Media Blog

If you’ve been thinking Google’s recently unveiled Chrome Frame plug-in for Internet Explorer might be the answer to all the web’s IE pains, well, you might want to think twice.

Mozilla’s Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver says Google’s Chrome plug-in for IE is a bad idea. In a post on his personal blog, Shaver expresses his belief that the Chrome plug-in for IE muddles the user’s understanding of browser security, and in the end will create more confusion and little benefit. Shaver argues that simply telling users to switch browsers is far better strategy.

The controversy surrounds Google’s recently announced open-source plug-in for IE called Google Chrome Frame. Chrome Frame can be used to automatically force IE to load a website using the same WebKit rendering engine as Google Chrome, complete with its enhanced JavaScript rendering and support for HTML5 technologies like Canvas and embedded audio and video.

On the surface it sounds like a great way to get offer Internet Explorer users a way to enjoy the modern web — the Chrome Frame plug-in makes HTML5 tools work and renders pages according to web standards. However, while Chrome Frame might look good to web developers tired of dealing with Internet Explorer’s wonky rendering and antiquated feature set, Shaver doesn’t believe Chrome Frame is the answer. Rather, he thinks the far better solution would be to convince users of IE 6 or IE 7 to simply upgrade to the Chrome browser itself.

According to Shaver, “running Chrome Frame within IE makes many of the browser application’s features non-functional, or less effective.” He points out that using Chrome Frame in IE partially disables the browser’s private browsing mode and other security controls.

In a follow-up e-mail with Webmonkey, Shaver says his concerns are not so much “surface attacks” that Microsoft lashed out against, but rather how users will react.

Part of the problem he believes lies with the decision to allow site developers to trigger the Chrome Frame, which means users never get to know which browser is actually in control.

Shaver thinks the confusion such a situation creates will adversely affect users, pointing out a number of possibly confusing scenarios:

Will they get anti-phishing indications that they understand?

Is the dialog telling them about a problem from their browser, from the injected rendering engine, or from a spoofing site?

If they permit a site to know their location, is that being sent by the same rules as when they answered that on another site, with a different-looking dialog?

Do they understand what browser they’re using when getting support?

Are they really in private browsing mode?

Are they mad at Microsoft or Google if it crashes?

He also points out that many people who are forced to use IE 6 do so because they have no control over what software they use — for example a corporate network where system admins control the software that’s installed. In that situation, it’s unlikely users would be able to install Chrome Frame anyway.

See Also:

• New Google Plug-in Embeds Chrome Inside Internet Explorer
• Google Chrome Closes in on Firefox With Official Extension Support
• Google Chrome Is Growing Up, Slowly but Surely

If you’ve been thinking Google’s recently unveiled Chrome Frame plug-in for Internet Explorer might be the answer to all the web’s IE pains, well, you might want to think twice.

Mozilla’s Vice President of Engineering Mike Shaver says Google’s Chrome plug-in for IE is a bad idea. In a post on his personal blog, Shaver expresses his belief that the Chrome plug-in for IE muddles the user’s understanding of browser security, and in the end will create more confusion and little benefit. Shaver argues that simply telling users to switch browsers is far better strategy.

The controversy surrounds Google’s recently announced open-source plug-in for IE called Google Chrome Frame. Chrome Frame can be used to automatically force IE to load a website using the same WebKit rendering engine as Google Chrome, complete with its enhanced JavaScript rendering and support for HTML5 technologies like Canvas and embedded audio and video.

On the surface it sounds like a great way to get offer Internet Explorer users a way to enjoy the modern web — the Chrome Frame plug-in makes HTML5 tools work and renders pages according to web standards. However, while Chrome Frame might look good to web developers tired of dealing with Internet Explorer’s wonky rendering and antiquated feature set, Shaver doesn’t believe Chrome Frame is the answer. Rather, he thinks the far better solution would be to convince users of IE 6 or IE 7 to simply upgrade to the Chrome browser itself.

According to Shaver, “running Chrome Frame within IE makes many of the browser application’s features non-functional, or less effective.” He points out that using Chrome Frame in IE partially disables the browser’s private browsing mode and other security controls.

In a follow-up e-mail with Webmonkey, Shaver says his concerns are not so much “surface attacks” that Microsoft lashed out against, but rather how users will react.

Part of the problem he believes lies with the decision to allow site developers to trigger the Chrome Frame, which means users never get to know which browser is actually in control.

Shaver thinks the confusion such a situation creates will adversely affect users, pointing out a number of possibly confusing scenarios:

Will they get anti-phishing indications that they understand?

Is the dialog telling them about a problem from their browser, from the injected rendering engine, or from a spoofing site?

If they permit a site to know their location, is that being sent by the same rules as when they answered that on another site, with a different-looking dialog?

Do they understand what browser they’re using when getting support?

Are they really in private browsing mode?

Are they mad at Microsoft or Google if it crashes?

He also points out that many people who are forced to use IE 6 do so because they have no control over what software they use — for example a corporate network where system admins control the software that’s installed. In that situation, it’s unlikely users would be able to install Chrome Frame anyway.

See Also:

• New Google Plug-in Embeds Chrome Inside Internet Explorer
• Google Chrome Closes in on Firefox With Official Extension Support
• Google Chrome Is Growing Up, Slowly but Surely

The web service Cliqset launched a beta version of its new website Wednesday.

The service has undergone a significant makeover with this release, having transformed from a developer-centric platform to a user-centric app for following, posting to and interacting with real-time activity streams around the web.

The redesign puts Cliqset in the same camp as other real-time services like FriendFeed, Facebook and Plaxo Pulse. It also opens up a new set of tools to developers that should prove to be a huge help for anyone building real-time web apps.

The launch is still a private beta, but Cliqset has offered to let in 200 Webmonkey and Wired.com readers — just go to this URL. The first 200 people to register will be automatically approved. Everyone else will have to wait a couple of weeks.

If you have a Cliqset account from the last version of the site, that should also get you into the beta.

When we last wrote about Cliqset earlier this year, the company was putting the finishing touches on its application platform. It was busy recruiting developers to code up some apps for engaging all the photos, links, status updates and videos being posted on the social web. But without too many apps to show off, things were pretty quiet on Cliqset — it basically served as a glorified address book.

The site has changed direction since then, and for the better. The Cliqset team has built in an impressive top layer of user-facing features that show off the robust, real-time streaming platform underneath.

The timing is right, as the real-time social web is undergoing a period of explosive growth. Dozens of services are competing to be your social hub —- a place to aggregate and interact with the streams of data coming out of Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr and all the various nodes on your own social map.

Facebook in particular has taken a specific interest, beefing up its own real-time mojo by purchasing FriendFeed in August, and shortly thereafter releasing its code for serving real-time data.

It makes sense then that Cliqset has much in common with other social aggregation sites like FriendFeed. After you sign up, you tell Cliqset what your username is at all of the other social web services you’re into — Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr and so on. Cliqset offers to pull content from around 70 social sites right now. It pulls all of your activities from those sites and posts them in a stream that refreshes as new stuff flows in. You can import your contacts to find other people you know on Cliqset. Once you do, you can see their updates appear in your stream, comment on each others posts and cross-post anything they share (to your own Twitter account, for example).

The new user interface is downright beautiful. You can tell Cliqset has really focused on making the stream as clean and uncluttered as possible. Extra functions and sharing buttons only appear when you hover over a shared item or click on one with your mouse.

A huge bonus is that Cliqset is using the emerging Activity Streams data specification to make all this happen. Activity Streams is an open-source XML-based format that uses a common actor-verb-asset model to report an activity on a social website. For example, “Amy shared a video” or “Mike rated this photo.” It’s a simple organizing principle that allows social web services to more easily talk to each other about what their users are doing.

But if not everyone is reporting their users’ activity data using a common model, it becomes harder to get two services to talk to each other. And only a handful of sites are supporting Activity Streams right now.

As Cliqset co-founder Darren Bounds tells Webmonkey, Cliqset is actually re-writing all the aggregated data streams into the Activity Streams format, physically cleaning up the social web’s mess as it goes.

By presenting such clean data, Cliqset is able to do some very cool things with its new user interface.

You can filter your stream by content type or activity using a set of icons at the top. So if you just want to see photos, status updates, or videos, you can click on the camera, the speech bubble or the movie camera. Likewise for bookmarks, likes, ratings. You can also build Boolean filters by including or excluding multiple content types.

Along with Wednesday’s new user-facing site, Cliqset is also releasing a set of APIs that expose these nicely-formed streams. So, if you’re a developer who wants to write a real-time updating web app, you can build it on Cliqset’s platform and avoid the headache of coding around various non-conforming stream formats.

And all that business about “finding your friends” — Cliqset is also supporting the open-source Portable Contacts format for importing and exporting address book data safely. When you check your Gmail contacts to see who else you know is on Cliqset, you’re not handing over your Google login or password. There’s still an annoying step where you’re asked to spam everyone you know and tell them about Cliqset — a truly poor practice everyone should just stop right now — but Cliqset leaves everyone unchecked by default and makes it easy enough to skip that part altogether.

Bounds says it was extremely important to him and his team that Cliqset implements and promotes open data stream and identity standards across the whole platform.

As such, the company is implementing OpenID and OAuth to handle logins and authentications, but something you won’t find as an option is Facebook Connect, which uses proprietary code.

It’s also notable that Cliqset is dumping its old iPhone app for a mobile client that better reflects the new real-time streaming experience. Bounds doesn’t have any details to share about those plans, but we’ll certainly be watching for something along those lines in the future.

See Also:

• Facebook Open Sources ‘Tornado’ the Engine That Drives FriendFeed
• Let’s Be Friends: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
• Facebook Cracks, Here Come the Apps

The web service Cliqset launched a beta version of its new website Wednesday.

The service has undergone a significant makeover with this release, having transformed from a developer-centric platform to a user-centric app for following, posting to and interacting with real-time activity streams around the web.

The redesign puts Cliqset in the same camp as other real-time services like FriendFeed, Facebook and Plaxo Pulse. It also opens up a new set of tools to developers that should prove to be a huge help for anyone building real-time web apps.

The launch is still a private beta, but Cliqset has offered to let in 200 Webmonkey and Wired.com readers — just go to this URL. The first 200 people to register will be automatically approved. Everyone else will have to wait a couple of weeks.

If you have a Cliqset account from the last version of the site, that should also get you into the beta.

When we last wrote about Cliqset earlier this year, the company was putting the finishing touches on its application platform. It was busy recruiting developers to code up some apps for engaging all the photos, links, status updates and videos being posted on the social web. But without too many apps to show off, things were pretty quiet on Cliqset — it basically served as a glorified address book.

The site has changed direction since then, and for the better. The Cliqset team has built in an impressive top layer of user-facing features that show off the robust, real-time streaming platform underneath.

The timing is right, as the real-time social web is undergoing a period of explosive growth. Dozens of services are competing to be your social hub —- a place to aggregate and interact with the streams of data coming out of Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, Flickr and all the various nodes on your own social map.

Facebook in particular has taken a specific interest, beefing up its own real-time mojo by purchasing FriendFeed in August, and shortly thereafter releasing its code for serving real-time data.

It makes sense then that Cliqset has much in common with other social aggregation sites like FriendFeed. After you sign up, you tell Cliqset what your username is at all of the other social web services you’re into — Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, Tumblr and so on. Cliqset offers to pull content from around 70 social sites right now. It pulls all of your activities from those sites and posts them in a stream that refreshes as new stuff flows in. You can import your contacts to find other people you know on Cliqset. Once you do, you can see their updates appear in your stream, comment on each others posts and cross-post anything they share (to your own Twitter account, for example).

The new user interface is downright beautiful. You can tell Cliqset has really focused on making the stream as clean and uncluttered as possible. Extra functions and sharing buttons only appear when you hover over a shared item or click on one with your mouse.

A huge bonus is that Cliqset is using the emerging Activity Streams data specification to make all this happen. Activity Streams is an open-source XML-based format that uses a common actor-verb-asset model to report an activity on a social website. For example, “Amy shared a video” or “Mike rated this photo.” It’s a simple organizing principle that allows social web services to more easily talk to each other about what their users are doing.

But if not everyone is reporting their users’ activity data using a common model, it becomes harder to get two services to talk to each other. And only a handful of sites are supporting Activity Streams right now.

As Cliqset co-founder Darren Bounds tells Webmonkey, Cliqset is actually re-writing all the aggregated data streams into the Activity Streams format, physically cleaning up the social web’s mess as it goes.

By presenting such clean data, Cliqset is able to do some very cool things with its new user interface.

You can filter your stream by content type or activity using a set of icons at the top. So if you just want to see photos, status updates, or videos, you can click on the camera, the speech bubble or the movie camera. Likewise for bookmarks, likes, ratings. You can also build Boolean filters by including or excluding multiple content types.

Along with Wednesday’s new user-facing site, Cliqset is also releasing a set of APIs that expose these nicely-formed streams. So, if you’re a developer who wants to write a real-time updating web app, you can build it on Cliqset’s platform and avoid the headache of coding around various non-conforming stream formats.

And all that business about “finding your friends” — Cliqset is also supporting the open-source Portable Contacts format for importing and exporting address book data safely. When you check your Gmail contacts to see who else you know is on Cliqset, you’re not handing over your Google login or password. There’s still an annoying step where you’re asked to spam everyone you know and tell them about Cliqset — a truly poor practice everyone should just stop right now — but Cliqset leaves everyone unchecked by default and makes it easy enough to skip that part altogether.

Bounds says it was extremely important to him and his team that Cliqset implements and promotes open data stream and identity standards across the whole platform.

As such, the company is implementing OpenID and OAuth to handle logins and authentications, but something you won’t find as an option is Facebook Connect, which uses proprietary code.

It’s also notable that Cliqset is dumping its old iPhone app for a mobile client that better reflects the new real-time streaming experience. Bounds doesn’t have any details to share about those plans, but we’ll certainly be watching for something along those lines in the future.

See Also:

• Facebook Open Sources ‘Tornado’ the Engine That Drives FriendFeed
• Let’s Be Friends: Facebook Acquires FriendFeed
• Facebook Cracks, Here Come the Apps

Yahoo has announced the official release of version 3 of its open-source Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library. The new framework is designed to simplify the process of building complex web interfaces.

With several popular JavaScript-heavy websites like Flickr, Yahoo Mail, MyYahoo and Yahoo Sports, Yahoo has long been at the web’s cutting edge for producing rich, interactive user interfaces. The company’s freely available YUI library has helped popularize various web interfaces we now take for granted, like drag-and-drop actions, tabbed interfaces and click-to-edit text fields.

YUI 3 represents a total, ground-up redesign of the framework and brings some much needed modernizations, including simplified syntax, JQuery-style selector support and a much lighter (6.2kb) “seed” file that makes for much faster page load times.

Developers first got a taste of YUI 3.0 over a year ago when Yahoo began offering a testing version of it, along with suggestions on migrating from YUI 2.0. Since then, Yahoo has vastly improved the library and launched it into the wild on the front door of Yahoo.com.

“The code we’re shipping today in 3.0 is the same code that drives the new Yahoo Home Page, and it goes out with confidence that it has been exercised vigorously and at scale,” writes Yahoo’s Eric Miraglia.

YUI 3.0 brings the framework up to par JQuery and other popular tools for building rich JavaScript interfaces, especially Yahoo’s decision to embrace selectors. While previously controversial since they involve some processing overhead, modern web browser have no trouble parsing selector libraries.

The nice side effect of selectors in YUI is that developers familiar with the JQuery or Prototype JavaScript libraries should be able to transition to YUI without too much trouble. That gives web developers yet another option when it comes to designing and creating rich web interfaces.

YUI 3 is a free download, you can grab a copy from the YUI blog.

Photo: Neil Crosby/Flickr

See Also:

• Yahoo Previews YUI 3.0 JavaScript Library
• Do Frameworks Have a Place in Web Development’s Future?
• Code for Tomorrow’s Web Today Using Modernizr

Yahoo has announced the official release of version 3 of its open-source Yahoo User Interface (YUI) library. The new framework is designed to simplify the process of building complex web interfaces.

With several popular JavaScript-heavy websites like Flickr, Yahoo Mail, MyYahoo and Yahoo Sports, Yahoo has long been at the web’s cutting edge for producing rich, interactive user interfaces. The company’s freely available YUI library has helped popularize various web interfaces we now take for granted, like drag-and-drop actions, tabbed interfaces and click-to-edit text fields.

YUI 3 represents a total, ground-up redesign of the framework and brings some much needed modernizations, including simplified syntax, JQuery-style selector support and a much lighter (6.2kb) “seed” file that makes for much faster page load times.

Developers first got a taste of YUI 3.0 over a year ago when Yahoo began offering a testing version of it, along with suggestions on migrating from YUI 2.0. Since then, Yahoo has vastly improved the library and launched it into the wild on the front door of Yahoo.com.

“The code we’re shipping today in 3.0 is the same code that drives the new Yahoo Home Page, and it goes out with confidence that it has been exercised vigorously and at scale,” writes Yahoo’s Eric Miraglia.

YUI 3.0 brings the framework up to par JQuery and other popular tools for building rich JavaScript interfaces, especially Yahoo’s decision to embrace selectors. While previously controversial since they involve some processing overhead, modern web browser have no trouble parsing selector libraries.

The nice side effect of selectors in YUI is that developers familiar with the JQuery or Prototype JavaScript libraries should be able to transition to YUI without too much trouble. That gives web developers yet another option when it comes to designing and creating rich web interfaces.

YUI 3 is a free download, you can grab a copy from the YUI blog.

Photo: Neil Crosby/Flickr

See Also:

• Yahoo Previews YUI 3.0 JavaScript Library
• Do Frameworks Have a Place in Web Development’s Future?
• Code for Tomorrow’s Web Today Using Modernizr