Google announced this week that it intends to make its (Beta) entry into the browser market today (the official launch is 11am PDT, so likely to be this evening). It certainly kept that well under wraps!

Their product, I must say, looks rather slick and functional, like most of the Google product family. There are a few “under the hood” differences to the other browsers on the market which, at the very least makes this release quite interesting.

The first major difference is the ring-fencing of the individual tabs. Instead of having a central browser window and tabs within it, each tab is given it’s own process. This should benefit the user on several levels.

Firstly, if one tab crashes the rest of the browser should be ok, and secondly the other browsers have suffered from memory leakage, where over time the browser takes up more system memory even though tabs have been closed. This “should” avoid that happening.

The interest I have with it is how “standard” it is in terms of rendering. The last thing we need is another browser with quirks! If it conforms to standards then it can only be good for the community.

I am also interested in how quickly it will be taken up by consumers. Google is a massive brand name for lauhching a product like this, and is a trusted name to the general public (unlike Firefox, who lots of people had never heard of when it was launched).

So, I eagerly await this evening, to download and test out one of the most exciting (to me) product launches of 2008.

In the mean time, take a look at the Official Google Chome Comic. It explains it all very well.

5:30pm, still no download… I guess it will appear later, apparently HERE (currently redirecting to google home page)

I have installed IE8 and given it the once over. Surprisingly (for me) my initial thoughts are quite positive.

Once I had battled through the install process and IE had confirmed I didn’t have any nasty gremlins lurking on my machine I eventually got presented with the typical “you need to reboot now” screen. Quite why Microsoft products seem incapable of installing something without a reboot is beyond me, but reboot I did.

I loaded IE8 and up came a barrage of screens trying to take over everything I used and rebrand it Microsoft…. it wanted Live.com to be my default search provider, IE to be my default browser, live maps to be default for location based things, and Encarta to be my default reference… all a bit much I think, but I guess that’s a different issue.

Being from a web design background I am fully aware of the compatibility issues between IE and well, everything else! As some of you may know, one of the major issues revolves around white space, especially in the vertical plane. I loaded up a few sites side by side in IE and Firefox and they looked surprisingly similar. I then pressed the “compatibility mode” button, new to IE8 and low and behold, in popped the dreaded IE white space. Another press and it was back to normal. Wow, are Microsoft actually getting there with this product? I don’t wish to tempt fate but I must say I am slightly impressed. Whether they succeed in their quest for CSS 2.1 compliance is another matter, but they certainly seem to be off to a good start.

I can’t say I ever see myself using a Microsoft browser as my default choice, but I applaud any effort to prevent us designers from having to design around the quirks of Internet Explorer.

I would be interested to hear what others have to say about this new release, good and bad.

Usually such news would give me a shiver down my spine. However, I heard a rumor that IE8 is going for full CSS 2.1 compliance. This is a very interesting concept and one that I am unsure whether to believe. It would be fantastic if we no longer had to design for separate browsers, but I think that day is quite a long way off.

An interesting feature seems to be the compatibility button, which you press to view sites designed for older browsers. I wonder if this means Microsoft have finally concluded that their previous IE versions have been shocking and this is their attempt to design on a clean slate. This would certainly be a welcome feature for the design community as a whole, but will probably result in some older sites not designed to standards only being viewable using compatibility mode. Worth it, in my opinion.

I will get it installed soon and give it a whirl. It will have to be a LOT better than the previous beta if it is to be useable. I still can’t imagine giving up Firefox though, but as always, I have an open mind.

Having used Stumbleupon for a month or so I thought I would write a post about my Stumble experience.

Surprisingly to me I am still a regular Stumbler. I did think this would just be another fad that I would tire of and uninstall, but it seems not. I am surprised by the quality of some of the stumbled sites out there ad find myself regularly hitting the Stumble button to pass a few minutes (or hours).

I must admit the main benefit for me is the sharing aspect. I hit Stumble a few times, find a good site, then immediately hit the “send to” button to share it. This makes it incredibly easy to surf the web with someone else, even though they are 5569 miles away!

I occasionally hit the “thumbs up” button, but mainly as it adds it to the bookmarks when you do that. In my mind making the adding of a bookmark default is a good move, otherwise I would be tempted just to hit stumble again.

After this relatively short space of time I am finding I now have a huge collection of bookmarks and have experienced an enormous amount of new sites that I never knew were out there. more than this, I now have subscriptions to a handful of great blogs which I check via RSS every day.

Thumbs up for Stumbleupon!

WordPress have announced the release of version 2.6 of it’s software. There are some major changes in this release that will enhance the user experience.

Here are a few:

Press me now

A bookmark that when you press it opens up a new window and allows you to grab content from that page and enter it into your blog post.

Gears

This allows you to store copies of your javascript and CSS files locally on your laptop, amking working on your blog easier. This is great for low bandwidth connections ling GPRS.

Word Count

There is now a live word counter on the right of the screen… useful for some I guess.

Versioning

This is a nifty feature. WordPress now stores versions of posts, so you can go back and see what was done when, restore to previous versions, or even compare two versions. This is a great feature and very well done!

Gallery adjustments

If you upload multiple images into a gallery on your post you can now re-order them using drag and drop. Simple yet effective!

Theme Previews

You can preview what a theme will look like before you set it live. This is useful if you want to see what a theme will look like before you unleash it on the public.

There are a few more features in the 2.6 release that I won’t go into right now. If you want to know more drop a comment on this post and I will do my best to answer.

We will be upgrading all our customer’s WordPress installations over the coming weeks, if you would like further details on this please drop us a line.

I heard about stumbleupon a while ago. It seemed to be the next “fad” like bebo, myspace, facebook, digg, technorati, the list goes on. I tend to avoid these “fads”, ok with the exception of facebook, which seems to be as essential nowadays as owning a mobile phone! It seems you no longer exchange numbers with people, you poke’em then ad’em! (but that’s for another post!).

The Install

I was initially turned off from stumbleupon because of the need to add a toolbar to your browser (boo hiss). I have been caught out in the past by this sort of thing. You install a product and all of a sudden your browser is highlighting links in yellow and hijacking everything.

So it was with caution that I installed stumbleupon. Fortunately the toolbar is harmless and well laid out.

Getting started

The registration process is quick and easy. It asks you about your interests. This is important as it determines what content is thrown at you.

You are first presented with a Stumble toolbar,with the obvious “Stumble!” button on the left.

Press the Stumble button and the browser will load a page Stumble thinks you might like, from your list of interests. If you like the page you can click the thumbs up button on the toolbar, or thumbs down if you don’t like it. Stumble uses this data to work out your likes and dislikes. The idea is the more you stumble the more accurate it will get.

Friends indeed

Once you have registered with Stumbleupon and greated your account you can add friends. This is a similar process to adding friends in Facebook, it even used the MSN API to grab your contact list if you allow it to.

Friends makes the whole stumble experience much more worthwhile. Rather than emailing your friend a funny link, or pasting it into MSN (if they are online) you can click the “send to” button and choose your friend. This will then pop up on their stumble toolbar next time they log on. It allows you to send a comment too. This is great fun but be aware, stumbling with friends is addictive!

Channel hopping

There is a selection of channels on the toolbar. If you wanted to search for a single topic, say internet games, you choose the channel and hit stumble. Your search will be narrowed and you will stumble just that area. This is a neat feature.

Favorites

If you discover a site it (are the first to stumble it) the site it automatically added to your favorites. This forms part of your mini-blog within your logged in area. When you stumble you can see who stumbled befor you. You can then enter their mini-blog and see their favorites. Not sure how useful this feature is, feels a bit too much like stalking to me!

So, what’s the big deal?

To me the big deal is getting back to the days where you actually “surf the web”. In recent years the internet has grown so big but has got cluttered with a lot of crap. Stumbleupon is a vehicle for navigating the good stuff and filtering out the bad.

I can come home from work and stumble for half an hour. To find this many good sites would take hours using google. It’s also great to be able to keep track of where you have been. All your “thumbs up” sites are kept in your user area and int he new version of Stumbleupon it actually adds it to your bookmarks (or favorites, in IE).

I love Stumbleupon, it’s a great way to find new sites, the only down side is I seem to find it very difficult to go to bed now… just… one… more… stumble!!!

Some of you may have seen on some of the news sites, there is a big debate at present about Net Neutrality and the threat to it.

Net Neutrality is basically the level playing field on which the Internet is based. It allows sites to load at the maximum speed it can, given the infrastructure in place. There is no fundamental, deliberate, throttling in place which would upset the balance.

Dig a little deeper and there is a lot more to it. Basically Internet Service Providers want to control the delivery of the Internet service, to control what we can see and what we can’t. They would also be able to throttle the connections based on who pays what.

Google are heading up the campaign against a bill to give the ISP’s power to control Interne content.

Here is an excerpt from the letter:

Today the Internet is an information highway where anybody – no matter how large or small, how traditional or unconventional – has equal access. But the phone and cable monopolies, who control almost all Internet access, want the power to choose who gets access to high-speed lanes and whose content gets seen first and fastest. They want to build a two-tiered system and block the on-ramps for those who can’t pay.

Read the rest of this entry »

Today was the launch of Mozilla’s long awaited Firefox 3. There was a slight hiccup when their servers all fell over due to the demand, but it seems to be ok now and I have just installed it on my Macbook Pro.

I have been a fan of Firefox ever since it first came out, taking every version as they came out and enjoying discovering the new features.

It has not been an entirely smooth journey. There have been memory leak issues, strange CPU behavior, flash was very resource intensive (especially in early versions) but all in all it has been all the time better than IE. I dislike IE for political reasons as well as how MS has made our (the web design community) lives more difficult in terms of cross browser standards and site conformity. That said, I do try every new browser that comes out and try to keep an open mind.

So, back to Firefox 3. I have installed all the Beta’s and the Release Candidates so it’s hard to think back to Firefox 2, but casting my mind back the main differences are the history, the address bar and the back/forward buttons. RSS and bookmarking had been smartened up as well. Read the rest of this entry »

If you are involved in development in the Internet in any way you cannot fail to hear the excitement surrounding Microsoft’s announcement of their Silverlight platform.

What is Silverlight?

Put simply it is being taken among the Internet in general as a competitor to Adobe’s Flash product. It is basically a framework for providing rich applications to the Internet browser.

Where Silverlight differs from Flash is it has been tailored to hook into the Microsoft API’s (under a generous but not completely open) license. This will enable applications to interact with MSN, Live Maps etc.

What’s to Love?

It’s cross platform user experience (not development environment.. see below). That’s good, but so is Flash. Come on, cross platform should be a minimum requirement in this day and age, not something to boast about!

Silverlight uses a mark-up language called XAML, “Whoopiedoo” I hear you shout, “another mark-up language, just what we need!”. This means absolutely nothing to the user, and developers will be able to adapt to it easily enough. The major advantage of XAML is that the search engines can read it. No longer will your site be crippled by the fact it has balls and whistles on it. Ok, so the readable part (XAML) of the app is only part of it, but hey, it’s better than Flash. Read the rest of this entry »