When a web app wants to know where you are, it can now just ask Google — providing you’re using the latest version of Firefox.

Google and Mozilla have partnered to geo-enable the next wave of web applications in Firefox, the companies announced Thursday. The latest version of Firefox — 3.5, now in the final beta stage with beta release 4 — will use Google’s Location Service as its default location provider. This is the same web service that powers all of Google’s geolocation applications, including Google Latitude and the location finder in Google Toolbar.

Once the user provides a web app with permission to do so (the geolocation abilities are opt-in, as they should be) the application can use the browser to determine the user’s location. This means developers can provide more accurate local search results and other geo-aware functionality without the user having to install any special software or having to manually enter location data, like a ZIP code.

On the social web, where you are is almost as important as who you are and what you’re doing. The major players recognize this, and that’s why we’ve seen a flood of location-aware apps and services emerge within the last year. Mozilla launched the Geode project, a location awareness add-on for Firefox, Yahoo brought us Fire Eagle and the Geocoder API, Google gave us Latitude and Microsoft is developing Vine. The latest smartphones like the iPhone 3G come with GPS capabilities which greatly extend the usefulness of the software on the devices.

Since the new capabilities will be built into Firefox 3.5, we can assume this means all of Mozilla’s Geode code will be moved into the browser for good, but it’s possible Geode will remain available as an add-on for users running older versions of Firefox.

This partnership is more than just one more key piece of data being stored within the all-powerful, ever-pulsating Google megabrain. The partnership uses a set of open standards that will soon power almost all of the geo-aware applications on the web: The internet lords over at the W3C have recently proposed a Geolocation API which is currently being adopted by all the major browsers.

See Also:

• Geode Tells Firefox Where You Are, What’s Nearby
• Firefox 3.5 Nears Completion, Beta 4 Now Available
• Microsoft Vine Adds Real Time News and Location Data to Your Address Book
• Mozilla Labs Wants to Know Your Browser Fantasies

Web designers hate sweating the small stuff, but sometimes, that’s all your clients obsess over.

Rather than give those fussy clients FTP permissions and access to your code — which often requires painful training — there are several tools you can employ to let them make their own text-related changes to the pages you’ve built for them. A new release from Adobe is one of the best.

The company has produced a new version of InContext Editing, a hosted service that lets web designers give their non-technical clients a way to edit web pages directly in the browser. They just go to the page they want to edit, start the web-based app, and click on the parts of the page they want to edit right there in the browser. It’s easy to deploy and simple for clients to use.

InContext Editing 1.5 is available now as a free preview release on Adobe’s website. After the free preview ends (Adobe usually previews apps for about six months) the service will be subscription-based and cost around $10 to $20 per month for up to five domains. Both you and your clients will need to register a free AdobeID to use it.

Adobe also makes a similar product called Contribute, which goes a little bit deeper by offering version control and allowing the creation of new pages. InContext Editing is simpler. It’s primarily a way for your client to make unsupervised changes to the “small stuff” like text, images or contact information without letting them alter any of the “big stuff” — markup, scripts, stylesheets or formatting. Adobe says both products will continue to exist in tandem since they serve different audiences.

InContext Editing 1.5 ties in to the company’s Dreamweaver design suite, so you’ll need Dreamweaver Creative Suite 4 on your end to set up pages. But the service itself is hosted and Flash-based, so aside from a web browser running Flash Player 10.0.22.x or later, no additional software is required to edit pages.

The client launches an InContext Editing session with a keystroke, and, after logging in, sees a Flash-powered editing interface overlaid on top of the page. There are clearly defined editable regions — parts of the page the client is allowed to click on and edit — and each region can be assigned different permissions. For example, if you want to let your client edit only the content and not the formatting, you can do that. You can also give them full control over layout, font selection and such as well. Everything is WYSIWYG, so if they know how to use something like Microsoft Word, they shouldn’t have any problems.

Any designer building pages in Dreamweaver CS 4 can create an editable page with minimal fuss. Just define the allowed regions on a page and set the user permissions. The edits are actually performed on Adobe’s server, which you configure during the setup process to push changes to your server via FTP.

Since InContext Editing is a hosted service, there’s no software to install. Adobe claims it works in all modern browsers — the demo we participated in used both Firefox on a Windows PC and Safari on a Mac OS X machine. More information — and a discussion forum — is available in Adobe Labs.

Microsoft has announced details about its latest Live.com web service, a location-aware, real time notification service for your address book called Vine.

Vine is primarily a tool for keeping those in your close social network — family and friends — updated with your status in times of emergency or distress. It can also be used to find and distribute information about weather events, school closures or community gatherings.

The service, which looks like a desktop widget, pulls in status updates from the Facebook and Twitter accounts of the people in your Live.com address book you want to keep tabs on. It also culls weather feeds from the NOAA and news feeds from local alert services. There are clients for desktops and Windows Mobile smartphones to post status messages and keep loved ones informed about where you are, how you’re doing and how to get in touch with you.

It’s in private beta right now, so we haven’t tested it, and Microsoft has not yet responded to repeated requests for more information. However, there are a handful of video demos and an FAQ fact sheet available on Vine.net which give you a good picture of what it’s about.

With the proliferation of always-connected mobile devices, your location is becoming increasingly important to anyone who wants to get ahold of you. This has led to a rise in geo-aware applications for smartphones and laptops that are able to provide real-time updates of your whereabouts to those within your immediate social network.

Geo-aware apps like FourSquare and Shizzow are useful for ad hoc meetups (usually at bars or restaurants), but location services like Yahoo’s Fire Eagle and Google Latitude, when tied to an address book or contact manager, can provide a valuable level of context if somebody needs to get in touch with you immediately. For example, if I know you’re visiting New Zealand or on a plane to London right now, that alters my expectation that you’ll return my call before the clock strikes noon in San Francisco.

We’ve been watching the socialization of presence, colloquially known as “Address Book 2.0,” develop slowly for the last few years. But it’s ready to erupt now that the sensors in our pockets (cameras, GPS) have improved and developers have begun writing web applications to harness these new data channels. We’re already seeing huge leaps forward in location-aware search apps (Yelp), and news gathering apps (Twitter). Geo-enabling our address books and opening them up with emerging standards like Portable Contacts are the next logical steps.

Vine is an extension of that trend. Judging from the way Microsoft is positioning the product in its pre-launch marketing, it looks like the company is targeting Vine for use by families and neighbors to meet the demands of crisis management. The videos on Vine.net show it being used during floods, health emergencies and, for some strange reason, as a way to locate the person in your family who bakes the tastiest slice of pie.

It’s an interesting angle — fear and paranoia may not seem like the best selling points, but events like floods and health emergencies are certainly the “to hell with privacy” moments that make sense to those who need to be convinced of the usefulness of geo-aware apps.

See Also:

• Shizzow’s Social Location Service Marries ‘Where’ With ‘What’
• The Next Social Network? It’s Web 2.0, And It Knows Where You Are
• Google Makes Finding Friends on Social Sites Safer, More Secure

Opera is celebrating 15 years of web browsing — Opera began life in April 1994 when Jon von Tetzchner and Geir Ivarsoy wrote the first lines of code that would eventually to become the Opera browser. Originally written for Sun OS, Opera is now available on nearly every platform known to man, including most PC desktops, mobile devices and even the Wii.

Opera’s market share among desktop browsers isn’t the biggest — between 2 and 4 percent, about the same as the much younger Google Chrome — but the browser is living proof that market share isn’t best indicator of influence. Considering what Opera has contributed to the web in the last fifteen years, we we’re excited to see not only what the browser can do in the next fifteen, but how it’s innovations will impact the larger web.

The Opera browser can take credit for pioneering much of what we today consider must-haves in a browser including features like tabs, mouse gestures, SVG graphics and support for the latest web standards. Opera also popularized the idea of showing page thumbnails when you open a new window or tab (a feature known as “speed dial”), which Safari and Firefox have since copied.

To this day the Opera browser continues to innovate the web experience, offering loads of features not found in other browsers, including the ability to take notes on a web page, seamless sync bookmarks across all platforms and Opera Turbo, which compresses webpages to give broadband-like speeds on almost any Internet connection

One of the standout features of Opera has been its aggressive support of emerging web standards. Not only is Opera a leader in CSS support, it was one of the first to embrace experimental HTML 5 features like the <audio> and <video> embed tags and the Canvas element. Opera was also one of the first browsers to pass both the ACID 2 and ACID 3 page rendering tests.

For more on the history of Opera have a look at Opera Software CTO, Hkon Wium Lie’s reflections. Opera CEO, Jon von Tetzchner, also offers his own thoughts on 15 years of Opera, and don’t miss the condensed history of Opera in cartoon form.

See Also:

• Opera 9.6 Delivers Improved Mail, Syncing Tools
• Opera Mini Brings the Mobile Browser War to Android
• Opera Link Connects Your Bookmarks Across Browsers
• Opera Taunts IE8 Over Standards

Mozilla has released a fourth beta of the next version of its Firefox web browser. Firefox 3.5 beta 4 is expected to be the last beta release for this latest version of Firefox, with the final code due to arrive in a couple of months.

Earlier betas in this round of experimental Firefox builds were labeled 3.1, and the browser was expected to be released at the end of 2008. However, Mozilla decided to push the release date well into 2009 and the company bumped the version number to 3.5 after deciding that the new features were more significant than it had originally envisioned. These new features include an enhanced JavaScript rendering engine to speed up web apps, an improved session restore tool and a private browsing mode (commonly known as “porn mode”) that eschews local page caching on a per-session basis. These were added largely in response to similar features that popped up in Google Chrome and Microsoft Internet Explorer 8, both of which were released while the latest Firefox was still in the early development stages.

Firefox 3.5 beta 4 primarily brings stability improvements, bug fixes and some more speed gains, particularly in the new TraceMonkey JavaScript Engine. If you’ve been following along and testing earlier beta releases, there won’t be any significant new features in this release, just improvements.

One noteworthy addition not found in beta 3 is the “Recently Closed Windows” tool, which works much like the “Recently Closed Tabs” tool by allowing you to re-open entire windows you’ve accidentally closed.

For more details on the other new features in Firefox 3.5, check out our earlier coverage, and be sure to read through the latest release notes before you download beta 4 (it is a beta and there are some known bugs). In our testing, we haven’t noticed any major problems.

One word of warning for those itching to get their hands on beta 4 — don’t expect all of your extensions to work just yet. If you’re a heavy extensions user, you may want to hold off upgrading until your must-haves have been updated. Most extension providers don’t bother building in support for new versions of Firefox until the browser reaches the release candidate stage.

See Also:

• Third Firefox 3.1 Beta Ready for Testing
• Firefox 3.1 Will Add More Awesomeness to the ‘Awesome Bar’
• Firefox 3.1 to Offer Improved Session Recovery Tools
• Firefox 3.5: Version Number Increase Reflects Number of New …
• Firefox 3.1 Beta 3 Solves JavaScript Woes