A new Google feature

What's nice about coming back from a vacation is to discover all the new features and software releases that appeared while one was unplugged.

Google offers a cool one: a calculator. Just type an arithmetic expression in the search box and hit return. It can handle unit transformation (16.67 kilometers in yards), use universal constants (pi * mass of earth), or mix the lot (170 centimeters * pi in Calories).

Handy as a binary to hexadecimal converter .. especially from Safari's built-in Google search box:

Macintosh Browser Comparaison

There's an interesting article on ArsTechnica ("Macintosh Browser Smackdown") by Eric Bangeman that compares the 9 browsers available to Mac OS X users.

It begins with a presentation of the two main rendering engines used by today's mainstream browsers (namely Gecko and WebCore) and then proceeds to test their load and rendering times for various sites and test suites, as well as their CSS1/2 compliance. Follows a qualitative evaluation with lists of pros and cons for each of the 9 browsers.

The final word is a matter of what suits you best. I personally switched from Camino to Safari early this year, and haven't switched back. The development of the former has significantly slowed down since Safari was launched. I keep IE handy for those few sites on which Safai chokes, or which require IE. Camino comes in handy for the sites that require a Gecko based rendering engine.

A PDF version of the article is available.