The browser wars are really starting to heat up, with Internet Explorer 9 beta to go live within a few weeks, Google just releasing Chrome 6, and now Mozilla that released Firefox 4 beta, one can’t but wonder who will take the crown of these next generation browsers.

As Google has done with Chrome, Mozilla has also gone and altered the look of Firefox 4 by moving tabs right to the top of the screen giving it top visual priority and modifying the default navigation icons a bit.

Apart from the changes in looks, Firefox 4 also features synchronization, allowing you to sync all your browser setting, passwords, bookmarks and open tabs across multiple devices. Managing tabs also got allot easier now that Firefox 4 allows you to drag and drop tabs in a manageable group that you can organize, name and arrange.

Under the hood is where it matter most for Firefox 4, the browser now allows you take advantage of your graphical hardware by rendering pages making use of Direct2D by default and with support for DirectX 10. Mozilla also introduced a new Audio API that exposes the raw audio data housed within the <video> and <audio> elements in HTML5 making it easy for developers to use JS to read and write audio data.

HTML 5 support has also been souped up with a brand new HTML 5 parser giving full support for web video, audio, drag & drop, and file handling in Firefox 4. Also support for CSS3 features like Transitions and Transformations makes it easy to add elegant animations to Web pages.

All in all Firefox 4 beta looks set to become a great browser, lets just hope Mozilla has sorted out the high memory usage that made usage of previous versions of their browser unbearable for me. You can grab yourself a copy of Firefox 4 beta here.

Director: Philip Noyce Screenplay: Kurt Wimmer, Brian Helgeland Cast: Angelina Jolie, Liev Schreiber, Chiwetel Ejiofor, August Diehl Time: 100min Age Restriction: 16V

Genre:
Thriller/Action

Summary Review:
Salt is Angelina Jolie’s best action movie to date, with a thrilling, twisted storyline that will keep you guessing to the last scene.

Synopsis:
There has been a plethora of espionage-themed action/thriller movies out in recent years, along the lines of the Bourne movies and Salt is another such film. But it is one of the better ones and it seems fresh.

Angelina Jolie plays Evelyn Salt, a skilled and respected CIA agent. One day she is interviewing a Russian defector in the high-security CIA offices when he accuses her of being a Russian KGB agent, who’s been planted to kill the US president.

Her CIA colleagues regard her with suspicion and wish to interrogate her, but Salt is not about to let herself be detained when they have just been informed that there is someone trying to kill the president.

She runs and escapes through a series of breathtaking stunts, which characterise the entire film and the rest of the movie revolves around Salt and who the real spy is.

Salt will keep you guessing right up to the last minute – as soon as you think you’ve figured it all out, a new twist is thrown into the works.

Angelina Jolie did all her own stunts, which is very impressive, and having a female lead in an action-packed thriller like this is a twist in itself. Salt is by far her best action film to date (the Lara Croft movies being lame comic-like films and Wanted being too far-fetched). Admittedly, if it had been a male actor in the lead role, this movie may have become transparently clichéd.

But thanks to its fast-paced, thrilling and intriguing storyline, Salt is gripping and entertaining.

Soon after Samsung broke news that they will be introducing a tablet to the market called the Samsung Galaxy Tab, they aired their first commercial showing off what the Galaxy Tab is capable of doing.

Watch out Apple, Samsung means business with the Galaxy Tab. I wouldn’t mind owning one of these.

Seems like Apple finally got some real competition for their iPad in the form of the Samsung Galaxy Tab, a tablet running Android.

Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Tab during an electronics fair in Berlin. Instead of calling it a tablet, Samsung is calling the Galaxy Tab a smart media device.

The Galaxy Tab runs Android 2.2 with a 1Ghz Cortex A8 processor, 512MB RAM, and either 16 or 32 GB of internal memory upgradable through microSD cards.

Furthermore it features a 7″ TFT-LCD screen capable of 1024×600 resolution, 2 cameras, one a 3-megapixel with flash at the the back and the other a 1.3-megapixel front facing camera for video calling. Connectivity include WiFi and 3G.

Samsung claims that the Galaxy Tab will be capable of 7 hours battery life during movie playback, supporting a variety of formats like DivX, XviD, MPEG4, H.263 and H.264.

The Galaxy Tab will be available from October through Vodafone in Europe, so there might just be hope for us South Africans to get our hand on this soon, perhaps before the iPad is available in South Africa.

Being a web developer I work with different kinds of browsers all the time, and since Google Chrome was released there was no turning back to my previous favourite Firefox. Two years in and Google Chrome still does not disappoint.

Since Google Chrome’s first beta release two years back the browser has come a long way, holding more than 7.5% of the world browser market share. This may not sound like a lot, but if you compare it to browsers like Opera that has been in the market for more than than 10 years and only still hold 2.4%, its clear that Google Chrome is catching up on competitors.

Google Chrome version 6 marks the second anniversary of the Web Browser that is built around speed and simplicity. The new version 6 or Chrome features a built in flash plugin, minor modification to the look, form autofill, and extension and autofill syncronization across computers.

In addition, Google Chrome also kept its support for HTML 5 top notch, making it even more appealing as a browser of choice while keeping it fast, simple and secure.

We have made it to the next round of the 2010 South African Blog Awards, I am saying we as I could not have made it without the support of everybody that nominated iGeek.

A big thanks goes out to everybody that nominated iGeek for the South African Blog Awards, iGeek has been nominated in the categories of Best New Blog and Best Science and Technology Blog.

The next step before victory is claimed is for you to go and vote, voting for the South African Blog Awards will be open until the 17th of September 2010, from there the judges will also have a vote and then the winners will be announced at the awards ceremony on the 25th of September.

To vote for iGeek follow this link or simply click the South African Blog Awards badge on the right of the site. You can place a new vote every 24 hours with the same email address, so remember to place your votes every day.

Thank you very much for your loyal support.

Cell C recently rebranded and rethink its strategy in the South Africa mobile space and made it clear that they are ready to take on the bigger cellphone operators MTN and Vodacom.

With the relaunch of Cell C’s branding the company also announced that they will be launching a brand new 4G network capable of broadband speeds of up to 21Mbps.

Cell C is already advertising its new HSPA+ packages on its website, currently seems like there will be 2 packages available, one with a maximum speed of 7.2 Mbps and another with a maximum speed of 21.6 Mbps.

The two broadband offerings from Cell C comes in way bellow that of MTN and Vodacom working out R63 and R50 per GB respectively.

1. 7.2 Mbps capable modem with 2GB worth of data every month for 12 months at only R1499
2. 21.6 Mbps capable modem with 5GB worth of data every month for 12 months at only R2999

Availability of these new Cell C broadband packages will be made public later this week.