Speed Force

The Opera web browser has always focused on speed as a selling point, but sometimes I think they’ve got Flash fans in their marketing department. I mean, not only are they promoting today’s release of Opera 10.50 as “The Fastest Browser On Earth,” but the announcement at Choose Opera starts off with “Catching lightning in a bottle.”

Then there was the red and yellow blur they used to promote a beta a couple of years ago…

Buzz on Flash: Rebirth is reaching a fever pitch in the last day before release! I usually do one of these link posts each week, and here I am at three in the space of two days!

Geoff Johns has posted a new promo poster (right) for Flash: Rebirth.

Wally West has defeated Superman in the CSBG character poll, moving him into the Final Four. (Hey, better than being a Cylon!)

Somehow I forgot to link to Crimson Lightning’s cover of the week last Friday, featuring another Return of Barry Allen.

IO9 contrasts Flash: Rebirth with Irredeemable, with Barry Allen and Irredeemable’s lead representing opposite ends of the superhero spectrum.

Green Lantern Spotlight profiles Barry Allen to kick off Flash Month.

Great Caesar’s Post wants to see more Flashes coming out of Flash: Rebirth.

Monty’s Mix Tape at iFanboy has a round-up of the Rogues’ latest adventures on Twitter (CaptainCold, WeatherWizard, MirrorMaster, and HeatWaveMick).

Blog@Newsarama’s J. Caleb Mozzocco, in the latest ‘Twas the Night Before Wednesday, isn’t impressed with the concept behind Flash: Rebirth, saying that the solicitation’s promise of a dead speedster “reinforc[es] [his] belief that all DC comics are either about 1) Continuity futzing, 2) Dead characters coming back to life, or 3) Live characters dying.” Of course, Flash: Rebirth looks to be about all three.

On the other hand, (the) David Press lists Flash: Rebirth #1 among this week’s Must-Have Comics.

Download Squad considers: If Web Browsers Were Super Friends, concluding that the Flash would be Chrome. (via noscans_daily) “Chrome is getting faster all the time. Gadgets aren’t required when you can zip through labyrinthine web page code at mind-blowing speeds…. Some people don’t like what’s going on with his costume, what with the little tabs right at the top of his head.”

Microsoft released Internet Explorer 8 yesterday, for Windows XP and Vista. So if you’re still running IE6 it’s once again time to think about upgrading. (Assuming, of course, that you’re not locked in by corporate policy or another piece of software.)

IE6 is now two versions behind the current release.

IE6 is almost 8 years old (it was released in 2001).

IE6 is lacking in many capabilities that all other modern web browsers have, in web technology, in security, and in features you can use.

You can read a review at Wired, a write-up from the IE team, or a summary of technical changes from WaSP.

Of course, Internet Explorer isn’t the only option out there. There’s Firefox, Opera, Chrome and a host of other alternative browsers that are worth checking out.

If you’re still running Windows 2000 or some other old version of Windows that can’t run IE7 or IE8, I’d absolutely recommend Firefox or Opera. Either will be much better than IE6, both will run on Windows 2000, and Opera will even run on Windows Me and Windows 98 (but you really ought to move to something more current than Windows Me.)

Reposted from K-Squared Ramblings

I’m beginning to wonder if there are some closet Flash fans in Opera Software’s PR department. Today’s release of Opera 9.60 features the slogan, Making You Faster. And while speed has always been a highlight of the web browser, it was just six months ago that they used a red-and-yellow blur to promote the then-current beta release.

I’ve been a fan of Opera since I was in college, when a friend introduced me to this browser that wasn’t Netscape and wasn’t Internet Explorer, but was really fast and fit (at the time) on a floppy. (Remember those?) Since then I’ve gone back and forth between Mozilla/Firefox and Opera a lot, and these days I use both regularly. Opera’s still very fast, and still unusually small — somehow they manage to fit a web browser, an email client, a news & feed reader, and even a chat program in the same space that Firefox fits just a browser.

Their strong suit has long been innovation: a lot of features that have become standard in web browsers got their start in Opera. One of the nice capabilities that’s been added recently is Opera Link, which will synchronize bookmarks, search history, notes and other data not just between different computers running Opera, but also with mobile phones running Opera Mini and Opera Mobile.

On a related note, Opera has released the following short video, “Sketch of my life,” all about choices. (I haven’t watched it with sound yet, since I don’t have speakers on my computer at work.)

Some administrivia today.

1. As of Monday, it’s been three months since I launched this blog. I have no idea what the typical lifetime for a comics-related blog is, but I can say I’ve kept this up far more regularly than I expected, with 162 posts in 94 days — an average of 1.7 posts per day! — and readers have made nearly 350 comments!

It’s also taking a lot more time than I expected, which has kept me away from other projects. (In particular, I’d planned a major update for the Alternative Browser Alliance this summer, which has become more urgent with the announcement and first beta of Google’s Chrome web browser.) I may be scaling back a little on Speed Force soon, but I’ll still aim for several posts a week.

2. I finally got around to replacing the banner at the top of the page. I didn’t want to stick with the theme’s default, since “train station” doesn’t really say “speedster,” and I was never really satisfied with the fractal “lightning.” (Besides, the smallest I could get that image without making it look really nasty was a whopping 50 KB.)

Still, I’m a web developer, not a graphic designer or an artist. Give me the graphics and I’ll build the HTML and CSS to turn them into a web page, but original art? It would make XKCD look like George Pérez. So instead of trying to draw something, I looked for photos of actual lightning on Flickr. I adapted “Lightning Crashes” by ~Prescott under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 Generic license. The banner can be re-used and/or modified under the same terms.

3. After a struggle for the #3 spot at Comic Blog Elite with Collected Editions, we’ve both been superseded by a number of high-profile blogs that have joined, including Once Upon a Geek, The Absorbascon and 4thLetter. Speed Force has been holding steady around #12 lately.

4. I’ve dropped the Recent Visitors/Viewers boxes from MyBlogLog and BlogCatalog. They add a lot to the download time, especially on certain browsers *cough* IE *cough* that wait until they’re loaded before displaying the main section of the page.

I hope you don’t mind the off-topic post, but web advocacy and alternative browsers are important to me, so I wanted to publicize this a bit.

Firefox and Opera have both released new versions of their web browsers in the past week.  Opera 9.5 came out on Thursday, and Firefox 3 is available today starting at 10:00 AM Pacific time.  I’ve used the betas for several months, and can highly recommend both of them. They’re both very fast, lean, modern browsers. If you’ve been concerned about Firefox’s memory usage, they’ve made massive improvements since version 2. If you’re concerned about Opera’s price, your knowledge is out of date—it’s been free (with no ads) since 2005.

This goes double for those of you still running Internet Explorer 6.  Web technology is passing IE6 by, and if you can upgrade to IE7 or switch to an alternative, and your favorite sites don’t force you to use IE, either Firefox or Opera will be a good move.

Additionally, Firefox is trying to set a world record for software downloaded in a 24-hour period.  That starts at 10:00 AM Pacific Daylight Saving Time on Tuesday, June 17 (that’s 17:00 UTC). You can use a time zone converter to figure out your what time that is in your own time zone.  If you want to participate, head over to the Download Day site, and download Firefox 3 during those 24 hours.

We now return you to your regularly scheduled comics blog.