Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey.

To go along with the desktop release of Firefox 20, Mozilla has updated Firefox for Android.

The latest version of Firefox for Android is available in the Google Play Store.

Like its desktop cousin, Firefox for Android features a new per-window private browsing mode, which makes it easier to log in to two separate accounts for the same service at the same time — think Gmail for home and work, or personal and work Twitter accounts.

In addition to the new features found in the desktop release, Firefox 20 for Android offers a number of small fixes that improve the mobile interface. For example, the virtual keyboard no longer automatically comes up when you view your bookmarks, making it possible to see more of your actual bookmarks (if you tap the search field, then the keyboard will come up). The Top Sites list in your about:home page is now customizable.

Less welcome, the ‘Quit’ menu item has been removed from Firefox versions running on Ice Cream Sandwich and higher. That’s in keeping with Android platform conventions, but if you used the Quit menu regularly, it’s annoying. Fortunately the QuitNow add-on more or less covers the same ground.

Mozilla also continues to bring features to older versions of Android, adding support for H.264 video and AAC/MP3 audio hardware decoders to phones running Gingerbread and Honeycomb.

For more details on everything that’s new in Firefox 20 for Android, be sure to check out Mozilla’s release notes.

The great Google+ eclipse continues. Image: Screenshot/Webmonkey

Add it all up and it certainly looks like Google wants to not just shut down an unprofitable service, but to kill off its support for RSS entirely.

RSS is an open format that offers an easy way to keep track of news and get updates from your favorite sites without having to visit two dozen different web pages everyday. While it never gained much traction with mainstream audiences, RSS remains popular with news junkies and is an integral part of the web, providing the “glue” behind many popular news apps like Flipboard or Pulse.

Google’s RSS extension for Chrome made it easy to discover and subscribe to RSS feeds by displaying an icon in the URL bar of any page that offered a feed. Clicking the icon would then give users a variety of ways to subscribe to the feed — one of which was Google Reader.

Fortunately there are several alternatives for those previously relying on Google’s homegrown RSS extension. Google Operating System’s Alex Chitu points readers to two possible replacements, one of which appears to be a fork of the original add-on.

Is the disappearing Chrome extension, closed bug report and end of life for Google Reader all part of a conspiracy to kill off Google’s support for RSS? Possibly.

But if you follow the discussion around the bug/request for RSS in Chrome it’s clear that there was never any support for the idea with in Google. Closing the bug was most likely a bit of house cleaning.

It’s also possible that the RSS extension was removed from the Chrome Web Store simply because it would potentially drive traffic to the soon-to-be-closed Google Reader.

That said, it’s clear Google has no love for RSS and apparently no love for other open web tools, like the CalDav format, which was also dropped as part of the company’s Spring cleaning. Instead Google is encouraging developers to use Google Calendar’s proprietary sync tools (there is a whitelist you can apply for if “the Calendar API won’t work for you” ).

Trying to move users from RSS to Google+ and from CalDav to Google Calendar may not be part of any vast conspiracy, but you don’t need a tinfoil hat to recognize that the days of Google as a champion of open web technologies are over.

Please speak slowly and clearly. Image: Vikramdeep Sidhu/Flickr

Naturally there’s a considerable way to go before this vision of a voice-driven web browser is a reality, but if you’d like to see one early experiment check out developer Jordan Moore’s voice driven demo page.

Moore’s page uses voice input to control things like font size, page color and line-height. Try saying “Make it darker,” “Make the text larger” or, for some scrolling Comic Sans, “Clown Mode”.

You’ll need the latest version of Chrome to see the demo in action since that’s the only browser that currently supports Google’s proposed Web Speech API. You’ll also need to click the microphone icon at the top of the page to activate voice input. As Moore notes, you currently “can’t bind an input to the speech input field.” That’s probably a good idea for security/privacy reasons, but it does detract somewhat from the vision of a purely voice-powered web.

Moore’s demo is creative and fun to play with and it hints at a voice-controlled web of the future, but it also showcases just how far away that future remains.

While Google’s voice transcriber (which converts your speech to text behind the scenes) is fast, it’s still not very good. It struggled with many of my deliberate, slowly spoken commands — struggled enough in fact that I doubt it would work at all for anyone with a strong accent, let alone non-native speakers. (Moore says it was “incredibly difficult to test voice commands with a Northern Irish accent.”)

Moore is the first to admit that voice-driven apps like his experiment aren’t ready for prime time. “I’m not sure of the practicality of this experiment right now,” he writes. “But I can see voice commands becoming a bigger part of what we do in the near future.”

As Moore notes, now is the time for experimentation. It’s a time for developers to try out new ideas and discover how voice commands might fit with and perhaps even rearrange the web as we know it. “Let’s think of the possibilities and other situations this might apply to,” Moore suggests, “We can have a bit of fun with this.”

Twitter's new logo versus its Batman parody. Images: Twitter & Josh Helfferich

In case you’ve been too busy using third-party apps to notice, Twitter recently unveiled a new logo.

From now on, proclaims the Twitter blog, “this bird will be the universally recognizable symbol of Twitter.” At least they aren’t being too over the top about it.

Ridiculous proclamations aside, we rather like the new bird and we like it even more when rendered in pure CSS, which is exactly what the developers at Upperdog, a design agency in Stockholm, have done. View source to see how it works. It’s an impressive exercise in CSS, but of course since it will only work in the latest browsers, you’re probably better off sticking with Twitter’s official graphics for real-world use (or an icon font version).

Twitter has some rather strict new rules they’d like you to abide by when it comes to the new logo. For example, you shall not “use speech bubbles or words around the bird” nor shall you do anything fun like animate the bird. There are some half a dozen other “thou shall nots” surrounding the new logo, all of which are virtually unenforceable rules that won’t endear the company to anyone but lawyers.

Perhaps Twitter just forgot that this is the internet. Whatever the case, there are, as you would expect, no shortage of sites and images mocking Twitter’s rather draconian new guidelines, including our favorite, ViolateTwitterBrandGuidelines which will help you willfully violate all of Twitter’s rules. There are also quite a few logo parodies popping up including this awesome (rotated, tsk tsk) Batman version.

Theoretically it should be possible to create the Batman version of the Twitter logo in pure CSS, which we’d really love to see. The first person to do so will win the internet (and a Webmonkey baseball cap if you email us).

[Update: I've got two submissions of a pure CSS Batman Twitter logo, both of which are awesome so consider that contest closed. I will send out hats ASAP. Of course you can still post links to your work and you will win the internet. For a day. Also, here's a ton of other Twitter logo "avatars."]

Adobe has made changes to a page on an Adobe website that controls Flash user’s security settings—or more specifically, to the Flash .SWF file embedded in the page that opens the Flash website privacy settings panel. The changes are intended to prevent a clickjacking attack that uses the file to activate and access users’ webcams and microphones to spy on them.

The change comes a few days after a Stanford student revealed the vulnerability on his website. Feross Aboukhadijeh posted the exploit, along with a demo and a video demonstration, on October 18. He said in a blog post that he had notified Adobe weeks earlier of the problem, reporting the vulnerability to Adobe through the Stanford Security lab.

The exploit demonstrated by Aboukhadijeh uses an elaborate clickjack “game” that overlays the SWF panel over buttons in a transparent iframe. Here’s a screenshot of the panel before Adobe’s changes:

Through a series of clicks, the exploit was able to clear the privacy settings for Flash’s web camera controls and then authorize a new site to activate and access the camera video.The changes did not prompt any pop-ups or other user notifications.

The changes made by Adobe are to the behavior of the widgets in the privacy settings panel. Here’s a screenshot of the new panel, after the exploit was attempted:

While my test of the exploit still added feross.com to my list of sites in the privacy panel, it was only successfully added with an “always ask” setting for establishing a video link.

This article originally appeared on Ars Technica, Wired’s sister site for in-depth technology news.

See Also:

• Adobe Hopes Impressive 3-D Graphics Can Save Flash 11
• Metro-style Internet Explorer 10 Ditches Flash, Plugins
• Adobe Proposes New Standard for 3D Effects on the Web

It’s impossible to imagine the web as it is today without Steve Jobs in the story. Even something as seemingly simple as proportional width fonts might not exist were it not for Jobs and Apple, to say nothing of the WebKit project and dozens of other contributions.

Through it all Jobs and Apple always managed to keep the focus on people. Computers, useful as they are, are nothing without people. The web is the same. The web is about people. It’s a tool to help people imagine more, do more, be more.

So thank you Mr. Jobs for being crazy enough to think you could change the world and the people living in it. It’s clear that you did.

If you haven’t already, check out Steve Levy’s piece on Jobs over at Epicenter. Below is a video of Jobs’s 2005 Stanford commencement address.

The CSS 3 box-shadow property allows for drop shadows and other gradient-based effects without the need for images or other hacks. Box shadow works in Firefox 3+, Chrome, Safari, Opera and Internet Explorer 9. Older versions of IE will ignore the rule, but in most cases losing the shadows won’t be catastrophic for your design.

Box Shadows are handy and can do a lot more than just create a shadow effect. Check out this experiment for some examples of the myriad effects you can achieve with just a few box shadow rules (note that some only work in WebKit browsers). However, the box-shadow rule also showcases the ever-present differences between web browsers — even when the browsers all handle the CSS just fine.

While box-shadow works in all the browsers listed above, that doesn’t mean that it looks the same in every browser. For an interesting look at the variety of ways web browsers display box-shadow, head over to this handy guide to box shadow.

As you can see from the screenshot above, there’s considerable variation between the four browsers — everything from the almost non-existant shadow in some IE 9 examples, to the much heavier shadows in Firefox 4. That’s not to say that any one of them is right and the others wrong, just that there are differences. You’ll also find quite a bit of variation in font display and CSS gradients.

The point is, no matter how hard you try, you’re never going to to have pixel perfect rendering across web browsers. Nor do you need pixel perfect rendering across browsers. The real lesson of box shadows is that there will be variety, so stop worrying and get on with creating.

See Also:

• Advice From the CSS Guru: Embrace Prefixes
• Dealing With Browser Differences in CSS 3
• A Universal Solution for Rounded Corners in Your Designs

LessChrome HD Offers a minimalist take on browser chrome

The LessChrome HD experiment is available through the Mozilla Add-ons site and you can even try it out without restarting Firefox. LessChrome HD works in Firefox 4 and above.

LessChrome HD doesn’t dispense with the URL bar, it’s just hidden. Moving your mouse anywhere into the window chrome will reveal it, as will the old cmd-L keyboard shortcut or cmd-T to create a new tab. Mozilla refers to this as an “on-demand interface.” In other words, it’s there when you need to navigate and disappears when you’re just reading something on the page.

LessChrome HD is somewhat similar to the new hidden nav bar option in Chrome 13 and seems to hint at a new UI design direction for browsers: hiding the URL bar. The extra screen real estate is useful if you’re using a small screen laptop, but even if you’ve got a massive monitor the minimalist user interface helps focus your attention on the web page, rather than the web browser.

Not everyone likes this trend. Software developer Dave Winer likens the missing URL bar trend to building a house without a backdoor, writing that the URL bar is “the way you can be sure you can get somewhere even if all the powers-that-be don’t want you to go there.” I’d argue that LessChrome HD and Chrome 13′s URL bar experiments are more like hiding the backdoor than eliminating it. That said, I’d hate to see this become a default in any web browser. It seems to work well as it is — an add-on for those that want it, while those that don’t can safely ignore it.

See Also:

• Chrome 13 Introduces Experimental Hidden Nav Bar Option
• AwesomeBar HD Packs More Awesomeness into Firefox
• Mozilla’s ‘Home Dash’ is a Dashboard for Your Personal Web