Yahoo! Releases Own Web Browser Dubbed 'Axis'

[joytech22]

I installed it out of curiosity, but out of habit in Chrome I still use the URL bar for my searches.
I actually have to go out of my way to use it. I have to remember to use it.

It isn't seamless like with the URL bar.
But I will use it for assignments, then I can read what's relevant on the pages it brings up. 😉

 

[mitch074]

@blazorthon : the Gecko engine that powered Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) was identical between said suite and Firefox. And, since Gecko does the page rendering but also the browser's UI, and looking at the history of Phoenix, then Firebird, then Firefox, the browser we know now is no more and no less than the browser component of the suite. See Thunderbird, still based on the very same Gecko engine than Firefox. As such, yes, it is the same browser.

@sykosis: this is why I mentioned "Mozilla 1.0 Final". Unfortunately, the version of Gecko that powered Netscape 6 was late, an early beta, buggy as hell and very unstable. Things got better with Netscape 7 (more or less Mozilla 1.0rc) but then Netscape went under and Mozilla spent some time lost in limbo, back in the boonies of AOL's servers.

 

[blazorthon]

@blazorthon : the Gecko engine that powered Firefox and the Mozilla Suite (now SeaMonkey) was identical between said suite and Firefox. And, since Gecko does the page rendering but also the browser's UI, and looking at the history of Phoenix, then Firebird, then Firefox, the browser we know now is no more and no less than the browser component of the suite. See Thunderbird, still based on the very same Gecko engine than Firefox. As such, yes, it is the same browser.

@sykosis: this is why I mentioned "Mozilla 1.0 Final". Unfortunately, the version of Gecko that powered Netscape 6 was late, an early beta, buggy as hell and very unstable. Things got better with Netscape 7 (more or less Mozilla 1.0rc) but then Netscape went under and Mozilla spent some time lost in limbo, back in the boonies of AOL's servers.

You're arguing that the base of the browser is the browser in order to say that Firefox is older than it is. This is wrong. Vista has the same basic kernel as Windows 7 and Windows 8, each generation just has been tweaked somewhat. Does that make Windows 8 as old as Windows Vista? No. It makes the basic kernel that old, but not the entire new OS, even though 8's kernel is "more or less" the Vista kernel and the kernel can be said to be "more or less" the main part of the OS. The browser called Firefox came out in 2004. How old some of its code is has no impact on this. That is when the entire browser came out as Firefox, plain and simple.

 

[mitch074]

@blazorthon : I was sure that the browser is the browser is the browser... I mean, it's a browser, it comes from Mozilla, it uses the same rendering engine, the same script engine, the same GUI engine albeit with a different icon set and is not weighted down with functionalities... Which were optional in the Mozilla suite anyway. It looks like a bird, it flies like a bird, it squeaks like a bird, it lays eggs like a bird and it is named like a bird... But it's not a bird?

If we follow your logic, Internet Explorer is not 10 years old, since it was renamed 'Windows Internet Explorer' for version 7 and came alone while previous versions were 'Microsoft Internet Explorer' and came with Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, and MSN Messenger included in the installer - as such, of all current browsers, only Opera is more than 10 years old! Even though Opera 6 has very little in common with Opera 12.

Horse manure. For having tinkered with rendering engines ever since 'Webkit' was still named 'KHTML+KJS, Apple branch', Gecko is the current rendering engine+script interpreter that changed the least (it did get several overhauls) since it came out.

 

[blazorthon]

@blazorthon : I was sure that the browser is the browser is the browser... I mean, it's a browser, it comes from Mozilla, it uses the same rendering engine, the same script engine, the same GUI engine albeit with a different icon set and is not weighted down with functionalities... Which were optional in the Mozilla suite anyway. It looks like a bird, it flies like a bird, it squeaks like a bird, it lays eggs like a bird and it is named like a bird... But it's not a bird?

If we follow your logic, Internet Explorer is not 10 years old, since it was renamed 'Windows Internet Explorer' for version 7 and came alone while previous versions were 'Microsoft Internet Explorer' and came with Outlook Express, Windows Media Player, and MSN Messenger included in the installer - as such, of all current browsers, only Opera is more than 10 years old! Even though Opera 6 has very little in common with Opera 12.

Horse manure. For having tinkered with rendering engines ever since 'Webkit' was still named 'KHTML+KJS, Apple branch', Gecko is the current rendering engine+script interpreter that changed the least (it did get several overhauls) since it came out.

Again, lets apply your logic to Windows. Windows Vista, 7, and 8 all have the same basic kernel, the latter two simply have updated versions of it. Are they all the same? No. Just because FF shared a lot of code with a previous browser does not matter. That browser was not Firefox.

Is an AMD Radeon card not a Radeon just because it's not called Ati anymore? No. The AMD 6800 and below Radeons all share a huge amount of their basic architecture with the previous Radeon group even though they don't have the same brand. FF is FF, not one of the older browsers with a lot of similar code.

Is Windows 8 not a Windows operating system anymore just because it's called Windows 8 instead of Windows 7 R2 or V2 or something else like that? You're trying to argue the wrong side of a semantics argument and it's not working. Internet Explorer is still Internet explorer. Windows is still Windows. Radeons are still Radeons. Firefox is still not Thunderbird, Netscape, or anything else but Firefox and it came out in 2004. A similar argument would be saying that just because Windows Vista uses the same basic kernel as Windows 7 and Windows 8, that Windows 7 and Windows 8 came out when Windows Vista did. It doesn't work like that and no amount of experience with rendering engines will change that.

How much or how little Gecko has changed doesn't matter because we're not arguing about when Gecko came out; we're arguing about when FF came out. Firefox came out in 2004 and no amount of arguing about how old some of the code is will change that. A lot of code in many programs, OS,s firmware, driver, etc. etc. is much older than the program, OS, firmware, driver, etc. etc. and there's nothing that you nor I can do to change the fact that just because parts of FF are from before 2004, FF is not from before 2004. Even if every piece of FF was older, it was not launched in the exact package that is FF before 2004, at least not as a testing version such as an alpha or a beta.

 

[mitch074]

Since Windows Internet Explorer came at version 7 in 2006 as a standalone browser with no mail client and no media player, Microsoft Internet Explorer died at version 6sp2 in 2004. Opera is, thus, the only current browser to be more than 10 years old. According to your argument.

I really thought software was defined by what it could do and how it did it, but obviously it's more a matter of what's written on the label.

I guess you were amongst the many who hit a bargain buying Windows Vista Ultimate in 2006, hailed as the most complete OS of all times, with incoming exclusive first-grade features.

That's what was written on the box, so it must be true.

(It would confirm my hunch as other software boxes bore the mention 'Windows XP or better', and if they worked well under Linux+Wine, they never worked on Vista - maybe Linux really is better than Windows... Hey, it says so on the box!)

 

[blazorthon]

Since Windows Internet Explorer came at version 7 in 2006 as a standalone browser with no mail client and no media player, Microsoft Internet Explorer died at version 6sp2 in 2004. Opera is, thus, the only current browser to be more than 10 years old. According to your argument.

I really thought software was defined by what it could do and how it did it, but obviously it's more a matter of what's written on the label.

I guess you were amongst the many who hit a bargain buying Windows Vista Ultimate in 2006, hailed as the most complete OS of all times, with incoming exclusive first-grade features.

That's what was written on the box, so it must be true.

(It would confirm my hunch as other software boxes bore the mention 'Windows XP or better', and if they worked well under Linux+Wine, they never worked on Vista - maybe Linux really is better than Windows... Hey, it says so on the box!)

I didn't buy Vista. Alright then, IE in its current form can be said to be newer than Opera.

Let's look at how this argument began.

I appluad their efforts. Unfortunately, this is about 5 years too late.

Its 10yrs to late.

Several popular web browsers today weren't around ten years ago, so that's BS. Firefox is from 2004 and Chrome is only from 2008 and there are others.

This is the comment that you replied to and tried to convince me that FF and Chrome shouldn't be considered as young as they are because they are based on older software. All that this argument with you has proven is that what I initially said was correct, yet you tried to argue against it anyway and now you're trying to insult me and make assumptions about me and my OS choices. Congratulations, you have now shown that everything that we've said since this comment was a waste of time for both of us.

My whole point was that a browser doesn't need to be very old in order to become a major player, yet you wanted to chime in over semantics and not only semantics, but your argument in semantics was completely flawed from the start and now you've been reduced to pointing out apparent mistakes that don't even have any impact on what I've said. Whether or not IE can be considered old is only going to take one example away and then it even fortifies my original point because it's yet another example of a browser that isn't ten years old or more, so like I pointed out to spookyman, Yahoo is not entering the market too late to become a major player if they handle this properly.

You're whole argument at this point is nothing but fortifying my original argument by telling us that IE's current form is only from 2006, thus less than ten years old, and mocking me. However, now that you brought it up... No. I'm not using Vista and I've never bought it.

 

[mitch074]

Then let me formulate the complete answer this way: several web browser, still in use today, were already able to handle web page preloading and preview ten years ago, but nobody went far with this due to the staggering bandwidth costs such a feature entails and the security concerns (XSS).

The web browsers that could handle such an operation natively (i.e. using their engine and default plugins, for example IE6's XmlHttpAccess) were:
- Microsoft Internet Explorer 6/Trident, now labelled Windows Internet Explorer 9 and having integrated XmlHttpAccess
- Mozilla Suite 1.3/Gecko, now found in the lightweight browser Firefox among others
- Opera, now at version 11
- Chrome and Safari/Webkit, a fork of KHTML found in Konqueror.

The feature itself is rather easy to implement:
- find all anchors with href defined in the page;
- create an iframe pointing to said href;
- neutralize the click event observer on these anchors, and replace it with a change of top level document for the iframe: set it as main document;
- add some animation, show/hide mouseover event handler.

Done.