Archive for the ‘Mobile’ Category

File Under: Mobile
Mar
14
2013

Google Boots Ad Blockers From Google Play Store

By

Google has pulled the popular Adblock Plus and other ad-blocking apps from the Google Play store.

To be clear, that means Adblock Plus and its ilk are no longer available for Android users. So far nothing has changed in the Chrome Web Store, which still hosts plenty of ad-blocking add-ons for Google’s web browser.

The move shouldn’t be surprising given that ad-blocking software cuts into Google’s bottom line, though that’s not exactly why Google says the apps were removed. The company says that such apps violate the Play Store’s terms of service, specifically that they cause “interference with another service or product in an unauthorized manner.”

Naturally if you’ve already installed AdBlock Plus — or any other affected ad-blocking app — it will continue to work, though there will be no more updates. For that reason, Wladimir Palant, creator of AdBlock Plus, suggests users “install our next release from our website once it is out.”

Palant calls the move “surprising” and wonders if it suggests “a course change at Google.” It doesn’t seem particularly surprising to me, but Palant’s thoughts on all the “for rooted phones only” apps currently available in Play seem well-founded:

Until recently the main distinction between Android and iPhone was that Android allowed you to install any app as long as it wasn’t malicious (meaning that it’s obvious what the app does). Google Play still allows apps stating “for rooted phones only” but I wonder whether these are next on the list to be removed — each of them performs “unauthorized actions”.

What’s really surprising is that Google ever allowed these apps in the first place.

Tags:
File Under: Mobile, Responsive Design, UI/UX, Web Basics
Mar
8
2013

Mobile Browsers Help Users Avoid Bloated Webpages

By

Stop feeding your website donuts. Image: D. Sharon Pruitt/Flickr.

Websites are getting fatter, dramatically fatter, with the average page size of sites tracked by the HTTPArchive now nearly 1.3 MB. If the current rate of page size increase continues, that number will reach 2MB sometime early next year.

That’s bad for pretty much everyone, but doubly so for mobile users with constrained bandwidth.

Fortunately for mobile users, the network increasingly seems to see large page sizes as damage to route around.

Services like Instapaper, Pocket or Safari’s Reader have long offered an easy way to strip out extraneous content. Now mobile web browsers are increasingly taking it upon themselves to speed up the bloated web.

The recently unveiled WebKit-based Opera Mobile borrows Opera Mini’s proxy-based Turbo Mode, or “Off Road” mode as it’s known now. Once only deemed necessary for feature phones (Opera Mini’s primary market) proxy-based browsing will soon be available in all Opera browsers.

Google’s Chrome for Android browser is getting ready to follow suit.

The beta channel release of Chrome for Android recently introduced an experimental data compression feature which Google says will “yield substantial bandwidth savings.” Chrome’s compression is nowhere near the level of Opera’s, but it does roughly the same thing — puts a proxy server between the user and the bloated site in question and then applies various speed improvements like using the SPDY protocol and compressing images with WebP.

To turn on the compression head to chrome:flags and look for the “enable experimental data compression” option.

Here’s Google’s description of the various optimizations:

For an average web page, over 60% of the transferred bytes are images. The proxy optimizes and transcodes all images to the WebP format, which requires fewer bytes than other popular formats, such as JPEG and PNG. The proxy also performs intelligent compression and minification of HTML, JavaScript and CSS resources, which removes unnecessary whitespace, comments, and other metadata which are not essential to render the page. These optimizations, combined with mandatory gzip compression for all resources, can result in substantial bandwidth savings.

In other words, Google and Opera are doing what web developers ought to be doing but aren’t. Just like developers should have been making reader-friendly pages, but weren’t, so “reader” modes were born.

It works too. In the video embedded below Google’s Pete Le Page shows how Chrome’s new proxy options take a page from The Verge and reduce it from a husky 1.9MB to a still fat, but somewhat better 1.2MB.

Want to make sure the internet doesn’t see your site as damage it needs to route around? Check out developer Brad Frost’s article Prioritizing Performance in Responsive Design, which has a ton of great advice and links, including what I think is the most important thing developers can do: Treat Performance As Design. In other words, if your site isn’t svelte and fast, it’s not well designed no matter how pretty it might look.

[Note: It is not ironic to post about web page bloat on a page that is, arguably, pretty bloated.]

Tags: , , ,
File Under: Browsers, Mobile, Multimedia
Feb
25
2013

Mozilla Wants to Put Your Phone Inside Firefox

By

What if your web browser were also your phone? That’s a future being imagined by Mozilla, Ericsson and AT&T.

Mozilla has combined Firefox’s WebRTC support with Ericsson’s Web Communication Gateway and AT&T’s API Platform to put together a working demo of calls — both voice and video — and text messages all made from within Firefox.

Mozilla’s “WebPhone” is one part Skype, one part Apple’s Messages and all parts web.

The demo builds on previous Mozilla efforts like the recent WebRTC video calling demo with Google, as well as the Firefox Social API demo Mozilla showed off last year (the Social API provides the glue that brings your mobile contact info into Firefox in the video above).

Aside from the cool factor, web-based calling has a potentially huge benefit for users — no more need for your phone. Mozilla’s WebPhone concept would make it possible to call from any device and the person you’re calling would still see your info.

WebPhone also makes it easy to receive calls and messages anywhere. Anyone who’s ever used Apple’s Message app knows that it’s nice to get messages on the desktop, eliminating the need to track down your phone when you’re already in front of a screen. WebPhone would make it possible to not only get messages on whichever device you’re using, but take calls as well.

Indeed what’s most surprising about Mozilla’s WebPhone demo is that AT&T and Ericsson are involved since more than anything they’re participating in a vision of the future where they are little more than pipes for sending data.

If you happen to be in Barcelona Spain for the ongoing Mobile World Congress event you can check out a live demo of WebPhone at the Mozilla booth. For now the rest of us will have to settle for the demo video above.

Tags:
File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Jan
11
2013

Preview Coming for Chrome for Android With New Beta Channel

By

Chrome for Android beta channel. Image: Scott Gilbertson

Want to be the first on your block to get new features for Chrome for Android? Google has a new beta channel release available just for you.

Starting today, you can install a beta channel release of Chrome for Android on any device running Android 4.0 or better. Note that it appears that you need to follow that link to get the beta channel release. Searching in the Google Play Store did not show the beta channel. The beta channel can be installed alongside the normal release channel.

The current release for the beta channel is Chrome 25, which is a significant update for the mobile version of Chrome, adding support for the new CSS Flexible Box Model syntax, dynamic viewport units (useful for responsive designs) and CSS calc(). The Android version of Chrome also gets the same updated IndexDB and CSS Filters support we looked at in the desktop release.

The beta channel release should also be a bit faster. The Chromium blog claims that improvements to the V8 JavaScript engine give the browser a 25 to 30 percent improvement on Google’s Octane benchmark tests.

The beta channel for Android offers some new tricks in Chrome’s developer tools, notably “big improvements in measuring your mobile performance with the Timeline’s frames mode.” Google also says it’s easier to navigate and edit your active scripts in the revamped Sources panel.

For more details on everything that’s new in the beta channel of Chrome for Android be sure to read through the Chromium blog’s announcement.

Tags: ,
File Under: Browsers, Mobile
Jan
8
2013

Mozilla Offers Sneak Peek at New Tricks in Firefox for Android

By

Image: Mozilla

The Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas has, thus far, been short on jaw-dropping new Android hardware. But fear not, Android fans, while new devices may still be just over the horizon, Mozilla has a sneak peek at a few new tricks coming soon to Firefox for Android.

To get the new year started Mozilla has released Firefox 18 for Android, which you can grab from the Google Play Store.

This release brings search suggestion to Firefox for Android, along with new phishing and malware protection. Once you opt-in to the new search suggestions, Firefox will — much like Google’s search page — start suggesting search terms as you type, making it faster to find what you’re after.

Like its desktop cousin, Firefox for Android will also now warn you whenever you visit a site that may be used for malware or phishing to protect users from malicious websites.

While Firefox 18 is a welcome upgrade for Android users, Mozilla has much more coming soon. The company recently posted a sneak peek at what’s in store for Firefox for Android in 2013.

The highlights include support for Private Browsing mode in the Android incarnation of Firefox. Private Browsing is getting an overhaul on the desktop side as well, with Firefox 20 expected to include a way to open Private Browsing tabs right alongside your normal tabs.

Presumably the new approach to Private Browsing will also ship with Firefox for Android, rather than the current, more cumbersome way of browsing privately, which requires hiding your current windows and opening an entirely new set of private windows.

Private Browsing is often dismissed as “porn mode,” but in truth there are plenty of uses beyond simply keeping your cookies and browsing history private. Think simultaneous logins, debugging with a “clean” visit to a site and anything else that requires separate cookies or sessions.

Next up on the Firefox for Android agenda is more device and language support. Unfortunately, the Mozilla blog doesn’t say which models might be added to the list of devices Firefox for Android supports, noting only that Mozilla is “bringing support for more devices all the time.”

The third sneak peek Mozilla is offering means more customization for Firefox on mobile — themes and more start page options will be coming soon.

Naturally, these three things aren’t the only changes due for Firefox for Android in 2013, but hopefully, now that the under-the-hood migration to native Android tools is done, Mozilla can focus its attention on new features and speed improvements.

Tags: ,
« OLDER POSTS