I remember when I first tried Opera, that was supposed to be “the fastest browser on Earth”, I accidentally pressed a mouse button combination and weird lines started drawing through the screen. The mouse gestures (I was to find out about them later) are stylized motions of the mouse cursor itself, that can be used as forms of commands and that can be mapped to a specific action. For example, you could have quickly moved the mouse towards the left direction to go back to the previous page.

At that time I was still using Internet Explorer and new features like tabbed browsing or cached pages seemed like heaven. I started using Firefox since one and a half years ago, and I of course I sticked to it until now. With the discovery of widgets that are able to completely transform Firefox now, it does seem like the best browser on Earth for me, not necessarily the fastest.

However, I did not see the gestures feature being implemented in the core system, so I thought there might be a Plug-In to do so. Here it is. The extension allows you to execute common commands (like page forward/backward, close tab, new tab) by mouse gestures drawn over the current webpage, without reaching for the toolbar or the keyboard.

You can also use click-only “rocker” gestures which are even faster than drawn gestures. This cool plugin is compatible with your Thunderbird aswell.

The official date for the big event was January 8, officials of Microsoft rejoice since the initial predictions noted the transition from IE6 to IE7 would be much slower. Now according to WebSideStory over 26 percent of visitors to U.S. Web sites are now using IE 7, this makes IE7 the second most used web-browser in the US after IE6.

The main competitor of IE7 is Firefox 2.0 from Mozilla. No data was published by Mozilla regarding the downloads made to date but initial prospects indicated Firefox 2.0 made 2 mil. downloads in the first 24 hours and IE7 made 3 mil downloads in the first four days. On the other side IE7 is embedded in the Vista operating system and is now a critical update for Windows XP.

Anyway the battle doesn’t end here, Firefox 3.0 is to be released this year and the IE 8 and 9 are in plan from Microsoft.

The Acid2 test is developed by The Web Standards Project, in order to point out flaws in HTML/CSS rendering engines in browsers. So far, several browsers have managed to pass the test, including Opera, Mac’s Safari and the less known Konqueror. Here are some of the results that show up in different browsers: Read the rest of this entry »