LSQHA Blog Reviews

Mozilla Contacts , the experimental project from the organization behind the Firefox web browser, has released a new version of their Contacts add-on which introduces Facebook integration. Previously , Mozilla Contacts allowed you to import your various address books spread out across the web (think: multiple email accounts, Twitter friends, LinkedIn colleagues, Plaxo contacts, Mac OS X address book, etc.) into the web browser itself - in this case, obviously, Firefox. Once there, the combined address book information could be used in form autocompletion everywhere across the web and more. Now, an updated version of Mozilla Contacts (download link) introduces a number of new features, most notably integration with Facebook Contacts and something called a "person URL." Sponsor Import Facebook Contacts into Firefox Mozilla Contacts' ability to sync with your Facebook Contacts come via the brand-new Facebook Graph API (application programming interface), which allows the Firefox add-on to import all your Facebook friends into the web browser itself as it does with the other services supported. However, this integration is still a little iffy, warns Michael Hansson, an engineer in Mozilla Labs , on a blog post about the release. "You may need to Refresh your connection to Facebook on occasion to make it work properly," he says. Person URLs Also new in Mozilla Contacts 0.3 is experimental support for "person:" URLs. This intriguing feature lets you look up anyone in your various contact lists or anyone on the web just by typing a URL in your address bar. After doing so, Firefox will combine the locally-stored information in the web browser with web-based information retrieved from the Internet to return a profile page about that person. You can try it now by typing person:mhanson@gmail.com or person:http://facebook.com/btaylor , for example, into your Firefox browser that has the updated Contacts add-on installed. Also New in 0.3 Other additions in version 0.3 include support for Yahoo! contacts, autocompletion of HTML5 input fields (with "email" and "tel"), enhanced search capabilities (including new discovery modules for Webfinger, HCard import, Google Social Graph, Facebook, Gravatar, Yelp, Amazon and Flickr), automatic combination of data discovered on sites that support standard automatic discovery mechanisms like HCard, RSS and ActivityStreams and finally, support for non-contact people in the AwesomeBar. Discuss

See more here:
Mozilla Contacts Releases Facebook-Integrated Version with New "Person URLs"

Opera announced today that its browsers are now used by more than 100 million people worldwide, saying that the distribution between mobile and desktop users is a nearly even split at 50 million a piece. While 50 million desktop users means just a tiny fraction of the browser market for home users, 50 million mobile users actually represents a dominance in the mobile browser market. Sponsor According to the latest numbers by StatCounter , Opera for the desktop comes in fifth (essentially last) place, behind Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome and Safari. Opera accounts for just under 2% of the browser market, while IE holds 53% of the market share, and Firefox comes in around 32%. Safari, Opera's nearest competitor (and default Mac browser) accounts for twice as many users as Opera. Looking at the mobile browser numbers , on the other hand, we see Opera Mini with 28% and iPhone's native browser following with just under 20%. And all of that could change, of course, if Apple would just accept Opera Mini into the AppStore . Opera submitted its mobile browser just under three weeks ago at the time of this writing, but has a policy that prevents other browsers from operating on the iPhone. While the numbers seem to say that Opera just isn't cutting it on the desktop, Opera Mini has been holding the lead as far as mobile browsing goes and we'd sure love to see it on the iPhone sometime in the near future. Discuss

Read more:
Opera Hits 100 Million Users, Leads in Mobile, Lags on Desktop

While everybody was talking about the iPhone OS 4 event yesterday , Apple also quietly announced WebKit2 , a major contribution to the open source WebKit project that forms the basis of Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome browsers. One of the reasons that Google Chrome doesn't crash very often is that Google uses a split process model. Every tab in Chrome runs in a different process and a crashing plugin or bug only takes down this tab and not the whole browser. While Google had to develop this code from the ground up for Chrome, Apple is now making this technology a core part of the WebKit2 framework. Sponsor Here is how Apple's engineers Anders Carlsson and Sam Weinig describe WebKit2: WebKit2 is designed from the ground up to support a split process model, where the web content (JavaScript, HTML, layout, etc) lives in a separate process. This model is similar to what Google Chrome offers, with the major difference being that we have built the process split model directly into the framework, allowing other clients to use it. What does this mean for users? First of all, Safari and every other application that uses WebKit, including the popular NetNewsWire RSS reader or the Konqueror browser for KDE, for example, will soon be able to rely on the same kind of crash protection that Google Chrome currently offers. Microsoft's IE8 already features a similar crash-protection mechanism and as our own Sarah Perez noted earlier today , the latest beta version of Firefox ( Lorentz ) now also lets some processes (Flash, QuickTime and Silverlight) run in separate instances. Getting Ready for Multi-Core Browsing WebKit2 will also implement a number of APIs that will make applications more responsive. These will allow applications to render web content in the background without blocking other processes that the application wants to execute. As Stephen Shankland points out , this technique will also make it easier for developers (including Apple) to take advantage of multi-core chips. For a more detailed look at the technical side of WebKit2, also have a look a this document from the WebKit2 team. Discuss

See the original post here:
Apple Announces WebKit2: Wants to Make WebKit Browsers More Crash-Proof

Firefox has released a new beta of their web browser called Firefox "Lorentz," a test build of Firefox 3.6.3 that's designed to minimized crashes. Previously, when a plugin caused a crash in Firefox, the whole browser went down in flames too. But in Lorentz, this will no longer be the case. The page running the errant plugin will offer you the ability to submit a crash report while the rest of the browser remains up-and-running like usual. The improved stability is due to Lorentz's process isolation, a feature which runs plugins as processes separate from the web browser itself. Does this sound familiar? It should, if you're a Google Chrome user. Sponsor Google Chrome , the speedy little web browser from the Internet search giant, introduced the idea of isolated processes when the browser launched back in fall 2008 . As explained by a Googler on the company's official blog, Chrome put "each tab in an isolated sandbox," so it could "prevent one tab from crashing another." The same philosophy is now seen in Firefox's latest. The Lorentz build, which initially focuses on just Adobe Flash, Apple Quicktime and Microsoft Silverlight, isolates plugins in separate instances, too. The end result? A browser that doesn't completely tank quite so often. If you do end up with a page that goes rogue, however, the screen turns grey and you're notified of the plugin crash by way of a text message and a sad-faced lego-like logo. ( See picture ). This image also seems to be cribbed from Chrome's playbook as it closely resembles the sad tab image that accompanies Google Chrome's "Aw Snap!" message that appears when something goes wrong with a web page. (Then again, a sad computer icon isn't anything new, as Mac users will certainly tell you .) But in this case, it's another reminder of how Firefox, once thought to be leading the way in browser innovations, now seems to be following in Google's footsteps. That said, Firefox enthusiasts are sure to welcome this change. And if you want to get all hacker-ish, you can even configure Firefox to isolate more plugins, too, as the Mozilla Links blog explains (via LifeHacker ): To have the Adobe Reader plugin running on its own process, create a boolean preference in about:config, name it dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.nppdf32.dll, set it to true, and restart. For Java, the preference must be named dom.ipc.plugins.enabled.npjp2.dll. You just need to know the name of the library (which you get from about:plugins), and create the preference accordingly. To try Lorentz for yourself, you can grab the latest build here . Discuss

See original here:
Firefox Lorentz: Now Firefox Crashes More Like Chrome

SublimeVideo , an HTML5-based video player from Switzerland-based development and design firm Jilion now includes a "fall back to Flash mode." This means that when a web surfer using a browser that doesn't support HTML5 visits a page that uses the player, it will automatically switch over (aka "fall back") to Adobe Flash, the plugin-based technology that older, non-HTML5 web browsers use. Why is this important? In addition to providing a path to move from one technology to the next, a transition that will take years at best, SublimeVideo could ease the workload for developers tasked with creating web pages that the entire web audience can access. Sponsor Moving from Flash to HTML5 The problem, as it stands today, is that some web browsers support HTML5 and Flash, while others only support Flash. And yet websites need to be accessible by all, no matter what browser is used. The Safari browser on the Apple iPad, for example, only supports HTML5, forcing many mainstream media sites to rapidly push out new and separate HTML5-ready versions of their site. The WSJ and NPR were among the first to release iPad-only websites, in advance of the launch of the Apple iPad. Others soon followed, but there are still so few big names doing so that Apple can list them all on their "iPad-Ready Websites" page , which now features 20 name-brands like CNN, Reuters, Time, MLB, flickr, Nike and others. What SublimeVideo Does Jilion's goal is to create a "universal video player" that works in all browsers, regardless of the technology supported. That means that users with the outdated Internet Explorer 6 browser could watch the same videos as those who use more modern browsers like Google Chrome (4.0), Firefox (3.6+), Safari (4.0.4+) or the upcoming Internet Explorer 9. Regardless of which version of the player was viewed - either the HTML5 version or the Flash one - the same user interface would be presented. This includes on-screen controls to play and pause the video, a button that takes it to full-screen mode and keyboard shortcuts that play, pause, and launch or exit from full-screen. While the SublimeVideo player is an arguably brilliant technology development, what it lacks - at least in its current form - are the features that many large companies have come to expect from the Flash experience: advertising and analytics. For companies in need of these types of tools, they'll likely go with an HTML5 video platform provider like Brightcove , who has advertising and analytics on their 2010 roadmap , MeFeedia , Ooyala or the new solution from