Chaos Laboratory

A couple of weeks back I had discussed the web-browsing enhancements you may gain by using the Google Public DNS Servers. Here I am with a new tool that can further boost your browsing speeds – in some cases even up to the order of 700% !

Namebench is an open source DNS benchmarking utility which can determine the fastest DNS servers for your internet link just by running a couple of short tests (average duration: 4-5 minutes).

…namebench runs a fair and thorough benchmark using your web browser history, tcpdump output, or standardized datasets in order to provide an individualized recommendation.

The tool is available for all major OS-es i.e. Windows, Linux and Mac and is hosted at Google Code.

I ran the tool both at my home and office and the DNS recommendations vastly improved my browsing speed. What’s cool about this approach is that the speed difference is apparent to the naked eye.

Namebench doesn’t modify your system settings in any way – that part is left entirely to you. So in case you don’t want to fire up your Network Settings panel and tweak the DNS settings manually, you can always fall back on a  graphical DNS switching tool like DNS Jumper. In this context, please note that the recommendations for one particular link (say your office) may not work for another link (your home), unless both connections utilize similar links from the same ISP. So make sure to perform the benchmark separately for every connection that you wish to optimize.

If you’ve got 5 minutes to spare and / or are seeking significantly enhanced browsing experience, namebench is definitely the tool for you. And if you find it really useful, be sure to leave a comment on your experience.

Jan 06th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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Lunascape 6 (Orion) is a brand new browser intended to make life much easier for web designers and developers alike.

Any decent web designer is aware of the pains one has to go through to achieve uniform cross-browser rendering of sites. And that involves a long and tedious cycle of writing appropriate CSS and  HTML while consistently testing the same on browsers used en masse namely, Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari.

So far one had to rely on bits and pieces  software offering disjointed functionality – like MultipleIE (multiple versions on Internet Explorer running simultaneously on the same system), IE & Firefox add-ons like IETab (that toggled the rendering engine between Gecko and Trident) and Chrome Frame (Google Chrome inside IE) or on online services like Browsershots that generates snapshots of a site across a multitude of browsers. What really was missing was a tool that brought all of these under the same roof.

The newly introduced Lunascape version 6 has not only managed to do the same – but also offer side-by-side  (split-pane) view of the same page in all 3 engines – Trident (IE), Gecko (FF) and Webkit (Safari). Throw in it’s Tripple Add-On capability & support for 11 languages – and you’ve got one hell of a testing platform.

It’s only a 10 MB download and definitely worth a try.

Jan 04th by miCRoSCoPiC^eaRthLinG

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