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SkyFire Mobile Browser 1.0 and the Flash User Experience

By Kevin Suttle
June 16, 2009

As we all know, Flash on mobile devices is nothing new. Flash Lite is on 400+ different mobile device models and 800 million total devices. It's hard to argue with those numbers. However, with the advent of the iPhone, netbooks, and new mobile operating systems such as Google's Android and Palm's WebOS, users are demanding an experience that mirrors the desktop. Others, as in Adobe and the Open Screen Project, want to take that notion a step further, and bring desktop Flash to mobile devices. The SkyFire mobile browser aims to do just that.

Google's Browser-Based Plan for Ebook Sales

By Mac Slocum
June 1, 2009

BEA '09 may be remembered as the moment when Google formally entered the ebook market. From the New York Times: Mr. [Tom] Turvey [director of strategic partnerships at Google] said...

Google's Unique Position and Imperative Need for Browser Interactivity

By Timothy M. O'Brien
May 28, 2009

Google's clarion call for HTML 5 and rich interactive browser applications marks an interesting fork in the road for technologists. Will we invest our time in learning more proprietary, native APIs to create better iPhone and Adobe AIR applications, or will everything start to move toward a standards-based browser as the underlying platform for interactivity. Despite Google's influence in the market, this isn't a foregone conclusion. Just how long will it take for the content generators to adopt HTML 5? And, what's in it for Google?

3D Web Plugins - The Next Trend?

By Andrew Trice
April 22, 2009

Both Adobe and Microsoft have demonstrated the capabilities and importance of player-based runtimes within the browser -- There is no question about it. There are numerous things that you can do within the player based runtime that allow for an enhanced experience, and amazing graphical capabilities. Now, it appears that more and more 3D browser plugins are popping up.

Internet Explorer Fades, Firefox Stays the Course, Google Chrome Surges

By Kurt Cagle
January 6, 2009

Poor IE. Like the late comedian Rodney Dangerfield, it seems to have a hard time getting much respect these days. Within Microsoft it has long been the unwanted stepchild - ignored when Microsoft shifted gears towards server-side technologies in...

Getting OpenID Into the Browser

By David Recordon
December 2, 2008

Imagine if your web browser knew who you were on the web. Just as you login to your computer, what if when you fired up your browser, it said "Hello Dave" and asked you to "unlock it" as well. In doing so you become securely logged into your OpenID provider and as you move around the web your browser takes care of automatically logging you into the sites that you want to be, asking you about others, and helping you register with new ones using your OpenID. Argue as much as you want about the details in making this happen, but I think it's hard to disagree that making it easier for people to manage and use their identity (or identities) online is a bad thing.

The Future of XForms

By Philip Fennell
October 2, 2008

Some of the recent talk on the Mozilla XForms Project's mailing list (dev-tech-xforms) has been about the winding-down in effort on the Mozilla XForms plug-in. There has been praise for the efforts of those developers involved in the project, and quite rightly so. However, some people may be seeing this as a bad sign for XForms in general. Well, not so I say and the reasons for this are three-fold...

Reflecting Upon Chrome

By Kurt Cagle
September 3, 2008

Scott McCloud may not have intended to become the icon for Google's most recent efforts, but the choice of the veteran cartoonist (and semiotician) was a master stroke on the part of Google for introducing their new web browser, Chrome. McCloud's spare, clean lines, intellectual positing and delicious manipulation of symbols could not better have captured Google's secret skunkworks project. McCloud was commissioned to create a series of web comic pages that would explain the inner workings of the new Google Chrome browser, intended for release later this month, but a fan of McCloud's work apparently leaked the comic early, forcing Google to announce their latest (and arguably most audacious) project to date. As it turns out, the extra month or so of work probably wouldn't have made that much difference - even in beta, it is likely that Chrome has completely changed the balance of power on the web. Rumors that Google has been working on a web browser have been repeatedly heard for years now, but the assumption has long been that Google's physical proximity to Mozilla's headquarters and its general commitment to server-side technology precluded any real benefit for Google in building a browser of its own. Those assumptions, however, appear now to have been wrong.

Social Networking and the Flock of Canadian Loonies

By Kurt Cagle
August 14, 2008

Flock 2.0 (http://www.flock.com) is a comparatively new browser, based upon Mozilla Firefox, that was designed from the ground up as a Social Networking "application". Designed to cover the major domains within that field - blogging, media manipulation, search, syndication and social community interaction - Flock represents a novel approach of using the browser in a dedicated fashion as both the vehicle and the gateway for devotees of social networking services.

why XSL-T support in the browser is a failure

By Bryan Rasmussen
June 30, 2008

Google needs to minimize the number of formats they MUST support, especially of dynamic formats where the content needs to be interpreted in order to be indexed. Think of how long it took for them to make some inroad on indexing Flash (as an example of flash indexing try this). The easiest way to prevent the need for indexing XML with XSL-T is to not do it until it becomes really wide-spread.

Tasty Toast Backup Feature

By David Battino
June 18, 2008

A while back, Derrick Story wondered how valuable Roxio Toast still was, given the disc-burning features built in to Mac OS X. Well, Toast hasn't grown moldy; Roxio added a bunch of features right after Derrick's post came out. I've covered two obscure but very cool audio ones: the ability to make high-resolution and surround-sound DVDs. Here's another tasty Toast...

Pre SDK thoughts

By Daniel H. Steinberg
March 6, 2008

As Apple prepares to announce the iPhone SDK in a couple of hours I'm torn. Haven't people been trying to convince us for years of the advantages of browser based applications? And Apple has put the browser on its list of strategically important pieces of the puzzle to own along with hardware and the operating system.

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