A new High Sierra beta is available now. Photo: Ste Smith/Cult of Mac
If you want the fastest possible web browsing experience on Mac, don’t sway from Safari.
Apple promises that Safari 11, which will debut in macOS High Sierra this fall, is “the world’s fastest desktop browser.” And tests show that it does not disappoint.
It doesn't just work on Facebook, either. Photo: Jim Merithew/Cult of Mac
Even though nobody asked for it, Facebook made it so videos play automatically, with the sound turned on, as you scroll by them in your News Feed. Luckily, a simple Chrome extension prevents that from happening — and it doesn’t just work on Facebook.
Browse the web anonymously and without restrictions. Photo: Opera
Paying for VPN services for your iPhone and iPad just became a thing of the past, thanks to Opera.
The company is today launching the first free and unlimited VPN for iOS, allowing you to browse the web anonymously, access content that’s blocked in your country, and more — without coughing up a single penny.
Would being yelled at by Steve Jobs be any better if it was done tunefully and in Italian? Photo: Ben Stanfield/Flickr CC
Steve Jobs’ life is about to get yet another retelling — this time in the form of an opera entitled The Revolution of Steve Jobs, coming to The Santa Fe Opera as part of the company’s 2017 season.
Remember the time Jobs broke into song while firing the MobileMe team? Soon you will.
France’s Opéra de Lyon is set to begin performing its multimedia opera — combining the story of Steve Jobs with that of Henry V, taken from Shakespeare’s 1599 play.
Written by German composer Roland Auzet, “Steve Five (King Different)” explores the supposed similarities between the two rulers (one of Silicon Valley, the other of England) who changed the nature of reality by inventing. The opera features both sung and spoken opera, as well as poetry, rap and orchestral interludes — and will debut on Friday, March 14 at the Théâtre de la Renaissance in Lyon, France. Subsequent showings will follow on March 15, 17, and 18.
Opera, the Norwegian web browser company that announced earlier this year that it was throwing in the towel on its own web-rendering technology and shifting to WebKit across all products has just released a new iPad browser: Coast.
According to Opera, Coast is “the browser your iPad deserves.”
Opera 15, the first Opera browser powered by Google’s Chromium engine, is now available to download on your Mac. In addition to a “fresh new look,” it comes with a new Speed Dial page that provides one-click access to your favorite sites, plus a feature called Discover that offers a range of content you might be interested in.
Can this cockpit hold the vasty plains of Cupertino? The Lyon Opera is about to find out. Coming in 2014 to the famous French opera house is Steve Five, an operatic mash-up of Shakespeare’s 1599 play Henry V and, wait for it, Walter Isaacson’s Steve Jobs biography.
Browsers on iOS run with a major disadvantage to Mobile Safari. Not only are they obliged to use Apple’s built-in WebKit rendering engine, but they have to use a slower version of Apple’s speedy Nitro JavaScript engine. The result? If you use any third-party browser on your iPhone or iPad, it will run slower than Safari… at least without a jailbreak.
It’s unfair, but various companies have still made excellent browsers for iOS, including Google Chrome and Opera. Mozilla, though, will not follow these company’s lead, having said at this weekend’s SXSW conference in Austin that Firefox won’t be coming to iOS any time soon.
Opera has announced that it will gradually phase out the use of Presto, its own rendering engine, in favor of WebKit this year. It will utilize Chromium, the open source project from Google, which powers the search giant’s speedy Chrome browser. Opera’s first Chromium-based smartphone browser will be previewed at Mobile World Congress later this month.