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Chrome

Submission + - The real reason Firefox lost to Chrome: Firefox 4 (astronautz.com)

edxwelch writes: In November last year Chrome overtook Firefox in market share for the first time. What people don’t realise is that the release of Firefox 4 caused a large part of the decline.
Firefox 4 was a major new release and came with a brand new Javascript engine and HTML5 parser. Unfortunately, these new features came with major memory leaks and performance bugs. The result was that if you used Firefox 4 for an extended period of time the browser would eventually become unresponsive, making it virtually unusable.

Android

Submission + - iPhone owners get "Samsunged" in new ad [video] (bgr.com)

zacharye writes: Following Samsung’s recent run of television advertisements depicting iPhone users as mindless hipster sheep, the company’s ad firm is back with another spot that again takes aim at Apple fans. The new ad shows iPhone 4 owners camped outside an Apple Store waiting for the latest iPhone model to finally go on sale...

Submission + - Comcast Now Offers 105Mb/s Service (comcast.com)

madsci1016 writes: "Comcast is offering 105Mb/s internet service to select markets. Interesting to note is the service will still have the 250 GB monthly transfer cap. At the new speed, you will be able to hit the cap limit in a little over 5 hours."
Idle

DIY FireHero Project 27

If you have a propane tank, an ultrasonic sensor, a copy of Guitar Hero and a touch of pyromania, this is the project for you. From the article: "For version 1 of FireHero, the player simply watches a video of the guitar hero chart and plays on the guitar accordingly. Version 2 of FireHero will have a much better system, with Autoplay functionality. I will be able to take a custom guitar hero chart, convert it into a MIDI file, and use Processing to analyze it and play FireHero to the track."
Security

Security Certificate Warnings Don't Work 432

angry tapir writes "In a laboratory experiment, researchers found that between 55 percent and 100 percent of participants ignored certificate security warnings, depending on which browser they were using (different browsers use different language to warn their users). The researchers first conducted an online survey of more than 400 Web surfers, to learn what they thought about certificate warnings. They then brought 100 people into a lab and studied how they surf the Web. They found that people often had a mixed-up understanding of certificate warnings. For example, many thought they could ignore the messages when visiting a site they trust, but that they should be more wary at less-trustworthy sites."
Space

Successful Test of Superconducting Plasma Rocket Engine 168

xp65 writes to mention that Ad Astra has successfully tested their VX-200 plasma engine at full power in superconducting conditions, the first time such an engine has been tested at those power levels. "The VX-200 engine is the first flight-like prototype of the VASIMR® propulsion system, a new high-power plasma-based rocket, initially studied by NASA and now being developed privately by Ad Astra. VASIMR® engines could enable space operations far more efficiently than today's chemical rockets and ultimately they could also greatly speed up robotic and human transit times for missions to Mars and beyond."

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