There are a few new user interface features (spell checking, an option to automatically download and install future version updates, and changes to its emailing functionality), and changes to assist developers (improved and altered transparency capabilities, improvements to their Dragonfly developer toolkit), but the majority of the noteworthy items in this alpha release have to do with the rendering engine and overall speed.

You can learn more and download it here: http://www.opera.com/browser/next/

The next public update of IE8 (for Windows Vista- and Windows XP-based operating systems as well as the Windows 7 Beta) includes improvements to Compatibility View that help end-users when they visit web sites that are not yet ready for IE8’s new, more standards-compliant defaults.

Here’s the short background:

In IE8 Beta 1 the newest standards-based rendering was the default view. It was left up to site authors to trigger into the compat mode as needed. While reserving judgement on whether that was the right strategy, it’s fairly obvious that sites that aren’t up to standards are often sites without attentive staff on hand to throw the trigger. So users suffered.

In IE8 Beta 2, they added a “compat view” button to the browser’s button bar. Now, “savvy end-users” could drop into compat mode as needed. Unfortunately, again, it’s the non-savvy users most at risk of suffering a poor user experience. They don’t know to click the button.

Even though many sites have taken the last several months to update their code bases to be ready for IE8, MS’s data shows that many major sites are still at risk. Furthermore, “We could also see from our instrumentation that not all IE8 visitors to those sites were clicking the Compatibility View button. So, large groups of people were having a less than great experience because they weren’t aware of the manual steps required to make certain sites work.”

Which brings us to tonight’s post. When users install IE they will be able to opt-in to what I’m calling “crowd-sourced compat mode toggling”

The system has some nice design elements. In addition to monitoring overall popular sites for user behavior they’re also maintain regional (and presumably segmentation) lists of top sites so that the Top N sites (they can’t track all sites) globally don’t drowned out popular regional sites.

Another positive: They indicate that sites will be able to opt-out of this program if they wish.

On the negative side, it seems that “site” is only at the top-level-domain granularity. I suspect they’ll want to revisit this because some large networks have very diverse subdomain properties. One size doesn’t fit all in this case. (Perhaps they could look at the scope of the cookies set by the domain?)

Another potential negative is that it seems like they’ll only be pushing the list out every two months. That’s awfully slow it seems.

All in all, not a bad idea. We’ll see how the implementation details play out.

Meermeer simplifies the process by letting developers send local code to the Meermeer server and almost instantly receive back screenshots of that page rendered in different browsers and on different operating systems, with no need to go live with the code.

> In the U.S. and Europe, web surfers are leaning forward, one hand on the mouse and the other on the keyboard, typing and mousing equally. In China, however, the process is much different. Web surfers there tend to lean back from the monitor while keeping one hand on the mouse, the other hand dangling. The keyboard is used much less frequently as much of the navigation is done with clicks instead.

The new version of Firefox, Firefox China Addition (beta) includes at least four interesting differences:

> * New mouse-based controls for common functions that are often invoked by shortcut keys in North America and Europe, which isn’t as common a habit of Chinese users > * Some Maxthon-parity features such as the ability to close a tab using double-click > * A drop-down button on the toolbar for launching common system utilities like a calculator, a notepad, a screenshot grabber and an image editor (editing images and pasting screenshots is a very common activity in China). Maxthon is usually included on the CD with the pirated copy of Windows XP that many Chinese have installed. > * A new sidebar called “Live Margins” which allows the user to drag any highlighted text to open a new drill-down search which will show you semantically relevant content as well as allow you to store pictures, videos and music you encounter so you can return to it or play it from the sidebar without interrupting your usual browsing tasks.

Read a more thorough overview on the always outstanding ReadWriteWeb blog: http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/firefoxchinaeditioneverythingalocalbrowsershouldbe.php

KidZui is a Firefox add-on that with one click turns Firefox into a kid-safe environment with over a million kid-friendly websites, games, pictures, and YouTube videos. Real parents and teachers review content for KidZui so your kids can surf independently.

From their announcement:

BrowserMob is the world’s first load testing service that uses real browsers (Firefox 3.0.3 to be exact). It’s on-demand, low-cost, and super easy to get started with. And best of all: you only have to pay for what you use.

Read all about it: http://blog.browsermob.com/2008/11/open-for-business/

We should start by building the infrastructure for an extension system that can support different types of extensibility. The system should be able to support an open-ended list of APIs over time, such as toolbars, sidebars, content scripts (for Greasemonkey-like functionality), and content filtering (for parental filters, malware filters, or adblock-like functionality). Some APIs will require privileges that must be granted, such as “access to the history database” or “access to mail.google.com”.

Extension components will typically be implemented using web technologies like HTML, JavaScript and CSS with a few extra extension APIs that we design. Extensions will run in their own origin, separate from any web content, and will run in their own process (with the exception of content scripts, which must run in the same process as the web page they are modifying). Some form of native code components may also be supported, but the goal is to minimize the need for this in extensions.

Read the full proposal and follow the project at dev.chromium.org.

Google Chrome did a smart thing: Less. They unified the search box and address bar, since that’s what people do anyway. That gives us back precious pixels for the only thing that’s as important to an average web user as where they’re going: Who they are. Identity belongs in the browser.

He credits Chris Messina with giving him the food for thought that resulted in this compelling vision:

Imagine if your web browser really knew who you were on the web. Just as you login to your computer, what if when you fired up your browser, it said “Hello Dave” and asked you to “unlock it” as well (Chris Messina was quite influential in my thinking about it this way). In doing so you become securely logged into your OpenID provider (or maybe more than one of them) and as you move around the web your browser takes care of automatically logging you into the sites that you want to be, asking you about others, and helping you register with new ones using your OpenID. Argue as much as you want about the details in making this happen, but I think it’s hard to disagree that making it easier for people to manage and use their identity (or identities) online is a bad thing.

It’s not all pie-in-the-sky: He notes that “Today, MySpace, Flock and Vidoop released a prototype of their implementation toward this vision with OpenID for Flock.”

Where do I sign up?

While this exercise was not a real scientific study, it provided enough evidence to point to clear areas of power consumption in every day web applications.

He tests IE 7.0 and Firefox 3.0.4 on a Dell laptop.

The Results

> The Results: There were several significant results that were found during the tests. The first was that the most important attribute of a website in terms of power consumption appears to be things like Flash animations and AJAX. These draw a significant amount of power long after the page has completed. During the tests it was found that the amperage tracked almost perfectly with the task manager CPU graph, visually giving clues as to timed events.

Flash is the least “green”

The number one most abusive technology appeared to be Flash banner ads. For the most part they are no different than the rest of the site, except that they continue to rotate. They could have easily been programmed to stop rotating after a few seconds, to return the site to a conservative power usage, but they weren’t. While other technologies can and did cause power spikes, they caused issues far less often than Flash, making it the least “green” technology we came across.

Browser	Amperage	Watts
Average across entire Alexa 100 in Internet Explorer 7.0	0.414	48.852
Average across entire Alexa 100 in Firefox 3.0.4	0.406	47.908
Average for top 10 power abusers in Internet Explorer 7.0	0.474	55.932
Average for top 10 power abusers in Firefox 3.0.4	0.481	56.758
Average for top 10 power abusers in Firefox 3.0.4 with NoScript and Adblock Plus	0.382	45.076

Conclusion

Conclusions: It does appear that it would be possible to surf in a “green” manner. That is, reducing the amount of client side scripting that runs within the browser, returning the browser to a static page while not viewing the page or closing the browser when not in use, and using power save modes built into the operating system. While the differences may appear to be minor in power usage, power consumption does add up over time.

The study is non-scientific, but still quite enlightening. Check it out.

More specifically:

PhoneGar PhoneGap is a free open source development tool and framework that allows web developers to take advantage of the powerful features in the iPhone SDK from HTML and JavaScript. We’re trying to make iPhone app development easy and open. For many applications a web application is the way to but in Safari you don’t get access to the native iPhone APIs, and the that’s the problem we’re trying to solve.

With that goal, about 15 folks showed up at the first PhoneGap sprint this page weekend and got quite a bit accomplished:

Here’s a quick summary of what we accomplished on the various platforms now in the PhoneGap umbrella.

iPhone

• Added network detection
• Notify user if no network is detected
• Memory clean ups
• Made default image/screen more intelligent

Android

• Accelerometer
• Basic camera support
• Offline support
• Bugs fixed

Blackberry

• GPS is totally working with the W3C API (maybe some error states don’t work but we’ll get there)
• Camera works
• Mapping works
• Phone calls work
• Vibration works