Since Google's official unveiling of the Chrome Web Store six months ago, the company has been on a mission to redefine our perception of what constitutes an operating system, a browser and a program, blurring the lines between each. In Google's world, an OS is a browser and a program - one of those hefty pieces of compiled code we used to download or (gasp!) install from a CD - is now a Web app.
Indeed, even the tiniest, incremental changes point clearly in this direction as word comes that the next version of Google's Chrome browser will give users the ability to kill that final remnant of the fact that they're actually using the Web - the address bar.
After more than 3 years of development and discussion by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) Working Group on the subject, the draft specifications document for HTML version 5 will now be moved into Last Call status after a 63 to 2 vote, with 3 abstentions. Technically, voting will close on the 22nd.
HTML5 is quite hot already, having being deployed with excitement by browsers on desktop and mobile computers. Some amount of controversy remains, however, over what the final version will look like exactly. As Deutsche Telekom AG's Kai Scheppe said in voting Yes, "I believe it is time to get full consideration of all stakeholders for this draft of the specification, which will only occur in last call status."
Google will begin renting laptop computers for $20 per month, a senior Google executive told Forbes. The laptops will run Google's Chrome OS, a computer operating system that does away with local storage and applications in favor of a Web browser...and only a Web browser. The browser, of course, is Google Chrome. Initially, the $20/month laptop package will only be offered to students, the report states, but it is surely a precursor to Google's greater ambitions, in both educational institutions and the enterprise.
Google has launched a test extension for its Chrome Web browser and browser-based Chrome OS computer operating system which seems to solve the problem of easily moving photos from a camera to online services like Google's Picasa. This is more of challenge for Google's so-called "cloud" operating system, Chrome OS, which is little more than a Web browser running on a notebook computer.
The new extension called "Picasa Uploader" appeared only days ago, just ahead of the start of Google's developer conference, Google I/O, which begins tomorrow in San Francisco. Will the extension launch at that time? How will it work? We don't know yet, but the possibilities are intriguing.
Sometimes you have to take a stand, even if that means standing against the United States Department of Homeland Security. That is what Mozilla is doing concerning the MafiaaFire extension to Firefox.
MafiaaFire redirects traffic from seized domains to other domains. According to Mozilla legal blogger Harvey Anderson MafiaaFire "seized domain names allegedly were used to stream content protected by copyrights of professional sports franchises and other media concerns." The domains in question alleged acts of piracy have little to do with Firefox itself and MafiaaFire just redirects from those seized sites. Mozilla is not going to disable the extension just because DHS wants them to. It wants legal justification.
Imagine a web where our browsers connected directly to each other to do voice, video, media sharing and run applications, using P2P and real-time APIs, rather than going through centralized servers that controlled traffic and permissions. That's a potent idea and if implemented properly could future-proof a part of the web from authoritarian crack-downs, disruptions by disasters and more. It could also establish a permanent lawless zone of connected devices with no central place to stop anyone from doing anything in particular.
It just so happens that something like that may now be under development in the most official of venues. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced today the formation of a new Web Real-Time Communications Working Group to define client-side APIs to enable Real-Time Communications in Web browsers, without the need for server-side implementation. The Group is chaired by engineers from Google and Ericsson. It sounds like Opera Unite to me (see video below), but democratized across all browsers. It sounds like it could be a very big deal.
If you're an early adopter type, you want to get things first. You don't want to wait for the first "unboxing" of a gadget on the Web, you want to be the unboxer, right? You don't want to wait for all the kinks to be ironed out, you want to see them in their first, raw nature. Reading reviews? Who does that anyway?
Opera announced today its own version for the early adopters, Opera Next, the potentially unstable and bug-ridden version of Opera for you early adopter types out there who want to know what's next.
We've known for months now that multiple user profiles were on their way to Google's Chrome browser, but now they've come even closer to reality as they hit the Canary build of Chrome.
Google watchdog blog Google Operating System reports today that the feature has made its way to the bleeding edge for early adopters and is even highlighted in Chrome documentation.
Earlier this week, Facebook announced the "Send" button. Like the long lost sibling of the "Like" button, the "Send" button lets users share content with their friends, but more selectively. While clicking on "Like" sends a message across your entire Facebook network, "Share" lets you chose specific users, email addresses and Facebook Groups to share content with.
The new feature launched on Monday with 50 partner sites, including a number of major mainstream media outlets, but missed out on a number of great sites we love to share from. What if you use Google Reader to read your blogs but you want to share with your Facebook friends? Well, you'll just have to install one of these two extensions to bring the "Share" button to your browser of choice.
Apple has added the "Do Not Track" option to the latest version of its default browser, Safari, catching up with the rest of the browser market. The Federal Trade Commission suggested the feature late last year during an investigation of ways to protect consumer privacy and, since then, most major browsers have adopted it.
"Do Not Track" gives users the ability to identify and opt out of certain type of online tracking.
