If Browsers Were Women

Written on 16th March 2009                                                                                                              123 COMMENTS
Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.

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browsers, funny, Internet Explorer, opera, safari

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Firefox has 20% market share, might steal more from Safari with “porn mode”

Written on 5th November 2008                                                                                                              5 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

“It’s Official” , triumphs the Mozilla blog, “Congratulations to the Mozilla community for reaching this historic milestone”. According to Net Applications, Firefox surpassed 20% worldwide market share. During the week of October 5th, 20 percent of Internet users browsed with the open source browser.

Watch your back Safari

The Firefox browser might steal some market share from Safari, as Apple’s browser will soon lose its greatest advantage for male Mac users. As I mentioned earlier, a friend of mine once told me he uses Safari’s stealth mode for his adult needs. Well, it seems like he can stay within the Firefox environment for that now.

Firefox released a beta version of a Private Browsing feature. Users of Minefield, Mozilla’s test area for new browser innovations, can now activate the “porn mode”. When toggled, it deletes your Web history, user names, passwords, searches, and cookies and bins as soon as you close the window, “effectively making it appear that the session never existed” – writes Josh Lowensohn from Webware.

Apple, browsers, firefox, mozilla, Net Applications, open source, porn, safari

5 Comments »

Yoono gets €2.6 million for attracting more users

Written on 24th June 2008                                                                                                              0 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

Yoono, often referred to as the French Flock, closed a round of funding, led by AGF Private Equity. The score? €2.6 million. The goals? Attracting more users and offering more widgets. Competition is tough, as Flock and Minggl in general terms offer the same service: a social browser experience. Here are the latest numbers on their battle:

Of course, the real deal is the number of downloads. According to Firefox add-ons Yoono has 13,885 weekly downloads (1,354,484 in total). There are numbers available about Flock and Minggle. But these traffic stats give an idea of Yoono’s challenge: take over Flock.

Yoono just got started, and when in private beta – Jason Kincaid from TechCrunch predicted that Yoono would success in its mission to become the most important social browser experience tool – as you don’t have to download a new browser (like Flock requires). A few weeks after that enthusiastic review, Yoono opened its gates to the public.

Yoono’s new sidebar has some new features like, filtering friends into groups, upload pictures and poke to Facebook, send Twitter messages, comment on Friendfeed, comment on Flickr pictures, browse Digg video, chat via Gtalk, and use MySpace.

browsers, facebook, firefox, flickr, Flock, funding, plugin, twitter, yoono

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Forget Web2.0, here comes HTML5!

Written on 23rd January 2008                                                                                                              6 COMMENTS
Boris Veldhuijzen van Zanten, Serial Internet Entrepreneur

Part of the W3C HTML5 Team at lunch

W3C, the have published a proposal for the 5th major revision of the core language of the World Wide Web: HTML. The new version comes with new elements and improved interoperability. We are especially interested in the new ‘irrelevant‘ attribute which we are sure will be widely accepted and implemented. It might even save Facebook and MySpace.

Also interesting are the ‘canvas‘ element which will represent a resolution-dependent bitmap canvas, which can be used for rendering graphs, game graphics, or other visual images on the fly and a whole bunch of new Link Types. Besides the now widely used “nofollow” there are a whole bunch of new Link Types such as: “alternate”, “contact”, “external”, “pingback”, “prefetch”, “sidebar” and “tag”.

It will take some time before you will be able to take advantage of these new tags though so no need to update your websites just yet. Microsoft, still the biggest player in browsers, hasn’t complied with previous W3C standards yet and most browsers don’t even support CSS3 at this point so it will take a few years before you can start using the “canvas” and “prefetch” tags. Unless you only use Safari and Firefox! The ‘”Canvas” tag was first implemented in Safari by Richard Williamson and has now been adopted in the official HTML5 specs and works in Firefox too.

The current draft is now open for suggestions for improvement. And the W3C is not shy about using Web2.0 technology and services to keep you involved in the process. You can follow (non-editorial changes only) the whole editing process via http://twitter.com/WHATWG or follow live updates to the document here: http://html5.org/tools/web-apps-tracker.

Oh, and can someone explain this obvious sneer at the end of the document (yes, we read all the way down) which we don’t quite understand:

“Special thanks and $10,000 to David Hyatt who came up with a broken implementation of the adoption agency algorithm that the editor had to reverse engineer and fix before using it in the parsing section.”

We will read the whole 318 pages (once we have printed them) tonight and give you more details soon, maybe, whenever. Can’t wait? Knock yourself out:
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/

browsers, HTML5, W3C

6 Comments »