Sunday, September 07, 2008
|
Loading ...
On July, Mozilla Online, Mozilla’s China subsidiary, introduced its own cute Firefox mascot: G-Fox, which just like its American and Japanese cousins, Kit and Foxkeh, aims to add more fun to the task of spreading Firefox.
I don’t understand a word of Chinese, but it seems the G stands for anything positive like good, great, guide, gravity, grace, gorgeous, you name it.
Mozilla has released the second alpha of Shiretoko, the development codename of Firefox 3.1. Alpha 2 brings a handful of improvements and new features that help advance the web to a more open, standards based stage, while tweaking the user experience.
The main improvement is the support for <audio> and <video> tags with native Ogg Theora and Vorbis video and audio codecs, as announced a few weeks ago. The addition of this feature will enable web and content developers to publish their audio and video creations in a royalty free format and don’t depend on the availability of a certain plugin in a specific platform (like Flash or Silverlight do). Read the rest of this entry »
The latest Firefox 3.1 (code name Shiretoko) nightlies include support for the W3C draft specification of Geolocation API, opening the way for yet richer web applications that can offer content customized to a user’s current location.
The API implementation enables the browser to act as a position broker communicating with the computer’s positioning API (probably connected to a GPS device or similar), and providing programmable objects web developers can access to retrieve this information. Due to the obvious privacy issues involved, the browser should always require explicit user consent to enable this interface, but the exact privacy and security considerations are to be defined.
The Foxkeh team let us down for a few days without a Foxkeh desktop wallpaper this September, but they have made it up with an updated Foxkeh theme compatible with Firefox 3.
You navigate, Foxkeh runs. What else could I possibly say? So, without further ado, here’s the theme:
Here’s the September wallpaper featuring Foxkeh doing baby-style skating, as usual, in a variety of sizes, with and without a September calendar.
Thanks Foxkeh team. We forgive you.
Mozilla has been nominated for a .net magazine award 2008 in the Standards Champion category.
.net magazine is a UK-based monthly publication for web developers and designers and the awards “celebrate the best in web design and development, mixing public opinion with the insights of a leading panel of judges from the likes of Yahoo, Microsoft, and Google.”
Firefox is nominated for best Open Source Application of the Year, a recognition it won last year. Miro, WordPress and OpenOffice.org are also running for your vote.
Finally, the Download Day campaign competes in the Viral Campaign of the Year category.
Voting is open until October 13, 2008, but remember votes won’t decide the winner but the three finalists in each category. A panel of judges will have the final word.
First, let’s meet Google Chrome in the flesh, now that is has been released.
To keep it as short as possible, let’s see what Chrome has that Firefox users may miss.
I would say the greatest advantage of Chrome over Firefox is its ability to handle tabs in independent processes which means a browser or plugin bug, or an incorrectly coded web page can’t take down the whole browser, but just that tab or plugin alone. This architecture also enables the cool task manager which as noted by John Resig, lets once and for all be able to know whether it is the browser or a badly coded web site the responsible for a slow down.
There is a noticeable memory overhead but what’s the point of having 1 GB or 2 GB of RAM if you’re going to care about 200 or 300MB. Slim is always good, but snappy is even better.
Then there is the really slick theme: no main menu, the status bar is overlaid at the bottom when needed, just like the find bar; there is no search bar which is integrated with the location bar, it has a new tab button, it has cool animations when accessing the bookmarks toolbar or moving tabs which definitely helps feel the browser more responsive.
Its private mode, Incognito, sounds like a nice to have rather than a must have feature for me, but with its implementation along with Microsoft’s and Apple’s, its definitely becoming a standard feature just like antiphishing protection.
It scores a 79/100 in the Acid 3 test (ahead of Firefox 3 (75/100) and behind Firefox 3.1 nightlies (85/100)). In the Sunspider JavaScript benchmark, it clearly beats Firefox 3.0.1: 3700ms vs 5100ms in my Dell Inspiron 6400 (2GHz Centrino Duo, 2GB RAM).
Another positive thing is what Google didn’t do: they haven’t stuffed it with Google applications integration: there is no Gmail integration (or any other web mail service), Google Reader, Google Docs, Gtalk, etc. Google is of course the default search engine but you can easily change it to any other provider. Of course this is just a beta, and Google integration may be already in the plans, but it’s good to know that there is Chromium, the open source project from where Chrome is derived, so developers will be able to modify it as needed.
What Chrome is missing from Firefox? Well, that’s a much longer list that of course starts with the lack of extensibility in the sense Firefox provides it: a way to make the browser do whatever you can imagine, to the point of making it a completely different application like FireFTP or Pencil do.
As said before, I think Google will try to bundle Google Gadgets and present it as the way of customizing the browser, but of course it would be as limited as developers found when Apple announced the same for the first iPhone.
What else? Hold tight. In no particular order: there is no tab overflow handling, no tagging or smart bookmarks handling, no download resume between sessions, no closed tab recovery, no multiple dictionary support, no toolbar customization beyond hiding the Home button and the bookmarks toolbar, the bookmarks toolbar is only accessible via Ctrl + B, no kind of web feeds support, no native video/audio support, no discontinuous selection option, no page printing options, etc.
The list goes on but since it’s a beta we can expect to see some of these features added, completed or corrected before the final release. Or not. This is Google and the final release may never come so I think if Google doesn’t provide a roadmap soon (ha!), we can treat (and beat) this as Chrome 1.0.
Conclusion
I like Google Chrome, and I believe it will be able to take a significant slice of the browsers market pie, hopefully mostly at the expense of Internet Explorer, but it remains to be seen.
While I don’t find it strong enough to beat with Firefox, it is definitely a yummy option for the hundreds of millions of Google users who will be prompted to install it through a web search results page, or any of the several Google products. Which at this point in time I think is fine. The web only benefits of more and more competition but my concern in the long term is: where do Google stop?
After all Google is a public company, and all its good public benefit intentions are second to those of their shareholders at best.
Features aside (they can always be copied, even extensibility) the main difference between Chrome and Firefox, both being open source projects, is what company stands behind and their mission. Mozilla is a public benefit organization, cares about the Internet and the Internet alone, which as noble, good and idealistic as it sounds, I still have to see any evidence that proves the opposite.
It has struggled in the past for sticking to its mission. Today it enjoys success for the exact same reason, in large part because of a business partner like Google, which is not the same as saying that Mozilla would die without Google: be sure there is no lack of companies interested in reaching 200 million users, daily.
I’m glad to welcome new products, specially products as good as Chrome.
In one of the most important announcements in recent years for the web browsers market, Google has announced that it is working on a new open source browser, called Google Chrome.
And from the creative way of announcing it in comic book form to a very nice feature mashup, Google means business with Chrome, announced for release later today in beta form.
Here’s a summary of what we can expect from Google Chrome:
- It is based on WebKit, the open source web engine that powers Safari. Google is also using WebKit for all web browser related operations of Android, its mobile devices platform.
- Tabs get a much more independent implementation: each will feature its own location bar (the omnibox, see below) and navigation buttons (a la Opera), but most importantly, they get their own process which means if one of them crashes it doesn’t take down the whole browser. It is easy to think a larger memory footprint as a consequence but Google notes that a second benefit is that when closing a tab or moving away to a different web site, it is easier to discard all used memory, preventing (or at least reducing) memory fragmentation which helps reduce the memory consumption. Internet Explorer 8 betas already implement the isolated tab crash aspect, but I’m not sure about the memory benefits.
- A task manager will allow users to know how much memory, CPU, and bandwidth is using each tab to easily spot the culprit of a slowdown.
From Wikipedia:
Canadian art student Deidre LaCarte, who was competing with her best friend and sister to see who could generate the most traffic, designed The Hampster Dance in August 1998 as a homage to her pet hamster, named Hampton Hamster. Using four simple animated GIFs of hamsters and other rodents, repeated dozens of times each, and a loop of background music embedded in the HTML, then a fairly new browser feature, she named the site Hampton’s Hampster House and had Hampton declare his intent to become a “web star”. Until January 1999, only 800 visits were recorded (about 4 per day), but without warning, that jumped to 15,000 per day. The Web site spread by e-mail, early blogs, and bumper stickers, and was eventually even featured in a television commercial for Internet Service Provider Earthlink.
Mozillian Alex Polvi, of the Firefox crop circle and Firefox robot build fame, is leaving Mozilla, and as a final contribution to all things Mozilla, and to celebrate 10 years of people’s insanity, he’s published a Foxkeh themed rendition of this infamous 90’s classic.
Can you stand two full pages of pure Foxkeh cuteness? Go figure. (But you may want to turn down your speakers before)
Thanks and best wishes to Alex on his future projects!
Mozilla Labs has released the first public release of Ubiquity, a Firefox extension that has been in the works for a few months now and introduced during the Mozilla Summit, last month.
It is really hard to explain what it does but here are a couple of examples:
One:
Two:
Subscribe RSS
Subscribe email