Tag Archives: Opera
Three Great Webapp Resources
Posted on 16. Aug, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 
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While we’re patiently waiting for get our web application fix from the soon to be launched official Chrome Web Store, here are some great places where you can check out the capabilities of what today’s browsers can do. You might be surprised to find out that webapps can do what native applications can, and that it may not be much longer before everything is centered around the (gasp) cloud.
FreeBrowserGamer
I came across FreeBrowserGamer when I was looking for something to play that required a no-frills approach within the browser, and this site certainly fills that need. Whether you are interested in 2D or 3D games you’ll find something original and challenging. When you look at the 3D games and their categories, you start to see that some of these titles actually have depth and quality which suggests that developers are putting money into browser based games such as Guns of Icarus (pictured below) and Earth Eternal.
Chrome Experiments
Despite its appearance, the Chrome Experiments site is one that was created by Google to show off what one can do with a little JavaScript and HTML5. Some interesting ones include social drawing applications, new and innovative ways to look at how we can mashup online video and remakes of games from the good old days. While the name suggests that this is a Chrome-only site, much of the applications here work just as well in Firefox, Opera and Safari.
HTML5 Games
This site claims to be the “largest directory of HTML5 games” and they do not disappoint. Whereas FreeBrowserGamer focuses more on original and 3D gaming that often requires a plugin installation, HTML5Games offers more of the 2D variety as well as a good selection of classics. Of course, there are some intriguing titles such as Galactic Inbox which is clearly a game that prods fun at the folks over at Google and Slither, a take on the classic game Snake but with a twist. There is also a section devoted to games that can be played on mobile devices.
Each of these sites offer something a bit different depending what you are looking for in an interactive browser experience. Hopefully you find what you’re looking for, and let us know if there’s something really cool on one of these sites that we should share.
Inside Chrome 6: Video
Posted on 19. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 2 Comments
This article on video is part of a series of posts discussing the new features and technology that will come with the official newest release of Chrome browser – Version 6.
The rise of video on the internet is going to really change the web – although that has been said for years, it’s taking advances in broadband and browser technology for it to happen. We’re getting close, and the fact that Google TV is coming later this year with a version of Android and the Chrome browser on top, new technology in Chrome 6 will propel web-based video even further.
Chrome 6 will support the WebM standard, which runs on the recently opened-up video codec called VP8. WebM is supported by Mozilla, Opera and Google among other technology companies. The early beta of Firefox 4 is the first browser to support WebM.
Earlier this year, Google bought On2 Technologies, which owned the patent to VP8. Once the acquisition was made, several open source groups such as the Free Software Foundation asked Google to open up VP8, and they did. The On2 acquisition was big for the development of HTML5 video in newer generation browsers. With WebM, HTML5 video is run through an open standard, a process that in the past has been handled by Flash and a video technology called H.264, which is not open.
So what does this all mean? Improved quality of video as well as overall performance, no matter where you are. Plus, we’ll see more capability to mash-up, modify and generally edit videos in ways we probably have not yet even though of.
Need some proof? Consider this Chrome Experiment called “Destructive Video” by Sean Christmann. Although it uses the Ogg video codec instead (WebM just came out), you are able to break up a clip into pieces whilst the video is play. Also, check out the YouTube mobile site, which is HTML5-based and very snappy. Although the codec used here is H.264, the WebM format will be introduced as mobile devices get WebM, which Android is expected have implemented later on this year.
thechromesource Daily: Links for 7/6/10
Posted on 06. Jul, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments
Chrome 6 will support WebM (hey, Opera already does), a better bookmark sync and some other UI changes.
Massive increases are being seen in the need for workers in geolocation, cloud services, HTML5 and mobile applications.
DownloadSquad’s Lee Matthews has found even more web applications which to play with in Chrome.
CNET reports that Google is working on orientation support for Chrome, giving it a leg up in webapps versus regular applications.
RWW’s Sarah Perez says orientation support shows how serious Google is about competing within the gaming market.
thechromesource Daily: Links for 6/1/10
Posted on 01. Jun, 2010 by Greg Farnum. 0 Comments
Computerworld asks, has the Microsoft-backed Bing search engine actually aided Google?
Chrome adds Opera-like Trash Can extension for better tab reopening.
Will Google really become more secure by moving away from Windows?
House Judiciary Committee to look at Google and Facebook privacy practices says Huffington Post.
Opera Thumbs its Nose at Chrome Speed Tests
Posted on 31. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
Always outnumbered in users but not one to back down, the folks at Opera have put out a video in jest of the Chrome speed test clip that was released by Google in celebration of the stable release of Chrome 5.
And, in case you may not remember the Chrome speed tests video, here it is.
Google I/O Day 1: HTML5, Open Source Video and Interesting Apps
Posted on 19. May, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments
While many expected big announcements at Google I/O, Day One featured mostly a build-up to what is expected to be much larger announcements at the second keynote that is happening tomorrow morning. Some of the rumors that have been heard about Android and Google TV did not come to fruition, at least for today.
A big revelation is the fact that Google’s $124.6 million purchase of video codec firm On2 will allow the company’s VP8 technology to be open sourced in a initiative known as WebM. This is going to be embraced by an array of web-centric companies, including Opera, Mozilla and Skype.
Some interesting web-based software companies were featured like the TV-Guide-ish Clicker.tv and MugTug, which is a browser-based image editing software that is powered by HTML5′s 2D canvas technology:
Heavily presented at today’s keynote were advancing technologies that are propelling the web. Interestingly, the CEOs of both Mozilla and Opera had a chance to talk and then the Chrome Web Store was announced which clearly will only be run within Google’s own Chrome browser and eventually Chrome OS.
We’ll be intently watching tomorrow, however, and keep posting updates as fast as we can.
Microsoft Takes Issue With Chrome Feature That Can be Turned Off
Posted on 01. Apr, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments
In a video that is meant to show off the security features of Internet Explorer 8, Product Manager Pete LePage takes aim at the Chrome browser, claiming that because IE8 allows users to search in a separate box rather than doing so in an all-in-one inbox box that Google is possibly compromising a user’s security by reporting every term back to Google.
“By keeping these boxes separate, your privacy is better protected and the addresses of the sites you’re visiting aren’t automatically shared with Microsoft, or anyone else,” LePage says in the video.
“As I start to type an address into the address bar, Fiddler [a Web debugging proxy] shows that for nearly every character I type, Chrome sends a request back to Google,” LePage says. “I haven’t even hit enter yet to load the website and Google is already getting information about the domain and sites I’m visiting.”
This only partially true. You are capable of changing your search provider in Chrome, and when you do the information that you search for in the Omnibox will send it back to the engine of your choosing. Just because IE8 has two separate boxes for these functions does not make it safer.
The option for sending information back to Google when you start typing into the Omnibox can be turned off by following these instructions. I know this because I downloaded Fiddler myself and tried it to make sure.
LePage also goes on to promote the virtues of IE8′s InPrivate feature, which allows users to surf the web anonymously. Interestingly, this feature sounds eerily similar to Chrome’s Incognito mode which has been a part of Google’s browser since 2008.
Look, there’s no doubt here that Internet Explorer is facing a decline in market share. A recent graph out by Net Applications shows that Internet Explorer is dropping while Chrome is gaining. At the same time, competitors like Safari (which can be traced to Mac adoption), Firefox and Opera are filling in the space where users once had Internet Explorer as their preferred browser. If Microsoft does not go on the offensive with videos like this they risk losing even more market share.
Expect Microsoft to heavily market IE8 and eventually IE9. They will also do well if they keep copying key elements of other popular browsers if they hope to stay relevant, one of the other “industry standard” practices LePage talks about in the video.
New Chrome 5 Release For Mac Tackles Bookmarks
Posted on 16. Mar, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
A few hours ago, the Chrome browser team announced an update to the Chrome 5 version for Mac that’s still in the “development channel”. The main update? Functionality of bookmarks has been vastly improved. This includes bookmark copying, the creation of bookmark buttons and some cosmetic issues with the bookmark bar alignment that was just plain annoying. Also, some Autofill features were added to help with overall quality.
This is great news for Mac users, as although Chrome has not been out as long for Apple computers than Windows ones, they are moving closer to being comparable. Obviously having things such as bookmarks and Autofill working well goes a long way towards adoption of the browser. Even though Safari is still the majority on Mac, Firefox dominates on Windows and Opera still offers one of the the fastest browsers available right now, it’s still amazing what Google has been able to do with Chrome after only being in the browser space for about a year and a half.
So for you Mac users who want to be on the cutting edge of Chrome, join the dev channel here.
Video: Browser Comparison Test
Posted on 08. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 1 Comments
Ah, so what is the best browser? If you look at this through the lense of Ian Hickson’s Acid Tests, which gives you a score based on how compliant your browser is with today’s web standards, one can get a good sense of what is good today and what isn’t. Plus, what is a Monday morning without a good video clip to keep you going:
I don’t have much to say about this, other than how horribly Internet Explorer 8 failed the test, but what are you gonna do?
Interview: HTML5 Standards Author Ian Hickson
Posted on 05. Feb, 2010 by Daniel Cawrey. 0 Comments
Ian Hickson has worked as a proponent of web standards for years. He is the maintainer of the Acid Tests website, which is a tool for browsers to make sure that they are fully compliant with today’s web standards. The most recent revision, Acid3, was developed to help browsers follow standards compliance with web 2.0 technologies.
Ian has been employed by Netscape, Opera Software, and now works for Google. He also was the lead on authoring the standards for HTML5. While he couldn’t talk about anything related to Chrome or Google with us, he answered our questions so that we can better understand this new web standard a bit better.
Tell us about yourself and how you got involed in HTML 5.
I was at Opera in 2003, working half in QA and half in their standards group, when the W3C called for a member vote on XForms (at that time the next generation of web forms, see here). Opera and some other companies — Apple and Mozilla in particular, though we were supported by some others also — tried to make the point that abandoning HTML wasn’t such a hot idea, and so we decided to write a proof of concept to show that it was possible to add many of the features of XForms to HTML. I happened to have some free time so I was volunteered to write it. We called it XForms Basic or something like that, and it wasn’t very popular at the W3C, so we lost the vote. However, it convinced us that it was the right direction to go in, so we worked on it a bit more, and renamed it to Web Forms 2.0 to avoid confusion with XForms.
In 2004 there was a big workshop organised by the W3C to Make a Decision about how we were going to move forward on the Web, and the W3C staff and many of the members voted for continuing down the path of XHTML2 and XForms, and said that if we wanted to work on HTML we should do so elsewhere, because the W3C had decided it was done with that.
So we opened a mailing list called the WHATWG to continue work on Web Forms 2.0 in public, and later that year started a new draft called Web Applications 1.0 into which we put many features aimed at writing Web apps, including a new version of HTML that we jokingly called HTML5, and a bunch of other features that later became Web Storage, Web Sockets, Server-Sent Events, and a variety of other specs.
Around 2005 I moved from Opera to Google, so that I could focus specifically on the spec work — Opera still wanted me to work 50% on QA, but Google were willing to let me work 100% on the specs.
Later, around 2006 or 2007, the W3C basically realised they had made a mistake, and they asked if they could work on HTML5 as well, so we renamed Web Applications 1.0 to HTML5, and the WHATWG and the W3C started working together. Web Forms 2.0 got merged into HTML5, and most of the bits of HTML5 that weren’t really HTML got split out into separate specs.
How far along is this technology? As in, when can users expect to see this on a regular basis?
Many parts of it were done before we started, because we took existing proprietary features and just specified them. For example, XMLHttpRequest was first specified in Web Applications 1.0, years after Microsoft invented it and all the other browsers copied it. It was later spun off into its own spec at the W3C. Other parts are brand new, and haven’t been implemented anywhere yet. Some parts might never get implemented, and we’ll throw them out when that becomes clear.
People are starting to use parts of HTML5 today. It depends really on what fraction of browsers you want to target. If you only care about Opera, Firefox, Safari, and Chrome, you can use the “canvas” element today without any trouble… but IE doesn’t support it. If you only care about IE, you can use onhashchange… but the other browsers don’t support it. I would give it a few years before the majority of the features are implemented everywhere, but who knows. After all, not everything in HTML_4_ is implemented everywhere yet, and people use that without even thinking about it!
How significant is the canvas tag and svg for HTML 5? Do you know of any good examples of this on the web right now?
IE doesn’t support this either, so it’s hard to find widely deployed uses of those, but there are some. Yahoo! Pipes has used it for some time. Dreamhost uses it in their hosting panel.
Talk a bit about how offline storage will work. Many users are concerned about being able to work offline.
The Offline Application Cache feature is actually pretty straight-forward. If you design your application such that it can work without contacting the server, then you just list all the files it uses (HTML pages, CSS, JS, images, etc) in a manifest using a simple format, and it works offline. The way it works is the first time you visit the page, it gets the manifest, downloads all the files, and the next time you visit the page, it just uses the downloaded files, regardless of whether you’re online or not – it then downloads the new files in the background, in case they have been updated. This makes things faster as well as making them work offline. If your application uses online data, though, like a Web mail application, you will have to do extra work to actually maintain an offline copy of the mail for the user, that’s not handled by the page.
Have you heard anything about 3D on the web? Will HTML 5 support this?
The Khronos Group is working on a 3D canvas context, but I don’t know much about it. Canvas is a part of HTML5.
Lastly, what is in store for the future when talking about HTML 5 on the web?
From the point of view of standards, HTML5 is old hat now! The WHATWG is already moving on to the next generation of HTML. One of the changes we’re making is that we’re no longer numbering the versions… in practice it hasn’t made much sense. Browsers started implementing HTML”5″ stuff before all the HTML”4″ stuff was implemented, and they ship whatever they have at the time they ship… it’s not like the version numbers really mean anything useful. So there’s just “HTML”, and we keep improving it.
One of the ideas we’re looking at is video-conferencing, but it needs a common codec even more than , so we’re kinda stuck with that. It’s also not clear how we should do the networking — there are lots of standards like SIP and Jingle that we could use, but they’re all really complicated, and not a good fit for what we’re doing.
On the nearer term, we’re going through all the feedback we’ve been getting on HTML5, and fixing bugs. There’s lots of work still to be done.
