September 01, 2006
Net browser promises secure surf
BBC NEWS | Technology | Net browser promises secure surf
A web browser has been released that promises total privacy for its users.
Browzar, as it is known, automatically deletes all traces of the pages a person has visited, and the terms that they have searched for on the web.
Most web browsers, including Microsoft's Internet Explorer, allow users to do this manually.
The developers of the browser say that it will be useful for people who want to protect their privacy on work PCs or when using shared PCs in net cafes.
Unwritten history
Browzar is similar to Internet Explorer but has had much of its software code rewritten.
It works by automatically deleting all private information about your surfing habits
Unlike other browsers it does not record the web address for any website you visit. So next time you logon, the names of sites such as http://news.bbc.co.uk are not stored in the drop-down address bar at the top of the browser.
This also means that there is no web history folder on a user's hard drive, that records visited sites.
So called cached webpages are also not stored. Normally these webpages are kept on a computer's hardrive to speed up the download times of frequently visited websites.
Computer users crowd round a screen
The browser prevents other people looking at private information
Using a cached page means a computer only has to download those elements of a site that has changed.
The browser also deletes "cookies" at the end of each browsing session.
A cookie is a small program that sits on your computer and identifies you to the website.
Cookies may hold personal preferences about the site and details of how you reached the page.
The browser also does not use an auto-complete function, that works like predictive text on a mobile phone, and can give away terms previously used on search engines.
Currently, web users can delete all of these files manually, but it is often fiddly and would need to be done after every browsing session.
Stiff competition
Browzar is entering a market dominated by Internet Explorer.
Earlier this year, web analysis firm One Stat released figures that showed it had an 83.5% market share. In 2004, that share stood at 95%.
Rival browsers such as Firefox and Opera have been gaining significant inroads into the browser market.
But the developers of Browzar do not see their product as a rival. Instead they say their software is a complement to existing applications and is "designed to be run at those times when we want privacy."
At present the free download is available for PCs running the Microsoft Window's operating system. It is currently offered as a "beta", or test version.
New versions for Apple Macs and Linux machines are expected soon.
September 1, 2006 at 09:31 AM in Browsers | Permalink | Top of page | Blog Home
November 25, 2005
Firefox plans mass marketing drive
Firefox plans mass marketing drive - Internet - News - ZDNet Asia
By Ingrid Marson, ZDNet UK
Wednesday, November 23 2005 07:48 AM
The Mozilla Corporation is gearing up to launch a large-scale marketing drive when Firefox 1.5 is released.
Christopher Beard, the vice-president of products at Mozilla Corporation, told ZDNet UK on Monday that there is a "strong likelihood" that Firefox 1.5, the next major version of the open source browser, will be released on 29 November.
Beard said the Corporation is planning a "big marketing push" that will coincide with the release of 1.5. This will include a community marketing campaign that will encourage Firefox fans to tell the world about their favourite browser by publishing home-made videos on a Mozilla Web site.
"You will have real people telling you about Firefox's features--what's cool and great," said Beard. "People can create the video and upload it to the Mozilla site. The video will then be reviewed and put on our Web site, with a link from their location."
The videos will be hosted on the SpreadFirefox community marketing site, which will display a world map with a dot marking each location where a video has been created.
Beard said he doesn't know how many people will get involved in this campaign, particularly as it is dependent on contributors having video equipment, such as a camcorder or a Web cam.
"It's hard to tell. With The New York Times' ad campaign we thought it would take weeks to raise the money, but in less than 48 hours we had already raised enough for an ad," said Beard. "With this [campaign] it's also uncertain--are we going to get hundreds, thousands or tens of thousands of videos?"
As the videos are likely to be posted in many languages, Mozilla will use international volunteers to filter the videos. It has already recruited teams to cover 20 European languages, according to Tristan Nitot, the president of Mozilla Europe.
Prizes for the best videos will be awarded at the end of the campaign. The Mozilla Corporation is also launching a separate competition to create a 30-second advert for Firefox, which will be open to everyone but will be particularly targeted at film students.
As well as the video campaigns, the Mozilla Corporation plans to launch a consumer-oriented Web site next week. Mozilla.com, which currently hosts a placeholder page, will in future be the main entry point for the Mozilla organisation, rather than Mozilla.org, Beard explained.
"Part of our marketing strategy is to target more of a general consumer audience, who don't necessarily have a technical understanding, so we are looking to make our Web sites more approachable," said Beard.
Mozilla is also hoping to improve its consumer focus by offering a major release every six to nine months, rather than every two years--as was the case when it was part of Netscape. In keeping with this new strategy, Firefox 2.0 is scheduled for release in the middle of 2006 and Firefox 3 is planned for the first quarter of 2007.
There have been more subtle change in Mozilla's marketing strategy over the last year. In 2004, before the release of Firefox 1.0, the Mozilla marketing contact predicted that Firefox would obtain 10 percent market share by the end of 2005. This week, Beard refused to provide any new targets, merely saying that Mozilla is "looking forward to continuing growth".
This change appears to have been partly driven by the proliferation of browser statistics, with companies pointing out any decrease in Firefox and many conflicting statistics available over Firefox's overall market share.
"It's difficult to get good statistics. People can use statistics in different ways," said Beard
November 25, 2005 at 04:40 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (15) | Top of page | Blog Home
November 05, 2005
Browsing goes up a notch with Flock
The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Browsing goes up a notch with Flock
By ANICK JESDANUN
The Associated PressWeb browsing used to be mostly about just that: Surfing site after site for information and goods.
But lately, more people are using the Internet as much to produce and share things as to consume them.
A new browser called Flock seeks to address the new reality of enhanced online creativity and community.
It's a souped-up version of the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox browser, with features added to help users create Web journal entries and share favorite Web sites.
Although Flock is still in an early preview mode, meaning it is crash-prone among other problems, it offers a good sense of what to expect.
I find Flock does succeed in taking Web browsing to a whole new level.
With Flock, traditional "bookmarks," also known as "favorites," are out the window. Instead, you "star" a page, and by doing so, you can automatically send the link to an online account you create at shared-bookmarking service Del.icio.us.
That means, in theory, you can easily access your favorite sites from any computer, not just the one where all your bookmarks are stored. (In practice, because it's still in preview, the synchronization is far from perfect).
Plus, you can discover new sites and help others do so. Del.icio.us lets you see which other members have the same sites listed in their collections. From there, you can see what other sites they frequent.
The thinking is that if two people have the same bookmarks, they are likely to have similar interests and would want to discover similar sites.
advertising
Flock also gives you a way to easily tag the online bookmarks to help with sorting and discovery.
Instead of using an arbitrary folder to hold a link for a site on the TV show "Lost," you can tag it "television," "Lost" and even "ABC."
You can use Flock's "favorites" manager to see only links carrying a certain tag, or you can search through other people's Del.icio.us collections by tag.
Flock also has a number of features meant to help people post to their Web journals, or blogs.
A built-in word processor lets you submit entries directly to some of the leading blog services, including Six Apart's TypePad and Google's Blogger.
If you come across something you like on the Internet, you can highlight the text, right-click your mouse and select "Blog This."
The word processor launches, with the text and a link to the site already filled in. All you need to do is add some comment and a title, and click "publish."
One feature lets you easily drag photos from the Yahoo!-owned photo-sharing site Flickr for use in your blog.
About the only thing missing is a tool for publishing entire Web pages, not just blogs. There are no plans for one; such a tool was explicitly removed from the Mozilla browser suite by the people who created the Firefox offshoot.
Besides producing and sharing, Flock has a number of features to assist in discovering. Start typing a word into the search box and Flock will find bookmarks and recently visited pages containing that string in the address or title.
The free browser is available for Windows, Mac and Linux computers, and its underlying code is open for anyone to examine and improve upon.
Developers say many more features are to come, including ways to seamlessly upload photos to your Flickr account and better integrate with social-networking services. Other bookmarking, photo and blogging services will also be supported eventually.
A more stable test version of Flock should be available next month, with a final release early next year.
I wouldn't recommend you replace your existing browser with Flock yet. But if you do more than passively visit Web sites, I'd suggest keeping a close watch.
November 5, 2005 at 09:31 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (21) | Top of page | Blog Home
November 04, 2005
Firefox back on the up
PC Pro: News: Firefox back on the up
Firefox has cornered 11.5 per cent of the browser market share, according to Web monitoring company OneStat.com.
Internet Explorer still dominates the landscape with a recorded global usage of 85.45 per cent. In contrast to Microsoft's browser, however, which saw a 1.18 percent decline since the end of April, the open source browser saw its usage share increase, up 2.82 per cent.
Last month, research firms reported Firefox was actually losing share, possibly because of a change in the way the new Netscape browser identified itself. However, it appears that was just a glitch.
The global usage share
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of Mozilla's browsers is still growing and it seems that Netscape users and some Internet Explorer users are switching to the Firefox version,' said the co-founder of OneStat.com, Niels Brinkman. 'It also looks like that browser users of Internet Explorer for Apple's Mac are switching to Safari because the global usage share is still growing.'
Behind the leaders come Apple's Safari (1.75 per cent), Netscape (0.26) and Opera (0.77).
The company has also broken down its figures on a UK basis. Here, IE records 93.37 per cent, Firefox 4.94 per cent, Safari 0.99 per cent, Netscape 0.23 per cent and Opera 0.39 per cent.
OneStat monitors, on a browser basis, the Internet users that arrive at sites using one of its services. The research, it states, is based on a sample of 2 million visitors divided into 20,000 visitors of 100 countries each day.
Last month we reported that Firefox had passed another download milestone - 100m surfers hunt down Firefox. A version 1.5 release is expected later this Autumn (Firefox 1.5 RC1 is currently with testers).
November 4, 2005 at 12:56 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 05, 2005
Flock, the New Browser on the Block
Flock, the New Browser on the Block
The latest challenger to Explorer and Firefox aims to beat the big guys by emphasizing blogging, networking, and online communities
Web browsers don't look much different than they did a decade ago, when Netscape Communications's initial stock offering catapulted software for navigating the Web into the public eye. You click on a site, look around, watch or listen to something, click somewhere else -- all by your lonesome self. Now, an upstart called Flock aims to change all that.
On Oct. 5, the Palo Alto-based startup takes the wraps off what it's calling a "social browser." Unlike plain-vanilla browsers such as Microsoft's (MSFT ) Internet Explorer, Flock's browser is built specifically for a new, emerging generation of Web users, one that isn't satisfied passively browsing media online.
Flock hopes to turn the browser into a dashboard for collaborating, blogging, sharing photos, reveling in a raft of other group activities that have recently caught fire online (see BW, 9/26/05, "It's a Whole New Web").
"INCUMBENTS ARE VULNERABLE." "The Web is not just a library of documents, but a stream of events and people," says Flock co-founder and Chief Executive Bart Decrem. "And people are spending a lot more time sharing on the Web."
Flock is also the latest and most ambitious example of a surprising renaissance in browser innovation. Less than a year after its first ready-for-prime-time release, the Mozilla Firefox browser -- which Decrem and some of his engineers helped create and popularize before starting Flock last spring -- has stolen nearly 10% of the market from leader Microsoft.
Another browser, Opera, has also gained, especially in Europe. "The incumbents are vulnerable," says David Cowan, general partner with Bessemer Venture Partners, Flock's lead investor. "Today, those are the juiciest targets."
They're also the most powerful competitors. In response to competition from Firefox, Microsoft has turned up the firepower in its own browser, adding improved security in recent releases and planning more features in a new browser in coming months.
BLOGGERS' BOON. Decrem concedes Flock has its work cut out for it -- especially since he's hardly aiming low. He hopes to have 100 million users within five years. "There's not too many people crazy enough to do a browser," he notes with a grin.
The Flock browser, which is expected to be released to the public in test form in about two weeks, does everything a regular browser does, but with several important additions.
For one, it makes blogging a snap by eliminating the need to do arcane coding in order to post, change fonts or add photos. Right click the mouse on a Web page, and a blogging wizard comes up that automatically creates links, citations, and quotes that are ready to insert into a blog. A horizontal bar on the browser also can load photos from the photo-sharing site Flickr, so they can be simply dragged and dropped into the blog post.
HANDY HISTORY. Moreover, Flock makes it easy to create online bookmarks for Web sites. Visit a Web site and click a "+" button on one of the browser's toolbars, and that site is saved to a personalized list on the social bookmarks Web site http://del.icio.us./.
Those bookmarks can be tagged with useful descriptions and shared with others. Flock also lets people create watchlists of people whose bookmarks they like and form groups with people who link to particular tags. Flock also keeps a history of every Web page a user visits, so they can be found easily later.
Even in raw test mode, Flock and its blogging tools in particular are drawing rave reviews from tech-savvy users. "Pure magic," says J. Michael Arrington, general partner at Archimedes Ventures, who co-writes the blog TechCrunch. "It's a beautiful application, and they're a bunch of smart guys." Even Robert Scoble, Microsoft's most famous blogger, has called the Flock browser "awesome."
PERSONAL TOUCH. The most innovative thing about Flock is that it's trying to do away with the notion of "browsing." Co-founder and Marketing Vice-President Geoffrey Arone says the term is an increasingly irrelevant description of what people do online. Essentially, Flock's software is intended to serve less as a window into static Web content than as a customizable conduit for participatory Web services, from Flickr to del.icio.us to the collaborative online encyclopedia Wikipedia.
It's not an entirely new idea. Tech-savvy folks can customize their Web experience with a number of new tools. Firefox, and now Internet Explorer, for instance, allow people to add "extensions" to their browser. They can, say, add a new search-engine box to their browsers, even alter the appearance and features of individual Web sites. Possible additions include blocking ads or filling in personal account information.
But Cowan notes that not everyone wants to trick out their Web browser. "Most people just want to drive their car off the lot," he says. So Flock's aim is to create software that makes it dead-easy for regular Web users to customize an experience with just a few clicks. The Flock software will be offered free, both to the general public and to other Web developers in open-source form, so they can add and contribute their own tweaks.
REDMOND'S RESPONSE. So how will it generate sales? Decrem expects to make money from running Google ads, as well as getting so-called affiliate fees for referring users to commercial sites such as Amazon.com (AMZN ). Moreover, he envisions getting money from other Web services, such as blogging or photo-sharing services, that might pay Flock for sign-ups sent their way from the Flock software.
At least for a while, that may be enough to sustain 12 guys and and a dog or two in a converted garage in Palo Alto, Calif. But getting traction among millions of Web users will be the tough part, even if the software ultimately works as well as it demos. After all, Microsoft's browser still commands 90% of browser use, and it's not standing still.
A test version of a new Internet Explorer, scheduled to be released to the general public soon, includes streamlined ways to find and read so-called RSS feeds and integrate them into calendar and e-mail programs. "We think these features will take the browser to the next level," says Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Internet Explorer.
"THE COMMON GOOD." What's more, the folks at Mozilla, the newly for-profit producer of Firefox, are still cranking away at making their software the browser of choice. Indeed, while Mozilla President Mitchell Baker welcomes browser innovation on top of Firefox, she questions whether an entirely new browser is the right way to go. Better, she contends, to create simple, targeted extensions that individual browser users can choose to add to Firefox. "It keeps the energy focused on the common good," adds Mike Shaver, Mozilla's technology strategist.
Flock is making a heady gamble -- one that conjures up ghosts of Internet bubble past. Flock's ancestor, Netscape, gave away free browsers, too. Despite being acquired by America Online for $4 billion, it was widely viewed as having gotten crushed by Microsoft. But if Flock can use its early buzz to shepherd the online masses toward its software, it may not be long before we click goodbye to the old Web browser.
October 5, 2005 at 07:50 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (11) | Top of page | Blog Home
August 06, 2005
IE7 and Longhorn to Get RSS Support
Microsoft IE7 and Windows Longhorn to Get RSS Support
By Greg DeMichillie [bio]
Posted: Jul. 18, 2005
* Chart: The Long and Winding Road of RSS
* Illustration: RSS in Action
* Sidebar: RSS Extensions and Creative Commons
The following is the full text of an article published by Directions on Microsoft, an independent research firm focused exclusively on Microsoft strategy & technology. Each month we make one or more key articles available to non-subscribers.
* See more samples
* See a list of upcoming articles and reports
The next versions of Internet Explorer (IE) and Windows (code-named Longhorn) will support RSS, an XML format for syndicating news and other Web content such as Web logs ("blogs"), enabling users to subscribe to a site and be notified when new content has been posted. But details remain sketchy on which of the proposed features are part of Longhorn and which are part of IE 7.0, and will therefore be available on Windows XP SP2 as well. Furthermore, multiple incompatible versions of RSS are available, and its future is clouded by infighting between the major players.
RSS: Not Just for Blogs
RSS is not a single standard or format—RSS developers can't even agree on what the letters "RSS" stand for. Rather, it is an umbrella term for a set of XML formats for syndicating news and other newslike Web sites. A site that uses RSS publishes on its site an XML file that summarizes its contents (often referred to as an "RSS feed.") When new content is posted to the Web site, the feed is also updated, usually with the assistance of an application built for that purpose. A user subscribes to the feed using an RSS-aware client application (often called an "aggregator," because it aggregates feeds from all of the user's subscribed sites.) The aggregator will periodically download a new version of the RSS file and notify the user of any new content that has been published.
Although RSS is best known for its use on blogs (many of whose owners tirelessly promote its benefits), many other types of Web sites offer RSS feeds, including major news organizations, such as the New York Times, CNN, and the BBC; online special interest sites, such as the popular Digital Photography Review, which uses RSS to inform readers of new product reviews; and Microsoft, which makes its security bulletins available to IT professionals via an RSS feed (although no Microsoft software currently supports RSS). Some sites, such as most blogs, choose to include the complete text of their content in the RSS feed while others, most notably subscription-based sites and those that rely on advertising, include only a summary of the content and require users to navigate back to the site to read the full contents.
Microsoft and other advocates of RSS expect it to play a larger role in the future and become a common way for users to receive many kinds of information—even information that doesn't come from a Web site. A corporate enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, for example, might produce an RSS feed with sales information updated on a daily basis, in addition to offering such information through traditional reporting technologies or via e-mail.
Simple Idea, Complicated History
Although the idea behind RSS is simple, it has suffered from a checkered development history that has hampered its adoption. As a result of this history, there are two similar but incompatible formats based on different underlying technologies, both attempting to solve the same problem in similar ways, and both using the name RSS.
The most recent versions of each of these parallel tracks are as follows:
RSS 1.0 is based on the Resource Description Framework (RDF), an XML format originally developed by Netscape to help third-party Web sites plug in to the My Netscape portal, and it has more advanced capabilities, such as having an author field for each item in a feed.
RSS 2.0, developed by blogger Dave Winer, is based on neither RSS 1.0 nor RDF, and is designed to be easier for developers to read and write.
(For details on the history of the term "RSS" and versions of RSS in use, see the chart "The Long and Winding Road of RSS".)
Both RSS specifications are ambiguous and do not fully describe what an RSS aggregator is expected to do when it encounters certain tags. For example, some aggregators allow the use of HTML markup tags, such as indicating bold-faced characters, within the title of an RSS entry and will display the title appropriately, while others will just display the text of the tag rather than applying the desired style. This leads to RSS feeds appearing differently when viewed by different aggregators.
Because of these differences, a group of programmers led by Sam Ruby (a member of IBM's Emerging Technologies Group and a key contributor to many Web services standards) is trying to craft a third alternative, known as Atom, that addresses the needs of both RSS camps and is rigorously specified.
Big Plans for RSS
IE 7 will support current and past versions of RSS (and Atom) in several ways. First, it will try to automatically discover if a Web site has an associated feed by looking for a link on the page that follows any of several techniques commonly used by Web publishers to indicate an RSS feed. Once a user has subscribed to a feed, IE will automatically display how many unread entries the feed contains.
(Similar features are already available in other browsers, such as Firefox on Windows and the Mac and Safari on the Mac. For an illustration of how RSS subscriptions work in those browsers, see "RSS in Action".)
Microsoft also plans to add RSS capabilities to the core Windows client OS. Plans for the Longhorn client call for it to support RSS and Atom through two major components that will manage the download of feeds and provide an API for applications to retrieve the data.
The Common RSS Store will hold the list of feeds to which the user has subscribed and will give application developers an API for adding and removing feeds and accessing content from feeds. A systemwide list of RSS feeds will allow multiple applications to access data from any of the user's feeds. A user could subscribe to a blog via IE, for example, and have any audio content published by that blog appear in Windows Media Player and any calendar entries appear in Outlook.
The Platform Sync Engine will download new content as it becomes available and place the content, including enclosures, into the Common Store. Providing a system-level component that downloads RSS content removes one of the limitations of current RSS applications—the fact that new content is only downloaded while an RSS-enabled application is running.
Finally, in addition to adding RSS to its own products, Microsoft is proposing a set of extensions to RSS that will make it more suitable for Web sites whose information is not strictly chronological. RSS assumes that content is always ordered from newest to oldest, but some sites might want a different ordering. An online bookseller, for example, might want to publish an RSS feed of its top sellers, ordered by sales volume. Microsoft is making these extensions available under flexible licensing terms that give third parties rights to not only use the technology but to also make derivate works. (For details on the licensing terms, see the sidebar "RSS Extensions and Creative Commons".)
Details Sketchy Until Sept. 2005 PDC
Although its announcement of RSS support was greeted with generally positive reaction from the blogging community, many questions won't be answered until Microsoft's Sept. 2005 Professional Developers Conference (PDC). Open questions include the following:
How much RSS support will be available on Windows XP SP2? Microsoft has not made clear which of the demonstrated RSS features are part of IE and will therefore be available on Windows XP SP2 and Longhorn, and which will only be available in Longhorn. Beyond resolving technical issues, Microsoft faces a marketing dilemma: making features unique to Longhorn raises the value of Longhorn to customers, but makes it less likely that ISVs will build applications that rely on those features, because many more PCs will be using Windows XP in the next two or three years than using Longhorn. On the other hand, making features available on Windows XP as well as Longhorn makes it easier for ISVs but lessens the value of a new OS to customers.
What other Microsoft applications will support RSS? Although it's clear that IE will support RSS, some of the scenarios Microsoft envisions will require RSS support in applications such as the Windows Media Player and Outlook.
Will Microsoft's server products generate RSS? Thus far, all of Microsoft's demonstrations and announcements have been about client-side support for RSS. But in order for RSS to be useful, Web sites and other applications must generate RSS feeds. Corporate developers, in particular, will be looking for Microsoft to support RSS in server products such as SQL Server and ASP.NET (which would extend such support to Windows SharePoint Services and SharePoint Portal Server.)
What kind of tools support will be available? The proposed Common RSS Store will provide an API for applications to retrieve data from RSS feeds. Developers will want to know whether this new API is built around the .NET Framework or is a traditional Windows-style API, and what kind of tools support will be available.
Resources
Specifications for RSS 1.0, RSS 2.0, and Atom are available at web.resource.org/rss/1.0, blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss, and www.ietf.org/html.charters/atompub-charter.html, respectively.
The Longhorn RSS team blog is at blogs.msdn.com/rssteam.
Microsoft's proposed RSS extensions are described at msdn.microsoft.com/longhorn/understanding/rss/simplefeedextensions.
A summary of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license and the full legal text is at creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/ and creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/legalcode.
A book published by O'Reilly, Developing Feeds with RSS and Atom (ISBN 0-596-00881-3), gives developers specific guidelines on authoring feeds using a variety of tools and languages.
August 6, 2005 at 01:44 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (4) | Top of page | Blog Home
June 25, 2005
Microsoft makes web feeds easier
BBC NEWS | Technology | Microsoft makes web feeds easier
By Jo Twist
BBC News technology reporter, Seattle
People like to get information when they want and wherever they are
Microsoft's next version of its browser, Internet Explorer 7, will make it easier for people to keep automatically aware of website updates.
IE7 will have an orange button on the toolbar which will light up when it detects a Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feed on a site.
Users can click on a "plus" button to subscribe to the site's feed, as they would with a bookmark.
The new browser is due to be released this summer.
It had its public debut at the Gnomedex technology conference in the US city of Seattle on Friday.
'Smarter feeds'
The open-source browser, Mozilla Firefox, already lets web users subscribe to feeds of websites they read regularly, such as weblogs and news sites.
The move is part of wider plans Microsoft has to integrate RSS formats throughout its latest version of Windows - Longhorn - which it sees as a major step forward.
"We are making sure that throughout Windows the experiences for users are easy," said Dean Hachomovitch, general manager of Microsoft's Internet Explorer team.
When I subscribe I can say what is interesting to me, the machine can do the work, and I can enjoy the fruits of its labour
Dean Hachomovitch
"We want RSS everywhere. I want it in more than just the browser and aggregators. We want to help RSS get even bigger and better than today."
Longhorn is expected to be released in December 2006, but a preview, or beta, could be out in the summer.
The move will make RSS clearer and easier to understand for non-technical people, across all kinds of applications, not just web browsing.
If users want to subscribe to a particular feed, they will be shown a searchable preview of the page, with no confusing bits of code on display.
Microsoft also said it had created some new extensions to the RSS format, which will be available for content publishers to use under the Creative Commons licence.
These will make feeds "smarter" and more effective at displaying different kinds of information, such as constantly updating news sites, or book wish lists.
Changing habits
Weblogs and global news sites are making much more use of RSS, and net users are becoming increasingly aware of the technology as small orange icons carrying RSS/XML text appear on sites.
Bill Gates
Bill Gates' Microsoft is having to face up to browser competition
BBC News and Sport have made their content available for online news reader programs via RSS since 2003.
Using "aggregators" - programs which automatically collect and organise website feeds - web users can stay up-to-date with site changes without having to search them out manually.
There is a plethora of free aggregator or news reader programs available online.
Browsing the web in this way has been described as similar to Japanese sushi belt restaurants. People can pick and choose which items they want to consume as they go past them.
'Getting it'
The technology also makes it easier for people to find and sort through what they want to get to on the web.
Mr Hachamovitch said that Microsoft was starting to "get it" when it came to RSS.
"Feeds are everywhere," he said.
"We are not done with search. There are still a lot of people doing great innovative stuff with search.
"But there is this other thing called 'subscribe'. It is not just a feature, it is a new approach."
"When I subscribe I can say what is interesting to me, the machine can do the work, and I can enjoy the fruits of its labour."
Being able to subscribe to all kinds of content - audio, visual, as well as text - is powerful, he added.
"It affects your web consumption habits. We believe in 'subscribe' very deeply. There is a lot of power and richness there."
Microsoft's announcement comes at a time when the browser wars are hotting up once more.
Mozilla's Firefox browser has steadily been gnawing away at IE's market dominance. Many like its features and increased security.
Because it is open source, people are free to adapt the software's core code to create other innovative features, such as add-ons, RSS news feed readers, or extensions to the program.
It recently celebrated its 50 millionth download since its official launch in November.
The Gnomedex conference runs from 23 June to 25 June and is a gathering for key players in new media.
June 25, 2005 at 02:48 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (4) | Top of page | Blog Home
April 30, 2005
Firefox crosses 50 million mark
Firefox just crossed the 50 million download mark, on Friday.
50,320,003
April 30, 2005 at 05:05 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (82) | Top of page | Blog Home
April 14, 2005
IBM on the hunt for Firefox programmers
Another move towards legitimisation for Firefox.
IBM on the hunt for Firefox programmers | CNET News.com
Published: April 13, 2005, 12:32 PM PDT
By Stephen Shankland and Paul Festa
Staff Writer, CNET News.com
TrackBack Print E-mail TalkBack
In the newest indication that Firefox has become mainstream, IBM is trying to hire programmers to adapt the open-source Web browser to work well with Big Blue's server software.
A job ad posted on IBM's Web site said an emerging technologies team in IBM's software group wants programmers for "enhancing the Mozilla Firefox Web browser with new features complimentary to IBM's On Demand middleware stack."
April 14, 2005 at 10:12 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (5) | Top of page | Blog Home
February 14, 2005
Bloggers, the new US media watchdogs
Bloggers, the new US media watchdogs - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News
WASHINGTON (AFP) - First CBS's Dan Rather, then CNN's Eason Jordan, Internet bloggers have come of age as media watchdogs with their part in the downfall of these influential, high-profile media heads.
Jordan, a top CNN executive responsible for the network's coverage in Iraq, resigned Friday following remarks suggesting the US military was deliberately targeting journalists.
The January 27 comments were initially ignored by mainstream reporters, but picked up and trumpeted across the Internet by an army of bloggers.
Jordan's downfall follows that of veteran CBS television news anchor Dan Rather, who announced he will resign in March after bloggers exposed documents he used in a report critical of President George W. Bush's National Guard service as forgeries.
Jordan made his controversial remarks while participating in a discussion panel at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Organizers have not released a transcript of the event.
Jordan acknowledged the remarks were "not as clear as they should have been," but insisted in a statement that he "never meant to imply US forces acted with ill intent when US forces accidentally killed journalists."
He resigned after two weeks of ferocious criticism on conservative weblogs such as captainsquartersblog.com, nationalreviewonline.com and easongate.com, a slick site dedicated entirely to the controversy.
In the 'old days' of just a few years ago media criticism would appear in the monthly Columbia Journalism Review or in specialized newspaper colums, said Paul Grabowicz at the University of California at Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism.
Now such criticism moves at lightning speed and grows so quickly it cannot be ignored, he said. And despite the heated rhetoric there is also often solid original reporting.
"The ground is shifting and the media is having a difficult time adjusting," Grabowicz said.
Though many of the blogs attacking Jordan are managed by staunch conservatives, the controversy cannot be written off as a right-wing attack on the "liberal" media.
Two left-leaning Democratic legislators at the Davos event swiftly criticized Jordan's remarks. And his performance defended panel moderator David Gergen, a Republican who worked with the first president George Bush.
"They went after him because he is a symbol of a network seen as too liberal by some. They saw blood in the water," Gergen, the editor of US News and World Report, told the Washington Post.
The conservative Wall Street Journal editorial page at first blasted Jordan, but on Monday dismissed the incident as a "kerfuffle."
Jordan "made an indefensible remark from which he ineptly tried to climb down at first prompting. This may be dumb but it wasn't a journalistic felony," the piece read.
The Journal then chastised CNN for failing to show "the good judgement and sense of proportion that distinguishes professional journalism from the enthusiasms and vendettas of amateurs."
Edward Morrisey, also known as "Captain Ed" at captainsquartersblog.com, wrote that bloggers didn't want Jordan's head just because he worked for CNN.
"We wanted accountability for a corporate executive that went overseas on multiple occasions to issue slanderous allegations against the US military simply to drum up business and gain a competitive advantage for access in countries already hostile to the United States," Morrisey wrote Monday.
Mainstream journalists agressivly report only on "acceptable targets" that fit their political beliefs such as "the US military, the Israeli military, the Bush administration and Republicans in general," wrote Morrisey, reflecting the views of many conservative blogs.
Blogs have become an important part of Internet life, according to two surveys in November by the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Some 27 percent of Internet users read blogs, according to the survey, which reports that some eight million US adults say they have created blogs.
Yet despite its influence, 62 percent of Internet users do not know what a blog is, according to the Pew survey.
A separate survey in December by the software company Perseus Development reported that 4.12 million blogs were created in 2004 by the top eight blog-hosting services.
But of the 3,600 blogs surveyed, 66 percent had not been updated in two months, and many had never updated after they were created.
February 14, 2005 at 09:57 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home
January 10, 2005
Extremely Critical IE Flaw Discovered
IT Observer - Extremely Critical IE Flaw Discovered
Author: Jeremy C. Wright, Staff Writer
Monday, 10 January 2005, 18:08 GMT
Reader Comments | Post your comment
Secunia upgraded a vulnerability assessment from last year from “highly critical� to “extremely critical� yesterday. The vulnerability is in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) 6.0 and affects users of IE on Windows XP Service Pack 2 (SP2).
The update, issued Friday, which is caused by the combination of an HTML Help control flaw and a drag-and-drop vulnerability, bypassing the "Local Computer" zone lockdown security feature in XP SP2.
The vulnerability affects users who visit a website where an attacker has manipulated the site to use the ActiveX Data Object (ADO) model to write arbitrary files onto the user's computer without the person's knowledge.
Microsoft had already released a patch for the drag-and-drop vulnerability, but officials were assessing the combo vulnerability's impact before deciding whether to issue a subsequent patch.
Microsoft officials said the Secunia advisory doesn't bring anything new to the table.
"This new report describes an exploit that takes advantage of two previously reported vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer," a statement by Microsoft reads. "Microsoft is currently working on an update to address these vulnerabilities. Customers who have followed our Safe Browsing guidance and have set their Internet Security zone settings to 'high' are not impacted by this vulnerability. Enterprise administrators who have restricted access to the 'startup' folder on their network client computers are at a reduced risk from this vulnerability."
Secunia officials recommend users switch to another type of browser until Microsoft comes up with a fix. Alternatively, they suggest users follow Microsoft's advice and disable the "drag and drop or copy and paste files" feature in IE and set the security level to "high."
Secunia also posted a test application for Windows XP SP 2 and IE 6.0 users to determine whether their systems are vulnerable.
January 10, 2005 at 11:31 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (1) | Top of page | Blog Home
January 04, 2005
The state of blogging
Pew Internet & American Life Project: Blogosphere
By the end of 2004 blogs had established themselves as a key part of online culture. Two surveys by the Pew Internet & American Life Project in November established new contours for the blogosphere: 8 million American adults say they have created blogs; blog readership jumped 58% in 2004 and now stands at 27% of internet users; 5% of internet users say they use RSS aggregators or XML readers to get the news and other information delivered from blogs and content-rich Web sites as it is posted online; and 12% of internet users have posted comments or other material on blogs. Still, 62% of internet users do not know what a blog is.
January 4, 2005 at 08:59 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (26) | Top of page | Blog Home
Is this internet prodigy about to knock Microsoft off its pedestal?
By David Adams
A Miami teenager has created a free web browser that has been called Bill Gates's worst nightmare
A MIAMI teenager is basking in the glory of helping to create a new internet browser at 17 that is now challenging the grip of Microsoft, which once held a virtual monopoly on web surfing.
Computer analysts say that Blake Ross’s browser, Firefox, is a faster, more versatile program that also offers better protection from viruses and unwanted advertising.
Not only that, the system is offered free over the internet and its codes and technology are all accessible as an “open source” programme. Firefox has already been downloaded by an estimated 15 million users since its launch in November, making it the world’s second-most-popular browser.
Industry experts have dubbed the new software “Microsoft’s worst nightmare”, according to the technology magazine Business 2.0. It hailed Mr Ross, now 19, as a software prodigy. He is also a talented pianist and “an unbelievable creative writer”, according to his mother, Ross. “Anything he does, he does well,” she said.
As a seven-year-old Mr Ross became hooked on the popular computer game SimCity, designing and budgeting his own virtual city. By 10, he had created his own website. He later created his own computer applications and online text games.Soon he was reporting computer software flaws to manufacturers online.
At 14 he was offered an internship at Netscape in Silicon Valley. His mother drove him out to California for three summers in succession.
At Netscape, Mr Ross was introduced to the Mozilla Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that promotes “choice and innovation on the web”.
Mozilla was already trying to develop an open-source alternative browser to Microsoft’s Explorer, which many analysts felt had grown clumsy and outdated. Mr Ross and his friend David Hyatt began working on a small, user-focused browser. What began as an experimental side-project turned into Firefox.
Mr Ross is quick to point out that he was one of a large team at Mozilla who worked on the project for five years. “It’s a big volunteer effort,” he said. In fact, the pair left before the work was completed, but Mozilla credits them with making the breakthrough. After he left to go to university, Mr Ross continued to be a “significant contributor”, according to Mozilla.
The task involved throwing out all the old codes and rewriting the entire system so it would support all websites on the internet. While Firefox still has a long way to go to rival Microsoft, it seems to be catching on. Firefox has received dazzling reviews from industry analysts. Recently some 10,000 Firefox fans raised $250,000 (£131,000) to take out a two-page advertisement in The New York Times. It is not just in dividual users who are taking interest. In December, the information technology department at Pennsylvania State University sent a note to college deans recommending that the entire 100,000-strong staff, faculty and student body switch to Firefox.
Mr Ross, now a student at Stanford University studying computer science, is taking it all in his stride. As a volunteer on an open-source product, there was no financial reward.
Microsoft professes to be unfazed. Windows executive Gary Schare said: “We’re seeing the natural ebb and flow of a competitive marketplace with new products being introduced. It’s not surprising to see curious early adopters checking them out.”
Not content with making a huge dent in Microsoft’s browser share, Mozilla, the foundation behind Firefox, is also going after Microsoft’s Outlook and other e-mail packages.
Called Thunderbird 1.0, the package works on Windows, Macintosh and Linux and has been praised by the industry and press for finally offering a challenge to Microsoft’s dominance in the e-mail arena.
The software provides a number of features which other packages are struggling to offer. Key features include e-mail junk filters that analyse and sort incoming mail and greater security elements.
The latest figures from Mozilla suggest that the free application has already had more than one million downloads in 21 different languages.
NET MILLIONAIRES
1975, Microsoft: Bill Gates founded Microsoft with a group of schoolfriends. Gates is worth £25 billion
1976, Apple: Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs built the first ready-made PC in a garage, selling a scientific calculator and a Volkswagen microbus to pay for it. Apple is now worth £6.3 billion
1984, Dell: Michael Dell, 39, founded the Dell Computer Corporation, now the world’s biggest PC manufacturer, by selling custom-built PCs directly to customers. It is worth £37 billion and Dell’s personal wealth is believed to exceed £10 billion
1994: Linus Torvalds created the Linux operating system while studying at Helsinki University. From the start, the code was freely distributed. It is becoming more popular as an alternative to the Windows operating system. He has become wealthy with his company Transmeta.
1998, Google: Sergey Brin and Larry Page began their search engine in a friend’s garage. It is now reputedly worth about £25 billion
1999, Napster: Shawn Fettings quit college at 19 to create a music download site with his uncle. By 2000 it was worth £42 million
1999: Evan Williams, 28, founded www.blogger.com. It now has more than a million registered users. In 2003 he sold it to Google
RIVAL BROWSERS
Internet Explorer
# Used by 90 per cent of internet users
# Riddled with security holes. Most web viruses exploit weaknesses in IE
# PC and Mac versions
Firefox
# Open source, non-profit software allows programmers to add applications and utilities — hundreds available free
# Can block pop-up adverts
# PC, Mac and Linux versions
# Tabbed viewing to switch easily between sites in same window
# Very fast rendering
Safari
# Apple’s browser for Macs, blocks pop-ups and allows tabbed viewing
# Many free add-ons available, such as customisable skins
Opera
# Tabbed browsing and pop-up blocking
# Customisable skins
# Mac, PC and Linux versions available
Stuart Miles
January 4, 2005 at 11:45 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (13) | Top of page | Blog Home
December 23, 2004
What would you want to see in Microsoft's IE?
What would you want to see in Microsoft's IE? - ZDNet UK Insight
Paul Festa
CNET News.com
September 30, 2004, 15:00 GMT
Even if Microsoft is trying to kill off standalone browsers, people are still trying to convince it to add features to IE
While Microsoft is attempting to make standalone browsers a thing of the past, Web developers and surfers alike are trying to push the company to bring Internet Explorer up to the present.
With no major upgrade in three years, apart from last month's XP Service Pack 2 security release, IE is showing its age. Despite this, Microsoft's browser software remains the industry standard, with 95 percent of the market, even though small competitors like the Mozilla Foundation's Firefox, Apple Computer's Safari and Opera Software's browser have apparently made inroads.
Microsoft has steadfastly refused to issue another standalone browser and has reserved the recent security upgrade to IE for people with the Windows XP operating system -- about half the 390 million users of Windows worldwide, according to research firm IDC.
But if Microsoft could be persuaded to update IE, what features would Web developers and surfers like to see?
Perhaps first on Web surfers' list is tabbed browsing. This feature, offered since the earliest versions of Opera in 1996 and subsequently by Mozilla-based browsers and Safari, lets the user open multiple Web pages within the same browser window. Fans of tabbed browsing say it reduces clutter and helps organise pages gleaned from search results.
Microsoft acknowledges the appeal of tabbed browsing.
"Once you start doing tabs, you never go back to a browser without tabs," said Gary Schare, director of security product management for Windows. "But like anything else, it's a matter of resourcing and prioritising what we work on."
Schare recommended third-party browsers based on IE that provide tabbed browsing, such as NetCaptor and Maxthon.
Another feature high on many Web surfers' wish list is live bookmarks, such as those available in Firefox, which display dynamically updated content from RSS (Really Simple Syndication) feeds along with the browser's bookmarks (or, in IE parlance, "Favourites").
If you want to get Web developers riled up, ask them about IE's support for CSS (cascading style sheets) and the PNG image format.
With CSS, bugs have lingered for years. Developers call IE's rendering of certain PNG images "ugly."
"It has been *seven years* since 'native PNG' support was announced for IE 4.0," wrote a respondent to a hotly discussed Microsoft Web log on the subject. "While I am pleased that development on IE will continue, and I'm hopeful that the issues I have with it will be addressed, I'm not holding my breath. Microsoft has squandered much of the public support and trust it once had, and it will take a lot more than vaporous quasi-announcements to win that back. The vague pronouncements released so far have been meaningless, except in a touchy-feely PR sort of way. There has been zero commitment, after making us wait many years."
Microsoft acknowledges the hue and cry over standards support but insists that it's acting prudently in holding back full CSS and PNG support.
"There are certainly aspects of IE rendering that developers would love to see some changes to," Schare said. "The challenge is that changing the way IE works along those lines has huge ramifications for backwards compatibility for Web sites that people have been building for years and years."
While developers call on Microsoft to give IE a general makeover, and Microsoft insists that its browser feature development efforts are strictly reserved for Longhorn, some people are posting wish lists of their own, including some on Microsoft's own Channel 9 blog site.
December 23, 2004 at 01:13 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home
Microsoft says Firefox 'not a threat to IE'
Microsoft says Firefox 'not a threat to IE' - ZDNet UK News
Munir Kotadia
ZDNet Australia
November 11, 2004, 11:52 GMT
Talkback
Tell us your opinion
Internet Explorer is no less secure than any other browser on the market and does not lack any important features, according to the Microsoft. Senior IT figures doubt them, however
Internet Explorer (IE) is no less secure than any other browser and does not lack any important features, according to Microsoft. But the managing director of Cisco admitted that he wouldn’t use IE without additional protection.
At a security round-table discussion in Sydney on Thursday, Microsoft's security and management product manager, Ben English, told attendees that IE undergoes "rigorous code reviews" and is no less secure than any other browser.
"Because IE is ubiquitous you hear a lot more about it, but I don't think that Internet Explorer is any less secure than any other browser out there," said English.
However, Ross Fowler, managing director of Cisco Australia and New Zealand, said the network giant uses IE internally but only after deploying its Secure Agent, which is a desktop utility that monitors all activity and alerts the user if it spots something unusual -- such as a keystroke logging program.
"Internally we have deployed Cisco Secure Agent to prevent those day-zero attacks and we have more and more of our customers -- particularly in the University sector -- deploying the Cisco secure agent,” said Fowler.
No threat from Firefox
Microsoft Australia's managing director, Steve Vamos, said that he did not believe IE's market share was under threat after the recent high profile launch of Mozilla's Firefox browser.
Vamos said that although he has heard other people mention the threat posed by Firefox, he does not believe the threat is real.
"I’m not sure that that is the reality. I have seen comments around that but there is nothing I can refer to that really supports that," he said. Instead, Vamos added, users needed educating about all the features already offered by Microsoft’s browser.
"We probably need to do a bit of work to communicate the features that are in IE," he said.
Vamos, who admitted he has never used Firefox, said there is a lot of hype surrounding the open source movement and if Microsoft's customers wanted new features they would have told the company about it.
"I don’t agree is that just because a (competing) product has a feature that we don’t have, that feature is important. It is not. It is only important if it is a feature the customer wants. There are plenty of products out there with features we don’t have. We have plenty of features that our customers don’t use.
"If there are features in our products that are sub-par or need to be added then I have great confidence that we are an organisation that responds pretty quickly and effectively to that," said Vamos.
Microsoft's English reiterated that features such as tabbed browsing were not important to IE users.
"I don't believe it is a true statement that IE doesn’t have the features that our customers want. We take user feedback very seriously. If you have that feedback then you should feed it back to us because we will feed it to the product team," said English.
December 23, 2004 at 01:11 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
Firefox hits 10-million mark
Firefox hits 10-million mark - ZDNet UK News
he open-source browser has now been downloaded over 10 million times in a month - but Microsoft says it isn't worried
Firefox, the open-source challenger to market heavyweight Internet Explorer, has surpassed 10 million downloads in a little more than a month since the browser was released in November.
The free Web browser from the Mozilla Foundation notched up 10 million downloads on Saturday as Web surfers continue to move away from Microsoft's market-dominating IE. The milestone highlights growing frustration with the security vulnerabilities that have dogged IE during the past few months. Nearly two dozen holes in the Web browser have been discovered during the autumn, ranging in degrees of seriousness.
Niels Brinkman, co-founder of research firm OneStat.com, said in a statement in November: "It seems that people are switching from Microsoft's Internet Explorer to Mozilla's new Firefox browser."
Firefox has surpassed the 10 million download mark while gaining five percentage points in May to 7.4 percent in November, according to OneStat.com.
Firefox's percentage gain helped cut into Microsoft's dominance of the Web browser market, cutting its market share to less than 90 percent. OneStat reported in November that IE's market share had slipped to 88.9 percent in the third week of November, down five percentage points from its share in May. Mozilla-based browsers, including Firefox, rose to 7.4 percent, up five percentage points from May.
Microsoft has disputed these numbers, claiming that they do not represent corporate users.
Gary Schare, Microsoft's director of product management for Windows, said of OneStat's statistics: "It doesn't jibe with what WebSideStory shows, and what neither of these count is corporate intranets where users aren't actually hitting the Web."
On Wednesday, the Pennsylvania State University's Information Technology Services department recommended that students drop IE in favour of Firefox and Apple's Safari to reduce attacks through vulnerabilities in the Microsoft software. The university said "media reports" and a string of warnings by Carnegie Mellon University's Computer Emergency and Response Team led to its recommendation.
December 23, 2004 at 01:10 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (4) | Top of page | Blog Home
Opera hints at version 8 with latest beta
Opera hints at version 8 with latest beta - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News
By Matt Loney, ZDNet UK
With voice commands, shrinking Web pages and improved RSS tools, Opera is confident that the beta of its new browser has enough new features to merit a jump to version 8.0
Norwegian browser company Opera Software released a beta version of its latest browser on Thursday.
This was intended to be the beta for version 7.6 of the browser, but the company says its new features are so substantial that "it exceeds the next logical version number and warrants a major release." This suggests a major version jump, backed up by the fact that the beta's 'about' page refers to itself as version 8.0.
The beta can be downloaded from Opera's Web site.
Opera chief executive Jon S. von Tetzchner said people who have licensed Opera 7 will receive free upgrades when the new version is officially released.
The new Opera browser includes an updated and more prominent RSS tool, and rendering technology designed to cut out the need for horizontally scrolling across Web pages, regardless of screen size. The same technology also means that online content can be printed on any size of paper without cutting off the edges. The browser will also contain an accessibility feature that allows uses to magnify Web pages and view them without scrolling sideways.
The renderer uses a combination of techniques: it reflows page elements where possible, and resizes them to fit where necessary. Depending on how a Web page has been written, this can result in either a rescaled version of the page, or some elements being pushed to the bottom of the page.
Opera has been working on the problem of rendering Web pages on small screens for some time. It produces versions of its browser for various mobile phones including Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Panasonic and Siemens handsets. It also recently added support for Microsoft smartphones, reversing its self-imposed ban on producing software for Microsoft.
The new version of Opera also features voice technology, allowing users to browse the Web using spoken commands, such as "Opera next link", "Opera back", or "Opera speak".
As Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser continues to suffer from high-profile security flaws, users have been flocking to alternatives in recent months.
Mozilla's Firefox browser "usage share" had climbed to four percent by mid-December, from three percent just before the launch of Version 1.0 in early November, according to San Diego-based WebSideStory, which sells Web site traffic monitoring software and services. Firefox appears to have taken that percentage point directly from IE, which slipped from 93 percent to 92 percent.
Another Web site metrics firm, Amsterdam, Netherlands-based OneStat.com, last month showed IE dipping below the 90 percent mark.
By WebSideStory's count, non-Firefox Netscape browsers accounted for three percent of the market, unchanged from the prior month, and other browsers -- which include Opera and Apple's Safari browser -- accounted for one percent of usage.
December 23, 2004 at 12:56 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (2) | Top of page | Blog Home
December 22, 2004
Browser Wars
Thu Dec 16, 3:00 AM
Michael Desmond
Are you sick and tired of Internet Explorer? Have you grown weary of the constant vulnerabilities and patches? Do you scratch your head at sudden program lockups and crashes? Are you dismayed that Microsoft hasn't lifted a finger to improve or enhance IE since it buried Netscape's Navigator browser at the dawn of the century?
Yeah, me too.
Welcome to Internet Explorer backlash. For the first time since Microsoft launched its flagship browser in 1995, Internet Explorer is actually losing market share. Research firm WebSideStory reported that the enormous chunk of IE users declined from a high of 95 percent in June to 92.9 percent in October. That number could drop further, as a sudden wealth of good browser options attracts users of all stripes.
A lot of the credit can go to the folks at the open-source Mozilla Foundation, which was established in 1998 to breathe new life into the fast-failing Netscape browser platform. It's taken six years and the utter failure of Netscape the company, but Mozilla is finally delivering on its promise.
Today, not one, but two significant browser alternatives are powered by Mozilla's Gecko software code base--America Online's Netscape 7.2 and the wildly popular new Firefox 1.0 browser. Of course, even those two aren't the only IE challengers: A third major alternative, the Opera browser from Opera Software, has been serving disaffected IE users for years.
With so many choices just a software download away, questions swirl. Why should you care? Which browser is best? And after all is said and done, should you really switch? Software junkies may tell you the answers are obvious and conclusions foregone, but wait; read on.
It's the Tabs, Stupid
There are a lot of reasons why users are fleeing Microsoft Internet Explorer, but a lot of it boils down to security. Microsoft has chosen to run IE like a highly automated factory. ActiveX controls, dynamic HTML, and other technologies deliver lots of automation and programmatic control over IE. That's great if you want to integrate, say, a billing system with your browser, or have Web sites offer dynamic interfaces. But those same controls can be misused or targeted, amplifying the threat from malicious code.
Microsoft's response has been a grim parade of patches, fixes, and advisories. In some instances, Microsoft has suggested turning off features or setting security levels so high that they disable the very capabilities that make IE attractive in the first place. Finally in October, Microsoft released Windows XP (news - web sites) Service Pack 2, a wholesale update that helped close many of the vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer.
But understand this: No browser is without flaws. Mozilla patched some holes of its own prior to the Firefox 1.0 release, and Opera has issued a few security-centric updates in the past year. The problem for Microsoft is the overwhelming popularity of its browser. Virus writers and hackers target IE because there are so many systems running it.
Perhaps more frustrating than security leaks is the fact that Microsoft quit adding new features to its browser. The last major feature refresh for IE dates back to August 2001--and it shows. Firefox, Netscape, and Opera all offer significant feature improvements over IE, including tabbed browsing for juggling multiple Web pages, and built-in pop-up blocking to prevent ads from opening new browser windows. Other refinements include helpful managers for file downloads, integrated search bars, and more accessible controls for managing histories, cookie files, and the browser cache.
In fact, the future of Web browsing comes down to one word: tabs. I realized it the instant I fired up multiple pages in a single Opera program window. Just like that, I could browse a half-dozen Web pages with ease, jumping from one to the next simply by clicking on the little tabs at the top of the window. What's more, I could open multiple tabbed pages in the background, so they could load while I looked at the page in the foreground.
Not all tabbing systems are created equal, and no one has done it perfectly yet. Opera gets the nod for best keyboard shortcuts. For example, I can close a tabbed page by holding Shift and clicking on the page tab; clicking the tab for the foreground page bounces me to the last page I viewed. I can even drag tabs around to keep pages in neat order. Both Firefox and Netscape offer tabbing that is a bit more rigid.
Time to Switch?
Of the four browsers I've worked with--IE, Firefox, Netscape, and Opera--Firefox 1.0 stood out as the best overall choice. The browser does an excellent job of faithfully displaying Web pages, offers a superior user interface, and suffers fewer crashes than my previous favorite, Opera. It's also highly customizable through something called Firefox Extensions. I installed one module that lets me navigate pages using mouse gestures, a feature I became addicted to during my Opera years.
One area where you'll hear browser makers tout an advantage is performance, or how quickly a browser can show you Web sites. I'd urge you to take any such claims with a grain of salt. In my testing, I found that performance was usually determined by the speed of my Internet connection (not surprisingly) rather than one browser or another. Although Firefox tended to outperform all the others in loading complex pages, we're talking about a difference of one to two seconds.
When the dust settles, the different browsers offer their own unique benefits and drawbacks. Here's a quick take on which browser might be best for you, depending on how you work.
Firefox: The best all-around alternative to IE. Great for power users who want to add functionality to the browser, and appropriate for newbies just getting started.
Internet Explorer: Best for corporate users in controlled environments and those who spend most of their time on Microsoft-branded or IE-specific Web sites.
Netscape: Best for AOL subscribers (with AOL Instant Messenger integration) and those who are willing to put up with some rough edges to use other goodies, including an HTML editor and e-mail program.
Opera: Best for power users who keep many pages open at once and perform frequent downloads. There's an e-mail program included, but banner ads on the free version of the browser are annoying.
So is it time to ditch Internet Explorer once and for all? In a word, no. Microsoft requires its browser to access its Windows Update and Office Update services, and it's not uncommon to find Web sites that are designed specifically for IE. Pages such as MSNBC.com can challenge non-Microsoft browsers. Firefox renders MSNBC pretty well, while Opera fails to render the fly-out menus on the navigation bar.
For the time being, most users will need to keep IE handy, just in case. Keep in mind that you can have more than one browser on your computer. If one acts up, close it and launch the other.
But for general-purpose Web browsing, there is no reason to put off the switch a minute longer. Firefox, Netscape, and Opera are an impressive trio of IE alternatives that could help shelter you from the daily blizzard of Internet exploits.
Michael Desmond is a freelance writer living in Burlington, Vermont. His wife doesn't understand how anyone can get so excited about tabs.
December 22, 2004 at 07:41 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (6) | Top of page | Blog Home
December 13, 2004
Firefox gains suggest browser wars may heat up
Firefox gains suggest browser wars may heat up - Yahoo! UK & Ireland News
Monday December 13, 08:40 PM
WASHINGTON (AFP) - The Internet browser wars, dormant for several years, shows signs of heating up again as a result of gains from a new program called Firefox, a research report showed.
Use of Firefox, created by the nonprofit Mozilla Foundation, has grown by more than a third over the past month, research firm WebSideStory.
In the period from November 5 to December 3, Firefox's online usage share grew from 3.03 percent to 4.06 percent, following a 13 percent gain during the previous month.
Microsoft's Internet Explorer retains its overwhelming dominance with 91.8 percent of the market, the report showed. But that has slipped from over 93 percent two months ago.
Microsoft, by integrating the browser into its Windows operating system crushed Netscape Navigator, which had been the dominant browser in the late 1990s, effectively ending the browser wars at the time.
But some Web users are concerned about the security of Internet Explorer and have been using alternatives.
"Since June 4, when IE's usage share first began to drop due to security concerns, IE has lost a total of 3.68 percentage points," WebSideStory said.
"Firefox's gains are clearly accelerating," said Rand Schulman, WebSideStory's chief marketing officer. "Much of it has to do with the release of Firefox's version 1.0 on November 9, after several months of offering a preview version. Firefox's stated goal of gaining 10 percent of the market over the next year no longer seems unattainable."
Netscape, which is now a part of Time Warner's America Online unit, held a 2.83 percent market share in early December, down from 3.05 percent two months earlier.
Netscape shares some of the same origins of Firefox, and includes some of the same features including "tabbed" browsing to allow several pages to be contained within a single window, accessibility to search engines and pop-up blocking.
December 13, 2004 at 07:12 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (1) | Top of page | Blog Home
November 20, 2004
Firefox lights up Web browser world
SAN FRANCISCO - Firefox 1.0 appears to have sparked new activity in the Web browser market.
The release of the open source Web browser by the Mozilla Foundation last week prompted Microsoft (Profile, Products, Articles) Corp. to break the silence about Internet Explorer (IE) and America Online (Profile, Products, Articles) Inc. (AOL) is breathing more life into the Netscape (Overview, Articles, Company) brand with a preview of a new Firefox-based browser scheduled to be unveiled on Nov. 30.
Microsoft has no plans to release a new version of IE until the next version of Windows, code-named Longhorn, due out in 2006. Still, the Redmond, Washington-based company says it has the option to add features to IE by way of the browser's add-on technology, said Gary Schare, director of Windows product management at Microsoft.
"It is an option for the Internet Explorer team to add functionality in between releases. We do not have specific plans at this point to use it, but it is an option," Schare said. Microsoft's MSN group already uses the add-on mechanism for its MSN Toolbar.
Microsoft has not released a completely new version of IE in years. Windows XP users recently got a browser upgrade with Service Pack 2 (SP2) for Windows XP. SP2 included features such as pop-up blocking and security enhancements, but those updates won't be made available for IE on earlier Microsoft operating systems, Microsoft has said.
While some people working on IE at Microsoft are maintaining the current version of the browser, most of the team members are focused on IE for Longhorn, Schare said. The Longhorn browser will include new features, improved security and privacy features and better support for third-party developers, he said.
For end-user features, Microsoft is looking at better ways to manage favorites and tabbed browsing, a feature to improve the browsing experience by consolidating multiple Web pages into a single window organized with tabs, Schare said. "Basically making IE a more functional and feature rich browser," he said. Firefox and other browsers that compete with IE already offer tabbed browsing.
Meanwhile AOL's browser unit Netscape Communications (Profile, Products, Articles) is preparing to preview a new browser based on Firefox. "It is based on Firefox, but will be Firefox Plus, it has got improvements beyond Firefox," AOL spokesman Andrew Weinstein said.
The preview, a so-called alpha release, is due on Nov. 30. The new browser and a new e-mail client will eventually replace the current Netscape offering, Weinstein said. He declined to detail product details.
AOL released Netscape 7.2 in August, but that product is based on Mozilla 1.7, a suite of products that includes a browser, e-mail client, Internet Relay Chat client and Web page editor.
Riding a continued high, the Mozilla Foundation keeps counting Firefox downloads, which hit 4.7 million on Friday morning, a spokesman said.
The rise of Firefox, first introduced in February this year when Mozilla renamed its Firebird project, has been remarkable. The browser held 3 percent market share at the end of October, according to WebSideStory Inc. The Mozilla Suite, Netscape and Firefox together held 6 percent of the market at the end of October, up from 3.5 percent in June.Though losing share, IE still dominated with 92.9 percent of the market, according to the San Diego Web metrics company.
Firefox is the Mozilla Foundation's stand-alone browser. The Mozilla open-source project was started in early 1998 by Netscape, which was acquired later that year by AOL. Last year, the people behind Mozilla created a foundation, largely funded by a $2 million pledge from AOL, to build, support and promote Mozilla products.
November 20, 2004 at 09:27 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home
November 14, 2004
Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer
Yahoo! News - Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer
Sun Nov 14,12:28 AM ET
By Rob Pegoraro
Internet Explorer, you're fired.
That should have been said a long time ago. After Microsoft cemented a monopoly of the Web-browser market, it let Internet Explorer go stale, parceling out ho-hum updates that neglected vulnerabilities routinely exploited by hostile Web sites. Not until August's Windows XP (news - web sites) Service Pack 2 update did (some) users get any real relief.
And yet people found reasons to stick with IE -- alternative browsers cost money, were too slow, too complicated, or didn't work with enough Web sites.
No more. Tuesday, the answer to IE arrived: a safe, free, fast, simple and compatible browser called Mozilla Firefox.
Firefox (available for Win 98 or newer, Mac OS X (news - web sites) and Linux (news - web sites) at www.mozilla.org) is an unlikely rival, developed by a small nonprofit group with extensive volunteer help. Its code dates to Netscape and its open-source successor, Mozilla, but in the two years since Firefox debuted as a minimal, browser-only offshoot of those sprawling suites, it has grown into a remarkable product.
Firefox displays an elegant simplicity within and without. Its toolbar presents only the basic browsing commands: back, forward, reload, stop, home. Its Options screen consists of five simple categories of settings -- most of which don't need adjusting, since the defaults actually make sense.
One in particular should delight many long-suffering Web users: Firefox blocks pop-up ads automatically.
But Firefox's security goes deeper than that. It doesn't support Microsoft's dangerous ActiveX software, which gives a Web site the run of your computer. It omits IE's extensive hooks into the rest of Windows, which can turn a mishap into a systemwide meltdown.
Firefox resists "phishing" scams, in which con artists lure users into entering personal info on fake Web pages, by making it easier to tell good sites from bad. When you land on an encrypted page -- almost no phishing sites provide this protection -- Firefox advertises that status by highlighting the address bar in yellow. It also lists that page's domain name on the status bar; if that doesn't match what you see in the address bar, you're probably on a phishing site.
To keep Firefox current with any security fixes, the browser is designed to check for updates automatically.
A "Find" bar at the bottom of Firefox's window lets you search for words on a page without blocking your view of the page itself; as you type a query, the first matching item is highlighted in green. "Find Next" and "Find Previous" buttons jump to other matches, and a "Highlight" button paints all of them in yellow.
For searches across the entire Web, a box at the top right provides a shortcut to Google queries, and a menu lists five other sites, including Yahoo, Amazon and eBay. Downloadable plug-ins offer access to such resources as the Internet Movie Database.
What if that Google search yields four interesting sites? Hold down the Control key as you click each link, and they will open behind separate tabs in your existing window. This tabbed browsing -- a feature shared with almost all non-IE browsers -- is far more efficient and far less cluttered than the old one-page-per-window approach.
Busy readers can also use Firefox's built-in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) newsreader to fetch updates from Web sites that publish their content using this standard. This "Live Bookmarks" feature lacks the flexibility of a stand-alone newsreader, but it's also simpler.
Web addicts can customize Firefox to no end with browser extensions that add functions and themes that alter its looks. Find the Options window's settings too limiting? Type "about: config" into the address bar and you'll see about 600 preferences to tweak.
I've used Firefox as my default browser since February, and in that time I've found few Web sites that don't look right in it. Most of the time, it's the Web site's fault: Microsoft's MSN Video blocks all non-IE browsers, while SideStep's airfare-search tool employs ActiveX (an ActiveX-free version is in the works). In these rare cases, I will fire up IE -- it's not like I can uninstall it -- or, more often, vote with my mouse and move on to another site.
Switching from IE to Firefox is nearly painless. Download a 4.7-megabyte installer, run it, and let it import your existing IE data. Your plug-ins, bookmarks, browsing history and even cookies should transfer over (IE's home page and any saved passwords should be imported, but were not in my tests); you can then pick up in Firefox exactly where you left off in IE.
I think anybody using Internet Explorer should switch to Firefox today. Seriously. Even if you've loaded every IE security update, Firefox will give you a faster, more useful view of the Web. If you haven't -- or if you use a pre-XP version of Windows ineligible for Service Pack 2's security fixes -- it would be lunacy to stick with IE.
(If you're using Mac OS X or Linux, there's no such urgency; Apple's Safari, for example, is a fine browser in its own right and offers a few conveniences that Firefox leaves out.)
Firefox's story doesn't end with this 1.0 version. Some upgrades, such as a rewrite of its awkward bookmarks-management interface, are waiting for later releases. But the beauty of an open-source product like this is that you can participate in its evolution. Firefox's code is open for anybody to inspect and improve; you can browse a database of bugs (bugzilla.mozilla.org) and vote on what you want to see changed next.
All of these advantages may still not suffice to knock off IE anytime soon. But Firefox's development won't grind to a halt if it doesn't suit some company's marketing plans. Can you say that about IE?
Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.
November 14, 2004 at 11:09 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (10) | Top of page | Blog Home
November 10, 2004
1,000,000 on day 1!
Spread Firefox - Igniting the web
Firefox 1.0 has been released in 17 languages and on 5 platforms. But you—and 1,000,000 others—already knew that. That's right, folks: at least one million downloads of Firefox 1.0 on launch day, and the number could go higher when all the ballots are counted. We'll have more for you later today.
November 10, 2004 at 11:04 PM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (3) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 29, 2004
Firefox aims for 10 percent of Web surfers
Firefox aims for 10 percent of Web surfers - ZDNet UK News
Ingrid Marson
ZDNet UK
October 25, 2004, 14:10 BST
The Mozilla Foundation expects one in 10 Internet users to be browsing using Firefox within the next year
Maybe the browser wars really are back.
Bart Decrem, the marketing contact for the Mozilla Foundation, told ZDNet UK on Friday that he expects the browser's market share to reach 10 percent by the end of 2005.
"I think we'll get to 10 percent over the next year. We don't have 10 percent of the Web at the moment, but we have the momentum," claimed Decrem.
He is confident of hitting this goal as interest in the browser has been accelerating over the last few months. He said this momentum can be seen in the increasing number of downloads for each version of Firefox: version 0.8 was downloaded 3.3 million times in four months; 0.9 was downloaded 6.5 million times in three months; and the pre-release version was downloaded five million times in just one month.
ZDNet UK's own figures show that since the beginning of this year there has been an increase in the percentage of site visitors using a Mozilla browser. In February around 9 percent of site visitors were using a Mozilla-based browser; this increased to 19 percent in October. Over the same period, IE use decreased from 88 percent to 79 percent.
CNET News.com and W3Schools.com, a Web development tutorial site, have found similar trends. The move from IE to Firefox is also shown by the fact that half of Firefox downloads are from IE users, according to Decrem.
Mozilla is also attracting increasing interest from non-technical users, who see the perceived speed of their Internet connection rise after switching to Firefox, according to Decrem.
"We get user emails saying, 'You're 10 times faster than IE'," said Decrem. "Benchmark tests show we're about the same speed, but home users who have been accessing the Internet for five years may have 15 or 20 pieces of spyware, which means that every time they access a Web page, the malware could be making an additional 15 connections to the Internet, to log the information it has gathered."
Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant for security firm Sophos, said that spyware and virus writers tend to write malware specifically for IE. This can noticeably slow down Internet access for home users who access the Internet via dial-up, although broadband users are unlikely to notice any difference.
"Some spyware hooks specifically into IE," said Cluley. "But other spyware, such as those which log key presses and pass them onto an Internet site, are likely to work on any browser."
Decrem said the recent interest in Firefox validates Netscape's decision to open the source code of its Communicator software in 1998.
"Netscape open-sourced the source code to 'harness the power' of the open-source community," said Decrem. "Now, six years later, this vision is finally coming into fruition. To get over the finish line we needed a non-profit organisation, which allows us to build new partnerships and do innovative marketing."
Decrem believes Firefox has been able to exploit public interest in open-source software by providing an easy to ease, accessible application.
"People have been hearing about open source for 10 years now," said Decrem. "They're intrigued by it and are inspired by the community approach, but they've not been able to experience it for themselves. Firefox is open source and turns up on your doorstep in a way you can consume. It is easy to use with good features."
Decrem believes that other open-source projects would get more interest from non-technical users if they took a tougher approach to jettisoning unnecessary functionality.
"At Firefox we are disciplined about getting rid of features," said Decrem. "It is hard to do that in an open-source development model. You need to take the open-source energy and overlay a product management discipline."
Another open-source project which has accepted the need for streamlining, is the Linux desktop GNOME, which over the last few years has made various changes to simplify the desktop. However, this approach has been unpopular with some GNOME developers, who spun off the GoneME project in July 2004 to develop a version of GNOME for experienced users.
"Current leadership in the GNOME Project have chosen a path that ignores the needs of experienced users," says the GoneMe Web site. "Many features are being added that many established users don't want or need. Some of the best of the old features are being dropped."
Creating a product for the average user also requires strong usability testing, according to Decrem.
"We have spent 10 years watching how people use stuff, for example, tab browsing came from watching people visit the same Web sites every day. Too often the Linux community lives in a bubble -- there is not enough interaction with tend users."
October 29, 2004 at 08:45 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (12) | Top of page | Blog Home
October 23, 2004
Browser Trends - W3C
Mozilla doubles market share from 8% in January to 17% in September.
2004 IE 6 IE 5 O 7 Moz NN 3 NN 4 NN 7
October 69.8% 6.0% 2.3% 17.0% 0.2% 0.2% 1.3%
September 69.6% 6.2% 2.3% 16.9% 0.2% 0.2% 1.3%
August 70.3% 7.0% 2.3% 15.5% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
July 71.0% 7.7% 2.3% 13.8% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
June 72.4% 8.3% 2.3% 11.8% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
May 72.6% 9.2% 2.2% 11.0% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
April 72.4% 10.1% 2.1% 10.3% 0.3% 0.3% 1.4%
March 72.1% 10.7% 2.1% 9.6% 0.4% 0.4% 1.4%
February 71.5% 11.5% 2.2% 9.0% 0.4% 0.4% 1.5%
January 71.3% 12.8% 2.1% 8.2% 0.4% 0.5% 1.5%
October 23, 2004 at 11:00 AM in Browsers | Permalink | TrackBack (8) | Top of page | Blog Home
Google's Browser Plans
MozillaNews - Google's Browser Plans
For several months, there's been a lot of buzz around Google's April 2004 registration of the gbrowser.com domain. After quite a while of digging, I believe I've managed to boil some truth out of the rumor stew. While this is pure speculation, it's speculation based on a wide variety of facts gathered over the past three months. Feel free to take it with a generous helping of salt.
The Mozilla developers have been stone silent on the issue, aside from a few accidental slips, but several other sources have let loose other bits of information. Interestingly, there's either great confusion on the plans (or a highly partitioned project inside Google), or a good deal of misinformation. Trying to determine what's real and what's not is like making a Venn diagram. Each source is a circle filled with information. Some information is common to all or many circles, some information only comes from one source. you have to put all the circles together, and where they overlap is the most reliable information. So after weeks of analysis, this is where we think Gbrowser is headed.
The overlap is looking like a Google branded and customized Firefox based browser. To help set it apart from the rest of the browser crowd, they're integrating a lot of their own technologies. Since Firefox does not contain a mail app, they're integrating Gmail for email access, with a built in new-mail notifier. Interestingly, mailto: urls will work with Gmail, allowing peple to click email links in pages and have Gmail open a new mail to that address, as well as IE-like buttons on the toolbar for composing new mail from scratch.
Newsgroups will be built in similar to Gmail with the Google Groups service, and possibly the ability to select groups to watch, like in a full fledged newsreader (like Mozilla Thunderbird). And Google News will also have built in access from the browser along with Google Alerts or a similar, RSS-based feature.
Other features include better search integration, with the extra features such as Image Searching by right clicking on an image or selected word. As Silicon.com found there is also a Google branded IM service on the way as well, and could be a Jabber or rebranded AIM also coming bundled with the browser.
There are other, extra-browser features that will most likely come with it, and tie into the browser, such as Google Desktop Search, Picasa (with links to the browser for web-related sharing, searching, etc.), and Google Toolbar features that IE users currently enjoy.
Also, Google loves the recently aquired Blogger, and will have built in linkage to Blogger and rich-editing tools, making Blogger a highly integrated feature, with the ability to blog links and web-content as easily as using the