faster

Life beyond JavaScript: Google's abuzz over RoboHornet test

Google last night unveiled an early version of RoboHornet, a general-purpose browser speed test that company engineers hope will shed light on something besides just JavaScript.

But Microsoft, maker of Internet Explorer, has derided the tests as not useful.

There are plenty of JavaScript speed tests, Google's new Octane among them, and for good reason: the programming language is used to turn static Web pages into interactive Web apps. But there's more to fast browsing, and Google hopes others will get involved to flesh out RoboHornet with a full suite of tests.

"It's a living, dynamic … Read more

SunVolt power station aims to make charging faster

Don Cayelli says one of his main motivations for developing his SunVolt Portable Solar Power Station was that he couldn't find a solar charger that worked well for charging his iPad on his boat.

He sails a lot and uses his iPad as a chart plotter and preferred to use the sun as a power source rather than rechargeable battery packs. Most solar chargers, he says, had internal batteries, and the standard approach was the solar panel would charge the internal battery and the battery would charge your device. That was because the panels were too small to charge … Read more

Facebook iPhone app to get speed bump next month

To say that Facebook's iPhone app is slow could be considered generous. In truth, it makes the tortoise look like the hare.

It seems almost inconceivable (and yes, I do think that word means what I think it means) that a Web-focused, modern company could produce such a slow rendition of its product on the most popular mobile product on the planet.

But, not to fear, Facebook has heard the crowing (and has seen the one-star reviews) and plans to update its iPhone app, according to The New York Times.

The New York Times managed to get two unnamed engineers to reveal that the Facebook iOS app has been completely retooled and will feature the only thing that really matters in social-networking apps -- speed. … Read more

CERN confirms speedy neutrinos follow laws of physics after all

Neutrinos can't travel faster than the speed of light after all.

CERN has confirmed that an initial reading, which recorded neutrinos -- nearly mass-less subatomic particles -- sent from CERN to the Gran Sasso laboratory as moving faster than light, was based off of a "faulty element" with the experiment's fiber-optic timing system.

The results, presented today at the International Conference on Neutrino Physics and Astrophysics in Kyoto, Japan, closes the chapter on a highly surprising finding last year that challenged the conventional wisdom of physics. The results quickly faced public scrutiny.

"Although this result … Read more

Twitter tweaks service to be faster, snappier

Twitter announced today that its Web site is getting new enhancements geared toward being "optimized for speed." Besides getting rid of the hashbang (#!) in URLs, the social network is also focusing on reducing the "time to first Tweet" and ensuring only what's necessary will load with each Web page.

"To improve the twitter.com experience for everyone, we've been working to take back control of our front-end performance by moving the rendering to the server," Twitter engineering manager Dan Webb wrote in a blog post. "This has allowed us to drop … Read more

7 myths about quad-core phones (Smartphones Unlocked)

Editors' note: This article originally posted on April 8, 2012, and was updated on December 19, 2012.

Open up your wallet today and there are no fewer than five smartphones you can buy running on quad-core processors. Seven months ago, there was one, the HTC One X, and only if you bought the international version, which lacked the 4G LTE speeds coveted by U.S. phone-buyers.

After CES next month, expect the number of announced quad-core devices to double as the core war continues to heat up.

By summer, you may turn up your nose at perfectly fast devices running … Read more

Not so fast, neutrinos. CERN says light's speedier still

New experimental evidence is helping disprove last year's highly surprising finding of neutrinos breaking established physics laws by traveling faster than light.

The finding involved clocking the neutrinos--tiny, nearly massless subatomic particles--as they traveled from the CERN particle accelerator near Geneva to the Gran Sasso National Laboratory in Italy, about 730km away. An experiment called Opera found the neutrinos taking less time to arrive than light would, but now another Gran Sasso experiment, Icarus, showed neutrinos making the journey at a more sedate pace under light speed, CERN said.

That finding comes after news in February that a fiber-optic connection problem … Read more

Bad data connection could explain too-fast neutrinos

A relatively mundane data-link problem could explain last year's surprising finding that subatomic particles called neutrinos appeared to violate physics laws by traveling faster than the speed of light.

Problems with a fiber-optic link in the Opera experiment "could have led to an underestimate of the time of flight of the neutrinos," CERN, the European nuclear physics center that generated the neutrinos for the experiment, said in a statement today. The fiber fed GPS location data into the experiment's master clock.

Too short a travel time to the destination--Italy's National Institute of Nuclear Physics lab … Read more

How to quickly see previews of links on the Web

If you spend a lot of time perusing sites like eBay or Craigslist, you know what a pain it is to open each individual link for a sale to take a look at the pictures and information. Whether you open the link in your current tab and press Back often, or are a multi-browser-tab master, there has to be a better way to do this, right? Google found a better way by incorporating previews into its search results, so why not use that same idea across the entire Web? That's where the ezLinkPreview extension for Chrome comes in handy. … Read more