How to zoom the full page, along with Facebook Comments Box

Ever wanted to zoom in that tiny text in Facebook Comments Box? Ctrl-+ doesn't work in this case, at least in Google Chrome browser. But here is a solution - a nifty bookmarklet, which you can drag to your bookmarks bar and click whenever needed. It uses CSS Transforms and it works in Chrome, Safari, Firefox, IE9+ and Opera.

Drag me to your bookmarks bar: 110%

%

Here is a live demo (change the zoom level first):

YQL as a free alternative to Google Translate, Google Finance and Google Weather API

Google has closed its free Google Translate API, Google Finance API and the unofficial Google Weather API, which many websites were dependent on. Fortunately, the Yahoo Query Language comes to their rescue. It takes SQL-like statements and provides data from many web services (like SQL tables) in JSON or XML format. You can use the following alternatives for Google APIs:

select * from yahoo.finance.quotes where symbol in ("YHOO","GOOG"); for Yahoo! Finance

select * from weather.bylocation where location='Chicago' and unit='f'; for Yahoo! Weather

select * from wunderground.forecast where location='Chicago'; for Weather Underground

select * from google.translate where q="This is a test" and target="de"; for Google Translate

Tutorials and examples of consuming YQL are provided on Yahoo! website.

Baidu Browser featuring T5 Engine is a king of HTML5

Chinese company Baidu has launched a new web browser for Android, called Baidu Browser (or Explorer). It claims to be 20% faster than others thanks to the new T5 Engine. I didn't believe it, so I downloaded and tested it on my Android 2.3.

The home page is clean, but in Chinese. The default search engine is of course Baidu. There is a voice search as well. The user agent contains FlyFlow/2.2, which is a codename of Baidu Browser.

T5 Engine is indeed a king of HTML5, it scores 467 points and 8 bonus points out of 500 in the HTML5 Test - far more than current mobile and desktop browsers!

As to performance of Baidu Browser (right), it's beats Dolphin Browser (left) in BrowserMark by 19950 to 22322 points, which is 11%!

As you can see, Chinese can develop very good and standard-complaint browsers! Download Baidu Browser for Android 2.2+ or Windows Phone 7+.

Welcome to Browsing the Net!

Here I will post some interesting discoveries while I'm browsing the internet. It will be websites, web apps, open source apps, OS-es, developer tools, frameworks and stuff like that. Have a nice time!