You must have come across one of the many browser comparisons which rely on benchmarks like Dromaeo, Sunspider, V8 and Peacekeeper. The main problems with these synthetic tests are that they simply measure the JavaScript rendering speeds. While rendering JavaScript is one of the more time consuming aspects of page rendering, js rendering speed tells only a part of the story. There are various other aspects like HTML/CSS rendering that must be taken into account in order to truly judge a browsers rendering speed.

Frustrated with artificial and misleading tests, a blogger took it upon himself to measure the real rendering speed of browsers. In order to achieve this he utilised offline copies of popular websites including Baidu.com, Blogger.com, Facebook.com, Google.com, Havenworks.com, Live.com, Myspace.com/tom, Reddit.com and Wikipedia.org. The average time taken to render each of these pages by all popular browsers (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, Opera and Chrome) was noted. And here are the results:

Opera - 204
Safari - 205.2
Chrome - 205.5
Firefox - 416
Internet Explorer - 556.8
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More and more cyber-criminals are using websites as a vehicle to deliver trojan horses and other malwares. Often they insert malicious codes into innocent websites run by unsuspecting webmasters. Detecting a malware infection is relatively easy (as long as you have a top class antivirus) if all the pages of a website is affected. However, the real trouble is detecting a single infected page when you have hundreds and thousands of webpages. Due to the rapid rise in the number of malware infected websites most modern browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Opera) include a built in blacklist of infected websites. Getting blacklisted by any of them can be a nightmarish experience. Besides causing immediate fall in the popularity of your website it will also dent your credibility. Even search engines like Google use third-party services for warning visitors of malware infected websites. Getting tagged by Google can be a torturous experience since most webmasters heavily depend on Google. The main problem with Web Malware Infections is that most webmasters aren’t even aware of the problem until it’s too late.

Dasient is a new service co-founded by Neil Daswani and Shariq Rizvi (ex-Google employees) along with Ameet Ranadive (from Yodlee). Dasient provides three features:
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 Continue reading to find out how you can win a MozyHome Unlimited license worth $54.45
 

I have already reviewed the much acclaimed Carbonite Data Backup and Synplicity Data Synchronisation solution. Today I will take a look at Mozy Backup – which is one of the most popular data backup solutions. Mozy has different solutions for home users (called Mozy Home) and enterprise users (called Mozy Pro). In this article I will be focusing on Mozy Home. You can learn about the differences between the two here.Mozy Home is available as a free download for Windows and Mac and provides up to 2GB of backup space for free. You can increase your online storage size by referring friends and relatives (1GB extra storage for referring 4 users) or by upgrading to Mozy Unlimited. Mozy Unlimited provides unlimited storage space and costs $54.45 per year.
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I started using Songbird when I began using Linux (again). I wanted something with a powerful library and an intuitive user-interface. Amarok just didn’t feel right on GNOME and although Exaile was pretty brilliant I still felt something was missing. That was till I tried Songbird. I had last tried it on windows a long time back (when it was initially released). But Songbird had improved vastly since then. Songbird isn’t perfect but combined with the awesome add-ons – it soon became the media powerhouse that I was looking for. In fact now Songbird is my default media player even on Windows (replacing Windows Media Player).

Songbird is a great media player in itself and the latest release adds a few much needed (equaliser) and much requested (library management) features. However, what makes Songbird really stand out from the crowd are its add-ons and web-integration. Songbird makes use of the Gecko (Firefox) engine to allow tabbed web browsing right inside the player. Without much ado here are ten add-ons you must install if you are a Songbird user.

1. mashTape – This is one of the first things that made me fall in love with Songbird and remains one of my favourite add-ons. mashTape fetches relevant information about the currently playing track from the web. The main pane shows artist biography, members of the band, discography, and related links fetched from last.fm. It also displays album reviews from Amazon and latest info related to the singer fetched from a number of sources including Google News, Yahoo! News, Google Blogsearch, HypeMachine and Digg. But my favourite feature is the cool slideshow composed of related photos from flickr. And oh yeah, before I forget mashTape also fetches relevant videos from YouTube and Yahoo! Music.

2. Now Playing List - Songbird doesn’t contain a Now Playing list (like Windows Media Player or Winamp) that allows you to quickly drag and drop songs and create custom temporary playlists on the fly. This can be a deal breaker for some (including me). Thankfully, there is an add-on that allows you to add a Now Playing List pane.

3. MediaFlow - I love the iTunes like Filter View present in Songbird. However, if you prefer the flashier Coverflow then MediaFlow is the add-on you are looking for. However, this plug-in does have some performance issues.
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Windows task-switcher (Alt+Tab or Win+Tab) sucks. It’s as simple as that. The much hyped Flip-3D (first introduced in Windows Vista) may look cool but is practically worthless. It definitely doesn’t make switching do another window any easier. I don’t know anyone who actually finds Flip-3D productive. The task-switcher found in Mac Operating Systems – called Expose, is a much better option. It displays all open windows as thumbnails on the screen. I had written about a free application (XNeat Windows Manager) to get Expose like task-switcher in Windows. However, recently I came across a better alternative called Switcher.

Switcher features 3 main modes –
Tile - This mode is similar to Expose and shrinks the windows until you can see all the Windows.
Grid - This is my favourite mode. Its similar to Tile and shrinks the windows to make them fit inside the screen. However instead of scattering them all over the place arranges them in a neat grid. In fact even Apple decided to implement a similar feature in its upcoming operating system Snow Leopard.
Dock - In this mode the maximum screenspace is dedicated to the active window and the other windows are displayed as think strips that occupy the top edge of the screen.
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For the greater part of this week the comment system of this blog was broken. It was due to an incorrect setting in my anti-spam plugin. Any attempt to leave a comment would have returned an error – “failed to add your comment”. I have fixed the issue now. Thanks to Andre for bringing this to my attention. I apologise for any inconvenience caused by my gaffe.

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Making a game is an expensive affair, often costing millions of dollars. Half Life 2 cost Valve in excess of $40 million. Considering the amount of effort and money it takes to create a game, it’s not surprising that high quality free games are few and far in between. But that doesn’t mean that there aren’t exceptions. I present to you ten truly awesome free games. Some of them were initially released as commercial ventures and were later re-released as free downloads. But many of the games are freeware in the true sense of the term. Some of these games are in fact so good that you would have a hard time believing that they are free. Here are my top ten free games:

1. & 2. America’s Army 3 and Area-51 (Action)

Choosing the best game for this category was fairly easy. Released earlier this month America’s Army features high quality visuals delivered by the Unreal 3 engine. The games release itself was plagued with problems and mired in controversy. The huge demand clogged up Steam’s servers and many people weren’t able to download it on the day of release. On top of that the game servers also had issues coping up with the demand and often took as long as a day to update your status. A patch has been issued to bypass these initial problems. Ignoring these initial hiccups, America’s Army is a fantastic shooter for its price. It is developed by the US Army and features realistic team based gameplay. Be careful while shooting because, as in real life friendly fires are scorned upon and result in serious penalty. Like the previous instalments AA3 is mainly an online game and online multiplayer is where all the fun is. Head over to the official website to enroll yourself and download the game.

Download Trailer
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Although Windows has included visual styles (also known as MSStyles) since Windows XP, they only support official themes digitally signed by Microsoft – which are few and far in between. Bypassing this built in limitation and enabling support for third-party themes in Windows XP was easy. It only involved patching a single dll file (uxtheme.dll). However, things got much more complicated in Windows Vista and Windows Seven. What was initially just a matter of modifying a few bytes of code in a single file now became a matter of patching multiple files spread across the system. This often created security and stability issue and degraded system performance. This prompted Rafael Rivera – the Windows Guru and the guy behind the original UxTheme patches to envision a solution that won’t involve patching multiple system files. The result of the labour of Rafael and his friend Max is UxStyle.

At the moment, UxStyleis still in its infancy. In its current form it is just a driver that employs kernel level access to enable support for third-party themes in Windows XP, Vista and Seven. It doesn’t include any theme manager or theme installer. You would still have to use the interface provided by Microsoft for applying your themes and visual styles. However, in upcoming beta releases Rafael does plan to provide a fully functional UI for applying themes. The GUI version is expected to be provided under UxStyle Premium package. It won’t be free and would also feature live/automatic updates. The UxStyle Core (containing necessary code for enabling third-party themes) will however be provided for free.
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