Category: What I do

Camino 1.1 Alpha 2 sucks in Firefox 2 features

From the release notes:

Camino 1.1 Alpha 2 is a heavily-updated version of the only native Mac OS X browser using Mozilla.org’s Gecko HTML rendering engine. Notable improvements include enhanced tabbed browsing (“single window mode”), integration with the Mac OS X spell-checking system, detection of RSS/Atom feeds, an improved design for the “blocked pop-up” notification, enhanced options for cookies and downloads, and a resizable search field in the toolbar. This release also includes enhancements in speed, security, and rendering accuracy brought by version 1.8.1 of the Gecko rendering engine.

Note that Camino 1.1 Alpha 2 is in the “alpha” stage, which means it is still under active development. We feel that it is usable on a day-to-day basis and is a large improvement over Camino 1.0, but you may still experience bugs and some functionality may not work entirely as intended. The goal of this early release is to demonstrate the team’s progress and to allow users to report problems early in the development cycle.

Camino 1.1 Alpha 2 shares the same code base as Firefox 2.0, both being based on version 1.8.1 of Gecko, and thus shares many of the security fixes and Gecko improvements that are in that version of Firefox.

Finally we’ll see real session saving, better tab behavior, feed detection and integration with Keychain for password saving. This is in addition to the integration that Camino already supports for the Apple Address Book.

There’s still no support for Firefox Add-ons and it’s unlikely that we’ll see any in the future, but the Camino 1.1 release, built on top of Firefox 2, is starting to shape up nicely.

ZDNet calls 2007 the year of URL-based identity

In its 2007 predictions, Identity World suggests that URL-based identities will take the alpha geek world by storm. I couldn’t agree more:

URL-based identity begins a cycle of real adoption in the blogosphere and alpha geek communities.

URL-based identity overcame many technical and interoperability hurdles in 2006, and got key buy-in from developing communities. 2007 will see the early incarnations of this technology begin a cycle of significant and real adoption in the blogosphere and alpha geek worlds.

I’ve started collecting resources on OpenID over on Ma.gnolia and imagine that in a year’s time, these sources will tell the story of how OpenID, like Firefox, rose from the shadows of former monolithic and proprietary endeavors to become the preferred and predominant open source, decentralized solution for representing oneself on the web. Truly there’s much work to be done and that’s what makes it so existing and worthwhile — it’s young enough and simple enough to still reflect the needs of the individuals whom it serves.

I’ll be writing about this more soon I hope, but I think Identity World has done a group job with their predictions. Now if only ZDNet would follow the advice of their own sages!

Opera 9.10 adds antiphishing

Opera Fraud Protection

Opera 9.10 is out today with the the addition of what they’re wisely calling “Fraud Protection” (Firefox calls phished or spoofed sites “suspected forgeries“).

Similar to Firefox’s hybrid approach, wherein you can either download a list of sites to your computer or instead run checks against a Google service, Opera downloads a list of URLs from Phishtank and then runs a query against GeoTrust to see if the domain you’re visiting is legit.

It’s interesting to see that the heaviest area of browser “innovation” in the past couple years seems to be in anti-phishing, anti-spam, anti-popups, anti-forgeries, anti-fraud and generally fighting other things that make the Internet suck.

Now, at least, most of the major browsers are caught up with technology that will submit your surfing habits to third party sites in the interest of protecting you from the baddies, though it’s of course curious the choice of partners in each case and how this benefits each, enabling them to learn from this data… For example, in the case of Firefox or Microsoft, who partnered with Google and… Microsoft… respectively, will they also be able to use this information to improve their search results and advertising tactics? They say no, but hey now, if they’re the only choice on the block, that puts them in a pretty powerful position to determine who’s on the up and up and who’s… not.

Would you like Google Java with that?

Google has open sourced its Google Web Toolkit under the Apache 2.0 license. This is great news for Java-based web developers… but for other folks who prefer PHP and Rails, I’m not sure what to make of it. I do have to admit, their announcement and all the pieces of it make for a great example of a textbook launch of a new open source initiative.

Searching for the Noah’s Ark of Syndicated Content


Original © copyright 2003, University of Delaware College of Marine Studies.

Filed under “thank god I’m not alone in this”.

Khoi Vihn recently posted on a topic that I very strongly relate to… “So Many Blog Posts, So Little Time”:

The problem is there’s so much great, engrossing net activity and blogging going on, and I have so little free time. When I do find myself with a spare moment, I’m struggling just to keep this blog up-to-date, leaving me very little time to just surf. The net effect is that I just can’t keep up with what everyone’s saying, except in fits and spurts. So, when talking to folks whom I consider to be good friends, I’m perpetually embarrassed by my shallow knowledge of exactly what they’ve been up to.

Phew. Well, at least I know I’m not alone — and Tara’s feeling this too. Running a business, having a flooded inbox, dealing with being a human, all that stuff, well, it makes you wonder what’s going to happen when the long tail starts experiencing this problem and revolts by abandoning social networks in droves, unable to keep up with the steady stream of service notifications. I mean, feeds help — but only at literally aggregating content… they do nothing to actually provide you more attention or brain power to consume or make sense of the content.

Meanwhile, Matt over at SvN4 lays out a couple possible solutions to what he calls “The RSS avalanche”, proposing four different filtering solutions:

I’d add three more options:

But still, these are only mechanisms for paring down the content available to you to consume. How do you still pick from these filters the things that are worth revisiting, bookmarking, taking time to consider, or even to respond to, in the comments or on your own blog?

What will the solutions look like for non-tech savvy audiences? Or just folks who increasingly don’t have the time to fiddle around with setting up these filters? Is this not the suggesting an inevitable return to the travel agent model? Wouldn’t you like an information-travel-agent to pick out the most interesting content, customized for just you? Who you can trust not to let anything slip by? I don’t think that robots or community filters can play this role, though they can help.

So I have a confession to make. I’m only subscribed to 15 feeds right now. Total. And with email, I still can’t keep up. So what are you doing about the coming deluge? Have you discovered the Noah’s Ark of Syndicated Content? And if so, why haven’t you shared it yet?!

Technorati becomes an OpenID iDP

iDP you ask? Well, that’s the new acronym you need to familiarize yourself with… it stands for “iDentity Provider” and in the world of OpenID, is akin to a credit card provider like MasterCard or Visa — since they provide you with a card and a network that accepts their plastic. Of course, Technorati was already a consumer, allowing you to claim your blogs… and now you can use your Technorati profile URL to log in at other OpenID enabled sites, like Ma.gnolia.