As Brad reported earlier today, Google is launching the first beta of its Webkit-based browser, Google Chrome, tomorrow!
Details of Google Chrome were originally leaked by the Google Blogoscope blog, who received their press copy of the Chrome comic book early, and as a result Google has moved the date of the release up 24-hours.
As a longtime Firefox user, I didn't pay too much attention when Microsoft announced the impending release of Internet Explorer 8 Beta 2. Still, after using the first beta and not running into the kind of horrible issues some of our readers reported, it warranted a download.
After a brief test drive, I'm pleasantly surprised by it. Installation was almost totally painless, though I wish Microsoft would figure out how to pull off a reboot-free install. Pages rendered quickly and accurately, the Firefox import worked very well, and my LastPass toolbar worked without asking for an upgrade. The Google toolbar, however, failed to work.
I also appreciate that IE prompted me to disable an addon - the Acrobat toolbar - when I closed it's toolbar. It's a small but useful feature. Slices and accelerators are showing a lot of promise, and the two I tried - Stumbleupon Buzz and send to GMail - worked nicely. You can see the Stumble slice at work in my screenshot.
I'm not sold on SmartScreen yet. I expected Web of Trust-like funcionality, but it's just not there. I ran around several keygen sites that make WOT cringe and didn't get a single alert from IE. That needs adressing. I like the idea of InPrivate as well, but would like to be able to mix tabs instead of running two separate instances of the browser.
If you do install the new version, be sure to check out the IE 8 Gallery, a new website that provides one-stop access to accelerators, slices, search addons, and toolbars. It's much, much less annoying than the IE7 addon site.
Let us know your thoughts if you've demoed the new beta!
We love software that packs a ton of tools and features into a single package. Call it Swiss Army Knife addiction. But it's just possible that HydraBrowser might go too far. At its most basic level, HydraBrowser is a web browser based on Internet Explorer, which means it will user whatever version of Internet Explorer you've got installed on your PC as its rendering engine. But HydraBrowser packs a ton of tools that you won't find in IE7 unless you spend the next week customizing it with add-ons.
Here are just a few of the things that set HydraBrowser apart from Internet Explorer:
Tabbed toolbar navigation that displays a separate set of menu options and icons for Tools, Edit, Favorites & Sidebar, Security & Settings, Tools, and RSS
A web gallery feature which lets you add thumbnailed bookmarks for pages you regularly visit to the navigation toolbar
Integrated translation tools using Google or Babelfish
Easy access to pop-up/ad-blocking settings as well as image, video, and sound blocking
Built in backup utility for saving your HydraBrowser settings.
Overall, HydraBrowser is choc full of useful features. And you can minimize the toolbars and sidebars which take up so much screen real estate in the image above. But overall, we're a little overwhelmed with the application. It suffers from a bit of Flock syndrome, in that there are so many tools you might never need that you kind of wonder why you'd ever want to use this browser instead of IE7 or Firefox.
We really like snarky comments. Or maybe we just really like the sound of our own voices, if by saying sound we mean "incessant tapping" and by voices we mean "keyboards." So needless to say, when we heard about iComment, we were intrigued.
iComment is a plug-in for either Internet Explorer or Mozilla Firefox-based browsers. The install instructions have a definite Windows slant, but we can verify it seems to work quite dandily in Linux. The idea behind iComment is simple. It allows you to leave your two cents on any website, or photo, or bit of text that appears on a page. You want the rest of the world to know how freakin' annoying a gratuitous bit of Flash on a page is? Tell 'em!
Of course, there are some issues that limit the usefulness of this plug-in at the moment. The first and foremost is the one that really can't be helped -- every plug-in starts somewhere. Through iComment, we are able to see the comments other people have left on a site, as well as our own. Very cool, but it's a bit of a hunt to find sites with comments, as this is a relatively new service. It is sort of interesting to hear, though, that the development team is working on a "friend/private" function where you can share comments with approved friends.
Recently, we told you about some ways to organize and manage your Firefox bookmarks, and one of our readers asked for similar suggestions to use with Internet Explorer. Since we want Michael and our other IE-using friends to loved too, we put together a few ideas for you. Favorites Box lets you add extra attributes to your bookmarks to make them easier to find and organize. Add comments, categories, tags, or login information or even set up a reminders. This one's free to try, but sets you back $19.95 if you want to keep it. Favorites Finder is a free extension that adds keyword functionality to your bookmarked sites so you can access them in just a couple of keystrokes. Just type a few letters of the site you're looking for and Favorites Finder will search your bookmarks and find all the matches, including whatever's in your folders. Power Favorites is a slick little extension that merges bookmarks from IE, Opera, and Firefox, then syncs them across multiples computers. You can annotate each bookmark with notes and tags, then view them by tag list or tag clouds. (Tag clouds? Are you listening, Foxmarks?) Power Favorites has a 30-day free trial, then it's $19.95.
When you finally decide to winnow down that super-long list of Favorites you've accumulated over the past two years, it's a pain to have to check each bookmark to make sure the site still exists. Use the free tool Favorites Inspector instead. It will plow through your whole list for you and alert you to any "404 error" pages so you can delete those Favorites instead of filing them.
Last year we introduced PicLens as a plug-in for Safari that allowed you to view full screen slideshows of photo galleries and images in a slick interface that nicely integrated with the browsing experience. Since then, support for both Firefox and IE browsers on both Windows and Mac have been added allowing the rest of the world to give this plug-in a try.
For those who haven't heard of it, PicLens supports Google, Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, Yahoo and a few other image services, making it a nice plug-in if you flip through photos and images on a regular basis, or just want to show off a gallery without downloading it. The slideshow expands to full screen, allowing you to enjoy all that screen real estate you gained with that 30" monitor this Christmas.
Did you run last week's round of Microsoft updates? Is your Internet Explorer version 6 crashing more frequently since then?
Microsoft last week issued a critical update for it's namesake browser, only to find out recently the fix is causing user's Internet Explorer to terminate while browsing websites. The unforeseen issues are fixed by either uninstalling the patch, or a cryptic registry hack.
Experts are unsure what is causing the issue. Some Internet newsgroups are inferring that anti-virus software is causing the issue. However an InfoWorld article has deduced that the issue is tied to sites that use secure login methods on a non-secure page (such as Microsoft Passport).
IT shops are being advised to put off auto-updating computers with the new round of patches for obvious reasons.
If you haven't already done so, it might be high time to give the parents the gift of Mozilla Firefox on your trip home for Christmas.
Today Web developers everywhere breathed a sigh of relief when Microsoft's Internet Explorer team revealed their latest milestone: IE8 now renders the Acid2 face properly!
For those who aren't familiar with this test, Acid2 is designed to determine how compliant a given web browser is with published HTML. A fully compliant browser displays a smiling yellow face. However, non-compliant browsers show varying degrees of garbage.
While we appreciate Microsoft's effort to embrace open web standards (finally), there is something a bit suspicious about the wording of the announcement. Apparently, IE8 only passes the test when operating in something called "Standards Mode".
We can only wonder what Microsoft is up to with such an odd distinction. Will IE8 run in Standards Mode or another mode by default in the future? Only time will tell.
Application are moving online at a frighteningly speed. People are increasingly using their computers as little more than internet terminals and media players. All of this innovation has happened, in part, because HTML and the browser marketplace has been relatively stable (even FireFox's original goal was to work like IE - only better). All that said, we've started to push Javascript, CSS, and HTML about as far as they can go.
Let's face it, HTML 4 is old. Really old. No doubt older than your PC. Older than your iPod (older than the very first iPod). It was built and designed solely for document rendering in the days before NetFlix added ratings to their website and Google started mapping. Now we have spreadsheets, word processors, work flow engines, games, and outlook style email clients running within the web browser. All on HTML 4. All with multiple hacks to make the code run correctly in as many browsers as possible. All with inherent security vulnerabilities . Isn't it time for a new version of HTML?
Douglas Crockford thinks so. The man behind JSON, JSLINT, and Manic Mansion (of all things) has a lot to say on the subject and offers so very timely and useful suggestions on what the next version should look like.
Here is the a quick summary of his wish list and an explanation of why Google (of all people) may make fixing HTML impossible.:
Last year eBay entered into an advertising agreement with Yahoo, part of that agreement was to build a co-branded toolbar. It's now available.
The new eBay toolbar uses both Yahoo and eBay features to power it. With it users can search for items on eBay or Half.com, and search with Yahoo using Yahoo Local, Yahoo Video and Yahoo Answers among others. The toolbar also has one click access to Yahoo Mail, and gives direct access to eBay.com. Complete with account guard to protect auction accounts and eBay auction Alerts.
The eBay toolbar featuring Yahoo is currently available for Internet Explorer Windows users only, with a Firefox version in development.
Online applications are great, but what happens when you can't get a connection to the internet? Whether it is because you are on an airplane, or in the middle of nowhere camping, and have to get certain emails, calendar items, or files, you are quite possibly out of luck. Its sure a bummer, and one of the reasons why so many people are hesitant about using online applications for their most important information.
Now Imagine being able to take your online applications, offline, and store that data locally in a completely searchable database? Google is making this possible with Gears. Google Gears is an open source browser extension that enables web applications to provide complete offline functionality. Google hopes that developers will use this new toolset to create offline web applications using JavaScript APIs to store and serve the applications resources locally, as well as store data in searchable databases. All of the syncing runs in the background without burning out the browsers memory usage, or slowing anything down.
The Google Gears Beta is currently available for installation on Windows XP,Vista, as well as on Mac and Linux machines. The plug-in works with Firefox 1.5+ and IE 6+. Google's first stop with Gears is Reader, with JavaScript APIs getting released shortly for data storage for use in applications like Docs and Spreadsheets.
The official Google Gears announcement will be made tomorrow to over 5,000 developers at Google's Developer Day gathering.
A couple of prominent web design gurus have announced a mini conference on "Web Browsers, Standards and Interop" during XTech 2007 in Paris on May 15th. The idea is to get browser vendors, web developers and designers all in the same room to spend a day talking about about how to make life easier for each other and, most importantly for website visitors. Ultimately, the organizers want a return to "the original platform and user agent agnostic vision of the Web."
That may sound like pie in the sky, but the organizers have made a good start: Microsoft, the Mozilla Foundation, and Opera Software have already committed to attending. Hopefully, the Apple WebKit developers and the KHTML team won't be far behind. Ideally, of course, some standards organizations would be involved, too. And who knows? Since this is all happening in Paris, some members of ISO and ECMA working groups just might stop by.
Personally, I'm excited about this. This conversation is about twelve years overdue. I don't expect to wake up on the morning of May 16th and discover that Trident and Gecko render CSS the same way, but it's a good first step in the right direction.
Compete aims to help users by showcasing websites that are trusted, transparent and add value to both the end user and the internet in general.
Compete has a few different products running, SnapShot, Toolbar, and Search. Snapshot is a handy service that provides traffic history and competitive analysis (similar to Statsaholic), which is great for search gurus and online marketing individuals. Toolbar is a browsing tool for IE and Firefox that provides real time SnapShot information to its users. Complete Search is built on Yahoo's search technology, and weaves in SnapShot results to provide trust scores and search results.
This site and the tools it offers isn't for everyone, but those that only care to be presented with what Compete sees as safe, popular and valuable to visitors might find it useful.
iReader lets users preview a links content before clicking on it. Unlike the somewhat annoying Snap, iReader is a browser extension that can be turned on and off by the user. Site previews can be really helpful in speeding up web surfing, and this application helps simplify them. iReader can give a list of text when links are moused over. Weeding out the good sites from the bad ones that you really don't care to visit, and speeds up your reading by decreasing load times. The iReader gives users a bulleted list of content for the website link, called an intelligent summary. Although still a little buggy, iReader is useful in deciding whether to click on a link or not.
iReader is available for both PC and Mac users running IE or Firefox.
SnipIT allows users to email selected pieces of text in Internet Explorer. Email clients that are currently supported with SnipIT are Microsoft Outlook, Hotmail, Yahoo! Mail, and Gmail. Microsoft released this little IE add-on last week, and sites like Download.com have it rated pretty popular already. I always find myself doing the copy and paste thing from websites into multiple text files that sit on my desktop. If they were contained in my inbox by a tool like SnipIT, I would be forced to act on them immediately. Too bad it only works in IE on a PC, because this seems like a useful little plug-in for all web users.
As Brad reported earlier today, Google is launching the first beta of its Webkit-based browser, Google Chrome, tomorrow!
We really like snarky comments. Or maybe we just really like the sound of our own voices, if by saying sound we mean "incessant tapping" and by voices we mean "keyboards." So needless to say, when we heard about 
iReader 
SnipIT 
