Lifehacker have published detailed speed tests for our fave browsers…

Firefox 3.6 is out, Chrome’s stable version got a big upgrade, and Opera 10.5 is inching toward release. It’s a great time for us to break out the timer, process manager, and code tracker for some up-to-date browser speed tests.

You can find the results and the final scores here – hard luck Safari users

If you are also considering upgrading the OS on your PC, they have also tested the latest browsers in Windows 7.

The latest, greatest version of Firefox was released on the 30th June and so far, so good. Touted as the fastest (benchmarked twice as fast as V3), safest and smartest version yet. So what can you expect from the new version?

What’s New in Firefox 3.5

Firefox 3.5  is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use. Some of the notable features are:

• Available in more than 70 languages. (Get your local version!)
• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• Better web application performance using the new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Improvements to the Gecko layout engine, including speculative parsing for faster content rendering.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

Developers can find out about all the changes and new features at the Mozilla Developer Center.

Reviews

The first tranche of reviews seem favourable – noting how solid and fast the release is. Here is a mini review from the Register and another from PC Advisor.

Google Chrome is getting extension support.

Oh yes, oh yes.

(…and a Mac and Linux version. No doubt our very own Mac guru, James will shout about this when it happens

OpenID eliminates the need for multiple logins; no more juggling of different login details for every website you visit. Here’s how it works:

• You simply sign up to an OpenID provider who you trust, and in return they give you an OpenID URL. For instance, “http://yourname.myopenid.com”.
• Then, when you come across a website (let’s call it example.com) you want to sign up to, you just enter your OpenID address.
• Example.com then goes to your OpenID address, to check you are who you say you are (I’m leaving out some of the techy-behind-the-scenes stuff here).
• If you’re logged into your OpenID provider, you’ll be asked to confirm you want access to example.com, and if you’re not logged in, you’ll be prompted to do so and then asked to confirm.
• Control is passed back to example.com, who now know who you are. Optionally, you can get your OpenID provider to send profile data to example.com (your name, website, e-mail, etc) to save you having to enter them yourself.
• And you’re done! In future, if you want to visit example.com, you’ll be logged in automatically provided you’re logged into your OpenID provider.

OpenID is an open, free standard, which means it’s good for everyone: cheaper for businesses to implement (and less hassle managing passwords/accounts), and it means users get less frustrated and have less to remember. However, it’s still a work in progress, and still in the ‘adoption phase’ – but lots of big names are lending support, such as Google, IBM, Microsoft, VeriSign and Yahoo!.

Whilst OpenID is a fantastic idea, and adoption is clearly on the rise, it’s still not quite as easy for users as it could be. Sites implement logins in different ways (sometimes the OpenID option on a login form is a somewhat hidden), and the whole process is a little bit more clunky than it could be. O’Reilly have a really interesting article on OpenID in the browser which discusses whether your browser could be the key to the whole process.

Imagine if your web browser really knew who you were on the web. Just as you login to your computer, what if when you fired up your browser, it said “Hello Dave” and asked you to “unlock it” as well … In doing so you become securely logged into your OpenID provider (or maybe more than one of them) and as you move around the web your browser takes care of automatically logging you into the sites that you want to be, asking you about others, and helping you register with new ones using your OpenID.

It’s a great idea, and I’m looking forward to seeing what develops in this area.

If you want to get your own OpenID, be sure to check out OpenID.net, who have an introduction to OpenID (the introduction to OpenID at myVidoop is good too), a guide to where to get an OpenID (including myOpenID.com and myVidoop) and a guide to the sites which currently accept OpenID.

Finally, this video from myVidoop explains OpenID in a really easy-to-understand way, and entertaining to boot – well worth viewing:

Click here to view the embedded video.