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just hat a great time toying around with PicLens, a browser-extension that displays image-streams in a semi-3D environment. controlling the image-stream is easy: use the scrollbar to swift through pictures quickly and smoothly, zoom using the mouse-wheel.

PicLens is available for Firefox, IE, Safari, works fullscreen, and basically supports any website offering RSS-feeds with enclosures (f.e. flickr, photobucket, smugmug). There’s also support for YouTube and Amazon.

Gecko-based web-browser Flock (Windows and Mac OS-binaries available) has been upgraded to version 0.9 earlier this week. 0.9 features even stronger integration with social web-services and blogging-tools than its predecessor - Flickr, Photobucket, YouTube, del.icio.us are supported out of the box, as well as most hosted & self-hosted blogging-tools. besides these well-known qualities, the Flock-team added numerous improvements to the user-interface. (more…)

Mozilla Labs released some details on their upcoming project The Coop. Coop aims on integrating social networking features and easy sharing of web-content right into the browser (something Mozilla-based Flock has been promising for a while, but at least in terms of social networking not delivered fully yet). more details can be found on the project-wiki, some discussion at TechCrunch.

Swift is a Windows-browser based on the WebKit rendering-engine used in Apple’s Safari. the idea is basically to give Windows-based web-developers a comfortable way to write cross-platform-compatible HTML, CSS & JavaScript. however, the current alpha-release of Swift isn’t mature enough to replace native testing on Safari: form-elements aren’t supported completely, pages render slightly different than on Safari, and the app seems to have a tendency to crash on complex documents. Windows-developers should keep an eye on Swift’s evolvement, a stable release could ease their lives consideably.

beta 1 of Firefox 2 - codenamed ‘Bon Echo’ - was released to the general public earlier this week. current Firefox-users probably might not want to upgrade to Bon Echo yet, as most extensions don’t work with the new browser. at first glance, it looks like the Firefox-team is improving the browser only incrementally. besides the integrated spellcheck (which is great!) there seem to be no major killer-features. minor improvements include flexible RSS-subscription (supporting Bloglines, MyYahoo and Google Reader), advanced browser-history and individual close-buttons on all browser-tabs.

liferhacker has some nice screenshots…

as reported on Ajaxian, Webkit - the browser-engine powering Safari, Mail and other OS X applications - has finally received an integrated JavaScript-debugger called Drosera. since Safari’s implementation of JavaScript is differing from Firefox and others in some spots, this will ease life of many developers greatly.

If you’re a Mac user and haven’t been intrigued by Firefox or more lately by Flock, I also recommend checking out the Safari Enhancer for a better user-experience with Apples own browser.

as mike arrington announcend earlier, first public beta (v0.7) of firefox-based browser flock was released today. for it’s seamless integration of several webservices, flock is supposed to be the “web 2.0″-browser of choice:

• flock fetches images of flickr- and photobucket-accounts, and furthermore allows drag&drop of images into html-areas (f.e. comment-boxes on blogs, user-profiles)
• social-bookmark-services delicious and Shadows are fully integrated into the browser, replacing local bookmarks
• flock’s powerful cut&paste clipboard simplifies blogging with Blogger, MoveableType, Wordpress and other tools.
• RSS-reader included

agreed, most of these features are available as firefox-extensions in some way, but Flock stands out with it’s polished userinterface and is definitely worth a try for everyone using at least two of these webservices.

during the last few days I’ve been diligently working on a web-application in the area of print/typography, featuring a browser-based text-editor with support for various fontfaces. the main problem in realizing such an editor is the impossibility to load arbitrary fontfaces (besides the standards, like helvetica, courier…) into the browser.

sIFR (Scalable Inman Flash Replacement), a free package of javascript, css and flash-code developed by mike davidson from newsvine.com, offers a unique solution for browser-based font-rendering. after loading a normal (x)html-webpage, a javascript-routine selects any number of marked DOM-elements (f.e. all headline-elements). the text-content of these elements is then replaced by flash-movies of the exact same dimension, rendering the text in any arbitrary font, embedded inside the movie. the whole process is instantly finished and runs hidden from the user. another big advantage: if flash is not installed or javascript is disabled, the browser displays all information in a chosen default-fontface. since all text is included in the (x)html-document, there are also no restrictions regarding search-engine spiders.

see sIFR in action: http://www.mikeindustries.com/blog/files/sifr/2.0/

opera.com released version 2.0 of it’s portable mini-browser today… as a happy user of opera mini 1.x I couldn’t resist trying the new version. unfortunately, the installation-process via cellphone is not as convenient as it could be. I failed in trying to download the new 2.0-package with opera 1.x from http://mini.opera.com - the old app wasn’t able to download and execute/unpack the new .jar/.jad files (opera is a java application). as a backdoor I used the built-in nokia-browser, which worked ok.

• ability to download images, mp3’s and other media directly to the phone
• skinable themes
• advanced search functions against multiple search engines
• “speed dial” - quick bookmark access
• quick & smooth panning while browsing

although written in java, opera seems to render pages as fast as the native browser of my nokia 6630. web-pages are generally rendered quite good, however, frame-based designs, advanced css, javascript and flash are not supported.