close
The Wayback Machine - https://web.archive.org/web/20100717204228/http://www.webmonkey.com/
Jul162010
File Under: Browsers, Mobile

Firefox Home Syncs Your Faves to Your iPhone

BERJAYAMozilla’s new Firefox Home app for Apple mobiles is now available for download. You can get Firefox Home for the iPhone and iPod Touch in iTunes. It’s a free download.

As we mentioned when we first told you about it, the Firefox Home app is not Firefox on your iPhone. It’s a companion to Firefox.

It securely syncs your bookmarks, browsing history, user preferences and open tabs from the last time you used Firefox, and it brings them down to your iPhone or iPod Touch so you can access that stuff on your mobile. It works in tandem with Firefox Sync, Mozilla’s hosted, cloud-based service that keeps all of your installations of Firefox synced up with one another.

BERJAYA

Browsing my Firefox bookmarks on the iPhone

It’s especially welcome now, as most of us use multiple screens every day — one or two computers, and at least one smartphone with a web browser. Firefox Sync tied our work machine and our home machine together by syncing all of our browser data in the cloud, and Firefox Home completes the circuit for iOS users, making all the hard-to-remember stuff — your myriad “starred” favorites and bookmarked URLs — available in your pocket.

Needless to say, this app is only going to be useful to you if you’re a Firefox user with an iPhone or iPod Touch. Android users have had Mozilla’s mobile version of Firefox available on their phones since April.

You also need to have Firefox Sync set up to use it. If you don’t have an account, you can sign up when you install the app on your phone. You will also need the Sync add-on for Firefox (newer versions of Firefox will ship with Sync pre-installed). As Charlie Sorrel notes in his Gadget Lab post, this is a bit more work than syncing your desktop Safari data to your iPhone, which just involves checking a box in iTunes (and you can keep Safari and Firefox in sync — and by extension, the iPhone — using Xmarks, but only on the Mac). Opera’s mobile browsers have easy syncing as well. But unlike those choices, this isn’t a new browser or a half-way-there solution, it’s a direct line to the same browser data that’s on your desktops and laptops.

Once the app is set up, you can search your history, access your Firefox bookmarks and see the tabs you most recently had open when you walked away from your computer. All of this info is accessible from within Firefox Home’s search bar, which is sort of a miniature version of the “Awesome Bar” in Firefox. It will search both page titles and URL strings, and it will auto-suggest results as you type.

BERJAYA

Searches use the Awesome Bar approach

Just like using the Awesome Bar in Firefox, everything shows up in a single list as you type, and a little icon shows up next to each item to tell you what sort of result it is — a bookmark, a piece of history, an open tab.

Click on an item and the page opens inside an in-app browser. It’s your standard iOS WebKit browser in a pretty blue wrapper, and it performs about the same as the built-in browser inside other popular apps like Twitter.

So Firefox Home is not Firefox on your iPhone, which is something we’re not ever likely to see. Mozilla’s brass has made it clear that Apple’s app policies are too restrictive for Firefox, and the company doesn’t want to dumb the browser down for the iPhone. For people who use Firefox as their primary browser everywhere else, this app is the next best thing.

You can read Mozilla’s announcement for more links, troubleshooting tips, and feedback channels.

See Also:

Jul152010
File Under: HTML5, Multimedia

More Cool HTML5/JavaScript Video Players

BERJAYA

One of the most-cited advancements in HTML5 the new syntax for embedding videos on web pages without the use of plugins.

Rather than load up a Silverlight or Flash player, you can just wrap a file URL in <video> tags and the video will play natively in the most recent crop of browsers — including Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad, where Flash and Silverlight aren’t allowed.

The design of default controls are left up to the browser vendor, but they are usually rather spartan, so the user experience is a little lacking. But since native web playback is all done with web standards, you can create fancy players in JavaScript and CSS that wrap around your video and make playing, controlling and navigating video content much more elegant.

We’ve previously told you about some great standards-based players from Sublime Video, Kaltura and Video for Everybody. Here are a few more.

  • FlareVideo (screenshot at the top) is an HTML5 player that we especially like because it’s very easy to dip into the CSS and JavaScript and start customizing. It also ships with a couple of themes that mimic the look of Vimeo and Spotify and serve as a helpful springboard for further customization.

  • Video JS is another player based on some lightweight JavaScript. It’s fully skinnable, library independent, and it has a fallback scheme for IE.

  • The Open Standard Media (OSM) player uses the jQuery framework to fancy up your HTML5 videos. So if you’re the jQuery type, this one’s for you. You can also use it to play back videos published on Vimeo and YouTube in a playlist that sits next to the player.

    • [Via insicdesigns]

    See Also:

    Jul152010
    File Under: Browsers

    Firefox 4 Beta 2, Due Next Week, Adds Tabs on Top for Macs

    BERJAYA

    Mozilla hopes to deliver the second beta version of Firefox 4 to users before the end of next week, according to the minutes from its recent developer’s meeting.

    Tuesday’s meeting notes show the team has picked next Thursday, July 22 as the proposed ship date for Firefox 4 beta 2.

    There are several enhancements on the way in beta 2, but the one sure to raise the most interest (or the biggest stink) is the new tabs-on-top interface for Mac OS X users. Windows users got the tabs-on-top look as the default interface in Beta 1 earlier this month. With beta 2, the rollout continues to other OSes.

    The tabs-on-top interface is a growing trend among browser vendors. It was popularized by Google Chrome, which shipped with top-tabs as the default within its initial release. Reaction was mostly positive — Opera now puts the tabs on top, and Safari tried the same thing in a beta release thing before abandoning it. But there are some within the Firefox user community who don’t want to see Mozilla’s browser make the switch just to chase the latest design fad.

    Mozilla’s lead user experience designer Alex Faaborg defends the decision, saying it has nothing to do with fashion. By putting the tabs on top, he argues, Firefox 4 will be better suited to running web applications that sit in their own tab. It turns the tab bar into something much closer to a dock or a task bar — a fitting change, since the browser is becoming something much closer to a GUI for an operating system.

    Here’s a mock-up showing several web apps running in top-placed tabs in Firefox. The browser may not end up with this design, but it nicely illustrates Faaborg’s idea.

    BERJAYA

    Here’s a seven-minute video his team produced that furthers the debate:

    Of course, if you don’t like your tabs up top, you can always revert to the old look in the browser’s View menu.

    Some other stuff due in Firefox 4 Beta 2: CSS transitions, better handling of retained layers on pages and a new feature in the add-ons manager that confirms when an add-on has been installed.

    As always, Mozilla’s ship dates and feature lists (especially for beta releases) aren’t final. The team usually sticks to the proposed plan, but don’t be angry or surprised if the release slips to the following Monday.

    The final browser is expected within a few months, and you can read our preview of Firefox 4 on Webmonkey.

    Illustration at the top courtesy of Mozilla. Firefox mock-up by Stephen Horlander and Alex Faaborg/Mozilla/CC.

    See Also:

    Jul152010
    File Under: Browsers, Mobile

    Opera Mini 5.1 Lands on Android Phones

    BERJAYA

    Lovers of Droid phones and tiny browsers with superfast load times can rejoice. The Opera Mini 5.1 browser for Android phones is out of beta and is now available as a general release.

    You can download it in the Android Market, or directly from Opera. If you’ve been testing the previously released beta on your Android phone, you can upgrade to the final release within the app.

    The newest version of Opera’s browser adds a pinch-to-zoom feature, but it’s not as elegant as what you’d expect if you’re used to iOS apps. A pinch only zooms you into a specific content well and out to the full page. Still, it’s useful enough to say goodbye to the crude magnifying glass zoom-in-and-out behaviors, which I certainly won’t miss.

    The default image quality has also been upgraded to better match the higher-resolution screens of newer phones like the HTC EVO and the Droid X. Opera serves pages to Mini users through a network of web proxy servers, and the data arrives compressed. The method speeds up page loads (especially on slow or flaky data networks), but pages come through looking a little crunchy. This update improves the low-quality image issues.

    Opera released its Mini browser for iPhone in April, and it was well-received. It definitely sped up the cellular browsing experience on the iPhone for most websites. But it’s still impossible to make Opera Mini your default browser on the iPhone, and Mobile Safari (with its smooth pinch-to-zoom) has Opera beat for more complex sites and pages that require more navigation than simple scrolling.

    Opera Mini for Android can be set as your default browser, and the browser also gets a session restore feature for quick recovery after crashes. There’s also a full-screen mode that does away with the chrome and fills the tiny screen with pure gold web content.

    See Also:

    Jul142010
    File Under: CSS, UI/UX

    Video: Top 5 Mistakes of Massive CSS

    Huge CSS files can gunk up your page loads, creating annoying wait times for your readers and (if things get really bad) even driving people away before the page fully loads.

    The trick to avoiding breaking your user experience is to make your CSS as lean, clean and fast as possible. There are tried and true techniques for speeding things up, like using Gzip, or serving one or two files instead of dozens. There are also poor optimization methods you should avoid.

    Today, we bring you an informative video from the recent 2010 O’Reilly Velocity conference on how to optimize CSS while avoiding some of the most common mistakes developers make. It’s especially useful for those of you with big CSS payloads. The first speaker is a little dry, but the fun picks up when Nicole Sullivan takes over about five minutes in.

    See Also:

    Jul132010
    File Under: Visual Design, Web Apps

    Test Your Site at Any Size With ResizeMyBrowser

    BERJAYA

    When building a website, it’s critical to test your page against multiple resolutions to make sure everything displays properly on different screens. It’s especially important to test against all the mobile browsers out there, now that the mobile web is exploding and the tablet/netbook web is gathering steam.

    ResizeMyBrowser, created by a developer named Chen Luo, is a super-simple web app that snaps your browser’s width and height to a selected resolution.

    There are some common resolutions to choose from, including both portrait and landscape views for the iPad, iPhone (older models and and iPhone 4), and Nexus One. You can also set your own custom presets that the app will remember the next time you visit.

    It uses the resizeTo JavaScript event, which means it won’t work in Google Chrome (a bug) or in Opera (not supported). But it works in all other desktop browsers.

    Jul122010
    File Under: Events, Web Apps

    Sched.org Goes to Comic-Con

    BERJAYA

    The 2010 San Diego Comic-Con is coming up on July 21-25. There’s so much going on, it’s triple-extra impossible to fit everything of interest into your schedule.

    But at least you can maintain some sense of organization amidst the chaos with Sched.org. The start-up is bringing its incredibly useful calendaring web app to the massive comic book and fandom convention. Find it at sched.comic-con.org.

    Build a personalized agenda by picking panels, movies and parties from a master schedule of everything that’s going on. Create a free account and get a unique URL you can share with your friends. Sched also looks great and performs well on iPhones and other mobiles. There are maps to help you find everything, too.

    Originally created by programmers Chirag Mehta and Taylor McKnight, Sched first popped onto our radar at SXSWi 2008, where the app gained a lot of traction. The simple calendar has remained a geek favorite at big events — they’ve done CMJ, Sasquatch, The Next Web and Black Hat, among others. Most users prefer it because the Sched guys list both official and unofficial events on the calendar, and because there’s a social sharing feature that lets you see which parties and events are the most popular and which ones your friends are attending.

    Check out the Sched’s dedicated site for Comic-Con. Check back often, and the schedule will be updated continuously. And follow Wired’s coverage on Underwire.

    Jul122010
    File Under: HTML5, Web Standards

    Chrome Shows Off Some Fancy HTML5 Tricks

    BERJAYA

    Google’s Chrome browser has a well-established reputation for being not only extremely fast at rendering executing JavaScript, but also robust in its support of cutting-edge HTML5 technologies.

    Both of these capabilities are on display at Chrome Experiments, a site that Google set up to showcase some of the coolest demos on the web for JavaScript apps, intricate CSS layouts and animations done with Canvas.

    Chrome Experiments now has over 100 demos on offer, and we picked out some of our favorites for this little gallery.

    Interest is exploding in HTML5 and its companion technologies. The hope is that these emerging standards will be widely used to power new web apps, as well as for playing animations, songs and videos in the browser without any plug-ins. Developers and content providers continue to rely on plug-ins like Flash or Silverlight for such multimedia playback tasks for now, but they are increasingly turning to HTML5, JavaScript and other web standards as browser makers continue to build the new capabilities into their latest releases.

    We tested all of these experiments in multiple browsers, and almost all of them worked in Safari and Firefox, though they performed much better in the latest beta of Firefox 4 than in the current stable Firefox 3.x builds. Some of them also work splendidly in the latest Microsoft pre-release, Internet Explorer 9 preview 3.

    Of course, a few of the Chrome demos on the Experiments site use Webkit-specific technologies and CSS prefixes, so those only work in Chrome and Safari. Some have poo-poohed vendor-specific prefixes, and others see them as a necessary step to force browser makers to adopt the latest behaviors being used in the wild. Regardless of that debate, it’s encouraging to see the different browsers all improving their JavaScript capabilities, which all of these demos exploit.

    In short, you don’t need Chrome to view these, but they will all be more impressive in Chrome than in other browsers.


    Continue Reading “Chrome Shows Off Some Fancy HTML5 Tricks” »

    Jul92010
    File Under: Location, Web Services

    MapQuest U.K Teams Up With OpenStreetMap

    BERJAYA

    The grandaddy of online mapping sites is turning to an open source library for its cartography data.

    Mapquest, which is owned by AOL, launched a new beta site Friday that uses data from OpenStreetMap. So far, the OpenStreetMap data is only available on MapQuest for the United Kingdom and some of continental Europe, but MapQuest says it will broaden the scope of this experiment in the future.

    Just to show it’s not messing around, the company has also established a $1 million fund “to support the growth of open-source mapping in the United States.” So, we can expect MapQuest to start hosting U.S. maps from OpenStreetMap at some point.

    OpenStreetMap is like a Wikipedia for maps. It’s a fully open source and crowdsourced project. All of the geodata in the OSM system is gathered and entered by volunteers, and all of it is freely available for all to use. Furthermore, if you find an inaccuracy in a map anywhere in the world, you can actually go in and fix it. Here’s what a year’s worth of OSM edits looks like.

    There’s a wiki with more information if you want to get involved. We’ve written extensively about the project before — check out some of the links at the bottom of this article.

    MapQuest is using OSM for tile images and all cartographic data. It is then applying its own user interface and routing algorithms on top of OpenStreetMaps’ maps.

    Here’s what MapQuest’s Antony Pegg has to say about the project on the MapQuest developer blog:

    The goal was to create a MapQuest experience for the United Kingdom using only OpenStreetMap data. As much as possible we tried to use the open source software used by the OSM community, so anything we did to these tools could be contributed back. We picked the UK first because we felt we had the best shot of getting use-able routes from the data without having to worry about a language barrier at the same time.

    See Also:

    Jul82010
    File Under: HTML5, Web Apps

    YouTube Launches New HTML5 Mobile Site

    BERJAYA

    The mobile version of Google’s video-sharing website received an upgrade Thursday. The new m.youtube.com has a bunch of new features, including high-quality video playback in the browser using HTML5.

    Surf to YouTube’s mobile site with any modern mobile with a browser that supports HTML5’s <video> tag (works great on iPhones, iPads and Android phones) and you’ll notice that when you click on a video thumbnail, the video loads inside a new browser-based player.

    The old site on an iPhone used to launch the YouTube native app, taking you out of the browser. In fact, the first time you visit the site on an iPhone, you’ll be prompted to “install” a bookmark on your home screen. This is likely a step to move people away from the YouTube iPhone app and toward the web-based app.

    The switch to an HTML5-based mobile experience comes only a week after YouTube published a public memo stating several places where HTML5 falls short when compared to Flash for delivering video. But Flash currently isn’t an option on mobiles. So, while HTML5-based video playback may not be YouTube’s first choice on the desktop (even though the company has been experimenting with it), it makes perfect sense on mobiles.

    The whole mobile YouTube site has been optimized for the small screen, and the experience on the phone is now much tighter. For one, the video quality is markedly better, and the web-app’s interface has been updated to look like a native app, with big, touchscreen-friendly button icons.

    There are also new features that aren’t in the YouTube iPhone app. The library is easier to navigate, the search box suggests results as you type, videos can be bookmarked like web pages, and favorites and the new “like”-style ratings have been added.


    Continue Reading “YouTube Launches New HTML5 Mobile Site” »

    « OLDER POSTS