Archive for January, 2011

File Under: Identity, Web Standards
Jan
31
2011

OpenID: The Web’s Most Successful Failure

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First 37Signals announced it would drop support for OpenID. Then Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo called OpenID a failure (along with XML and AtomPub). Former Facebooker Yishan Wong’s scathing (and sometimes wrong) rant calling OpenID a failure is one of the more popular answers on Quora.

But if OpenID is a failure, it’s one of the web’s most successful failures.

OpenID is available on more than 50,000 websites. There are over a billion OpenID enabled URLs on the web thanks to providers like Google, Yahoo and AOL. Yet, for most people, trying to log in to every website using OpenID remains a difficult task, which means that while thousands of websites support it, hardly anyone uses OpenID.

OpenID promised to solve two problems. First, it would offer an easy way to log in to any website without needing to create a new account. And, second, it would enable you to have a consistant identity across the entire web. This worked well with the limited audience of bloggers and tech-savvy users that were part of the original vision.

But then as the vision of OpenID grew to encompass, well, everything, it became bogged down in the details. Despite widespread support, there is no uniform user experience. Every site that supports OpenID does it slightly differently, which only further confuses the majority of people.

The main reason no one uses OpenID is because Facebook Connect does the same thing and does it better. Everyone knows what Facebook is and it’s much easier to understand that Facebook is handling your identity than some vague, unrecognized thing called OpenID. That’s why, despite the impressive sounding billion URLs and 50,000 sites supporting OpenID, it pales next to Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect has been around less than half the time of OpenID and yet it’s been adopted by some 250,000 websites, is available to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users and has the advantage of Facebook’s brand familiarity.

Facebook also added a key ingredient that helped drive other sites to adopt Facebook Connect — sharing user data. One of the reasons more sites support Facebook Connect is that they get a piece of the user pie.

Web publishers never warmed to OpenID since it allows a user to log in to a website and leave a comment on a story, a blog post or a photo while essentially remaining anonymous to the publisher. That anonymous aspect has made OpenID less attractive to publishers who want to collect more data about their readers or interact with them — whether that means following them on Twitter, connecting with them on Facebook or sending them e-mail.

The OpenID Connect proposal aims to solve this shortcoming by using OAuth to allow publishers to request more information from a user when they log in using OpenID. But so far there has been very little support for OpenID Connect. Facebook Connect is still far more popular.

However, not everyone wants to tie their website’s login structure to a single company like Facebook. If 37Signals is the poster child for OpenID failure, Stack Overflow is the poster child for its success. The popular programming Q&A site abandoned traditional username/password based accounts in favor of OpenID and declared the experience a resounding success.

Government sites are also looking to use OpenID rather than tie themselves to Facebook. And the Obama administration has announced plans for an Internet identity system that sounds a lot like OpenID, though the exact details have yet to be revealed.

Eventually OpenID will likely disappear from the web, not because it was a failure, but because identity will be managed in other ways. Mozilla is hard at work putting identity in the browser. It’s not hard to envision Firefox managing your OpenID credentials for you, just as it does today with your passwords. In that sense OpenID may end up like RSS (another tool routinely declared dead), invisibly powering features behind the scenes, essential, but unnoticed. Eventually online identity may even come full circle and move back into the real world — chips in your phone, tokens that generate random codes or biometric devices.

The legacy of OpenID may well be that it was ahead of its time, but that hardly makes it a failure.

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File Under: Browsers, HTML, Mobile, Web Standards
Jan
28
2011

W3C ‘Touch Events’ Specification Targets Tablets, Touch Screens

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The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body that overseas HTML, CSS and other web technologies, has release a rough draft specification for touch screen devices. The spec is far from complete, but eventually it could give developers a set of standards for creating touch-based interfaces.

Thus far touch screen devices have primarily mimicked mouse behaviors. But the rise of multi-touch gestures and the larger screens available on tablets, mean that touch screens of the future may offer design possibilities far beyond the mouse-based world that exists on today’s web. The goal of the W3C’s touch-based spec is to help define standard behaviors and events that developers can translate into touch-friendly interfaces.

Like much of the W3C’s work, the new touch-screen spec starts with existing specs, in this case Apple’s iOS touch event spec. The W3C’s draft adds several more events like X and Y radii for touch areas and a “force” property. The later, while rather vague at the moment, could give developers a way to emulate mouse-rollover events. For example, a light touch could trigger a rollover, while a hard touch clicks a link.

Mobile platform consultant Peter-Paul Koch calls out a few minor problems and undecided issues — for example, no units are specified for the radius or force properties — but overall says the spec is a step in the right direction.

The Touch Events Specification is a long way from done; it doesn’t even have a real URL on the W3C site yet. And, other than the events cloned from Apple, the spec is not supported anywhere in the wild. Still, touch screens clearly need an expanded set of standards to go along with desktop standards and it’s nice to see the W3C stepping up to the plate.

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File Under: Browsers, Visual Design
Jan
27
2011

Mozilla’s ‘Home Dash’ is a Dashboard for Your Personal Web

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Your favorite sites ready to go with Home Dash

Mozilla Labs has cranked out an interesting new experiment dubbed Home Dash, a Firefox add-on that removes the standard web browser interface — the location bar, search bar and tabs — and leaves behind just a Firefox logo. Click the logo and you’ll be presented with a dashboard where your most-visited sites are found.

It’s not an entirely new take on browsing, but Home Dash is definitely an extreme departure from the traditional web browser interface. In its current form, Home Dash is a bit like the idea pioneered by Opera’s Speed Dial feature — present a user’s most visited sites and eliminate the need to search. But Home Dash goes further and eliminates most of the browser chrome as well.

If you’d like to take it for a spin, head over to the Firefox add-ons site and install Home Dash (you’ll need to be using a Firefox 4 beta release for Home Dash to work). For some tips and help with Home Dash, see Mozilla’s follow-up post.

The idea behind Home Dash is to move from a search or recall-based browser to a “browse-based” browser. The web browser as we know it is primarily a recall-based experience. Much like the command line of yesteryear, it’s up to you to remember URLs and websites (or create bookmarks and shortcuts). But a browse-based interface works on recognition rather than recall — you see a thumbnail of where you want to go; you click on it. The burden of remembering names and URLs, or even creating shortcuts, is removed. Mozilla’s Head of User Experience, Alex Faaborg, has a nice piece with some more background on the difference between these two approaches.

With Home Dash you browse to the sites you like, rather than typing in URLs or search terms to find them. For now that means Home Dash pulls up your twenty-four most visited sites as thumbnails. When you hover a thumbnail the actual site will load in the background, but for anything beyond your most-visited sites you’re back in the search bar, recalling. The usefulness of Home Dash will depend entirely on how you use the web. For those that typically visit the same sites over and over, Home Dash may be a better interface. But if you more frequently search new information, and land on new sites, Home Dash may get in the way.

Eventually, the team behind Home Dash is planning to let you customize the dashboard by adding and removing websites, as well as resizing the thumbnail previews the way you see fit. Plans also call for Home Dash to broaden the range of “sites” so you can add web apps, widgets and even people. For now though Home Dash is very experimental and limited.

Home Dash is also buggy, UI elements flashed and occasionally disappeared in our testing and overall experience felt more like a step backward than anything else. In fact, it may well be that the URL bar is the command line perfected and we don’t need a browse-based experience. After all, once you’ve moved beyond your twenty-four sites, Home Dash offers nothing you can’t already do with the URL and Search bars.

However, while the traditional desktop experience may not be the ideal setting for Home Dash, it isn’t hard to see the appeal on touch screen devices like the many Android-based tablets that are due to arrive in the near future. The Mozilla Labs announcement makes no mention of tablets, but a touch-based version of Home Dash seems inevitable.

If you’d rather not install something as experimental as Home Dash, check out the video below which covers the basics (requires a WebM-video-capable browser):

Video (1:05) downloads: webm (5mb) and ogv (4mb)

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File Under: CSS, Visual Design, Web Standards
Jan
26
2011

Transform Your Site With CSS 3

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CSS 3 transforms in action

Our friends at TypeKit, the custom web fonts service, have posted a nice CSS tutorial from web developer Andy Clarke. Clarke walks you through the basics of how to use CSS 3′s new two-dimensional transform properties.

CSS transforms allow you to rotate images, create a mirror effect without adding extra images or add some scaling mouse events to your pages. With rules like scale() rotate() and translate(), CSS 3 can do what was once only possible with JavaScript. The final result of Clarke’s tutorial may be a bit too close to Apple’s Coverflow visuals to just cut-and-paste, but the step-by-step walkthrough makes it simple to tweak the look to your liking.

In addition to the transform rules, the tutorial makes use of the oft-overlooked, but very powerful, nth-of-type(n) selector to avoid cluttering the markup with extraneous ids.

Best of all, thanks to widespread support in modern browsers and a little JavaScript help for older browsers, the example code in TypeKit’s walkthrough works in just about every web browser. That said, perhaps the best advice in the tutorial is this gem:

No two browsers are the same, so to make the most from emerging technologies such as HTML5 and CSS3, we need to banish the notion that websites should look and be experienced exactly the same in every browser. We should design around browser differences instead of hacking around them.

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File Under: Browsers
Jan
26
2011

Firefox 4 Beta 10 Improves Stability, Uses Less Memory

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Firefox 4 beta 10Hot on the heels of last week’s beta 9 release, Mozilla has pushed out another update for Firefox 4. With the final release drawing near, Mozilla is hard at work squashing the last few bugs blocking the Firefox 4 release. While the latest release, beta 10, doesn’t get them all, it is stable enough for early adopters.

If you’d like to try out beta 10 and help out in the testing process, head over to the Mozilla beta downloads page and grab a copy.

For those that have been using Firefox 4 beta releases for some time, there isn’t much new in this release. Most of the focus has been on improving stability and performance, particularly when it comes to hardware acceleration, one of the much-touted new features in Firefox 4.

Beta 10 sees Mozilla taking a more conservative approach to hardware acceleration by restricting it to only certain graphics cards. For the time being, if your graphics card isn’t completely up to the task, Firefox 4 will automatically disable it via a new graphics driver blacklist. Eventually Mozilla plans to expand its hardware acceleration support, but for now only cards from Intel, AMD, and Nvidia will make the cut.

On the Mac side, Flash performance should be a bit better in this release, and, perhaps more importantly, it should be less likely to crash your browser. There have also been some small tweaks to cut down on Firefox 4′s memory footprint.

While this beta shows Firefox 4 very close to complete, Mozilla is still planning at least one more beta release before Firefox 4 is considered ready for prime time. The current roadmap puts the final release of Firefox 4 near the end of February 2011.

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File Under: Browsers, Identity, Security
Jan
25
2011

Chrome Add-on Kills Tracking Cookies

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Not to be outdone by Mozilla, Google has released a new add-on for its Chrome web browser that allows users to opt-out of online advertising tracking. While Mozilla’s privacy tool is still just a proposal, and involves a new HTTP header, Google’s add-on uses the more practical, cookie-based approach and works today.

The Keep My Opt-Outs add-on works like a very persistant cookie, but this one is working in your favor. The add-on uses Chrome’s internal cookie APIs to set the opt-out flag for each advertising network that participates in the opt-out program created by the ad industry. Not only is it easier than setting those cookies yourself, the add-on ensures that, even if you clear the rest of your cookies, the opt-out cookies remain intact.

While it works, Google’s approach is something of a hack. The add-on intercepts and rewrites cookies, which is not exactly an ideal solution. Still, if you’re a Chrome user and you’ve been looking for a way to stop advertising cookies today, the Keep My Opt-Outs add-on has you covered.

Keep My Opt-Outs also makes a viable alternative to ad-blockers, particularly for those concerned that ad-blocking add-ons are denying their favorite sites much needed revenue. Provided you don’t mind a few advertisements here and there, using the new add-on in conjunction with some smart cookie settings, you can support your favorite sites without forfeiting your privacy. And for those that do use ad blockers, keep in mind that just because the ad is not shown, doesn’t always mean it can’t set cookies.

In the long term, Mozilla’s header-based approach to stopping cookie-based tracking is a better solution, and we expect, if the idea catches on, Chrome and other browsers will support it as well. For those who want something that works today, Google’s new add-on fits the bill.

Footprints photo by Vinoth Chandar/Flickr/CC

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File Under: Browsers, Identity, Security
Jan
24
2011

Mozilla Plans ‘Do-Not-Track’ Privacy Tools for Firefox

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Mozilla wants to create a new HTTP header that will allow Firefox and other browsers to shut off web tracking tools like cookies. The new header would offer a universal way to tell websites that a user wishes to opt-out of third party, advertising-based tracking.

Behavioral advertising, as such tracking is known, is becoming increasingly common on the web. Advertisers use cookies to follow you around the web, tracking which sites you visit, what you buy and even, in the case of mobile browsers, where you go. The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has already outlined a Do Not Track mechanism (PDF link), which would work much like the FTC’s Do Not Call list, offering a way to opt-out of online tracking.

The proposed do-not-track HTTP header is one of several ways Mozilla plans to implement the FTC’s suggestions. While the header idea has been around for a while — the Do Not Track Firefox add-on from the Stanford Law School is one example — currently most online opt-out schemes use cookies to set user preferences. Mozilla believes “the header-based approach has the potential to be better for the web in the long run because it is a clearer and more universal opt-out mechanism than cookies or blacklists.”

While the new header is just a proposal at the moment, Mozilla already has some code ready and is considering adding the feature to future versions of Firefox. The current plan is to create a new preferences option that would allow you to opt-out from tracking. Check the box in the preferences and Firefox will start sending the do-not-track header each time you request a new page.

Interestingly, the header Mozilla proposes is not the same as the “X-Do-Not-Track” proposal, which is already implemented in Firefox add-ons NoScript and Adblock Plus. For more details on how Mozilla’s new HTTP header will work, see Mozilla developer Sid Stamm’s blog post.

Like Mozilla’s proposed privacy icons, the problem with the new header is getting third-party ad sites to obey it. Mozilla calls it a “chicken and egg” problem and hopes to jumpstart the idea by including the header in future releases of Firefox. At that point it would be up to third party websites to support the header and, as Mozilla puts it, “honor people’s privacy choices.”

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File Under: HTML, HTML5, Web Standards
Jan
21
2011

Meet HTML, The Spec Formerly Known as HTML5

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It won’t be an unpronounceable symbol, but HTML5 is getting a Prince-style name change. From here on out HTML5 will simply be HTML — according to the WHATWG anyway.

Just a day after the W3C unveiled its new HTML5 logo, the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG) has announced that it will drop the term “HTML5,” stop the versioning of HTML altogether and instead treat the evolving specification as a “living standard.”

While eliminating the version number from HTML has been part of the WHATWG’s plan from the beginning, the timing of the change is clearly related to the W3C’s attempt to embrace the term “HTML5.” The W3C recently showed off a new HTML5 logo, but the accompanying FAQ used the term HTML5 to cover everything from the actual spec to only tangentially related tools like CSS 3, WOFF and SVG. Many developers saw the W3C’s nebulous use of the term HTML5 as a sign that the term had become, like “AJAX,” just another marketing buzzword.

The W3C has since rewritten its FAQ to clarify and more sharply define just what HTML5 is and is not, but before that happened Ian Hickson, the WHATWG’s editor, announced that the WHATWG was renaming its spec to just HTML. Hickson says the WHATWG was “going to change the name last year but ended up deciding to wait a bit since people still used the term ‘HTML5′ a lot.”

Hickson then makes a not-so-subtle jab at the W3C, saying HTML5 “is now basically being used to mean anything Web-standards-related, so it’s time to move on!”

The W3C has long had a tenuous relationship with the WHATWG. Technically the W3C is the standards body charged with publishing the HTML spec. The WHATWG — a consortium of browser makers — grew out of the W3C’s neglect of HTML and its misguided decision to pursue XHTML 2. Now that both groups are working on the same spec, in theory, their goals are the same. In practice, however, the two groups often butt heads. In other words, just because the WHATWG has decided to abandon the term HTML5, don’t expect it to disappear overnight.

The W3C will continue to work toward “snapshots” that reflect stable milestones of the ever-changing WHATWG version of the spec. For now at least, that means the term HTML5 will be alive and well at the W3C, as the group works through its standard practice of issuing working drafts, holding last calls on changes and finally publishing the spec as a “recommendation.”

Since browser makers have long been well ahead of the W3C when it comes to implementing the latest and greatest parts of the HTML5 spec, they will likely focus on the WHATWG’s HTML spec, which will, like Google’s Chrome browser, follow a “rolling release” schedule.

No doubt the media and marketers will continue to use HTML5 as a buzzword that means far more than just the spec, but even that’s not always a bad thing. There’s no doubt that Apple, Google, the New York Times and everyone else who’s used HTML5 as an analog for the New Shiny has helped HTML5 — and all the other tools it’s come to stand for — gain momentum. As web developer Jeff Croft puts it, “sometimes we just need a word to rally behind.”

While not everyone understands the nuances of what’s HTML5, what’s CSS 3 and what’s just JavaScript, that doesn’t change the fact that everyone is excited about building a better web and that is exactly what HTML(5) is designed to do.

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File Under: Browsers
Jan
21
2011

Chrome 10 ‘Obliterates’ Your Browsing History

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Version 10 of Google’s Chrome web browser has entered the dev channel, available to those who enjoy living on the edge. This release features an update to the V8 engine that powers Chrome’s speedy JavaScript, a more refined preferences dialog and print and save options for any PDF files you view in Chrome.

If you’re already subscribed to the dev release channel you should be automatically updated. If you’d like to take the dev channel for a spin, Google has instructions on how to switch Chrome channels.

Of course the dev channel releases often have bugs and Chrome 10 is no exception. Commenters on the Google Chrome blog report that Google Sync no longer works with this release. If that happens to you, you might try disabling any startup flags you might have been using with previous releases, which reportedly solves the problem.

Along with the update to the JavaScript engine, this release features a number of bug fixes (particularly on the Mac platform) and some welcome refinements to the new tabbed preferences dialog. In addition to a better looking UI, the new settings page now has a search box to quickly find the preference setting you’re looking for.

Chrome 10 also features an updated message for the “clear browsing data” option on the preferences page. Instead of just deleting your browsing history and other items, you can now “obliterate the following items from the beginning of time.” We doubt that bit of linguistic whimsy will make it all the way to the stable release of Chrome 10, but it’s certainly more entertaining than the old “clear browsing data” message.

Provided Google sticks with its six week update schedule, Chrome 10 should arrive as a stable release in April 2011.

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File Under: Browsers, Web Basics
Jan
19
2011

Firefox 4 Ditches the RSS Button, Here’s how to get it Back

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That dark spot no one clicks? Yes, that's the RSS button

Firefox 4 is nearly complete. The next version of the venerable web browser introduces dozens of new features — everything from built-in bookmark syncing to hardware acceleration — but it also removes a few noteworthy features as well.

The now-departed status bar — which has been replaced by the add-ons bar — isn’t the only thing that’s been relegated to dustbin in Firefox 4. The familiar RSS icon in the URL bar is gone as well.

RSS has a long, complicated history and, despite its usefulness to the web at large, it just never caught on with mainstream users. RSS may power much of the web behind the scenes, but from a user’s point of view it remains an awkward tool with a terrible user interface. As Firefox developer Leslie Orchard points out, clicking the old Firefox RSS button would give you “a plainly-styled version of what you were probably already looking at on a site.” Of course, if you knew what you were doing, you could quickly either create a live bookmark or add the RSS feed to a feed reader. But for the uninitiated, the UI was confusing enough that Orchard says “some people would think they broke the page when the button was clicked on accident.”

According to Mozilla’s user study the RSS icon was clicked by a scant 3 percent of users. The only thing more neglected is the scroll left button, which is only present on very wide websites. With no one using the button, Firefox designers decided to remove it from the increasingly cluttered URL bar.

Cue the outrage and pleading for its return.

But just because the RSS button has lost its former position in the toolbar doesn’t mean you can’t easily subscribe to RSS feeds in Firefox 4. There’s a new menu option under the Bookmarks menu that will offer to “Subscribe to this page” and you can also add a subscribe button to your toolbar if you like. Just head to the customize option under the View menu and you’ll see a new toolbar button for RSS feed. Drag that button to the toolbar and you’ve restored the RSS button.

Given that seemingly no one used to original button, removing it hardly seems a bad thing, especially when it’s easy to get it back.

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