Media Blog

Most everyone acknowledges Google Chrome is both lightweight and lightning-fast, but the browser often falls short in the features department when compared to other offerings like Firefox and Safari.

However, several improvements will be showing up soon in Google’s web browser that bring it further up to speed with the competition in the features department.

Google is adding some rather sophisticated cloud-based data synchronization capabilities to its browser, according to a post on the Chromium mailing list (an e-mail list for developers working on Chrome’s code, which is open-source) from Friday.

The new features will let users sync their Google Accounts to Google Chrome. At first Chrome will just sync bookmarks, but looking at the documentation, it’s clear Chrome will be able to sync other user data — user preferences and more sensitive stuff like login credentials — in future releases. The sync features could start showing up in Chrome developer releases as early as this month, according to Ars Technica.

So, you’ll soon be able to load any instance of Chrome on any computer, log in to Google, and have access to all of your bookmarks. Firefox has a similar system called Weave, which is made by Mozilla and is available as an add-on along with a server-side component that can be run privately. However, Google’s sync plans involve “push” style notifications that provide instant updates, whereas Weave and sync tools like it rely on polling, so data is updated only when a button is clicked.

It was revealed last week that Google is also adding a theming system to Chrome, so users can apply skins and custom color schemes. Again, Firefox has its own themeing system called Personas.

There are other things happening in Chome’s universe as well. The latest builds have seen a speed boost on some Linux desktops, and the still-nascent Mac version of Chrome is close to offering support for the Flash Player.

In the world of web browsers, raw speed and useful features have always been a trade-off. Make a browser as lightweight and devoid of unnecessary features as possible, and it will require fewer system resources to get its job done faster, feeling snappier to the user and rendering pages more quickly. But people have come to expect more than just a blank window to the web, so browser makers have added things like bookmark and history managers, skinning and theming options, identity managers and bug reporting systems to their browsers’ default installations.

It’s a game of balance — add too few features and users feel cheated on what they’ve come to consider basic functionality. Add too many features and you start to slow the browser down.

The biggest browser makers, Microsoft and Mozilla, have gone the route of constructing plug-in architectures so people can add whatever extra third-party features they want. But Google and Apple have largely shied away from plug-ins so far — though there are some for Safari and Google is taking baby steps.

So do these latest developments mean that Chrome is slowly going to bulk up and become a contender? If so, signs point to the “filling out” kind of bulking up and not the “bloating” kind. Maybe it’s moving from featherweight to middleweight, at least.

Chrome’s svelte frame is why its proponents love it, though those same evangelists will also admit they keep Firefox around simply because of all the cool stuff it can do that Chrome can’t.

To take advantage of all the latest features showing up in Chrome, you need to download the Channel Chooser and make sure you switch to the developer’s stream. That’s the only way to get the latest experimental updates.

See Also:

• Five Questions About Google Chrome OS
• Google Chrome Gets Add-ons, Closes in on Firefox
• Mac Chrome Starting to Look Like a Real Browser

Just a few days after teasing Firefox fans with mockups and design changes for the coming Firefox 3.7, Mozilla is back with more ideas for Firefox 4.0.

As the Mozilla wiki notes, these are merely sketches of what Firefox 4.0 might look like. The point is to throw some ideas against the wall and see what sticks. So far it looks like Mozilla could have a bit of Chrome envy — one of the proposals uses the same tabs-on-top look that Google pioneered with its Chrome browser.

Couple that with the plans to isolate each tab to its own process and Firefox is starting to sound (and possibly look) a bit like Google Chrome. Protected tabs are definitely a good thing (a single page won’t crash your whole browser), but, judging by the discussion on the Mozilla wiki, the tabs-on-top design is somewhat more controversial. Keeping tabs below the menu bar for the default theme and offering an advanced option to move them to the top strikes us as a good compromise.

Other ideas in the screenshot mockups include consolidating the Stop, Refresh, and Go buttons into a single button on the right side of the URL bar. The idea is to save space in the toolbar and to make the button contextual — when you type in the URL bar it would turn green and be a Go button, when the page is loading it changes to a Stop button and when the page is done it would become a refresh button.

The three-in-one button on the right is pretty similar to Safari 4, though the Mozilla mockup makes it much more clearly a button than what Safari offers.

As with the earlier screenshots, the mockups are limited to Windows themes; there’s no hint of what Firefox 4 might look like in Mac OS X or Linux. But fear not Firefox fans, there’s still plenty of time before Firefox 4.0 arrives.

And remember, these are just mockups. If you have strong feelings about them — good or bad — be sure to let Mozilla know. You can leave your feedback on the wiki — just hit the discussion button at the top of the page to join in.

[Bonus points to Mozilla for including OpenFontLibrary in a screenshot — it’s a great place to grab some free, legal fonts for use with Firefox 3.5’s CSS 3 @font-face support.]

See Also:

• Mozilla Mulls Design Makeover for Firefox 3.7
• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5
• Firefox 3.5.1 Released, Critical Flaw Fixed
• Hacker Finds Security Flaw in Firefox 3.5, Fix on the Way

Developers working with template site designs often have several CSS files to wrangle — one for the basic layout elements and others with site-specific rules. Sometimes all you need to do to create a new site is change the color scheme, but how do you find all the different color declarations in a large CSS file?

Well, now you don’t have to because developer Ryan Berg created a fantastic little tool named CSSPrism. CSSPrism takes a stylesheet URL and then scans through and displays all the hex colors from the file.

CSSPrism uses the very slick jQuery color picker to make editing your color scheme a snap. You can even export the results as a new stylesheet and drop it into your site. There’s also a handy bookmarklet that will insert links to any site’s linked CSS files just inside the body tag.

As some have already pointed out, the Firefox Web Developer add-on offers similar features in its Information menu (try the View Color Information option), but Berg’s tool has the added color picker and export features that make it well worth a visit.

Head on over to CSSPrism and give it a try. One thing to keep in mind — currently CSSPrism doesn’t do well with compressed stylesheets, so if you have a single line, compressed CSS file you’ll have to feed the source copy through CSSPrism to see the results.

See Also:

• CSS Variables: Coming Soon to a Browser Near You
• New Generator Tool Makes Blueprint CSS More Flexible
• Use CSS to Hack Around Browser Incompatibilities
• What’s On Your CSS Wishlist?

Our favorite web development framework, Django, has released another major update, bringing Django to version 1.1.

Django is a powerful open-source web framework, written in Python. Compared to other open-source (or even proprietary) frameworks for building specialized, database-driven websites, Django makes the core tasks remarkably easy and fast. Django powers numerous high-profile websites, from the geo-aware EveryBlock to Google’s App Engine tools.

The latest release contains quite few nice new features including improvements for Django’s object-relational mapper (ORM), support for “unmanaged models” (great for projects working with a legacy database), bulk actions in the admin and much more.

As is the project’s policy, most of your existing code should work with Django 1.1. There are however a few backwards incompatible changes and deprecated features so be sure to test your code thoroughly before you upgrade.

You can grab the latest stable version of Django from the official download page and be sure the read through the release notes for more details on all the new stuff.

As with the initial Django 1.0 release last year, the latest version comes just before DjangoCon. DjangoCon 2009 sees the conference swinging north to Portland, Oregon where, from September 8-12 Djangonauts will gather to discuss Django tips, tricks and features.

The first three days are conference days with this year’s focus falling on what the planners call “the how-to talk.” The last two days of the conference will be sprint days focused on getting Django 1.2 ready for prime time.

If you’re interested in attending head on over to the DjangoCon website for more details.

See Also:

• Cool Tutorial: Django in the Real World
• Django Deemed Perfect, Goes 1.0
• Django Developers Announce First-Ever Conference
• Django Poised to Take Over the Web With New Foundation

Django’s big sell is that it’s easy.

Compared to other open-source (or even proprietary) frameworks for building specialized, database-driven websites, Django makes the core tasks remarkably easy and fast to complete. A developer with working knowledge of databases and Python can get a site up and running in less than an hour.

But once your code is written, what comes next?

That question forms the basis of a talk given by Jacob Kaplan-Moss, one of Django’s lead developers, at the OSCON Open Source Convention in San Jose, California Tuesday. His slides are now online (PDF, 1.7MB)

The concentration is on testing, staging and deployment. There are also recommendations for fine-tuning performance. And even if you don’t know Python or if you’ve never used Django, the presentation is still helpful since it’s full of general advice about building and deploying web applications.

Also, there’s a great series of tutorials hosted by the Django Project itself, and there’s a beginner’s Django tutorial right here on Webmonkey.

Illustration: Stefan Imhoff

See Also:

• EveryBlock Source Code Release Offers Glimpse of the Magic Behind the Curtain

Mozilla just released Firefox 3.5 a few weeks ago, but plans are already afoot for future improvements.

Previous announcements have included some details about new features headed for future versions of Firefox. For example, Mozilla plans to add support for multiple processes and isolate each tab to its own process (much the way Google Chrome does now).

While we may have to wait a while for other new features to be announced, Mozilla has released some design mockups for Firefox 3.7. Keep in mind that these are just mockups, intended mainly for brainstorming, and may well change significantly before Firefox 3.7 arrives.

That said, the new mockups for the Windows version of Firefox bring a few new visual elements that will give Firefox an updated skin, and fit a little better with the look and feel of Windows 7.

The mockups on the Mozilla wiki show Firefox embracing the Aero Glass look of Vista/Win 7 and even using the same translucent window style found in the OS itself. The toolbar and tabs will be rendered using Windows’ Glass look, and the main app buttons will be translucent and slightly glossy “to meld with the toolbar,” as the Mozilla wiki puts it.

Also changed is the location of the new page button, which shifts over to the left side of the tab bar, and the tools/bookmark bar menu, which moves to the right of the main search box.

So far we haven’t seen any Mac OS X mockups, but with the Windows version heading in a more OS-native direction, perhaps Firefox 3.7 will do a better job of embracing its platform as well (for a list of some ways Firefox’s current design fails on Mac OS X, have a look at John Gruber’s still pretty accurate critique of Firefox 3 on OS X)

Of course Firefox 3.7 is still a ways off. Mozilla’s director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, has already said that the next version of Firefox (currently listed as 3.6) will land around the same time as Windows 7, which is expected to ship in October. That would likely mean that 3.7 won’t be arriving until sometime in 2010.

If you’d like to look way into the future, there’s also a single wireframe mockup of a possible design revamp for Firefox 4.0. Undoubtedly the most controversial idea being tossed around in the 4.0 mockups is moving the tab bar above the URL bar, something Google Chrome has already done and Safari 4 flirted with during the beta phase before returning to the traditional URL bar in the final release.

If these design ideas fill you with horror, that’s okay, nothing is set in stone yet. Even better, you can join the discussion and add your own ideas to the mix.

See Also:

• Mozilla Pushes the Web Forward With Firefox 3.5
• Firefox 3.5.1 Released, Critical Flaw Fixed
• Hacker Finds Security Flaw in Firefox 3.5, Fix on the Way

Every time we dig through our server logs, we uncover some interesting user data. Today, we dove a little deeper than usual, and as a result, our mining session turned up some particularly unique discoveries. I’ve assembled the most interesting data points below.

Note: These results are for all of Wired.com — stories, blogs, photo galleries, magazine content and the How-To Wiki. Product Reviews and Webmonkey are reported separately, but I’ve included the relevant data points for Webmonkey wherever there’s something interesting to point out.

Browsers:

• Almost half of Wired.com’s readers are Firefox users. Mozilla’s open-source browser accounts for just over 48% of our web traffic. That’s far more than any other browser. Webmonkey’s audience skews a little higher, at around 55% using Firefox.
• Firefox 3, which is over a year old, is the most popular browser among Wired.com readers by a very wide margin. Firefox 3.5, which was released three weeks ago, doesn’t show up until #23 in our rankings. We have more Chrome users than Firefox 3.5 users.
• By contrast, just over a third of our readers with Safari are running the most recent version, and two thirds of our readers with Chrome have 2.0, the most recent version.
• Internet Explorer 7 is the most popular version of Microsoft’s browser we see. The dreaded IE6 is the next most popular, then IE 8 in third. The people we have the most pity for are the poor souls running IE6 for AOL (#34 on the list).
• The only version of Opera that shows up in our top 50 is Opera 10. Go early adopters!
• Firefox 1.0 shows up at the bottom of the list, at #50.
• The oldest browser within the top 50 is Netscape 7.0, which came out in 2002. Please, sir or madam, upgrade.

Operating Systems:

Not too many surprises here. Windows XP is number one, followed by Vista, then Mac OS X. Linux is fourth, followed by Windows 7.

Yes, Wired.com sees more Linux users than Windows 7 users. It’s the same on Webmonkey. Be fair — Windows 7 isn’t even out yet.

And speaking of Be, there’s some funky old junk out there surfing the tubes! This is the bottom bracket in our breakdown of top 30 operating systems:

22. OS/2
23. AIX
24. HP-UX
25. BeOS
26. Amiga OS
27. IRIX
28. Windows 9x/NT
29. VMS
30. OSF/1

Kudos to the BeOS holdouts — does NetPositive have JavaScript yet? And Huzzahs to the Amiga faithful! For the uninitiated, “Huzzah” is what they say at renaissance faires when you tip the beer wench. If you had an Amiga, you’d know that.

But, wow… IRIX? VMS? Windows NT? Anyone who wants to lay claim to those, please do so in the comments.

Adobe announced two open-source initiatives Tuesday, both of which are intended to make it easier for web publishers to create rich media web experiences based in Flash.

The Open Source Media Framework (formerly code-named Strobe) is a set of components released under the Mozilla Public License that let developers build applications based around Flash video. The other code release, the Text Layout Framework, is a set of ActionScript tools for using a wider array of fonts and producing better-looking text content in Flash and AIR apps.

Though these development will likely present new opportunities for publishers who want to get video and rich text layouts online with minimal hassle and a lower up-front cost, it’s difficult to see Adobe’s move as anything but a defenses against open video initiatives like Ogg Theora.

One of the great promises of HTML 5 is an open video experience on the web — the ability for people to watch videos play back in the web browser natively, without having to download a plug-in like Flash or Silverlight to see it. Though still in draft, HTML 5 has provisions in place to allow for embedding of audio and video on web pages through the use of tags, with the playback codecs bundled in the browser. Of course, the web standards crowd prefers to recommend browsers use codecs believed to be free of patent restrictions, such as Ogg Theora and Dirac.

The technology is already being used in the wild — both YouTube and DailyMotion are experimenting with Flash-free video playback with Ogg Theora, and Google Chrome, Opera and Firefox 3.5 offer support for such features.

At the end of June, however, the HTML 5 working group removed the codec requirement from the draft specification after the various browser makers couldn’t come to a consensus over which codec to support.

This left the door open for Flash to hold on to developers who would have otherwise jumped ship for free software alternatives. Tuesday’s OSMF code release extends that hand even further — by freeing up the tools under an open-source license, Adobe is only strengthening its position among developers building rich internet apps.

It’s important to note that the tools needed to create video-playing Flash apps, Flash CS 4 and Flash Builder, are only available commercially, and that the playback technology is patented — Adobe must license it from the patent holders.

The timing of the Text Framework Layout release is no less curious. Just last month, a new project called Typekit was launched with the goal of allowing developers to license and use more complex fonts in their web designs. Once Typekit gets off the ground, licensed fonts will be downloaded by users in a protected environment and laid out on a page using open web standards.

Right now, this is exactly the kind of thing designers use Flash for. With technologies like sIFR, designers can go beyond the handful of fonts supported by the current web browsers, creating more complex type displays.

But newer, emerging standards like CSS3 allow for many of the same layout options as Flash, so if a service like Typekit can free up more typefaces for designers to use, the threat against Flash is obvious.

Adobe’s code releases are more than just insurance policies against losing developers to Flash-free technologies. They are also reminders that, while HTML 5 looks promising, there’s already a technology here and in abundant use that can solve many of the same problems HTML 5 hopes to. And after Tuesday’s release, it’s more attractive to the fence-sitters.

Update: Also be sure to check out Dana Blankenhorn’s opinion piece about Adobe’s open-source strategy at ZDNet.

See Also:

• W3C Drops Audio and Video Codec Requirements From HTML 5
• How Firefox Is Pushing Open Video Onto the Web
• Google Throws Its Weight Behind HTML 5

Monday, July 20 is the fortieth anniversary of the first manned moon landing. Google has chosen to mark the occassion by releasing a new set of maps for Google Earth that let you browse the surface of the moon.

Google Earth is free software. You’ll need the latest version to explore the moon, so if you don’t already have Google Earth 5.0, download it now. If you already have 5.0, no upgrade is required.

To access the new moon maps, go to the little planet icon drop-down in the Google Earth toolbar and select “Moon.” You’ll notice there are also selectors for Sky and Mars — these are previous enhancements to Google Earth that are also available. Users of Google Maps have also been able to explore the moon, the night sky and Mars in a web browser for some time.

Some awesome metadata comes with Google Earth’s moon maps that makes it worth the download, though. There are interactive tours of the moon’s various sights narrated by Apollo astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Jack Schmitt, 360-degree photo-montages of landing sites, clips from televised footage of the various Apollo missions and overlays of the training maps used by the astronauts. The are also 3-D models of the moon’s terrain, complete with models of the landers, probes, rovers and other artifacts left by humans.

Check out this video featuring Apollo 17 astronaut Jack Schmitt that shows off some of the enhancements.

See Also:

• July 20, 1969: One Small Step… One Giant Leap… [Wired.com]
• Wired Science Moon Landing Coverage
• Google Earth and NASA Turn Up The Lights

Check out WPBeginner, an excellent site filled with tutorials and advice for budding web builders getting started with WordPress.

Every professional web developer has been asked at some point by a relative or close friend to “help me build a website.”

Our web skills play a large part in endearing us to our non-technical friends, and everyone likes to be appreciated, but that request probably makes you shudder every time you hear it.

Tools like WordPress have grown so terribly easy to use, most people are capable of building a simple site with a blog, a photo gallery, contact form and other simple functionality all by themselves. They just don’t know it, and building things on the web is such unfamiliar territory, they simply haven’t bothered to fully explore their options.

Go ahead and point them to WPBeginner. It’s an impressive repository of clearly-written articles on how to install and set up WordPress, including advice on picking and installing themes and plug-ins — Akismet, Super Cache and Feedsmith are on the recommended list. For absolute beginners, there’s also a list of WordPress-friendly hosting providers, advice on picking and purchasing a good domain name and advice on using the latest social tools to increase readership.

The editorial staff actively responds to user questions in the comments on all the articles, too, so it’s a good place to go for help.

For the seasoned users, there are more advanced tutorials and articles about customizing layouts, improving search rankings and using JQuery.

WPBeginner also offers a free WordPress setup service. They’ll install a simple blog site for you free of charge — all they ask is that you name them as a referral with one their partnered hosting providers.

See Also:

• Tutorial: Get Started With WordPress
• Tutorial: Get Started With Movable Type
• Tutorial: Tips for Better Blogging