Mar82010
File Under: Browsers

Amazon Is Building a Better Browser for Kindle

Browsing the web on one of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers is like taking a step backwards in time. It’s clunky and has only limited support for web standards and bare-bones JavaScript capabilities.

But now Amazon may be looking to add browser engineers to the Kindle team, according to the job listings on the company’s website.

A job posting for a browser engineer at Lab126, the division of Amazon that develops the Kindle, indicates the company is looking for somebody to develop “an innovative embedded web browser” for a consumer product.

The role at Lab126 includes designing new features for a new browser while supporting the existing code. Job requirements include familiarity with current web standards and web rendering engines, as well as experience with Java and embedded Linux, both of which the Kindle runs.

The Kindle’s current browsing experience is notably sub-par. It’s good enough to check your e-mail, post to Twitter or read Wikipedia, but it doesn’t handle images or more complex web apps particularly well. It certainly doesn’t live up to the same vision of the mobile web being outlined by the iPhone, or Android phones like the Droid or Nexus One. And with the coming of the Apple iPad and other threats to Amazon’s dominant e-reader, which should behave on the web about as well as (if not better than) the iPhone, the Kindle had better improve its browser if the device is going to continue to compete with these more capable devices.

Amazon recently launched a beta program for third-party app developers who want to build software for the Kindle.

Apparently, the job listing has been up for a month, but I only became aware of it once CNet’s Stephen Shankland tweeted about it.

Calls to Lab126 and Amazon on Monday morning went unreturned. I’ll update this post if and when I get more information from Amazon or anyone else.

Meanwhile, if you have any advice about improving the Kindle’s browsing mojo, leave it in the comments.

Photo: Charlie Sorrel/Wired.com

Mar82010
File Under: Browsers, Events, HTML5

Meet the Winners of Webmonkey’s Google I/O Giveaway

We’re giving away a pair of passes to Google I/O today.

A little over a week ago, we kicked off our contest, encouraging you to send us any HTML5 web apps or Google Chrome browser extensions you’ve built. Alternatively, we asked you to tell us how you’d describe a web app to your grandmother. We got a heap of submissions, but we worked our way through the field and picked two winners.

Abraham Williams and Mike Cantelon will be heading to Google’s premiere developer event, which takes place May 19 and 20 at Moscone Center in San Francisco, free of charge.

Here are the winning apps, chosen by the Webmonkey staff, along with a couple of honorable mentions:

Winner: Intersect by Abraham Williams

Williams came up with this cool extension for Chrome that shows additional information about a user’s followers on Twitter — in particular, it shows where you and another user’s social graphs overlap. Install the extension and visit somebody’s Twitter profile page. You’ll see additional grids loading below their stack of followers. You see which of your friends are also following that user, which friends you have in common and which followers you have in common. It’s an excellent social discovery tool for Twitter power users, and the best extension for Twitter’s stock web interface we’ve seen yet. Congrats, Abraham!

Winner: Blood Funnel by Mike Cantelon

Cantelon created this funky little game called Blood Funnel using JavaScript and HTML. It’s basically Space Invaders, except with flying, demonic Goldman Sachs bankers standing in for the buglike aliens. The paranoia is amped up by an awesome, thumping techno soundtrack — served up as an ogg file, of course. Check out Cantelon’s JavaScript source, it’s elegant. Caveat: Blood Funnel is nimble in Chrome, but it’s slower in Firefox. Congrats, Mike!


Continue Reading “Meet the Winners of Webmonkey’s Google I/O Giveaway” »

Mar82010
File Under: Browsers

Browse the Web as it Looked in 1993

github

Github user Alan Dipert has posted the source code for NCSA Mosaic 2.7 on the code-hosting website.

You can download it and run it on any modern Linux installation. It seems to run on Ubuntu just fine, though PNG support is a little wonky. The good news is that the folks on Github are actively submitting patches.

Mosaic was the first graphical web browser. It was born in the early ’90s, created by a small team headed by Marc Andreessen. The same crew would go on to found Netscape Communications and build the Netscape browser, which would eventually lead to the Mozilla browser, and finally to Firefox. So, running Mosaic is basically taking the browsing experience all the way back to its roots.

Dipert acknowledges the work of two other coders who ported the old code to run on the modern Linux: Sean MacLennan and Alan Wylie. As MacLennan says on his site, “If you are going to run a 10-year old protocol (HTML), you might as well use a 10-year old browser.”

I first started using Mosaic at the beginning, in 1993. We had it running at my college radio station, and we DJs would use it to download the news wires we’d read on air at the top of every hour. I also used it to browse Wired’s gopher server and read the magazine articles on my computer in my dorm room. About two years later, HotWired arrived on the web proper, and I used Mosaic to browse it.

OK, I’m getting misty. Somebody cue up some Pearl Jam.

Screenshot and hat tip from Tomayko.

Mar52010
File Under: Monkey Business

Welcome to the All New Webmonkey

monkey_newpaint

As you may have noticed, we’ve given Webmonkey an entirely new coat of paint.

The visual design has been refreshed — something we’ve been doing every couple of years since we launched in 1996 — and we honestly think the site has never looked better. It took a lot of hard work by everyone on the Wired.com technical and design teams to pull it off.

As pretty as it is, there are other changes behind the scenes that we feel are just as important. We simplified the site navigation and upgraded our search tool, making it much easier to find blog posts and tutorials around specific topics. We also upgraded our publishing system, which will allow us to use photos, screenshots and galleries in more interesting ways in our reviews and tutorials.

Most notably, however, this latest redesign of Webmonkey brings to an end a two year experiment. In May of 2008, we moved all of the tutorial content on the site (over 500 articles and reference pages) to a wiki. We asked all of our readers to chip in and help improve our educational content by contributing edits. Many of you jumped in, offering updates, tips, links and corrections. Certain communities really made a difference — in particular, our Django tutorial, our Python tutorial and our series on JavaScript frameworks all benefitted greatly from reader edits. We sincerely appreciate all of the work that everyone put in to improve our content.

But the wiki experiment didn’t pan out. Spam became a huge problem, and despite our best efforts to automate our defenses, keeping spam bots and vandals off the site put serious strain on our small team. Also, while MediaWiki is great software (we’ll continue to use it on Wired’s How-To Wiki), fully incorporating the wiki content into the rest of Webmonkey, which was and still is running WordPress, proved to be a challenge. Search, site navigation and content discovery were suffering because of it.

In February, we froze edits on the wiki and began porting everything into WordPress. All of the legitimate edits and updates that were made by our readers while the wiki pages were open to the public have been preserved in the WordPress versions. We also found some time to update some of the older articles, too.

Now, the tutorials easier to find. They look better (thanks to Alex Gorbatchev’s SyntaxHighlighter) and the multi-page lessons are easier to navigate. And while the spam bot armies are locked out for good, the tutorials are open for comments just like blog posts. So if you spot something that needs updating or fixing, just leave a note and we’ll attend to it.

There’s still some work to be done. Over the next few weeks and months, we’ll continue updating the content library, beefing up the number of templates in the Reference section and building out the directories. In the near future, we’re going to install Disqus to handle comments, so you will be able to log in using OpenID, Facebook Connect, your Twitter or Yahoo credentials, or an existing Disqus login if you want to leave a comment anywhere on the site.

So for now, click around the site. Follow us on Twitter and become a fan on Facebook if you haven’t already. And of course, please let us know what you think of the new Webmonkey in the comments.

Mar22010
File Under: Browsers, HTML5

Microsoft to Double Down on HTML5 With Internet Explorer 9

With the latest releases of Opera, Google Chrome and Firefox continuing to push the boundaries of the web, the once-dominant Internet Explorer is looking less and less relevant every day.

But we should expect Microsoft to go on the offensive at its upcoming MIX 2010 developer conference in Las Vegas, where, it has been speculated, the company will demonstrate the first beta builds of Internet Explorer 9 and possibly offer a preview release of the browser to developers. Several clues point to the possibility that the next version of IE will include broad support for HTML5 elements, vector graphics and emerging CSS standards. If Microsoft plays its cards right in Vegas, IE 9 could be the release that helps IE get its groove back in the web browser game.

The biggest clue comes from the scheduled sessions for MIX, which takes place mid-March. There’s a two-part talk scheduled on HTML5, entitled HTML5 Now: The Future of Web Markup Today, by Opera Software’s Molly Holzschlag.

Indeed, Holzschlag tells Webmonkey she expects Microsoft to step up HTML5 support in IE9. “Look especially for Microsoft to be working on browser storage and other HTML5 features,” she said in an e-mail.

There’s also a session on IE and SVG, the vector graphics tools supported by pretty much every other browser. IE Senior Program Manager Patrick Dengler is scheduled to present on the Future of Vector Graphics for the Web.

Couple these clues with a post from the IE team on its official blog late last year about increased JavaScript rendering speeds and CSS support, and the team’s recent push to provide better support for SVG graphics and animations, it looks like IE 9 will present a huge step forward for Microsoft into the realm of HTML5, CSS 3 and other modern technologies that drive the most forward-thinking web apps.

Such a shift in thinking would be welcome. Picking on Internet Explorer Explorer is like fishing with dynamite — it’s just too easy to be fun anymore. In fact, many prominent forces on the web have stopped arguing against IE and simply started waving their hands in dismissal. It started with a few developers, but recently even Google has turned up its nose at IE, referring to it as a “non-modern” browser when talking about web standards and releasing its Chrome Frame plug-in to enable IE7 and IE8 users to run more advanced web apps. Worse, third-party developers have started to one-up Microsoft by hacking features into IE, like giving it the ability to display HTML5 video playback when none existed.

The current release, IE8, which shipped on every Windows 7 desktop in 2009, caught Microsoft up to where other browsers were in 2007 with support for CSS 2.1 and a couple of token HTML5 tools — most notably the offline storage elements. But that’s where its support for emerging standards ends.

At PDC09, Microsoft’s last big developer event, president of the Windows division Steven Sinofsky promised that Internet Explorer 9 was going to offer a “more modern” (there’s that word again) browsing experience and emphasized coming improvements in performance, JavaScript rendering, support for existing web standards and support for HTML5 and CSS 3.

But Sinofsky tempered his statements by saying Microsoft will continue to be “responsible” about how much it supports HTML5, so that “we don’t generate a hype cycle for things that aren’t there yet across the board for developers to take advantage of.”

While Microsoft is technically correct when it keeps saying that HTML5 isn’t finished, its failure to offer broad support for the new markup language has held IE back from the web’s cutting edge. The company has traditionally been reticent to support emerging standards, viewing them as a moving target and choosing only to concentrate on standards that have been ratified by the W3C, the web’s governing body. But delays at the W3C haven’t stopped the competition from forging ahead with HTML5, and if IE doesn’t start embracing the new laws of the land now, the browser’s dominance on the web is going to continue to crumble.

We contacted a Microsoft rep for this story, but they chose to save any further talk of IE9 until MIX.

See Also:

Mar22010
File Under: Browsers, Security

Google Chrome Beta Adds Privacy and Content Controls

The latest beta release of Google Chrome adds a slew of much needed privacy and content controls — as well as automatic page translation — to Google’s fast, but slightly feature-deficient browser.

The new features — which put Chrome on par with other browsers when it comes to privacy controls — are so far only available to those using the beta channel. Google says the new privacy controls will make it to the stable channel in the coming weeks. If you’d like to switch channels, and try out the new features now, head to the Chrome channel changer page.

The new features allow for much more fine-grained control of cookies, images, JavaScript, plug-ins, and pop-up windows, allowing you to always block them, always allow them or only allow them from trusted sites. The ability to whitelist specific sites matches what Firefox (and others) have long offered and helps close the feature gap between the two browsers.

To access the new controls in the latest release, head to the wrench menu and select “Options.” From there, click the “Under the Hood” tab and chose “Content settings.”

If you elect to disable cookies (or any of the other options) Chrome will display an icon in the URL bar which you can click to add an exception. The process is unfortunately a bit awkward, requiring you to type in the domain exceptions yourself. Choosing the “Ask me” option provides a more automated experience (and a quick lesson in just how many cookies are being set in your browser).

In a particularly nice touch, Chrome offers a link to control Flash cookies via Adobe’s setting page. Other browsers do not (without extensions) provide a way to stop these particularly pernicious cookies.

Chrome’s new features aren’t just for privacy either. The image-blocking feature could be used as a primitive ad blocker, provided you’re willing add the necessary domains. Image blocking can also be handy in situations where your internet connection speeds are slow.

Also part of the new beta release is automatic web page translation. When the language of the page you’re visiting is different from your language setting, Chrome will now offer to translate the page using Google Translate. While machine translations aren’t perfect, Google Translate isn’t bad for conveying the basics of a multilingual page.

If you’d like to take Chrome 4.1 beta for a spin, head over to the beta download page. For more details on the privacy controls, here’s Google’s video intro:

See Also:

Mar12010
File Under: Browsers, JavaScript

Firefox Borrows a Bit of Safari’s Magic to Speed Up JavaScript

Mozilla’s Firefox web browser was one of the first to optimize for today’s JavaScript-heavy web pages. Mozilla’s new Tracemonkey JavaScript engine — released with Firefox 3.5 — put the browser at the top of most page rendering speed tests. But lately, Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari and the coming Opera 10.5 have been beating Firefox at its own game.

Mozilla is hoping to change that with some new improvements to Tracemonkey that promise to make Firefox even faster — particularly on JavaScript-heavy websites like Gmail or Facebook.

The new project — JagerMonkey, as it’s known — is built on top of Tracemonkey and borrows its assembler from Apple’s open source Nitro JavaScript engine. As JagerMonkey programmer David Mandeli writes on his blog: “we know [Nitro] is simple and fast from looking at it before… it’s open-source, and it’s well-designed C++, so it was a great fit.”

The goal of JagerMonkey is to cover a couple of blind spots in Tracemonkey’s JavaScript rendering process. Most JavaScript can be compiled “just in time,” that is, optimized by turning it from JavaScript into much faster native code. When that’s possible, Tracemonkey’s performance matches that of Chrome, Safari and Opera.

However, not all of the web’s JavaScript can be converted to native code the way Tracemonkey currently works. Mandeli has a detailed explanation of what sort of code doesn’t work and why, but the short story is that when Tracemonkey doesn’t kick in, Firefox is still rendering that code at the same speed it was in 2007 — in other words, very slowly by today’s standards.

JagerMonkey will change that, handling the code that the existing Tracemonkey engine cannot.

Of course it will be some time before JagerMonkey makes it into Firefox proper. In fact, as of right now it isn’t even in the Firefox nightly builds. If you really must try it for yourself right now, you’ll find a link to the source code on the Mozilla wiki.

So far, the project doesn’t have a roadmap and the wiki page indicates that there are still many optimizations to be done, but when JagerMonkey finally lands, it may well put Firefox back on top in the web browser speed wars.

Photo: Wikimedia Commons, PD

See Also:

Mar12010
File Under: Browsers

New Opera 10.5 Delivers Speed, Windows 7 Tricks

Opera software has released Opera 10.5 for Windows, boasting that it’s “the fastest browser on Earth.” We took the beta version for a test drive last month and found that it is indeed snappy, besting Safari 4, Firefox 3.6 and even Google’s speedy Chrome browser in our informal testing. Now that the final release is here, speed lovers have yet another browser to add to their stable.

At the moment Opera 10.5 is available for Windows only; the Mac and Linux versions of Opera 10.5 remain beta releases, though Opera assures Webmonkey that the final releases for both platforms are coming soon. The beta releases for those platforms have only been a few weeks behind the Windows version on 10.5.

The main focus for Opera 10.5 is speed, and much of the speed comes from two new under the hood features in this release, namely the new Carakan JavaScript rendering engine and the Vega graphics engine.

If you want to make Opera 10.5 even faster you can also enable Opera Turbo, in which case Opera handily beat every other browser in our tests. Of course Opera Turbo involves a bit of a trade off — all traffic is routed through Opera’s servers, where the data gets compressed, and Turbo mode lacks some features , like secure connections.

Even without the added boost of Opera Turbo, this new release consistently bested both Safari and Firefox in our speed tests and held its own against Google Chrome.

At this point, it’s safe to say that all four major web browsers are so close in terms of speed that the real differentiating factor is the feature set. And it’s here that Opera really shines with nice Windows 7 features, like access to individual tabs — and even Opera’s Speed Dial sites — from the Windows taskbar. There are plenty of extras as well, including everything from a BitTorrent client to Opera’s set of Unite web server tools.

In addition to the Windows 7 integration, Opera 10.5 sports a somewhat different look on Windows, having eliminated the traditional menu bar in favor a new “Opera menu,” which looks and behaves much like the single button menus found in Microsoft Office.

The Opera menu is unobtrusive, hanging down like an inverted tab on the far left of your window, and saves considerable screen real estate, making it very nice for netbooks (If you don’t like the new Opera menu, you can turn the old menu back on by clicking “show menu bar”).

Also new in this release is support for HTML5 video. As Opera CTO Hakon Lie told Webmonkey last month, HTML5 video is the future of the web, “but only when combined with a free and open video format.” To that end, Opera has joined Mozilla in supporting the Ogg Theora codec for video playback in Opera 10.5.

Opera 10.5 also supports the HTML5 offline storage spec, which allows web applications to store data on your PC for things like offline document editing, offline web-based e-mail or offline RSS readers. The latest version of Opera also adds some new CSS 3 tricks with support for both transitions and transforms.

See Also:

Feb262010
File Under: HTML, UI/UX

Using ‘Mad Libs’ to Make Web Forms More Fun

In an ideal world, the web would have a built-in identity solutions — websites would automatically know who you are when you arrive. In the real world, however, almost every website has its own sign up and authentication process, endless forms enticing you to enter your name, your e-mail, pick a password… yawn, what now?

It’s repetitive, boring and makes many of your users click away in disgust. But what if you turned the sign up form into a narrative, something a bit like a Mad Lib?

That’s exactly what web developer Jeremy Keith has done for his podcasting site, Huffduffer. Instead of a list of blank boxes, Huffduffer’s sign up form looks like this:

All the usual behaviors of a web form are still there. You can tab between fields, your password is still masked and errors are highlighted if there are any. The difference is the in the presentation. It doesn’t look like some kind of online test.

In short, Huffduffer’s sign up for is refreshing, but does it work? Well, Luke Wroblewski, Chief Design Architect at Yahoo and author of the book Web Form Design, had the same question and, with some help from the team at Vast.com, ran some tests.

The designers at Vast redesigned their response forms along the lines of Huffduffer’s form and found that, as Wroblewski reports, “Mad Libs style forms increased conversion across the board by 25-40 percent.”

The forms are live on both Vast and the Kelley Blue Book website if you’d like to experience them yourself. Wroblewski has a few minor caveats about the increased number of users — be sure to check out his post for the complete details — but at least in some cases it would seem that a narrative flow trumps the boring old form.

See Also:

Feb262010
File Under: Events

Win A Free Ticket to Google IO 2010

Google’s premiere developer event is coming up in just a couple of months, and we’ve got two passes to give away.

Google I/O takes place on May 19 and 20 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s the company’s largest developer event, with hundreds of sessions and demos of all the latest Google tech. Plus, there are the big keynotes like the launch of Wave, the first major public demo of Android and the HTML5 coming-out party where everyone in the room got a free Android phone.

If you live in or near San Francisco, or if you have the means to get here, you can win one of the two passes we’re giving away. Each one is worth $500! Here’s the deal:

  • Submit a link to something cool you’ve built using HTML5 — a web app, a canvas demo, an audio or video demo, a mobile app that uses geolocation. It has to be your own work, and it has to be somewhere on the public web.
  • Or, submit a link to a Google Chrome extension you’ve built. Tell us what it does and why it’s awesome.
  • Or, tell us how you would explain what a “web app” is to your grandmother. Let’s assume your grandmother is a nontechnical web user — you can’t use the word “application” or any acronyms, just plain English. (Yes, your submission has to be in English).

To participate, leave a comment on this post, send a tweet to @webmonkey, or send an e-mail to webmonkey@wired.com. Whatever you do, make sure your contact information is easily accessible. A valid e-mail address or URL is a must if you want to collect your prize.

Keep in mind, Google I/O is in San Francisco, and we’re only giving away a ticket to get you in — we’re not paying for flights or hotels, though we will pass along some free Webmonkey swag at the conference. And, OK, we’ll buy you a taco if you ask nice. Also, your ticket is nontransferable.

We’ll pick two winners in a few days, so enter early and don’t miss out.

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