File Under: privacy, Web Basics
May
18
2012

Twitter Improves Privacy Options, Now Supports ‘Do Not Track’

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Photo: Only Sequel/Flickr

Twitter has jumped on the “Do Not Track” privacy bandwagon.

The company recently confirmed that it supports the Do Not Track header, a user privacy tool originally created by Mozilla that is in the process of becoming a web standard. That means if you visit Twitter in any web browser that supports the Do Not Track header, you can opt out of the cookies Twitter uses to gather personal information, as well as any cookies set by third-party advertisers.

Behavioral tracking, as such practices are often called, is a common on the web. Advertisers use cookies to track your clicks, watching which sites you visit, what you buy and even, in the case of mobile browsers, where you go. Often the sites tracking you are not just the sites you’ve actually visited, but third-party sites running ads on those pages.

And it’s not just advertisers tracking your movements, social networks like Facebook and Twitter also follow you around the web. You may not realize it, but Twitter has been tracking your every move for some time. The company doesn’t make a secret of it either. In a blog post announcing Twitter’s new “tailored suggestions system” Twitters Othman Laraki writes, “we receive visit information when sites have integrated Twitter buttons or widgets.”

To be clear, not only is Twitter able to set cookies any time you visit its own domain, whenever you visit a website (like this one) with a “Tweet This” or similar button Twitter can see you there as well. This practice is hardly unique to Twitter; Facebook, Google+ and others are doing the same thing.

Most of the time the information gathered is used to create a better experience for users. In the case of Twitter’s new “tailored suggestions” feature the information is used to build a profile of what you like and then Twitter makes suggestions based on that profile. You can read about exactly what Twitter does with your info and how long it keeps it in the company’s privacy policy.

The problem with such tracking is that it’s necessary for features we want, like smart, targeted suggestions — new users to follow, music you’ll likely enjoy, books you might want to read and so on — but it can also be used for decidedly less friendly purposes. As awareness of the downsides to such tracking become more well known a growing number of people are opting out of the tracking. The Mozilla Privacy blog reports that “current adoption rates of Do Not Track are 8.6 percent for desktop users of Firefox and 19 percent for Firefox Mobile users.”

To take advantage of Twitter’s new Do Not Track feature you’ll need to be using a web browser that supports the header. Currently that means Firefox, Opera 12+, Internet Explorer 9+ or Safari 5.1+. Chrome has pledged to add support for Do Not Track, but doesn’t just yet. For more information on protecting your online privacy, including tools like Ghostery, which go even further, blocking all tracking cookies, see our earlier post, Secure Your Browser: Add-Ons to Stop Web Tracking.

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File Under: HTML, HTML5, Web Standards
May
17
2012

Ready or Not, Adaptive-Image Solution Is Now Part of HTML

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So many screens, so few images (testing responsive sites with Adobe Shadow). Photo: Adobe.

The web needs a more intelligent way to serve images.

No one wants to waste bandwidth sending large images over limited mobile pipes, but everyone wants images to look good on the myriad screens connecting to today’s web. Currently web authors use a variety of hacks to (incompletely) work around this problem, but to really solve it the web likely needs new tools.

Unfortunately, thanks to miscommunication between standards bodies, web developers and browser makers, instead of a solution to the image problem what developers got this week feels more like a slap in the face. Eventually an adaptive image solution will likely emerge, but the real lesson for many developers will be about how the standards process works and how they fit into it, if at all.

Webmonkey has previously looked at some proposed solutions to the adaptive image problem. Some very smart web developers came up with the idea of a <picture> element that works much like the current HTML <video> element. These developers thought they had the attention of the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group, better known as the WHATWG. Then, earlier this week, Edward O’Connor, Apple’s WHATWG representative, proposed another method of solving the problem, using a new srcset attribute on the <img> element. See our earlier coverage of the srcset attribute for a more detailed look at how it works and compares to the <picture> proposal.

What has web developers up in arms is that Ian Hickson, editor of the WHATWG spec (and better known as Hixie) has already added the srcset attribute to the WHATWG’s HTML draft spec, seemingly ignoring the months of effort that went into <picture>. Worse, members of the WHATWG apparently weren’t even aware that developers were putting forth the effort to come up with a solution via the Responsive Images community group. Nor were concerns about the srcset syntax given much consideration. Hickson does address some objections to srcset in his message to the WHATWG, but ends up dismissing most of them.

That doesn’t match up with how most people envision the web standards process. But as web developer and standards advocate Jeremy Keith writes, “this is exactly how the WHATWG is supposed to work. Use-cases are evaluated and whatever Hixie thinks is the best solution gets put in the spec, regardless of how popular or unpopular it is.”

In fact, think of the WHATWG as the source for initial, rapid development of new features. The group was started by browser makers because the W3C’s HTML Working Group (HTMLWG) moved too slowly. But if the WHATWG is the source of rapid development, the W3C is an effective check on that speed, ensuring that even those of us who don’t make web browsers still have a voice in the future of HTML. (see our earlier overview for more on the history and differences between the HTML WG and the WHATWG.)

While the HTML WG is also chaired by Hickson (a position he will soon step down from), it offers a much more democratic (and consequently slower) process and has overridden the WHATWG’s rash decisions in the past. For example the W3C added the time element back after Hickson removed it from the WHATWG spec.

Confused yet? It gets worse. The WHATWG is working on an ever-evolving standard, what it calls a “living standard,” which is different from — and may well diverge from — the snapshot-based standards issued by the W3C, like HTML5. In a comment on longtime web standards champion Jeffery Zeldman’s post on the matter, Jeremy Keith writes, “I don’t mind if the srcset attribute is in the WHATWG HTML spec but not in the W3C HTML5 spec. If it works, it’ll end up in a future W3C version number.”

Implicit in Keith’s statement is that if the srcset attribute doesn’t end up working out it won’t be in HTML5.x and would likely just fade away like the blink tag, the applet tag and other HTML ideas tried and later discarded.

Which is another way of saying developers need not panic. Perhaps web developers don’t have a voice in the WHATWG simply because we’ve been using the wrong channels (W3C community groups don’t seem to be an effective means of communicating with standards bodies, in fact they seem more like this.). If you’ve got ideas and would like a voice in the future of the web join the WHATWG mailing list and login to the IRC channel. Introduce yourself, learn the rules and contribute.

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File Under: Browsers
May
16
2012

Chrome Offers Tabs to Go With New Tab-Syncing Features

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Image: Google

Google has released an update for its Chrome web browser that adds tab syncing to Chrome’s list of tricks. Using the latest version of Chrome you can now access the tabs open on your desktop at home while you’re out and about with your Android phone. The syncing should work with any device that can run the latest version of Google Chrome.

Current Chrome users will be automatically updated to the latest version. If you’d like to try out the latest version of Chrome head over to the download page.

The tab-syncing feature was already available to those using the Chrome beta channel, but now it’s available in a more stable form.

As with the rest of Chrome’s syncing features, you’ll need to be signed into your Google account in Chrome for it to work. To give it a try just sign in and look for the Other Devices menu on Chrome’s New Tab page. Click that button and you’ll see a list of every open tab on all the devices signed into that Google account.

While tab syncing is handy if you move between home and work computers, it really shines when going from desktop to mobile. If you’ve got an Android phone with the new Chrome beta installed, you’ll now be able to access any open tab on your desktop machine no matter where you are. The reverse is also very helpful, especially for those times when you encounter a mobile-unfriendly page — just open it later when you get home.

Note that Chrome users will be automatically updated to the latest stable version of the browser over the next few days, but the Chrome Blog reports that the tab-syncing features “will be rolled out more gradually over the coming weeks.” If you don’t have access just yet, you’ll have to get by with this video from Google until tab syncing is enabled for your account.

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File Under: Multimedia, Web Services
May
15
2012

Flickr Goes Big With Larger Images, Responsive Redesign

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Flickr: now with bigger images and a (mostly) responsive design.

Flickr recently changed its “lightbox” photo pages — the darker photo-friendly interface on the site — to display much larger photos. Now the grandfather of online photo-sharing sites is rolling out a site-wide redesign that uses the same big, beautiful images to put your photos front and center on every page.

The larger images in Flickr’s revamped photo pages put the emphasis where it belongs — on your photos. Peripheral information, like comments, maps, tags, set info and so on are still there, they’re just now (rightly) dwarfed by the actual image.

The result is a much more photo-centric site that does a nice job of differentiating itself from the current trend of low-res, filter-heavy photo0sharing services.

Web developers, take note: Flickr’s new layout isn’t just eye-catching, it’s also somewhat responsively designed — adjusting to the myriad screens on the web today and displaying the best photo possible without clogging your tubes with huge photo downloads. Flickr does stop short of scaling pages down to phone-size screens — for which there is a separate mobile website — but it resizes nicely to handle tablets.

That’s right, Flickr is the latest (and perhaps the largest) website to embrace not just a mostly responsive design with a liquid layout and media queries, but also a responsive approach to images.

We’ve looked at dozens of ways to handle images in a responsive design, but Flickr has opted for a custom setup that uses a bit of server-side PHP and some JavaScript to serve images based on screen size. Flickr is also using a custom algorithm that takes the width and height of the screen into account and “will display content at a width that will best showcase the most common photo ratio, the 4:3.”

For more details on how Flickr is handling the responsive aspects of the new design, check out the Flickr code blog.

Developers working with the Flickr API should note that the new photo sizes are now available through the Flickr API if your app or website would also like to display larger images.

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File Under: Browsers
May
15
2012

Firefox for Android Preps for Prime Time

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Flash Player running in Firefox for Mobile. Photo: Scott Gilbertson/Wired

Mozilla has released an update for its Firefox for Android beta mobile web browser. The latest beta sports a redesigned interface that looks a little less like Firefox and a little more like a native Android application.

If you’d like to help Mozilla test this beta, head on over to the Android marketplace and download a copy today. Unlike the recently updated Chrome for Android, which requires the latest and greatest Android Ice Cream Sandwich, Firefox for Android will run on Android Froyo 2.2 and better (it is, for the moment, only available in English, though).

The newest Firefox for Android beta is — despite looking a bit different from the early mobile releases — still pretty much the Firefox you know and love, with support for mobile add-ons, tabbed browsing and Firefox Sync, as well as the mobile-friendly “Awesome Screen.”

The Awesome Screen is similar feature-wise to the Awesome Bar in desktop Firefox, but tweaked to make mobile browsing and searching easier. To use it, just tap the location bar and you’ll see a list of your favorite bookmarks, history items and search engines.

Mozilla says the latest Firefox for Android beta starts up faster and some improvements to the underlying code should make for faster response times, better graphics performance and smoother panning and zooming. And while it’s not the only Android browser to do so, Flash fans will be happy to know that Firefox for Android continues to ship with Flash despite Adobe’s decision to stop developing the mobile Flash plugin.

The major focus for this beta release is getting the new native interface in Firefox for Android ready for prime time, so if you do decide to test it, be sure to let Mozilla know if you encounter any bugs.

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