Fun Fact:
We all know Mozilla’s Firefox browser, and by the name and logo, you would probably assume that it is a Red Fox. However, Firefox is another name for the Red Panda and that’s exactly what Mozilla’s Firefox is! To learn more about the Red Panda check out National Geographic.
An amazing little project by Teehan+Lax changes the way we use Street View by creating incredible “Hyper-Lapse” video from the images in google’s Street View database by stringing them all together. The end result is just plain awesome to look at.
Even better, you can make your own version, although it will be a slightly lower quality version. All you need is a browser that supports WebGL, like Goole Chrome, Safari, Opera, or Firefox and then you can simply head here to set a start and finish point and make your “Hyper-Lapse” video.
Hyper-lapse photography – a technique combining time-lapse and sweeping camera movements typically focused on a point-of-interest – has been a growing trend on video sites. It’s not hard to find stunning examples on Vimeo. Creating them requires precision and many hours stitching together photos taken from carefully mapped locations. We aimed at making the process simpler by using Google Street View as an aid, but quickly discovered that it could be used as the source material. It worked so well, we decided to design a very usable UI around our engine and release Google Street View Hyperlapse.”
To Enable WebGL in Safari on the Mac (Safari 5.1 and Up):
Firefox (4 and Up) WebGL is on by Default
For Internet Explorer you can use this plugin.
We are constantly using our web browser, it’s one of the most frequently used applications on any computer, so we need it to be stable and quick. Sometimes though, things start to fail and we get frustrated. When things get ugly we just move on to the next one, perhaps even back to the one we used to use, to see if it has gotten any better. Fortunately, there are plenty of browsers out there to choose from.
I test out a lot of browsers but tend to find myself using either Firefox or Safari the most when I am not reviewing one. I actually had a good run with Internet Explorer for a while, up until I started to experience issues with certain web applications failing. These web application failures only happened when using IE and it was an app that I used on a regular basis.
While looking at web browser statistics, I was quite surprised to see StatCounter showing IE in the lead. I thought for sure that Firefox or Chrome would top the charts but IE is still quite dominant. It’s easy to see how a pre-installed web browser on the world’s most popular OS could easily grab such a large percentage of users and while many may have installed a second browser, they continue to use IE as their default browser. I’m not saying that IE is unusable but it needs a lot of improvement. In fact I prefer Internet Explorer’s UI over most, but the stability issues that plague my applications are just too much.
I basically consider four major factors when choosing a browser, stability, speed, simplicity and security. I like my browser to more or less, stay out of the way. I want the content to be the main focus and I like a clean interface that has only what I need and nothing else. An ideal browser should be fast and reliable, unexpected crashes and failure to load specific, media rich content are major decision factors for me. Security needs to be strong, especially if you use online banking and or shopping.
Here is a recent snapshot of the top 5 browsers from 2011 to 2012.
