Written on 21st May 2009
5 COMMENTS Zee, Editor in Chief at The Next Web, Principal at WeDoCreative.
Google are clearly taking the speed factor very seriously and have just upped the ante with their latest release of Google Chrome, this update is apparently 30% faster than the previous. Additionally, over 300 browser crashing bugs have been fixed making the browser more stable than ever.
According to the announcement, other features that have also been integrated include:
Improved New Tab Page: The most requested feature from users was the ability to remove thumbnails from the New Tab page. Now you can finally hide that embarrassing gossip blog from the Most Visited section.
Full Screen Mode: If you’ve ever given a presentation or watched a large video using Google Chrome, you might have wished you could use every last pixel on your screen for the content. Now you can hide the title bar and the rest of the browser window by hitting F11 or selecting the option in the Tools menu.
Form Autofill: Filling out your information in forms over and over again can be tedious. Form autofill helps by showing information you’ve previously entered into the same form fields automatically. If at any point you want to clear out your information, that’s easy to do from the Tools menu.
Below is a video from Chrome Product Manager Brian Rakowski detailing the last update:
The major update we’re all waiting for is the OS X release of the browser. According to reports, the browser will be available towards the end of this summer, but you are able to test early versions of the browser here.
Meyer talks about the next web from a front-end engineering perspective. He explains how JavaScript will help build the next web on top of the web that aleady exists today.
For example, YouTube shows the movies in Flash but Flash movies are completely inaccessible to keyboard users. We are paralyzed so we need to bring back control to the user by adding keyword accessible controls to Flash movies:
Interesting example of how Javascript&CSS makes Flash video much more usable for people that can’t use a mouse, independent of Adobe. @kruithoph
In the visual realm ever since CSS has been created there has been a lot of talk about fonts. Scalable Inman Flash Replacement (sIFR) uses JavaScript to solve the font issues on the web:
sIFR is meant to replace short passages of plain browser text with text rendered in your typeface of choice, regardless of whether or not your users have that font installed on their systems. It accomplishes this by using a combination of javascript, CSS, and Flash.
Typeface.js does the same thing but without the flash and Cufon is a follow up project for customized fonts.
The JavaScript engine increased in speed due to massive changes. A huge amount of effort was put in the upgrade of JavaScript performance:
Modern Javascript engines, an order of scale faster than before, are not only interesting, but critical and potentially revolutionary @kruithoph
Eric Meyer announces the death of plugins as JavaScript will rule the world.
We all know the hype of Applications moving online with Gmail, Google Docs and other popular webaps as examples. But a drum machine? That works? In Javascript???
Yep, that is what the people at TheManInBlue have built as a demonstration. All without libraries and without Flash. The developer published as a demo of what is possible with Javascript and hasn’t tested it on all browsers. But he does offer this:
“I do guarantee that if I’m running it on my computer, on a stage, through a loud speaker system with plenty of bass, in front of a couple hundred people, it kinda makes me feel like a rockstar.”
It is supposed to work in IE6, Firefox 3 and Safari 3 as long as you have the Quicktime Plug-in installed. Sounds like it will work on all Macs and some Windows machines to me. Check it out, and pump up the bass!
Most web-based games might appear innocent, but a blogger from GUYA.NET proves that they can function as a way for the web’s bad guys to take over your webcam. When this blogger first heard about this phenomenon clickjacking, he tried to develop a game that could do the same thing. He discovered that the Achilles heel of Flash was the Flash Player Setting Manager. Nice piece of citizen journalism.
By creating some sort of overlay in a Javascript Game, users just think they’re trying to click a button as fast as possible. What they really do, is granting some voyeur access to their web cam. Check it out:
Kudos for Adobe, who fixed this problem by “framebusting the Setting Manager pages“. Supposedly, 99.9% of the users are protected from spies, pervs, or whatnot. The issue still exists for Java, SilverLight, DHTML games and applications though. For details on this I gladly refer to ha.ckers.org.
The web is divided, there are people that adhere to the international standards and have their websites work in all browsers, and cowboy coders, called that way because they ‘code without rules’. Unfortunately, cowboy coders far outnumber real web developers. It’s time to change that.
Fronteers is the dutch branch organization for front-end developers (the people that write CSS, HTML, JavaScript and AJAX) and the first of it’s kind internationally. It was set up last year in September and is run completely by volunteers. Within a year, they already have around 120 members, a figure that continues to grow.
Why is this good? Members of Fronteers are actively working on making their websites better, and making them work for more people. A wholly different world from the “it works in my browser”-excuses of old. As more people start working like this, the web will become better for everyone.
That is why Fronteers is organizing a two day conference on the 11th and 12th of September. With a heavy focus on CSS and JavaScript, it’s sure to be of interest for anyone working with the web. During those two days, industry heavyweights such as Dean Edwards, Andy Clarke, Bert Bos (W3C), Christian Heilmann (Yahoo!) and Stuart Langridge (Lugradio) will talk about topics ranging from Maintainable CSS to JavaScript closures and from the CSS box-model to the HTML5 video elements.
As is the case in so many professions, there is not just one good way to build websites. That’s why the conference also has a secondary track where there will be in-depth discussions on topics such as CSS, SEO, and Accessibility. A perfect opportunity to ask Christian Heilmann of Yahoo! about their website, or the makers of the Dutch Web Accessibility Guidelines about said guidelines.
Of interest to many web workers will also be a presentation held by Pete LePage. LePage is a member of the Microsoft Internet Explorer team and currently works on their new browser, Internet Explorer 8. The presentation is said to provide insight into the browsers’ improvements that are yet to come.
The two-day conference costs 250 euros. Members of the Fronteers organization get a discount. For more information about the congress, visit the congress website.
Netvibes’ chief architect François Hodierne announced the opening of netvibes.org, a website dedicated to Netvibes’ Open Source projects: “By giving away our technology, we hope to foster innovations in the widget and personal-page space, and launch a discussion about their wide implementation.” Netvibes widgets are based on UWA, the Netvibes Universal Widget API. ‘Universal’ since UWA-based widgets run on any platform that supports common Web standards (HTML/JavaScript/CSS). That means iGoogle too.
Netvibes.org is basically a sneak-preview of what’s really coming as the Netvibes developers need some more feedback before the project officially launches. Developers who want to give UWA a try, can work on three projects now:
The UWA JavaScript Runtime: JavaScript libraries that make it possible to run UWA widgets
The PHP Exposition libraries: make it possible to parse and compile UWA widgets
The Exposition widget server: makes it possible to serve widgets to users, notably within an iframe.
I love the paradox of open source. Netvibes says it “gives away” their technology, yet they will probably never turn the personalized homepage into a open source project. Thus what Netvibes (and most other web companies do), is giving away little pieces of the technology – almost everything but the core technology -, so more service-related widgets will flood the web. That gives them a) a better image and b) more functionality.
Written on 21st May 2009
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The Next Web Blog is closely associated with The Next Web Conference which is held annually in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. At this event speakers from all over the world come together to talk about, and show off, the future of the Web. (More info 
