Media Blog

From the weekend desk, two items announced late Friday afternoon we’d be remiss if we didn’t tell you about.

First, Google is officially dropping support for IE6. Come March 1st, the company is also going to start phasing out support for other older browsers from Apple, Mozilla and Google itself, but IE6 is the one everyone’s most happy to see gone. The notoriously buggy browser is still supported by some institutions and large organizations. The new minimum browser requirements in Google Apps will be Microsoft Internet Explorer 7.0, Mozilla Firefox 3.0, Google Chrome 4.0 and Safari 3.0.

Second, Mozilla has launched Firefox for mobiles running Nokia’s Maemo operating system. This is the first official 1.0 version of Mobile Firefox, and the first mobile browser ever to support add-ons. We took it for a test drive when it was still in beta and found it to be quite slick.

It’s official, your Firefox syncing prayers have been answered — Weave 1.0 has arrived.

Weave is a free add-on for Firefox that syncs your data — bookmarks, browsing history, open tabs, Personas and stored passwords — across multiple PCs running Firefox and supported mobile devices. Weave is currently an add-on available through Mozilla Labs, but look for Weave to become a part of Firefox itself later this year.

Once installed, Weave works transparently in the background, syncing your data to Mozilla’s servers and then on to any other synced computers (you can use your own server for syncing, too). The result is a universal browsing experience that offers the ability to move from one computer to another without interrupting your customized workflow. Weave syncing in very fast — when you’re setting up a new computer, or a new instance of Firefox on your user account on a multi-user machine, you basically get your own version of the browser, tricked out and bookmarked to your specs, about a minute after you log in to Weave.

There is, however, one major element of Firefox missing from Weave’s syncing capabilities — Firefox add-ons. The good news is that add-on syncing, along with search box plug-in syncing, are scheduled to arrive with Weave 1.1, though so far there’s no hint of a release date.

Now that Weave is ready to graduate from Mozilla Labs to prime time add-on, Mozilla plans to incorporate the add-on into Firefox, making sync a standard feature of the browser.

Whether a built-in version of Weave for Firefox will arrive with the next major release or be part of Mozilla’s new “rolling release” schedule remains to be seen. In the mean time, if you don’t want to wait you can download a copy of Weave and get started today.

Keep in mind that, if you’ve been using early releases of Weave, it’s best to update all computers running Weave before attempting to sync.

See Also:

• Mozilla Gets Ready to Weave Syncing Into Firefox
• Update Moves Weave Closer to a Starring Role in Firefox
• Mozilla Weave Goes 1.0, Firefox Sync Almost Ready for Primetime

It’s currently quite fashionable to say Flash’s days are numbered — click around on the tech blogs and you’ll see.

The marketplace is certainly lining up against it. The iPad doesn’t run Flash. Same with the iPhone and iPod Touch. Major video sites are switching from the Flash Player to HTML5 video. Google and Mozilla are both enabling their browsers to play full-screen embedded video files, and there’s a whole lot you can do in JavaScript and CSS now that you couldn’t do even a year ago. AIR tastes like last week’s cheese — in an age of web apps, requiring a desktop install to run something that mimics the web just feels unnecessary.

Therefore, Flash is as good as dead, right?

Well, that’s hogwash, according to Adobe Photoshop product manager John Nack, who posted a well-reasoned retort to naysayers on his blog earlier this week.

His key points, quoted from his post:

Flash is flawed, but it has moved the world forward.

Open standards are great, but they can be achingly slow to arrive.

Talk of “what’s good for standards is bad for Adobe” is misinformed nonsense.

Flash will innovate or die. I’m betting on innovation.

Nack works on the Photoshop team, not the Flash team. But he has a background in web standards (SVG in particular) and his opinions are presented in a sane and balanced manner. Required reading for sure. Read Nack’s entire post on his blog.

See Also:

• Adobe Reminds Us Flash Isn’t Out of the iPad Game
• Adobe Debuts New Flash Tools for Building and Tracking Social Apps
• Adobe’s New Flash Tools Ease the Pain for Both Designers and Coders
• Flash Player 10: Dazzling Effects, Better Performance, Runs on Linux

Think that turning off cookies and turning on private browsing makes you invisible on the web? Think again.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has launched a new web app dubbed Panopticlick that reveals just how scarily easy it is to identify you out of millions of web users.

The problem is your digital fingerprint. Whenever you visit a site, your browser and any plug-ins you have installed can leak data. Some of it isn’t very personal, like your user agent string. Some of it is more personally revealing, like which fonts you have installed. But the what if you put it all together? Would the results make you identifiable?

As the EFF says, “this information can create a kind of fingerprint — a signature that could be used to identify you and your computer.”

The EFF’s test suite highlights what most of us probably already suspect — we’re readily identifiable on the web. We ran the test on a Mac using Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome, all of which leaked enough data to make us identifiable according the EFF’s privacy explanations.

The purpose of Panopticlick is to show you how much you have in common with other browsers. The more your configuration mirrors everyone else’s, the harder it would be to identify you. The irony is, the nerdier you are — using a unique OS, a less common browser, customizing your browser with plug-ins and other power-user habits — the more identifiable you are.

For example, say you’re running Firefox on Ubuntu with the Gnash plug-in instead of Flash — way to stick it to the man — but you’re also showing up with a unique configuration of browser, OS, installed fonts, plug-ins and more which can be combined to identify you via a unique online fingerprint.

So what can you do to make yourself less identifiable? Well, by disabling cookies, the Flash plug-in, the Java plug-in and most of our extensions we were able to blend in better. Actually, the fact that we didn’t have Java or Flash turned on made us more identifiable in those categories, but it also denied the test access to our installed fonts and other bits of data, so overall, less identifiable.

Obviously that approach has a downside — without Flash there’s not much in the way of online video, a lack of cookies will cause issues with logins, and without Java, you won’t be able to crash your browser or cause it to get hung up for hours.

In short, the disabling method isn’t much fun. Strange though it may seem, the best way to lose the unique online fingerprint is to blend in with the herd. As the EFF points out, mobile browsers are hardest to identify since there are few customization options and, for the most part, one version of Mobile Safari looks just like another.

By the same token, if you want to blend in, stick with stock system fonts, run Windows XP, use Firefox with no add-ons and turn off cookies. You’ll be much harder to identify.

We should point out that, no matter how well you blend in the fingerprint test, you are of course still identifiable by your ISP. Advertisers and websites generally can’t access the information your ISP has on you, but of course governments — with the cooperation of your ISP — always can. So don’t think just because you’ve eliminated your fingerprints no one knows who you are.

Front door photo: Brian Lane Winfield Moore/Flickr (CC)

See Also:

• Protect Your Privacy: Stop Cache Tracking in Firefox
• Mark Cuban and EFF Debate YouTube and Copyright
• Google Wants Global Privacy Rules
• Unlike Google, Ask.com to Offer Real Privacy Controls

In response to Apple’s iPad product announcement Wednesday, Adobe has posted a message to its Flash Platform blog assuring developers they’ll be able to use Adobe’s Flash authoring tools to build iPad apps.

Developers are currently able to publish almost any project built using ActionScript 3 into a native iPhone or iPod Touch application using a cross-compiler called Packager for iPhone. Adobe is tweaking Packager for iPhone, which will ship as part of Flash Professional Creative Suite 5, to work with the iPad SDK and support behaviors specific to the new device.

The biggest change is the difference in screen size. Adobe says it will first concentrate on getting ActionScript 3 apps to translate to the iPad properly, then build in support for the device’s larger screen size.

Keep in mind, this does not mean that Flash apps, AIR apps or the Flash Player are going to work on the iPad. There seems to be some confusion about this — probably because Adobe’s communications are purposely vague about this fact, and bloggers are unclear as to what Packager for iPhone actually does. When you export a Flash app to the iPhone, you’re not getting a Flash app, you’re getting an app that was built in Adobe’s ActionScript 3 programming language using the Flash authoring tool, then translated into iPhone-native code.

Flash and AIR apps don’t work on the iPhone or the iPod Touch and they won’t work on the iPad. Apple’s mobiles currently use hardware-embedded decoders to render YouTube videos, but we can expect that scenario to change soon, now that YouTube is moving towards HTML5 video playback using h.264, which Apple devices use as their native video codec.

In fact, during Steve Jobs’ announcement Wednesday morning, many attendees (including our own Gadget Lab team) noticed when a “plug-in missing” icon popped up on the New York Times homepage as Jobs was demonstrating the iPad’s Safari web browser.

Adobe was going to release a full beta of Flash Professional CS5, but the company decided against it so it could get the final app out more quickly.

Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com

See Also:

• Adobe Debuts New Flash Tools for Building and Tracking Social Apps
• Adobe’s New Flash Tools Ease the Pain for Both Designers and Coders
• Flash Player 10: Dazzling Effects, Better Performance, Runs on Linux
• Adobe Announces Flash Lite 3.0

We were half-expecting Twitter to break entirely when Steve Jobs took the stage Wednesday morning to announce the new Apple iPad. It was a little slow, but it didn’t break.

The New York Times’ Labs website was tracking all Apple-related Tweets in real time during the event. A screenshot is shown above — a simple page that updates around once every two seconds. The data is pulled in via JSON requests, and the super-clean refreshes are handled with jQuery.

Twitter sets limits on API calls. Currently it’s set at 150 calls per hour, which, for apps that send regular requests, is 2.5 calls a minute. This app appears to be updating far more quickly than that, so unless we have our numbers wrong, we’d guess the NYT has a backstage pass here.

View the deceptively simple source and .js files on the NYT Labs site. Also look for the special warning about sharks.

Those of you itching for a simple command-line interface to control your favorite web apps now have several different choices.

Last week, we told you that Mozilla Labs had put Ubiquity on the back burner. Mozilla’s Ubiquity project for Firefox promises to eventually bring the power of the command line into your web browser, enabling you to perform specific tasks — like e-mail a link to a Gmail contact, post a tweet, check the weather or pinpoint something on a map — all with just a few keystrokes. Ubiquity showed promise, but Mozilla has decided it needs to focus on other projects, which unfortunately means Ubiquity currently doesn’t work with the newly released Firefox 3.6.

Luckily, Ubiquity is not an entirely new idea. There have been quite a few attempts to create powerful, command-line interfaces for interacting with the web. Here are some tools you can explore while Ubiquity is laying low.

One of the newest command-line-style tools is Quix, a JavaScript bookmarklet that offers keyboard-based access to text commands. You can use Quix to shorten URLs on the fly, post messages to Facebook, search Flickr photos and loads more, all without lifting your fingers from the keyboard.

Quix is like any other JavaScript bookmarklet you’ve used, you simply drag the provided button to your bookmarks toolbar and then click it. Keyboard junkies can assign a shortcut to the bookmarklet and bring up the Quix dialog without using the mouse (Quix has instructions on how to set that up in each supported browser).

Once the Quix window is activated you can type any number of commands — see the Quix site for a complete list of what’s available — or extend Quix by writing your own commands. The Quix command syntax is borrowed from Shaun Inman’s Shortwave, a similar command-based JavaScript bookmarklet.

While Shortwave doesn’t offer as many commands out of the box as Quix does, it is extendable, so you can always write your own. Even if you don’t extend it, Shortwave makes a good, lightweight option.

Yubnub is another command-line-style option for power users looking for an Ubiquity alternative. Yubnub is quite a bit older than Quix and consequently already has a loyal following of users — some 22,000 commands have already been written.

Like Quix, Yubnub works in just about any web browser and the thriving hacker community that’s grown up around it have managed to integrate Yubnub tools into Mac OS X, a Python library and even the Sony PSP.

While all three of these bookmarklet tools cover some aspects of Ubiquity, none of them can match Ubiquity’s integration with Firefox, nor do they cover all the tasks Ubiquity can handle. On the plus side, if you use multiple browsers, you might be better off with Quix, Shortwave or Yubnub since they will work anywhere.

And we’ll be sure to let you know when Ubiquity moves back into the spotlight at Mozilla Labs.

See Also:

• Mozilla Puts Ubiquity on Hold
• Firefox Has Been Hitting the Gym — Version 3.6 Is Faster, More Capable
• Make the Web Do Your Bidding With Firefox’s New Ubiquity UI

Google has added two much-requested features to its Chrome web browser: extensions support and bookmark syncing between multiple computers.

The features are included in the latest version of Google Chrome, which was made available Monday as a free download. The update, which curiously does not carry a version number, is for Windows users only. Mac and Linux versions of Chrome are still catching up to the Windows release.

Both extensions and bookmark syncing have been available for some time to anyone using a beta release of Chrome, but people sticking with the official releases haven’t been able to get in on the fun. If you’re running an official release version of Chrome, you should see an update alert shortly. If you’d rather not wait, head over to the download page.

Once you’ve got the latest version installed you can browse through the over 1,500 extensions in the new Chrome Extension gallery. As we’ve said in the past, Chrome extensions don’t offer the range of functionality you’ll find in Firefox, but for popular extensions like e-mail notifiers, Twitter utilities or OpenID auto-fill for faster logins, Chrome has you covered.

Also new to the stable version of Chrome is bookmark syncing, which means you can automatically synchronize your Chrome bookmarks across computers. The built-in bookmark syncing features will work for most users, but if you’d like to sync bookmarks between Chrome, Safari and Firefox across multiple PCs, be sure to check out the XMarks extension.

There’s no word on when official support for extensions and bookmark syncing will make its way to OS X or Linux. If you’d like the same features on non-Windows versions of Chrome, you’ll need to download the appropriate beta or Dev channel release.

Web developers should also take note that Monday’s stable channel release contains enhanced support for several web APIs, including JavaScript, various web storage APIs, and WebSockets. There’s also support for adding desktop notifications to your web app the less-annoying way — in the user’s status bar instead of in noisy alert boxes. More details are posted on the Chromium blog.

See Also:

• Google Chrome for Mac Now Supports Extensions
• Chrome Extensions Are Cool, But They Can’t Match Firefox
• Chrome for Mac and Linux Is Here. Be Excited

Faithful users of Mozilla’s Ubiquity add-on for Firefox found the extension broken when they updated to the latest version of Firefox, which was released Thursday.

You read that right, Mozilla’s own add-on hasn’t been updated to work with Firefox 3.6. In fact, Ubiquity, an innovative add-on that allows you to interact with maps, Twitter, YouTube and other web services through a command line interface, hasn’t seen an update since the summer of 2009. You’d be forgiven for thinking Mozilla has abandoned it.

As it turns out, you’d actually be right, Mozilla has abandoned Ubiquity — but not forever, just for now.

Jonathan DiCarlo, who works at Mozilla Labs, recently posted an update letting the Mozilla community know that Ubiquity is on hold. The reason, according to DiCarlo is that Mozilla labs had too many projects going and, “Ubiquity was one of the things that was put onto the back burner in order to focus better on Weave, Jetpack, Bespin, and other core projects.”

Mozilla’s current roadmap calls for both Weave and JetPack to graduate out of Labs and into Firefox proper, which is likely why the company has chosen to focus its efforts there rather than on Ubiquity.

Which isn’t to say that Ubiquity will never make it into Firefox. Aza Raskin, Head of User Experience for Mozilla Labs, at one point showed off a mockup of one way that some elements of Ubiquity might make it into Firefox. The demo was dubbed Taskfox, and frankly it looked awesome, but so far there is no timeline for when — or if — it will ever become a part of Firefox itself.

Even if Ubiquity never moves beyond Mozilla Labs, Mozilla, for its part seems to have a pretty clear idea about what works in Ubiquity, what doesn’t, and where it can be improved. In fact, DiCarlo has a second Ubiquity post running down everything Mozilla has learned from Ubiquity.

The rather lengthy post is notable for addressing what we found to be the chief shortcoming of Ubiquity — the lack of commands. Mozilla essentially created the frame work and left the work of creating actual, useful commands up to users.

As DiCarlo admits, “we might have been putting the cart before the horse… it’s not the system that is valuable to users, it’s the individual commands, and the time they can save.”

The good news for those of you relying on Ubiquity is that, while Mozilla may be taking a break to finish up Weave and JetPack, the Ubiquity community is still thriving. The mailing list reveals bugs are being fixed and users remain enthusiastic about the project.

If you’d like to update to Firefox 3.6 and want Ubiquity to keep working, you can disable process where the browser checks add-ons for compatibility (go into about:config, search for extensions.checkCompatibility and toggle the option). Keep in mind that doing so may cause problems with Firefox.

Hopefully, even though Ubiquity may be on the back burner, Mozilla will eventually at least release an update that works with Firefox 3.6.

See Also:

• Firefox’s Ubiquity Add-on Gets Smarter, Goes International
• Make the Web Do Your Bidding With Firefox’s New Ubiquity UI
• Firefox Has Been Hitting the Gym — Version 3.6 Is Faster, More Capable

Google is now offering up YouTube videos using HTML5’s next generation video tag. But this advancement is only available to those surfing with Chrome or Safari — Firefox and Opera users need not apply.

YouTube’s HTML5 video support effectively eliminates the need for Adobe’s Flash plugin for viewing videos on the site. The move comes in response to a survey where users voted “support HTML5 open web video with open formats” to the top of the YouTube’s feature request list.

Unfortunately for fans of the open web, Google seems to have stopped reading at “support HTML5″ because “open web video with open formats” is entirely missing from the new features.

To test YouTube’s new HTML5 support for yourself, head to the TestTube page and enable the new features for your account. Just make sure you’re using either Google Chrome browser or Safari because those are the only two browsers that support the new features.

The video quality of HTML5 playback (shown below in a screenshot taken with Google Chrome on a Mac) is a little chunkier than the Flash version, but it works. The frame rate is just as smooth and the player controls, which are JavaScript and CSS, operate as you’d expect.

Eliminating the need for Flash means YouTube videos will be less likely to crash your browser and should stop your PC’s cooling fan from turning into a jet turbine, but it doesn’t really forward open video on the web — it just moves from one proprietary solution (the Flash plugin) to another, the H.264 video codec.

While Google’s early support for the new HTML5 video is a big win for HTML5’s vision of a plugin-free web, unfortunately Google’s HTML5 support also highlights what will be a thorn in the side of open web video for some time: codec compatibility issues.

At the moment, YouTube’s HTML5 video support is limited to web browsers that support the H.264 video codec — namely Google’s Chrome and Apple’s Safari. Because the W3C declined to specify a standard video codec to go along with new video element, the choice of codecs to support lies with each web browser.

Browser manufacturers are split into two camps, those that support the free, open Ogg Theora codec (Chrome, Firefox, Opera and others) and those that support the proprietary H.264 codec (Chrome and Safari). Internet Explorer is entirely removed from this debate, as it does not support the video playback capability of HTML5 — in fact, IE support for HTML5 in general is almost entirely non-existent, even though all the other browsers are racing to build in support.

Google’s decision to start with the H.264 codec is disappointing since Mozilla and Opera have declined to pay the expensive licensing fees for H.264 and support Ogg Theora for open video on the web.

What makes Google’s choice of video codec even more regrettable is that the Ogg Theora codec (a free, open video codec) works in Google Chrome, Firefox and Opera. Had Google opted to support Ogg Theora only Apple would have been left out of the fun.

However, there may be a simple practical reason YouTube chose to start with H.264 — it most likely already has most of its videos in H.264. Thanks to the YouTube application for the iPhone and Flash 10’s H.264 support, behind the scenes much of YouTube’s video is likely already in H.264.

Hopefully Google will add support for Ogg Theora in the near future, after all the number one request in YouTube’s survey wasn’t more HTML5 support, it was “support HTML5 open web video with open formats.”

We welcome this baby step away from plugin-based web video, but keep in mind that we’re still some ways away from truly open, free video on the web.

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