CSS transition have been finally made available on Firefox (3.7, pre-alpha2). With this feature developers will finally be able to apply movement to CSS elements, quite a good alternative to the more common use of Javascript. Here’s the developers Firefox version if you want to have a try.
// HTML
<ul>
<li id="long1">Long, gradual transition...</li>
<li id="fast1">Very fast transition...</li>
<li id="delay1">Long transition with a 2-second delay...</li>
<li id="easeout">Using ease-out timing...</li>
<li id="linear">Using linear timing...</li>
<li id="cubic1">Using cubic-bezier(0.2, 0.4, 0.7, 0.8)...</li>
</ul>
// CSS
#delay1 {
position: relative;
-moz-transition-property: font-size;
-moz-transition-duration: 4s;
-moz-transition-delay: 2s;
font-size: 14px;
}
#delay1:hover {
-moz-transition-property: font-size;
-moz-transition-duration: 4s;
-moz-transition-delay: 2s;
font-size: 36px;
}
Since my MacBook is gone and it will be for a while I guess, I was force to come back to my old laptop, a Pentium IV with only 256megs of ram.
I’m currently running Windows XP Pro which is fine but Firefox is just sucking up all the resources making everything else unbereably slow.
Here’s a short list of a few lightweight browsers I tried out in the past days:
K-Meleon: so far, the very best lightweight browser for windows. Basically it has got all Firefox funcionalities minus add-ons and a slightly old look&feel. It’s open source and works with the Mozilla rendering engine. It’s multitab and has got basically everything the old mozilla had.
Google Chrome: it’s Google’s wonderboy, truly a lightweight champion. The only bad thing it’s that it is not stable, not enough for me at least. Still the fastest so far.
Flock 1.0: another Firefox spin-off, at least 3 times faster and lighter. Still to much of a Firefox, which means huge memory leaks if left standing by. It’s more focused on social media but I noticed it is also quite lightweight.
23/03/09 update:
I just bumped into two other browser which even if they’re not exactly the most lightweight they may run smoothly on a machine with limited resources.
I’ve just found another one which is worth to be mentioned. Maxthon: originally born as an attempt to tweak Internet Explorer, its features and popularity escalated to a point in which is got funding from Google and one of Skype’s founder. It’s Classic Version its tiny and lightweight with a full set of features and that’s the one you should go for if you’re willing to spare some resources. It might be unknown to the most but is the most popular web browser in china. Give it a try and see if 186million users do actually know about web browsers.
AvantBrowser: according to its creators it’s the fastest browser ever. It uses the Internet Explorer shell built in windows (hence you gotta check your Internet Explorer out first).It’s largely inspired to Opera and it has got plenty of feature right out of the box, which makes it a really good alternative to using to many apps in a system with limited resources. It deserves a try.
According to the Statcounter guys, Firefox 3 is finally overtaking MS Explorer 6. The overall figures show the Internet Explorer 6 and 7 marketshare dropping of 5% while Firefox has grown of 2 points from february last year.
While these figure may not be impressive, it was just to point out the great real time service on browser shares offered by Statcounter:
You can find it here, stats are updated daily.
