Liebao (Cheetah) Browser

A Chinese company KingSoft (known best for its free Microsoft Office alternative) has released a good looking web browser Liebao (Cheetah in Chinese). The latest version is 4.3 and it is based on Chromium 29 and Blink engine, with compatibility mode based on Trident engine from IE. Cheetah Browser runs in Chinese by default, but deleting the file: C:\Users\YourName\AppData\Local\Liebao\x.x.x.x\Locales\zh-CN.pak enables English language. The browser chrome was designed by Rigo, a partner of Lenovo and Microsoft.

Have a look at the promo video:

Here is the screenshot of themes gallery:

The new tab page:

The main menu with tools:

Cheetah Browser scores 494 points in HTML5 Test. You can download this browser directly from here (exe file, open at your own risk).

The best Android browser is... Opera!

I have tested the most popular web browsers on Android Jelly Bean: Stock Android Browser, Google Chrome 29, Opera 16, Opera Mobile Classic 12.1, Mozilla Firefox 24 and Dolphin Browser 10 with Jetpack. While Opera and Opera Classic have an Off-road or Turbo mode, which speeds up loading websites, it was disabled for this test. Here is the comparison table, two best results are green:

Browser	Browsermark	Octane Benchmark	HTML5 Test	CSS3 Test
Stock Browser	2132	1175	327 + 14	45
Chrome	2240	1951	429 + 11	60
Opera	2650	2089	443 + 11	62
Opera Classic	1740	571	406 + 12	52
Firefox	2071	2253	426 + 10	58
Dolphin	2008	1544	471 + 3	57

The best Android web browser, in terms of performance and compliance to web standards, is the new Opera! However, Dolphin has the best support for HTML5 and Chrome with Firefox are almost as fast as Opera.

Safari in iOS 7 has better performance than iOS 6

As the new Apple iOS 7 has been finally released, I have upgraded an iPad 2 and compared the performance of Safari Mobile browser in iOS 7 to iOS 6. The benchmark results show that iOS 7 has better performance in web browsing and better compliance to web standards. Have a look at the comparison table:

Browser	Browsermark	Octane Benchmark	HTML5 Test	CSS3 Test
Safari / iOS7	2288	1479	399 + 9	61%
Safari / iOS6	2022	935	386 + 9	59%
Improvement	13%	58%	3%	2%

For more information about Safari Mobile in iOS 7, read this excellent article on Breaking the Mobile Web.

How to update Safari for Windows to the latest version of WebKit

If you are still using Safari 5.1 for Windows (e.g. for the excellent font smoothing), you can keep up with modern web browsers by upgrading its WebKit engine to the latest version released by Apple. Just follow these steps:

1. If you have iTunes already installed, go to step 5.
2. Download the latest release of iTunes for Windows.
3. Open the downloaded file iTunesSetup.exe in an archive manager, like 7-Zip or WinRAR.
4. Extract the file AppleApplicationSupport.msi and run it. Complete the installation.
5. Copy the folder C:\Program Files (x86)\Common Files\Apple\Apple Application Support (or without (x86) when on 32-bit system) to C:\Program Files (x86)\Safari and merge with the existing Apple Application Support folder.

When you restart Safari, you will notice much better HTML5 & CSS3 support (319 -> 342 points in HTML5 Test) and JavaScript performance. Enjoy!

Alternatives to Google Instant Previews

A few days ago Google silently disabled Instant Previews in Google Search. It provided small thumbnails of search results, which you could quickly preview before loading the full web page. Here is a list of alternative extensions for Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera web browser:

• SearchPreview for Firefox and Chrome
• CoolPreviews for Firefox and Chrome
• ezLinkPreview for Chrome
• Thumbshots for Firefox
• SearchenginePreview for Opera

What is your favorite one?

How to add Google+ Comments to any website

Google+ Comments is a social wigdet from Google, which works similar to Facebook Comments Box or Disqus. For now, it is available only for blogs on the Blogger platform. But here is an unofficial way to embed Google+ Comments on any website or blog:

1. Edit your website and add this HTML:
   

   <script src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js">
   </script>
   <g:comments
       href="[URL]"
       width="642"
       first_party_property="BLOGGER"
       view_type="FILTERED_POSTMOD">
   </g:comments>

   or a valid HTML5 version:
   

   <script src="https://apis.google.com/js/plusone.js">
   </script>
   <div class="g-comments"
       data-href="[URL]"
       data-width="642"
       data-first_party_property="BLOGGER"
       data-view_type="FILTERED_POSTMOD">
   </div>

2. If you want to insert a comments counter, add this HTML code instead of <g:comments>:
   

   <g:commentcount href="[URL]"></g:commentcount>

   or a valid HTML5 version instead of <div class="g-comments">:
   

   <div class="g-commentcount" data-href="[URL]"></div>

3. Replace [URL] with the URL of your web page and fit the width.
4. Link your web page to your Google+ profile.

If you prefer to load Google+ Comments dynamically, insert this HTML code:

<div id="comments"></div>
<script>
gapi.comments.render('comments', {
    href: window.location,
    width: '624',
    first_party_property: 'BLOGGER',
    view_type: 'FILTERED_POSTMOD'
});
</script>

Similarly with Google+ Comments Counter:

<div id="commentscounter"></div>
<script>
gapi.commentcount.render('commentscounter', {
    href: window.location
});
</script>

You can see it in action on the Google+ and Facebook Comments page.