The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘firefox’

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 And in case you think this data is out of date, notes other 2010 milestones, such as the launch of Firefox 3.6.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.

Jolicloud, the French startup founded by well-known European entrepreneur Tariq Krim that produces a custom Linux-based operating system for netbooks, has just announced on its blog that it will be releasing a solid beta version of the OS later this month.

In a fairly surprising move, the company also announced that it is ditching Mozilla Prism in favor of Google Chrome to power the back-end of its app platform. All Web applications currently in the App Center – more than 600 by now – will automatically be converted to Chrome.

The move is interesting because many believe that Google’s own upcoming operating system, Chrome OS, will overshadow Jolicloud’s effort in a huge way. If that’s your line of thought as well, check out Michael Arrington’s recent interview of Krim on that very subject.

Jolicloud says the reasons for the switch, which was decided upon after evaluation of “different technologies and opportunities”, were Chrome’s speed (courtesy of its V8 JavaScript Engine), better memory usage, support for multiple authentication technologies right out the gate (Facebook Connect, Twitter Connect, etc.) and enhanced HTML5 and Web sockets support, among others.

However, Jolicloud is quick to point out that the move will not its commitment to Firefox, which will still be the default browser.

The startup says the upcoming version of the Jolicloud OS will feature a new desktop mode adapted for all screens larger than 11 inches and be compatible with 100% of Intel-based netbooks (see second screenshot below). In addition, an entirely new release of Jolicloud Express for easy installation on Windows netbooks is on its way.

(Full disclosure: Krim will be showing off the new version of Jolicloud next week at Plugg, a conference I organize. I didn’t know that for sure until after his blog post went up).

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]

Google Buzz might have been pushed out too soon, but there are already at least a dozen apps for Google Buzz, most of them unoffical. That’s not a lot, but it’s enough to start BuzzAware, a Google Buzz app directory. BuzzAware is started by the same folks behind Twitdom, a Twitter app directory with more than 1,500 apps.

Some of the apps in BuzzAware include:

• Browser add-ons for Firefox (Buzz It!) and Chrome (Chrome Buzz)
• Google Buzz desktop app built on Adobe Air
• Buzz buttons (Buzzr) and counters (BuzzStats) for your Website or blog
• A bunch of WordPress plugins
• A Buzz search engine (Buzzy)
• Ways to send your Buzz stream to Twitter (BuzzCanTweet) and import your Twitter contacts to Buzz (Tw2Buzz)

If Buzz grows, so will this list of apps.

Email overload is a pain for many reasons, but above all, the worst thing about an overstuffed inbox is the fact that you sometimes miss messages you shouldn’t have, or you forget to keep in touch with the people who are important to you. If you’ve run into these issues before, a new Y Combinator-funded startup called Etacts might be exactly what you’re looking for.

Etacts is similar in some ways to CRMs like Highrise and SalesForce, but founders Evan Beard and Howie Liu say they’re focusing on helping people stay in touch, rather than on teams looking to complete sales. The service’s home screen features a list of people you know, ranked by how often you communicate with them via Email or phone. The list includes information like the total number of times you’re interacted with each person and when you first began talking with them online. Most important, it lets you know how long it’s been since you last contacted them, and lets you set regular reminders — if you go too long without talking to someone, the service will send you an alert.

To start using Etacts, you enter your email account login credentials (at the moment the service only works with Gmail or Google Apps, but support for any IMAP service provider is coming soon). From there, Etacts will examine your inbox to automatically build out your list of important contacts, so you don’t have to do any work. You can also optionally enter the credentials for your mobile carrier, which Etacts can use to track who you’ve talked to over the phone or have text messaged.

The service can use this data to offer plenty of related features. If you tell Etacts which of your contacts are especially important, it can automatically flag any new incoming messages. The service offers a plugin for Google Chrome and Firefox that adds a new button to Gmail’s interface: “Send and Remind Me”. Hit that, and you’ll send the message and automatically add a reminder to your Etacts account. If too many days go by without receiving a response, Etacts will remind you to resend your message (or to ask your contact what’s up).

And, if you really want to pump out your correspondence, you can turn to Etact’s message sending feature. This allows you to build templates of messages you commonly send, with variables for each person’s name. It’s essentially a mail merge, but it makes it easy to manually tweak each message for each recipient — you can construct 90% of the message from a template, and then add a personal touch yourself. You can get a feel for how you can modify the base message from this screenshot.

I really like most of the features Etacts has to offer — it’s straightforward enough that it didn’t take long at all to figure out how everything worked, and it seems like it would appeal to any professional that has to manage a sizable contact list. My biggest gripe with the service is the fact that it requires users to hand over their email login credentials to Etacts. The company only stores your Email headers (as opposed to the full message body), and I’m significantly more paranoid than your average consumer about this sort of thing, but other startups have had issues with this in the past. For example, reMail (which was just acquired by Google) launched with Email search that was powered by its own servers, and then switched to a model where searches were done locally on the user’s mobile phone (so that credentials weren’t exchanged).

Google Chrome and Firefox both throw up a malware warning for AOL’s Chinese portal (click at your own risk), and Google even warns people who run a search for ‘AOL China’ that the site may harm their computer, as you can tell from the screenshot above.

As far as I can tell, Internet Explorer 8 (with Protected Mode turned on), Bing and Yahoo Search don’t flag anything out of the ordinary with the website. Curiously, neither does AOL Search, which is powered by Google.

I continued to the site, which is located at both chinese.aol.com and cn.aol.com, and the warning message tells me the website is getting flagged because it contains elements from the site www.tq121.com.cn, which is said to appear to host malware. The URL www.tq121.com.cn earlier led me to weather.com.cn, but no warning messages pop up when visiting that site.

Digging a bit deeper, I found that the Safe Browsing Diagnostics page for chinese.aol.com reports the domain name tq121.com.cn to function as intermediary for distributing malware hosted at xzgfgh.8866.org. (Best not to visit any of those, obviously).

Looking at the Safe Browsing Diagnostics page for the latter URL turns up red flags for sited hosted on the network The Planet, a hosting company that is suffering from a couple of security issues of its own at the moment, as you can tell from similar warning messages appearing when visiting legacy domain domains.theplanet.com.

We’re sure that these are just pieces of a bigger puzzle, but it’s definitely worth reporting that a website owned by an Internet company the size of AOL appears to be used to distribute malware. And frankly, it’s worrying that Google and Firefox both raise warning flags while behemoths like Microsoft and Yahoo consider everything to be perfectly safe.

(Thanks for the tips, Michel Wester and Andrew Hartnett)

Zynga’s smash hit FarmVille is about to reach a new audience of future tractor riding, crop harvesting fiends. Today, the company announced that FarmVille will now be featured on MSN Games, Microsoft’s casual gaming portal. This marks the first time that a Zynga game will be featured on a full-fledged gaming site. And it’s only the first step: Zynga says that more of its games will be appearing on MSN Games and Windows Live Messenger in the near future.

Unfortunately it looks like you’ll need either IE or Firefox to get this working. Which is just stupid, given that FarmVille works fine on just about every browser out there when you play it on Facebook. We’ve asked Zynga why this is (it almost certainly has something to do with the way MSN Games is set up).

Zynga has made no secret of its desire to expand its games beyond Facebook.com. In November, the company launched a dedicated web portal at FarmVille.com, and it’s doing the same thing for other games as well. Of course, the games still pull in a user’s social graph through Facebook Connect, but by deploying these games outside of Facebook proper, Zynga can get more control over the gaming experience (in the case of its own websites) and gain greater distribution (in the case of deals like this one). And Zynga still has 75 million users playing FarmVille on Facebook every month.

In honor of the launch, MSN Games has skinned its site with a FarmVille theme.

Zynga’s smash hit FarmVille is about to reach a new audience of future tractor riding, crop harvesting fiends. Today, the company announced that FarmVille will now be featured on MSN Games, Microsoft’s casual gaming portal. This marks the first time that a Zynga game will be featured on a full-fledged gaming site. And it’s only the first step: Zynga says that more of its games will be appearing on MSN Games and Windows Live Messenger in the near future.

Unfortunately it looks like you’ll need either IE or Firefox to get this working. Which is just stupid, given that FarmVille works fine on just about every browser out there when you play it on Facebook. We’ve asked Zynga why this is (it almost certainly has something to do with the way MSN Games is set up).

Zynga has made no secret of its desire to expand its games beyond Facebook.com. In November, the company launched a dedicated web portal at FarmVille.com, and it’s doing the same thing for other games as well. Of course, the games still pull in a user’s social graph through Facebook Connect, but by deploying these games outside of Facebook proper, Zynga can get more control over the gaming experience (in the case of its own websites) and gain greater distribution (in the case of deals like this one). And Zynga still has 75 million users playing FarmVille on Facebook every month.

In honor of the launch, MSN Games has skinned its site with a FarmVille theme.

This has not been the greatest start to the year for Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser. Days after news of the latest security flaw in Internet Explorer, Google is adding fuel to the fire by phasing out support for IE6 for two of its Google Apps products, Docs and Sites (which recently got an aesthetic upgrade).

For both the consumer and enterprise versions of Google Docs and Sites, the only browsers that will be fully compatible are Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0+, Mozilla Firefox 3.0+, Google Chrome 4.0+ and Safari 3.0+. The phase out will take place beginning March 1. While you’ll still be able to access Docs and Sites from IE6, you will have restricted functionality and many features won’t work, making the applications for the most part useless. We hear that Google will be phasing out IE6 support for the remainder of Google’s major products, including Gmail and Calendar, over the coming year. This isn’t Google’s first move to phases out IE6 functionality for its products. Last July, the search giant began phasing out YouTube support for the Microsoft browser. For users of IE6, the online video site began pointing to ‘modern’ browsers like Google Chrome, Internet Explorer 8 and Firefox 3.5 as alternatives. A similar prompt will now take place on Docs and Sites for users who are browsing from IE6.

For the most part, the tech community, including web developers and designers, tend to have a profound dislike of Internet Explorer 6. Obviously, the browse has many issues, including low performance and major security flaws. Even Microsoft itself, is recommending that all its customers upgrade to Internet Explorer 8, the latest version of the browser which has better security in place. The main reason why IE6 is still being used at all is because of corporate IT departments across the globe needing to make upgrade decisions. Unfortunately, a number of these companies still have to use the browser because they have systems in place built specifically to run with it. To add insult to injury, IE6 continues to lose market share in the browser world.

And Google isn’t the only technology company that is looking to close off support for IE6. Digg has hinted at wanting to cut support for the browser too. I have a feeling that as Google joins the web in gathering pitchforks around IE6, more companies will flock to join the movement.

One common complaint about Digg is that you have to visit the site to actually digg anything. Well, unless you use the Digg toolbar, which caused a bit of controversy when it launched last year. But last month, Digg announced a new API that made it so developers could finally create apps that would allow for the digging of items outside of Digg.com. And today, the service is eating its own dogfood by releasing two such applications: an updated extension for Firefox, and a brand new extension for Chrome.

Both extensions now not only show you a Digg count when you’re browsing a story that has been submitted to the service, but, when authorized, they allow you to digg that story right from the overlay drop-down the extension creates when clicked on in the toolbar. Both are fast and simple — especially the Chrome one.

And you can also easily share the content you are browsing on Twitter or Facebook with a click in this drop-down. The link shared is a Digg-shortened URL that includes the DiggBar if you’re signed in and using it. You can also email any story with one click or submit it to Digg if the story hasn’t already been.

The Firefox extension continues to offer a bit more functionality, including the ability to see what your friends on the service are digging. But they’ve made the resulting pop-ups less intrusive. And they’ve also made the extension toolbar itself shorter.

It’s good to see Digg actively promoting this use of the service outside of its main domain even though that won’t help bolster its stagnating traffic. But as we’ve seen with Twitter, even though a website may have stagnating traffic, use of the service through its APIs can still be on the up and up, which is important. And that’s what this new Digg API is all about.

Find the Firefox extension here and the Chrome one here.