Archive for April, 2010

File Under: Browsers, Multimedia, Web Standards
Apr
30
2010

Microsoft Says Web Video in IE9 Is All About H.264

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ie9

Microsoft’s next browser will support native playback of videos using HTML5, but it will only support H.264, and not its more open alternatives.

In a post on the official IEBlog Thursday, Microsoft’s general manager of Internet Explorer Dean Hachamovitch outlined his company’s position in the ongoing Flash vs. HTML5 video debate. He says that when it comes to playing web videos without plug-ins, Microsoft will support H.264-encoded videos in its browser. He makes no mention of those encoded with Theora or any other codecs, and nobody is expecting Microsoft to support anything other than H.264 — Hachamovitch first mentioned singular support for H.264 in IE9 last month when he showed off an early version of the browser.

The argument over which web video playback technology to support has been a point of major tension among browser makers ever since last year, when the Worldwide Web Consortium (W3C) bowed out of the debate, declining to recommend any single video technology for HTML5. The result, so far, is a stalemate — Microsoft and Apple are supporting H.264, Mozilla and Opera are supporting Ogg Theora and Google, for the time being, is supporting both.

As we’ve said before, H.264 is a dangerous path for web video to go down, mostly because there are patents and licensing issues associated with it that keep it from being freely used. It should be noted that both Microsoft and Apple — the two main proponents of native H.264 playback in their browsers — hold patents in the H.264 patent pool.

Other technologies, such as Ogg Theora and VP8, appear to be a much safer alternative for video on the web to remain free and open, which is why the browser makers who have no stake in H.264 (Mozilla and Opera) are pushing for Theora.

Google Chrome’s support varies based on platform, and there’s a rumor the company will release the VP8 video technology it now owns under an open source license soon.

Curiously, there’s no mention of Silverlight in Hachamovitch’s post. But he doesn’t tie Flash to the whipping post like so many others have been quick to do. His words on Flash are quite tempered. Diplomatic, even:

Today, video on the web is predominantly Flash-based. While video may be available in other formats, the ease of accessing video using just a browser on a particular website without using Flash is a challenge for typical consumers. Flash does have some issues, particularly around reliability, security, and performance. We work closely with engineers at Adobe, sharing information about the issues we know of in ongoing technical discussions. Despite these issues, Flash remains an important part of delivering a good consumer experience on today’s web.

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File Under: Browsers, Software
Apr
30
2010

Xmarks Syncs Open Tabs Across Browsers, iPhone

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xmarksThe popular Xmarks browser extension has added a new feature to sync open tabs across browsers and platforms. Xmarks, which started as a Firefox extension, is now also available for Google Chrome, IE and Safari, so this new feature has the capability to keep all of those browsers in perfect sync. It will now even allow you to sync your open tabs to the iPhone using the Xmarks web-based interface.

The new features bring Xmarks closer to Firefox’s own Weave syncing tool. Although Weave can handle some things Xmarks cannot — like form data and browser settings — Weave only syncs between Firefox installs.

If you frequently switch not just computers, but browsers (as many of us do), Xmarks offers a more universal syncing solution.

Once Xmarks is installed, you’ll need to create a web-based account if haven’t already. The new tab syncing feature is disabled by default, so make sure you head to the preferences panel (or page, it varies by browser) and turn it on. Once open tab syncing is enabled, just click the “open remote tabs” menu item and you’ll have access to any tab in any browser where Xmarks is installed.

Xmarks has long been a favorite for syncing bookmarks across browsers, but the new tab syncing features make it even more useful. Weave is nice, but for true cross-platform, cross-browser syncing, Xmarks is the way to go.

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File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Apr
28
2010

Early Version of Firefox Lands on Android Phones

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Fennec pre-alpha running on Android (Click for larger). <em>Pic courtesy of Mozilla</em>

Fennec pre-alpha running on Android (Click for larger). Pic courtesy of Mozilla

The mobile version of Firefox, known by code-name Fennec, is now available for testing on the Android mobile platform.

Details are on Firefox engineer Vladimir Vukicevic’s blog.

Fennec for Android is a pre-alpha release, so please be aware that it’s buggy and could freeze your phone, requiring a reboot. Also, memory handling hasn’t been optimized yet, so it might choke or crash your phone when trying to load large pages. Mozilla says Fennec for Android has only been tested on Motorola Droid and Nexus One phones running Android 2.0 and up, so your mileage will certainly vary on other phones.

Still, it’s exciting to see Firefox making its way onto Google’s open source Android platform after months of development. The tiny browser has already shipped on Nokia’s high-end mobiles. I was able to thoroughly test and review Firefox for Nokia’s Maemo OS, and I found it replicated the experience of using the desktop version of Firefox extremely well, even on a much smaller screen.

From the looks of it, Firefox on Android will borrow many of the same design innovations that made the Nokia/Maemo version a pleasure to use. One very cool thing is already available: An experimental version of Weave has been hacked together for this build, so you can sync all your Firefox bookmarks and settings to Android right from the get-go.

The final version will be ready later this year, Mozilla says. The work done here should lend itself to other Android implementations of Firefox in the future, including a larger version for any Android tablets now in development.

Once fully baked on Android, Firefox will play a vital part in shaping the rapid growth of the mobile web. At this point, the development of websites for mobiles has been largely geared towards making them look good on the iPhone and, to a lesser extent, Opera Mobile and Android’s native browser. Android’s browser and Mobile Safari use the same WebKit layout engine, and Opera uses its own.

Adding Firefox (which uses different layout and JavaScript engines) into the mix not only encourages designers to build all-inclusive mobile-web experiences that work across multiple browsers and screen sizes, but it should also help foster the growth of HTML5 mobile apps. All of the modern mobile browsers support the key elements of the emerging standard, even if they all support HTML5 components differently.

Vukicevic has more details about Firefox for Android on his blog, including system requirements, instructions on how to install it, how to troubleshoot it and where to send feedback. There’s also a Google Group dedicated to Fennec on Android.

A fennec, BTW, is an adorable little fox with giant bunny ears. Flickr has a lot of them.

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File Under: Uncategorized
Apr
27
2010

Opera 10.52 Offers a Faster, More ‘Mac-Like’ Browser

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operamacOpera software has released Opera 10.52 for Mac OS X. The latest version of Opera’s flagship browser brings some speed boosts, more HTML5 support and much tighter integration with the Mac platform.

Mac users can grab the latest release from the Opera website.

While the Opera web browser may not have the largest market share, it is the source off many browser innovations. Tabbed browsing got its start in Opera, and the browser was one of the first to broadly support emerging standards like HTML5 and CSS 3.

The new Mac version features a revamped interface that makes Opera look and feel almost like something Apple would have created. In fact, aside from Apple’s Safari, Opera 10.52 is the most Mac-like of the web browsers available on OS X.

The changes — which include using the Cocoa and Core Text frameworks — also offer some performance improvements. Opera 10.5 was already one of the fastest browsers available and the new update continues to best both Firefox 3.6 and Google Chrome in our informal page load tests.

This update is also notable for supporting the multi-touch trackpad gestures available in Apple’s more recent laptops. In Opera 10.52 you can use gestures like pinch to zoom and three finger swipes to navigate back and forth in your browser history (both Safari and Firefox support the same gestures).

Opera 10.52 for Mac features a number of smaller enhancements that make day-to-day browsing a bit nicer. The URL bar’s search capabilities have been improved and you can now search your bookmarks and history page as you type — much like the Firefox “awesome bar,” and Opera’s page dialogs and alerts are now considerably less intrusive.

While Opera 10.52 is relatively minor update, it’s worth the upgrade for Mac fans — particularly those looking for a more “Mac-like” experience. To get Opera 10.52, head over to the Opera downloads page.

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File Under: CSS, Fonts, UI/UX, Visual Design
Apr
26
2010

Google Chrome to Support the Web Open Font Format

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Google’s Chrome browser plans to jump on the Web Open Font Format bandwagon. A note in the Chromium project’s bug tracker says that “it appears that we have decided to implement WOFF in Chromium.” Work on adding WOFF support to Chromium is already underway, though there’s no timetable for when the new features will make it into a shipping version of Google Chrome.

The WOFF was conceived by Mozilla as an easier way for web designers to include fonts in their designs. The idea is to let web authors include WOFF fonts in their page designs by linking to the font files in their code the same way they link to images and other downloadable files.

WOFF attempts to address some of the problems with CSS 3′s @font-face rule, which allows for downloadable fonts, but says nothing about the format of the fonts. As we’ve noted before, using @font-face can lead to radically different results in different browsers. Last year popular website Boing Boing launched a redesign using CSS3’s @font-face rule, but ran into problems when things didn’t render correctly on older machines.

Another concern is page load times. Because WOFF has built-in compression, adding extra WOFF fonts to your pages shouldn’t slow them down as much as a traditional OpenType or TrueType font file.

Since WOFF support was added to Firefox (in version 3.6), Opera and Microsoft have both pledged their support and the format has been submitted to the W3C for consideration as a standard.

The IE9 beta doesn’t yet support WOFF, but Microsoft is an official sponsor of the W3C proposal and the IEBlog has written about WOFF so we hope to see WOFF support before IE9 is finished.

With Google Chrome onboard, Apple’s Safari may soon be the only currently shipping browser without WOFF support.

Perhaps even more important than browser support is the fact that font foundries are getting behind the new spec. WOFF fonts aren’t secure, so the format won’t be used by foundries wanting to regulate the use of their work. However, over 30 major type foundries — including Adobe, House Industries, Hoefler & Frere-Jones and ITC, LinoType — are already endorsing the format.

While WOFF doesn’t solve all the problems of web fonts, it’s a huge step in the right direction. With Firefox, Opera, IE and now Chrome all supporting WOFF, designers may soon be able to add just about any font to any webpage.

If you’d like to know more about WOFF, plus see examples of its use, head over to the original announcement on the Mozilla Hacks blog.

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File Under: Events, Social, Web Standards
Apr
21
2010

Facebook Adopts Open Standard for User Logins

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Oauth logo

SAN FRANCISCO — As we predicted, Facebook is switching to an open standard to handle user authentication across its entire platform of connected websites and applications.

Facebook is ditching its proprietary Facebook Connect system, which lets people use their Facebook username and password to log in to other sites around the web. In its place, the company will implement OAuth 2.0, an open source (and soon to be IETF standard) protocol for user authentication.

Viewed along side the barrage of other major announcements unleashed by Facebook at its F8 developer conference here on Wednesday, the move may only seem like a minor data point. But it is one with the potential to make a broad and deeply significant impact on the social web.

Right now, users expect three choices for logging in to a site with an existing ID: Facebook Connect, Twitter or OpenID. That forces publishers to implement three separate systems — one for OpenID, one for Twitter, which uses OAuth, and one for Facebook, which uses Facebook Connect. But once OAuth 2.0 is up to speed and more sites move over to it, things get simpler for site owners.

Where there used to be three options — Facebook Connect, OAuth and OpenID — there will now only be two. And the two that are left are both open source.

There are still details involving token management, auto-registration and other bits of complex backend plumbing to be sorted out, that Wednesday’s events don’t change.

But the move towards OAuth is a step towards interoperability the social web sorely needs. Most importantly, it will be easier to build pathways connecting OAuth and OpenID, since both are fully transparent, open standards and the proprietary Facebook Connect system has been removed from the equation. The switch paves the way for further integrations between existing technologies.
Continue Reading “Facebook Adopts Open Standard for User Logins” »

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File Under: APIs, Events, Social
Apr
21
2010

Adding Facebook ‘Like’ Buttons to Your Site Is Damn Easy

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Like this? Yes, "Like" this.

I want to offer a quick look inside the technology behind Facebook’s Open Graph initiative to show how easy it is to mark up your website and let Facebook users interact with it.

This is only a part of the broad Open Graph strategy the company announced at its 2010 F8 developer conference. (Read our full coverage of the keynote).

Basically, Facebook is offering up a set of widgets — it calls them Social Plug-ins — that you can drop into any web page to make that page more “Facebooky.” There’s a Like button, a Recommendations widget that shows what other pages people’s friends are reading, an Activity Stream widget that shows a simplified version of the visitor’s personal Facebook news feed, and a Facebook Bar, a toolbar site owners can float at the bottom of the screen that serves all of these things at once.

Using the Open Graph widgets, you can incorporate some of Facebook’s key social interaction features into any page on the web.

The most important Social Plug-in, and the one we’ll no doubt see the most use of, is the Like button. Put it on your page, and if a Facebook user visits your site and clicks on it, a link to your page gets added to their activity stream. Suddenly, all of their friends can see that link, click on it and be led directly to your page. When that second person arrives, the Like button is personalized for them — it shows which of their friends have already clicked it, and when they click on it, a link to your page gets added to their stream.

Continue Reading “Adding Facebook ‘Like’ Buttons to Your Site Is Damn Easy” »

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File Under: Browsers, Multimedia
Apr
21
2010

Firefox Quarantines Video Plug-ins to Stop Browser Crashes

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Mozilla has announced a new beta of Firefox 3.6.4, an incremental update which adds one significant new feature to Firefox 3.6 — Flash and other plug-ins now run in separate processes. That means if Flash crashes, it won’t cause the entire browser to crash with it.

To give the new beta a try, head on over to the Firefox downloads page. If you’ve subscribed the beta channel in the past you’ll automatically get the update, or you can force Firefox to update using the “Check for Updates” menu item. For now, the isolated processes feature is only available in the Windows and Linux versions of Firefox. A Mac version will be available soon.

With the new “out of process plug-ins,” or OOPP as this feature is known, when a plug-in like Flash crashes, users will simply see a sad face where the Flash content should be. Reloading the page will restart Flash and try loading the file again.

Firefox’s new isolated processes feature is similar to what Google Chrome already does and will significantly improve Firefox’s overall stability since plug-ins can no longer bring down the whole browser.

For the beta, only the Flash, Silverlight and Java plug-ins are included, though you can try isolating others (for example, the Adobe Acrobat plug-in) by visiting the about:config settings and adding them to the list. Just be aware that there’s a reason only the primary three plugins are supported right now, adding others may cause Firefox to crash.

While Firefox 3.6.4 is just an incremental update it’s the first time Mozilla has delivered on its new strategy of pushing out features when they’re ready, rather than waiting for the next major release. You can thank Google Chrome and its constant updates for pushing Mozilla to adopt roughly the same policy.

To give the new features a try, head over to the download page and grab a copy of Firefox 3.6.4 beta. Remember, the isolated processes feature is only available in the Windows and Linux versions. A Mac version will be available soon.

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File Under: Multimedia, Software
Apr
21
2010

Adobe Revamps Flash Player for Netbooks, P2P, Private Browsing

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Adobe has released the first beta for Flash 10.1, the next major milestone for the Flash Player plugin.

Flash 10.1 is an important update not just for its enhanced speed and new features, but also for Adobe to show that there is in fact still a place for Flash on the web.

Flash’s ubiquity as the solution for web video and animations has been challenged recently; first by HTML5, which gives developers a standardized way to embed audio, video and animation without resorting to Flash, and also by Apple’s decision to ban Flash from its iPhone/iPad platform.

While we expect HTML5 to slowly but surely replace Flash for common tasks like web audio and video, the plugin still offers many features HTML5 doesn’t and Flash 10.1 builds on those strengths with several new features.

The two most interesting features for web developers are the new priority tag in the Flash HTML embed code and the peer-assisted networking features.

The priority tag is especially helpful for speeding up page load times on netbooks and mobile devices since it allows developers to lower the priority of a Flash movie. Set the priority tag to something low and your Flash movie won’t try to load until the rest of the page is already finished. That means faster page load times and no waiting around for large Flash movies before you see the surrounding content.

The peer-assisted networking builds on Flash’s existing P2P capabilities to offer peer-based streaming media — think BitTorrent in your Flash player. However, don’t look for Flash-based torrent clients, what’s more likely are browser-based VOIP apps, better chat features in Flash games, improved conferencing applications and possibly even P2P radio streaming.

Other new features available in Flash 10.1 include support for the host browser’s “private browsing” mode (Flash won’t accept cookies or other local objects when you’re in “private” mode), a new accelerometer class (don’t even think about using it for the iPhone), hardware video decoding, much better performance and more.

For full details on everything that’s new, be sure to check out the release notes.

For now Flash 10.1 is a beta release, so it’s a bit soon to start using the new features in the wild. But if you’d like to test them out, head over to the Adobe Labs download page and grab a copy (be sure to use the uninstaller to delete your existing Flash Player before you install the new version). The updated Flash for Mobile client will reportedly be arriving later in 2010.

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