New Browser Round-Up

IE 8 Beta 2 (Microsoft)

Pros:
Love the Accelerators (in theory), and the web slices. All in all, pretty fast.

Cons:
Slow as hell if you select anything on the page, because of the accelerators. This needs a fix, pronto, because it makes selection basically useless.

Chrome Beta (Google)

Pros:
Nice, minimalist UI (although not too different to IE).

Cons:
When you first start it up, if there's nothing in the cache, it's ludicrously slow to load pages. I saw GIFs slowly fill in, pages take 6 or 7 seconds to render, etc. For some reason though, once it was up and running, it rendered really nice and fast.

I'm not going to recommend either one (try them both!) as they're both in beta. The sooner the IE 8 beta gets the kinks out of the selection handling though, the better.

New side project...

I've decided to say, well, frankly, screw it and throw my hat in the ring for the Web2.0 social media kinda thing.

So I've started up a site - pyrogrya (catchy name, huh?) that will eventually blossom into a wonderful social media networking site that you can all enjoy.

Why am I doing this?

Because frankly, it doesn't seem that hard to do. And there's a project I've wanted to tackle for about 7 years now (on various devices) that since finally getting smartphones that can handle 3G no longer makes any sense whatsoever to do as a desktop or smartphone app. I can stick it on the web, and in fact, its usefulness should grow exponentially.

What is it?

Can't tell you yet. I want it to be somewhat of a surprise when it goes live. But I guarantee that a lot of you will find it handy. And heck, if I don't give too much away, it won't be so much of a pain when it doesn't go anywhere just like the rest of my side projects do.

Still, here we go. I bought a site, created a logo, and have started writing the database schema... this should be interesting :)

Developer blog can be found here.