Yes, Google, you can proudly herald this one as a major victory for your browser in my books. If other Javascript benchmarks haven't been anything you could get excited about, maybe this one will do it. Ben Firshman's Javascript NES emulator runs best in Google Chrome.

Just head on over to his site (which will likely start bogging down today as this little baby inevitably moves from Reddit to Digg), pick a game, and get ready for some early 90s video gaming excitement.

One downside: you'll have to be cool with a similarly early 90s style screen (think original Gameboy). You'll only get a viewable area of about 256x240. If size isn't a major concern for you, here's a list of the games you can play:

• Contra
• Donkey Kong
• Dr. Mario
• Golf
• Legend of Zelda
• Lemmings
• Mario Bros.
• Pac Man
• Super Mario Bros.
• Tennis
• Tetris
• Tetris 2
• Zelda II
• Super Mario Bros. 3 (partially working)

JSNES works in other browsers, of course, but not quite as well. Firefox frame rates are generally reported to be about 1/10th or less those from Chrome. Safari (and most other Webkit browsers) should be up to the task.

[via Reddit]

So, you're a web designer, and you want to start taking advantage of new features in CSS 3 and HTML5. That's great, but you know that most of your users aren't running browsers that support these new standards. You could just wait for browsers to get with the times, or you could check out Modernizr.

Modernizr is a JavaScript library by Faruk Ates that detects which functionality a browser can support, and allows you to use if-statements to fine-tune your fallbacks for browsers that don't support the new hotness. Modernizr can't fix old browsers, but it can make it more practical to support newer ones. On top of all the CSS 3 styles it can detect support for, it also allows you to use and style HTML5 elements without breaking your site for IE users. Not too shabby for a little bit of JavaScript.

Recently, a critical Javascript vulnerability was discovered in Adobe Reader which affected several versions on all platforms. It was the second major exploit this year targeting the application.

Adobe has responded quickly, putting together updates for Windows, Mac, and Linux in less than two weeks. While an immediate "Patch Tuesday" fix a la Microsoft would have been even better, it's good to see Adobe prioritizing security.

That's an important and necessary step. Unwary PDF users will continue to be an attractive target for hackers and Adobe must be increasingly vigilant.

If you took F-Secure's advice and temporarily switched to another PDF reader temporarily, the newly-patched Reader is ready for download if you are. I've not been a fan of Reader in the past - due to its footprint and sluggish startup times - but version 9 is a major improvement over older versions.

More details about the exploit and download links for all platforms are available from the Adobe security bulletin.

Google Chrome may be one of the fastest web browsers around in terms of launch speeds and page loading. But there's one thing that Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and other browsers have that Google hasn't had - until now: support for plugins, add-ons, extensions, or whatever else you want to call them.

But now the folks behind Chrome have created a way to wrap JavaScript files that alter the way you interact with web sites into extensions for Chrome.

Right now, extension support is still pretty clunky. You'll need to have Google Chrome 2.0 beta or a recent developer build installed to use extensions. Then you'll have to download and unzip the file to a directory like "c:\myextension" and append the following line to the target properties of your Google Chrome shortcut:

--enable-extensions --load-extension="c:\myextension"

Once that's done, you can use the extension. There's a sample extension available at the bottom of the Google tutorial. Once you've installed it, visit www.google.com to see what it does. You'll probably be quite undewhelmed.

Hopefully we'll see more impressive extensions soon - and an easier way to install and run them,

[via Google Operating System]

One of the main draws for Firefox is how customizable it is, both in appearance and functionality. We've shown you some of our favorite Firefox themes, but if you're looking for more than a cosmetic change in your browsing experience, you should get to know Greasemonkey.

In case you're not already familiar: Greasemonkey is a Firefox add-on that allows you to apply powerful user-created scripts to the sites you visit. Scripts do everything from drastically changing the layout of a site to adding new menus or doing common tasks automatically. Greasemonkey can change a font that annoys you, or it can change the way you use your browser.

Firefox isn't the only browser that can take advantage of userscripts. For Webkit-based browsers like Safari, check out GreaseKit. Opera is capable of running many userscripts through its own User JavaScript feature. Some of the scripts mentioned in this post might only work in Firefox, though.

Here are ten of my favorite scripts. If you're using some good ones that you don't see here, sound off in the comments.

1. Google Account Multi-login:

If you have more than one Google account, grab this script to replace the "log out" link on most Google services with a menu that lets you quickly switch from one of your accounts to another. A nice time saver for Gmail junkies.

2. Helvetireader:

I love the way Helvetireader cleans up Google Reader. Download it if you're interested in viewing Google Reader in a simple red and white layout, all in Helvetica. It gets everything that's not essential to reading your feeds out of the way.

3. Download YouTube Video as Mp4:

Does just what it says. Causes a download link to appear right under the embed codes to the right of the video on any YouTube page. This definitely beats pasting the URL into one of those YouTube Downloader websites.

There's no denying that Opera has a loyal following, yet it continues to languish in relative obscurity in the shadows of Firefox and Internet Explorer, and now Google Chrome. Could Opera's new Javascript engine (codenamed Carakan) be the key to more widespread acceptance?

A recent blog entry on the Opera web site states that "Carakan is currently about two and a half times faster at the SunSpider benchmark than the ECMAScript engine in Presto 2.2 (Opera 10 Alpha).

On my laptop running an Intel T5500, Opera 10 posts a total time of 5006.4ms. Even at 2.5 times faster, that's still not as fast as the 1410.2ms Chrome 2.0.160.0 puts up. In fact, the projected 2002.6ms time is 50% slower than Chrome.

That said, Sunspider is only a benchmark. What really matters is how browsers compare to each other in real use, and Opera 10 alpha certainly "feels" like it's competitive with Chrome and Firefox.

The Opera development team also reports that "other benchmarks" with which Carakan is already compatible report results that range from 5 to 50 times faster than Futhark. There's no mention of what the tests involved, but it's fair to say that if those numbers can be translated into real world performance Opera will be in a good position to throw down the gauntlet.

I'm in love. With a browser.

Nope, it's not Firefox, and not Safari, though I've had flings with both in the past. Not Camino, not even Chrome.

My new thing is with Minefield, from Mozilla. Okay, so Minefield is essentially an early build of the next version of Firefox. But the latest version has a drastically improved Javascript engine under the hood. Is it fast? Let me tell you - it's crazy fast. In fact, Ars Technica is reporting that Minefield is 10% faster than Google Chrome.

Faster than Chrome, available on Windows, Mac, and Linux, and oh - it supports your Firefox add-ins, as long as you're willing to force compatibility using Nightly Tester Tools. Minefield is an alpha release, so it's likely to still be buggy. So far I've been lucky though; all of the add-ins that I've activated have worked fine right out of the gate.

Let me guess, you're in love now too, eh? Well, there's more than enough Minefield to go around. Go get some. Minefield, that is.

[via Ubuntu Unleashed]

It's been about a week since Google launched the public beta of its open source web browser, Google Chrome. While the browser certainly ain't perfect by a long shot, it does render pages quickly and has a few innovative features like an unconventional placement for tabs and a unified search box/location bar.

Over the past week there's been a flurry of activity surrounding the browser. Not from Google developers, but by third party developers who have done their best to make Google at least as useful as Firefox or Safari. A few folks have taken a different approach and tried to make Firefox look and feel a bit more like Chrome. Here are a few of our favorite Google Chrome updates from week one.


Themes

If you like Google Chrome's layout but can't stand the bland light blue color scheme, you're in luck. It turns out that all you need to do to change the browser's theme is replace a single default.dll. Your first step should be to the ChromeSpot message boards where dozens of users have posted custom themes. You can also find custom themes at Google Chrome Themes. (Link removed due to allegations that the developers were stealing themes without crediting the authors).

One you find a theme you like, you should backup your default theme by making a copy of your default.dll file. It's located in \Documents and Settings\[username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\Application\[version number]\Themes in Windows XP. Then just download the theme of your choice and unzip the new default.dll location to the same location.

If you're using Windows Vista the path should be \Users\[username]\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\Application\[version number]\Themes\

Unfortunately since Google hasn't yet built a theme manager for Chrome there's no simple way to switch between mulitple themes from within the browser settings. If you're looking for an easier way to switch between themes you can try the Chrome Automatic Theme Switcher, but it won't work with the latest build of Chrome.

[via Lifehacker and Google Blogoscoped]

If your site uses thumbnail images, but you're still opening a separate tab or a separate window to show the larger version, you need to see this: FancyZoom is a little bit of Javascript used by Cabel Sasser on both his personal site and the Panic website, to zoom images inline. Cabel describes the effect as "Mac-like," which is about as accurate a description as you can get. It feels like it should be part of Safari, but it works just fine in other browsers, too.

FancyZoom is a more compact alternative to other zooming effects you might be familiar with, like Lightbox or That Thing Apple Uses on Apple.com. It can be added to a site using only 2 lines of HTML, and it doesn't require any additional libraries. You can also use FancyZoom on a text link to an image, instead of a thumbnail, which could definitely come in handy for some blog layouts we've seen.

[via JoshSpear]

Ahh... nothing like the sweet smell of website glitches in the morning. The web development junkies here at Download Squad know how it feels to spend hours tracking down stubborn CSS styles that have managed to magically disappear, or have cascaded themselves into places where no man has gone before. We can attest to debugging JavaScript into the wee hours of the night, and trying to get rid of that one extra pixel of whitespace at the bottom of the page until we give up and hope nobody notices.

If the above description fits a lot of your day-to-day activities, and you're a Firefox user, Firebug, something we covered a couple years ago in its infancy, is the extension for you. When we last looked at it, Firebug was a basic JavaScript console with a DOM inspector. However, since then, it's had a couple of layout changes, and has been given features that changed Firebug from a simple developer console to a powerful tool for all aspects of web development.

Barack Obama's design team has garnered a lot of praise for their work on his campaign materials, including the official website. Heck, there have been entire articles devoted to praising their choice of typefaces. One of the cooler elements the Obama team has cooked up for their website is a slideshow-like animated list for front page navigation.

If you're a fan of this slideshow, and you want to create a similar effect on your own site, look no further than the aptly-named BarackSlideshow script. DevThought has come up with a bit of CSS and JavaScript that loads images and animation effects almost identical to the originals. Some users in the comment thread are reporting browser or plug-in specific issues with the script, so your mileage may vary.

Since it was revealed that Apple's recently-announced .mac replacement, MobileMe, was partially built on something called SproutCore, the buzz around this hot new JavaScript framework has been growing. Although this is the first that many people will have heard about it, SproutCore has actually been around for a while, powering services like .mac's Mobile Galleries. Now it's getting so much attention that SproutCore.com has been unreachable all day, a week after the WWDC announcement.

So, why SproutCore? Daniel Eran Dilger, over at RoughlyDrafted, has a great rundown of things to love about this open source JavaScript framework: it will allow developers to build web apps that look more like desktop apps, function offline, and take advantage of modern browser features. Apple's using SproutCore to build a front end for WebDav and its own WebObjects, but other developments could easily add PHP, JSON or XML data to the mix, to name a few.

[via RoughlyDrafted]