i’m sure they will post the latest info there first.

When you think about it, most there money comes from selling operating systems and Office products. Now, browsers are becoming more and more the platform of choice to write applications on. it makes sense really.

The app will run on any device with a net connection (including phones, pda’s etc), you can almost guarantee it will work, there is no need for the user to install software, updates are easy to roll out, ease of distribution, the list go’s on and on.

While as it stands there aren’t to many office based application that can challenge the MS office in the features category, there are certainly very capable alternatives out there, the main one being Googles offering, Google docs (http://docs.google.com/). All the documents are saved online, so you can give other people access to them and wherever you are in the World you will always have access to your data.

One of the only downfalls of online applications is when you lose your net connection. We’ll Google have even come up with a way of getting round that. It’s called gears ( http://gears.google.com/).

I dont personally know all that much about it, its a framework that will allow you to build web based applications that will also work of line. At the moment the only apps I have seen that use it are Google ones, but i’m sure more will be popping up.

So, are the mighty Microsoft doing anything of there own like this. Well, a bit. They have bought a stake in the social networking site Facebook (http://www.facebook.com/).

One of the cool features of Facebook is the fact that you can create applications using there framework, and post them to the community. As the Facebook community is absolutely massive (according to compete.com 14 million used applications in Facebook in August) your application will get a lot of exposure.

On the back of this Microsoft has added support via a developer kit into its Visual web Developer product (http://www.microsoft.com/express/samples/facebook/default.aspx). The thing I find funny about this is when you look at the Facebook developer documentation it’s language of choice is PHP. Will this be changing to dotnet now Microsoft have got there claws into it?

So, are Microsoft trying to embrace the internet as its development platform of the future, or sticking to there so far successful business model of traditional desktop software. I’m sure we’ll find out over the next few years.

And just out of interest, while we are talking about browsers, this is a breakdown of what browsers people visiting this site have been using over the last month:

I did download the first one, it worked ok but lacked a couple of features, and when I uploaded the postings some of the formatting didn’t look correct on Blogger. I might try the new one and see if its any better.

I have got another article up on AspFree.com, its about logging terminal server connections and you can read it in all its glory here

On a completely different topic, if you like a bit of English alt rock music, check out the Pigeon Detectives first album Wait For Me. It’s rather good

A lot of the images also seem to be of better quality than Google maps.

Problems do seem to happen when you start looking at different countries other than the US and the UK. I looked a the south of France and there wasn’t even any house’s being shown. So good features, but a long way to go yet if they want to challenge Google