The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘browser’

We have written repeatedly that Windows itself is one of the main reasons why touchscreen computers have never caught the general public’s attention. The interface just wasn’t designed for finger input

More here:
Notice the lack of Windows in HP’s slate device

A few weeks ago, we noted that the Denver, CO-based design company Aten Design Group was holding a funeral for Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), the much-hated browser. The funeral took place last night. It wasn’t without controversy as there were protestors, and even a bouquet of flowers sent by Microsoft. But overall, it looks like it was a classy ceremony.

The blog Nonprofits and Web 2.0 was on hand and has posted several videos (a few of which I’ll embed below). There’s also a huge set of pictures in this Flickr album. As we noted originally, despite the funeral, IE6 is likely to live on for a few years as many sites are likely to still support it for the foreseeable future (though YouTube turns off support next week). And don’t forget all those pour souls in corporate jobs who are forced to use the browser because their IT departments won’t allow them to upgrade.

Microsoft itself is trying to get users to upgrade from IE6 (to their updated IE8), and the flowers that they sent to the funeral speak to that. The card sent with the flowers read: “Thanks for the good times, IE6. See you all @ MIX, where we’ll show a little piece of IE heaven. The Internet Explorer Team @ Microsoft“

[photos: flickr/atendesigngroup]

It was only December when Google officially launched extensions for its Chrome browser. Almost immediately, there were 500 extensions in the gallery as many developers had been working on them for a while. Today, Google is saying that number is now past 3,000. And that’s significant because it’s already pretty close to the browser known for its extensions (which it calls “add-ons”), Firefox.

The exact number of add-ons for Firefox is a bit unclear. If you go by the category counts on the add-on site, there are 11,623. But it’s hard to know for sure if there is any overlap between the categories (I couldn’t find any, but I’m not sure there isn’t). More significantly, if you go by Mozilla’s statistic site where they tout their numbers, they claim to only have around 6,000 add-ons. To quote them, “Over 6,000 free, community contributed Add-ons for Firefox – more than for any other browser“. And in case you think this data is out of date, notes other 2010 milestones, such as the launch of Firefox 3.6.

On its add-ons page, Mozilla notes that there have been over 1.8 billion add-ons downloaded and over 170 million in use. But neither of those numbers are the total number of add-ons, just how often they’ve been downloaded in total and the total (including the same ones) currently in use by people. Both of these numbers would blow away the still much smaller Chrome, obviously.

So, depending on what number you go with, Chrome already has either half or one quarter the number of extensions Firefox does — in just a few months. Why? Well, certainly there’s a lot of excitement around Chrome right now, which was just released in beta for Mac and Linux at the end of last year. In fact, certain statistics have it as the only major browser that grew in size last month. But for extensions specifically, the rapid growth is likely due to just how easy they are to make for Chrome and maybe more importantly, submit to the extension gallery.

Mozilla has done a number of posts recently on its Add-ons Blog to talk about the add-on approval process (here’s a good one from last month). Much like Apple App Store, Firefox add-ons much be reviewed and approved before they can go live. Chrome Extensions, on the other hand, go live immediately except for a handful that access things such as files on a users computer (those are flagged to be reviewed). Almost all of the extension developers I’ve talked to prefer Google’s method, and most of them develop for both. The quick rise in number of extensions for Chrome seems to speak to that.

Mozilla is trying to do something about the ease of development too. Its new Jetpack project allows developers to create add-ons using HTML, CSS, and Javascript — exactly how developers create Chrome extensions. So if this method of development catches on, it could help Firefox maintain its extension lead.

The battle continues.

Google has acquired online photo editing site Picnik, according to a blog post made by the photo editing startup today. Google also announced the acquisition on its blog. The entirety of Picnik’s blog post is embedded below.Terms of the deal were not disclosed in either posts.

Picnik is one of the fastest growing photo sites on the web. Picnik is a powerful, cloud-based photo editor that is integrated directly into Flickr, SmugMug and other photo repositories. Interestingly, Picnik is Flickr’s default photo editor. I’m assuming that will discontinue with the acquisition. It would make sense that Google would fold Picnik’s technology into its photo sharing product and Flickr competitor Picasa, which has some basic editing offerings but doesn’t compare to Picnik’s vast editing technologies.

Competing online photo editors include Fotoflexer and Photoshop.com.Picnik offers a base version of its photo editor for free, and subscription model for a more feature-rich offering. When we spoke to the startup’s CEO Jonathan Sposato a year ago, Picnik was cashflow positive, a little more than two years after launch.

Google is on a bit of a shopping spree; the search giant bought iPhone email app reMail, and social search startup Aardvark in a matter of weeks.

When Bitnik, Inc was created, our founders envisioned making great software for real people and giving users the power to edit digital photos in their browser, without having to purchase or download complicated software. While our first office in 2005 only had two desks, today we’ve grown to 20 employees and have become the world’s most fun online photo editor, with millions of visitors every month. As we’ve grown together over the years, we’ve worked hard to build a company of great people creating great software. We think our emphasis on strong partnerships, a fun culture and you, our users, is what has made Picnik so awesome.

And all this leads us to today’s exciting news: we’ve just been acquired by Google! What does this mean for Picnik? It means we can think BIG. Google processes petabytes of data every day, and with their worldwide infrastructure and world-class team, it is truly the best home we could have found. Under the Google roof we’ll reach more people than ever before, impacting more lives and making more photos more awesome.

What does this mean for you Picnikers? Nothing is changing right away, but Picnik now has more potential than ever before. The team that built Picnik from the grass up will continue making advanced and powerful photo-editing easier, more intuitive and more fun, so say tuned to hear about all the cool new stuff we’re working on. We want to thank you all for being great users, pushing us to grow and do big things. So thank you all for your continued support, and Happy Picniking!

If you’re either American or Canadian (or just a hockey lover), chances are you were watching the gold medal hockey game yesterday. And with over 400 million users, there’s also a good chance you have a Facebook account. So what does it look like when those two worlds collide? Like the picture above.

As you can see, Facebook status updates per minute exploded at two times yesterday. The first peak, at 2:29 PM PST, is when Zack Parise of the U.S. tied the game with a goal in the third period. The second, much larger peak took place at 2:54 PM PST, when Sidney Crosby scored the game-winning goal for Canada in sudden-death overtime. All told, more than 3.5 million status updates were sent during those two times, according to Facebook. Perhaps even more remarkably, that was twice the pace of updates for the rest of the day.

While Twitter has yet to release similar stats, the service also undoubtedly saw an explosion of tweets during those two times. At one point after the U.S. scored, my entire tweet stream except for two tweets was some variation of “USA USA,” “OMFG!! USA,” “GOAL HOLY JESUS USA !!!1!!!,” or the like.

Data released a week or so ago had Twitter seeing 50 million tweets per day now. Meanwhile, recent Facebook data says that the networks sees over 60 million status updates posted each day (from 35 million active status updaters).

Bit.ly, the biggest link shortening service around, just raised another modest $1.5 million in convertible debt from all of its existing investors on a pro rata basis, including betaworks, Jeff Clavier’s SoftTech, Ron Conway, Mitch Kapor, Chris Sacca, Howard Lindzon, and O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures. The funding amount appeared in a new SEC filing and I confirmed it with betaworks CEO and bit.ly president John Borthwick. “Everybody round the table wanted to put in more money,” he says. “No one wanted to let anyone else in.”

The round was structured as a convertible note because it was faster to do it that way, says Borthwick. He also gave me a quick update on bit.ly. Last month, 2.7 billion short bit.ly links were clicked on, with last week being the biggest ever (744 million short links clicked). As the realtime Web grows, so does bit.ly.

Bit.ly Pro, the branded short links for professional publishers and brands, is also “on fire,” he says. There was so much demand for the product that bit.ly had to close the beta 72 hours after launch. The startup is going through and provisioning the 5,000 companies who signed up in that period. Current bit.ly Pro beta customers include the New York Times (http://nyti.ms), TechCrunch (http://tcrn.ch), ABC, NBC, CBS, MTV, Fox, PBS, Dow Jones, Foursquare, Pepsi, the Gap, the Olympics, and about 100 of the Fortune 500.

The service is still free during the beta period, but bit.ly is working on a dynamic pricing model which will be announced later on.

Simply put: Google Chrome is amazing. Ever since it was finally released for the Mac late last year, I’ve been blown away by its big things (speed) and little things (search box that is also the URL box). But the true power of Chrome may lie in what third-party developers are able to do with it. This is what helped Firefox rip market share away from Internet Explorer over the past several years. Chrome is still young, but already making impressive gains in share each month as well. And the browser could be about to get even better.

In a post today on the Chromium Blog, software engineer Erik Kay notes the existence of experimental APIs for Chrome. Basically, these are new APIs that aren’t yet ready for prime time development, but are available on the dev builds of Chrome for developers to play with right now. The first two experimental APIs available sound very interesting. One, “experimental processes,” allows third party developers to access Chrome’s process model. This allows for extensions that could monitor CPU processes for individual tabs, for example. But the other is potentially more interesting. “Experimental history” is described as follows:

The history API lets you query and modify the user’s browsing history. When it’s finalized, we’ll also allow you to replace the history page with your own, just like you can replace the new tab page today.

While the initial reaction may be to freak out about an extension with such power, Google has so far been very good about keep malicious extensions out of the Chrome Extensions Gallery. While it is mostly open, Google does monitor extensions that attempt to access files on your computer, for example.

Still, having a browser API that an extension could use to read your history sounds a bit scary. But imagine some of the cool things it could do too, such as suggest better web pages for you to browse. Or, you could maybe even create a browser-based game that makes you go through this altered history to look for clues on something (seems natural for a movie promotion, or the like).

And remember, these are just the first two experimental APIs. The power lies in what else the Chromium team opens up to be modified. Already, Chrome Extensions have stuck it to Firefox ones by being arguably easier to create, and inarguably easier to get to users quickly. Now, it appears that Chrome Extensions are about to get even more powerful. And that should ultimately be good for both web developers and users.

[image: Columbia TriStar]

Data storage company Pivot3 has raised $25 million in Series D funding led by Focus Ventures with existing investors InterWest Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Mesirow Financial Capital Partners IX, and Silver Creek Ventures participating. This brings the startup’s total funding to over $75 million.

Pivot3’s storage solutions offer integrated server virtualization for data to enterprise customers. Its RAID-based solutions are generally used to store video surveillance data. The company has over 140 customers including Port of Seattle, the Mall of America, and the City of Trenton. The investment will be used to expand sales operations internationally and for product development.

In the first half of this year Adobe will release Flash 10.1, which will add support for the countless Flash apps around the web to many mobile devices, including Android. That sounds exciting, but it’s still unclear just how well these Flash apps will perform on mobile devices — for one, there’s the matter of processing power, but there are also issues with screen size and input methods. Now Taimur Asad over at Redmond Pie has installed a pre-release version of HTC Desire ROM (which includes Flash) onto his Nexus One to get an early look at how Flash will perform on the device. And for his first test, he’s put Zynga’s massive hit FarmVille though its paces. We’ve embedded his video walkthrough below.

So how does it look? Passible, at best. Some of Asad’s finger taps don’t seem to register properly (though he admits to not knowing how to play, so he wasn’t always clicking in the right places). But even if the game worked perfectly, the small screen size clearly isn’t ideal — you’re forced to constantly pan and zoom to get anything done. That said, the application did appear to run pretty smoothly on the Nexus One’s Snapdragon processor.

Given these issues, I suspect developers behind popular Flash applications will build versions that are optimized for mobile form factors. And while these Flash apps won’t work in the browser on the iPhone, developers should be able to bundle them into native applications using Adobe CS5’s export tool.

Note: If you want to try this yourself it’s possible to install the early ROM to your own Nexus One, but you may well run into some major bugs — this isn’t something for the faint of heart (yet).

Twitter is now processing 50 million Tweets a day, which comes to about 1.5 billion Tweets a month. Royal Pingdom recently reported that Twitter passed one billion Tweets a month last December and measured about 1.2 billion in January. On a daily basis, Royal Pindom was measuring 27 million Tweets a day back in November, 2009. But the latest data comes from Twitter itself (after attempting to strip out spam Tweets).

In January, comScore estimated that Twitter.com attracted almost 75 million unique visitors worldwide. But the number of messages going across Twitter is perhaps a more useful metric because it cuts across all third-party Twitter clients as well. At its most fundamental level, Twitter is a communications service, and 50 million messages a day is certainly a healthy number. What Twitter doesn’t say is how many of its users are responsible for those 50 million Tweets, or on average how many Tweets a day comes from each user. I’d love to see the distribution of Tweets across heavy, medium, and light users.

How many of those 50 million Tweets come from the top 10 percent of users? It seems to me that even though I follow more than 300 people on Twitter, I hear from the same 20 to 30 blabbermouths every day.