Business Tech

Google Browser Size shows how much of a Web page browsers can show on average.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google published a tool Wednesday called Browser Size that lets Web developers gauge how much of their pages are visible in people's browsers.

With its own analysis, the search giant found that a lot of people couldn't see the download button for Google Earth because they had to scroll before it would show in their browser. Revamping the page increased download rates 10 percent, according to a blog post by Browser Size team member Arthur Blume.

The tool loads a Web page behind a pastel overlay that indicates what fraction of people can see a particular point on the Web page. The upper left is of course 100 percent, but when the point is farther down or toward the right, fewer and fewer can see it. The overlay statistics are based on a fraction of the people who visit the Google.com home page, said programmer Bruno Bowden.

"For example, if an important button is in the 80 percent region it means that 20 percent of users have to scroll in order to see it," Bowden said.

I'm intrigued by this sort of data. It's interesting to see the jump between old-style screens with a 4:3 aspect ratio and newer HD-style models that usually are in a wider 16:10 proportion. I'd be particularly curious to see how the overlay changes from one Web page to another--for example, I'd imagine gaming site visitors have bigger screens than mainstream Web pages.

Here's a hint if you're reading this on a laptop with a modest screen size: to see more of the Brower Size overlay, try pressing Ctrl-minus to zoom out.

I spend a lot of time looking at Web pages and have no particular fondness for scrolling. I therefore appreciate various efforts to maximize browser real estate devoted to actual Web content. Perhaps Google's tool will help on the Web design end, too, helping justify redesigns to put the good stuff in plain sight.

Google's browser has passed Safari in terms of worldwide browser usage--at least by one measurement.

NetApplications' measurements of browser usage share, which track which browsers individuals use based on visits to the company's network of Web sites, gave Chrome the third-place spot after No. 1 Internet Explorer and No. 2 Firefox for the week of December 6 through 12, according to a Computerworld story Tuesday. Chrome had 4.4 percent share to Safari's 4.37 percent.

Google released beta versions of Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux on December 8. Earlier, only developer channel versions had been available. Google plans to release the "stable" versions January 12, according to the Chromium development calendar.

Take these usage share numbers with a grain of salt. Even though 0.03 percentage points still is a lot of people in the real world, it is a small fraction, and a change in Net Applications' assumptions in August led to share changes two orders of magnitude more dramatic. Weekly statistics also vary: Although Firefox cleared 25 percent share in one week of November, it averaged only 24.72 percent for the overall month.

I've asked various browser makers about how trustworthy they view NetApplications' statistics to be. The answers generally are favorable but not ringing endorsements.

Regardless of the precise details, though, the Chrome trajectory is upward: its November usage share was 3.93 percent to Safari's 4.36 percent.

And although Google relied on word of mouth for promoting its original online search product, it's taking a more active role with Chrome. The latest example: a "Chrome for Christmas" site that lets people send invitations to download Chrome.

Firefox proved that a browser not bundled with an operating system can be successful, and Chrome could show the idea isn't a fluke if its growth continues.

Google is promoting its browser through this 'Chrome for Christmas' e-mail campaign.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

3D graphics became ordinary first in games, then in operating systems, and on Thursday, it took a significant step toward being built into Web browsers as well.

The Khronos Group, which oversees the OpenGL graphics interface, announced that its work with Mozilla to bring hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web has reached draft standard form. The standard, called WebGL, lets programmers who use the Web's JavaScript language take advantage of the fact that video cards can handle 3D graphics with aplomb.

The group now wants commentary from Web developers and others who might be involved with WebGL so it can be finalized. "I anticipate us moving toward a spec that is not provisional, not merely a draft, in early 2010, the first quarter," said Arun Ranganathan, chairman of the WebGL working group and standards evangelist at Mozilla.

Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser in terms of usage, but all four of its main challengers--Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, Google's Chrome, and Opera Software's Opera--are working hard, sometimes in an informal alliance, to get ahead by advancing the Web state of the art.

WebGL fits into that effort, and not just academically. All four of those browser makers have endorsed WebGL, and developer test versions of Firefox, Safari, and Chrome have it built in. Microsoft declined to comment for this story beyond reiterating its general support for standards.

Ultimately, building 3D support into the Web could advance user interfaces of Web applications--including games, the popularity of which can be a powerful incentive for upgrading to the latest technology.

It's not clear exactly how it will play out, though, Ranganathan said. The arrival of Canvas, an advanced 2D interface for browsers, has led to a blossoming of graphics work, and he expects a similar change with 3D graphics.

But don't hold your breath for Web-based first-person shooters that rival native applications. First, even if 3D is accelerated, there are plenty of other processing and user interface constraints on Web applications. Second, even after WebGL is standardized, it must be built into browsers, people must upgrade to those new versions, and programmers must learn how to support the technology.

WebGL isn't the only 3D Web work under way. Google has its own O3D project, which currently is a browser plug-in but that the company also is building directly into Chrome.

O3D is a higher-level interface, though, not a direct competitor. Details are technical, but O3D uses a retained mode approach to WebGL's immediate mode interfaces.

And of course, a decade ago there was VRML--virtual reality modeling language, a file format rather than interface. A VRML successor called X3D, though, can actually make use of WebGL, and indeed a project called X3dom aims to do just that.

Just as Microsoft advanced the state of the art for programming on Windows, Google is trying to do the same with Web-based software. Its latest move: the release of Google Web Toolkit 2.0.

GWT translates software written in the Java programming language into the JavaScript code that browsers can run natively. The technology is designed to produce fast-executing JavaScript and ease the pains of incompatibilities among different browsers.

Google Web Toolkit, released Tuesday night at a Google Campfire One developer event, fits in with the company's general push to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications, not just static Web sites. The financial reasoning the company offers boils down to this: more use of the Web means more searching on Google and more search advertising revenue.

GWT is an open-source tool. Among the newer Web sites Google built with it are Wave, Orkut, and the AdWords interface.

"We've been working with those teams in applied R&D in the last year to evolve to meet their needs," said GWT product manager Andrew Bowers. Specifically, he mentioned three new features in the refurbished GWT:

• Speed Tracer, a Chrome browser extension that graphs a Web application's sluggishness over time.

The tool is designed to help Web developers find problems in the complex interactions of JavaScript, the Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) that's assuming new duties in describing a Web page, and the Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) that handle formatting chores. "As more functionality moves from standard JavaScript into HTML and CSS, a lot of things are moving to native functionality, it gets harder to find performance problems," Bowers said.

• "Code-splitting" technology to break Web applications up into urgent sections that must be downloaded immediately and the other parts that can be sent at a more leisurely pace.

Bowers likened the incremental application download feature to streaming video, where people can start watching the video before the full movie has been downloaded. The feature was developed with the Google Wave team, he added.

• Coming from work with the AdWords team is UiBinder, which lets programmers separate an application's user-interface code from the program logic that actually does the thinking. The result: user interface designers can be given free reign without the logic programmers worrying about everything breaking, Bowers said.

Google also has used GWT to develop Google Health and iPhone Web applications such as Google Latitude and Gmail.

But GWT isn't universal at Google. Google Docs and Gmail, for example, rely on JavaScript but don't use GWT. Some of those projects grew from code bases that predate GWT, Bowers said.

But Google is working pretty hard on another JavaScript programming tool called Closure, which has its own compiler to produce fast JavaScript. It's another open-source project, and not just a historical artifact.

Different strokes for different folks, said Bruce Johnson, GWT's technical lead of the different tools.

"Probably Closure is going to be more targeted at someone who wants to write JavaScript to begin with," Johnson said. "GWT is for Java developers or people who see additional benefits to programming that way."

Mozilla is wrapping up work on its first version of Firefox for mobile phones, an important step in bringing the second most popular PC browser to an area where a rival project holds more influence.

"Our goal is to have a release candidate next week," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of mobile. "If things go smoothly, we'll have a (final) version out in the next few weeks," with the debut planned for this year, he added.

Mozilla has been a leader in advancing the Web state of the art. But when it comes to the mobile phones, where the power of a new generation of hardware has transformed browsers from primitive afterthoughts to useful tools, Firefox has been missing in action.

Instead, an open-source project called WebKit powers the browser on the higher-end mobile phones du jour--Apple's iPhone, the Palm Pre, and Motorola's Droid and other models running Google's Android operating system, with BlackBerry headed that direction, too.

In contrast, the first mobile Firefox version will run on Nokia's powerful but relatively obscure new N900, a $569 hybrid computer and mobile phone that uses Nokia's Linux-based Maemo operating system. A Windows Mobile version of Firefox is set to arrive next year, and Mozilla has begun working on an Android version now that Google released a native developer kit.

Firefox has one big thing going for it, though: it's a close relative of the PC-based browser that today is used by about a quarter of people on the Web.

The link extends beyond brand familiarity. For one thing, mobile Firefox is based on the same code as the present Firefox 3.6--also a beta version due to finished by the end of 2009. For another, through a Mozilla service and browser plug-in called Weave, mobile Firefox synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, and even open tabs with the desktop version of the browser.

In addition, Firefox for the N900 can run many Firefox extensions--AdBlock Plus among the 30 or so now available. Sullivan recommends updating their interfaces for the small devices, though.

Nokia partnership
Mozilla has been working closely with Nokia to develop Firefox on its N900 handset. It already ships with a lighter-weight browser that uses the same Gecko code base as Firefox, but the full Firefox mobile version--a project code-named Fennec--is more powerful.

"You want to put the desktop experience into a pocket-sized device," said Ari Jaaksi, vice president of Maemo devices. "What do people use on the desktop? Firefox."

However, Firefox won't ship with the device, at least initially. The company is open to the idea of including it in the next version of the operating system, due in the second half of 2010, Jaaksi said. Mozilla, meanwhile, is comfortable with the idea of people having to actively download the browser, the most common way Firefox has been distributed on PCs.

The N900 is available as an unlocked device through various retail channels, but Nokia doesn't yet have any partnerships in the United States with wireless service carriers who might help bring the N900 to a broader market. It's a relatively powerful device with a 600MHz processor and 3D graphics hardware--enough oomph to run Adobe Flash on Web pages today. Its price may seem high, but bear in mind that unlocked devices don't get a subsidy by carriers that expect to see their up-front payment returned over months of subscription payments.

Nokia's N900 will be the first device that runs the mobile version of Firefox.

(Credit: Nokia)

So does Firefox require this level or horsepower?

"We need pretty high-end stuff to make the Web great," Sullivan said, but not so high-end that the N900 is the only handset to fit the bill. "Everything now on the mid- to high-end is fine."

WebKit has intercepted the newer generation of smartphones. Through the wonders of Moore's Law, new devices get steadily more processing power and memory. So aiming for today's top-end phones can mean software will work on tomorrow's mainstream models.

The N900 is at the top end of the range, but Firefox runs elsewhere, too. The Windows Mobile version of Fennec is in alpha testing now, lagging the Maemo version by about three or four months, Sullivan said. Mozilla plans to release it in final form in the first half of 2010, he said.

Firefox: like an operating system?
Mozilla has a lot of plans for mobile Firefox that, to some extent, put it in opposition with Nokia. The N900 is aimed in part at programmers who want to low-level control over a device through its Linux operating system. But Firefox--like Google's Chrome--is assuming the role of a general-purpose foundation for running programs.

"We're almost an operating system," Sullivan said.

Several features support the direction. Built into Firefox now is geolocation, which lets a Web application tap into the phone's services to figure out where a user is and, for example, show a map of the nearest pizza shops. Also included is support for orientation detection, important for games, and offline data storage, important for a variety of programming needs.

There's more on the way in 2010, Sullivan said:

• Support for multitouch displays for a more sophisticated user interface.

• Support for haptic feedback, such as the phone vibrating when a virtual keyboard key is tapped.

• The ability to control a camera.

• Support for Electrolysis, Mozilla's project to split tasks such as the user interface, tabs, and plug-ins into separate processes. That improves stability and performance, he said.

• Support for JetPack, Mozilla's next-generation extensions system.

S• Integration of the Weave synchronization software so it's no longer a plug-in.

• Support for WebGL, an interface to provide browsers with accelerated 3D graphics.

• Faster execution of JavaScript programs that are common and increasingly powerful on the Web.

Applications that run natively on a device--whether directly on the hardware as in the case of the iPhone or on the Java-derived layer called Dalvik on Android--are an important area of mobile development today. But the Palm Pre uses a browser-based application design.

"It's the right model. It's not there yet," Sullivan said of Web-based programs. Today programmers must create separate versions of applications for BlackBerry, Nokia's Symbian, Android, the iPhone, and other mobile phones.

But that profusion will be replaced by the universality of the Web, he predicted.

"In three years," Sullivan said, "80 percent of those applications are going to be Web-based."

The beta version of Chrome for Mac OS X is available. Google released its browser beta for Linux too.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Two key pieces of Google's effort to make Chrome a more competitive browser fell into place on Tuesday as Google released beta versions of the browser for Mac OS X and Linux.

Tuesday's software release is a version of Chrome that had previously been available only as developer preview software for Mac and Linux machines. "It took longer than we expected, but we hope the wait was worth it," product manager Brian Rakowski said in a blog post.

Macs are widely used, if not as common as Windows machines, and there's been some demand in tech circles for the Mac version of Chrome. Linux, while less widely used among ordinary computer users, has importance of its own: it's the foundation for Chrome OS. That's the browser-based operating system Google hopes will be popular on Netbooks starting next year.

According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta versions are scheduled to graduate to the next level of maturity, "stable," on January 12. Chrome for Windows graduated out of beta almost exactly a year ago.

Google doesn't emphasize product version numbers in the project, instead automatically delivering updates behind the scenes to the browser that take effect when it's restarted. But it does use version milestones to keep track of development internally.

The biggest new feature of Chrome 4.0 is support for extensions, which let people customize the browser. In the Mozilla world, they're called add-ons, and they've been a big part of Firefox's success.

Mac OS X has a mandatory menu bar, so unlike the Windows version, Chrome on the Mac has traditional menus.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Extensions aren't useful, though, unless people can find them. Google on Tuesday also launched a Chrome extensions gallery page.

There are more than 300 extensions available for Chrome, extensions programmers Aaron Boodman and Erik Kay said in a blog post.

However, extensions on the Mac aren't yet available, though they had been for a time in the developer-preview version. "Extensions aren't quite beta-quality on Mac yet, but you will be able to preview them on a developer channel soon," Rakowski said.

Also on the Chrome for Mac to-do list: a bookmark manager, PDF viewing in the browser, bookmark synchronization, 64-bit support, and my personal favorite differentiator of Firefox 3.6 on the Mac, full-screen support.

Chrome now has an extensions gallery.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Why try Chrome?
For those of you new to Chrome, here's a brief version of why it's my default browser on both Windows and, as of about a month ago, Mac OS X. Your preferences and needs may vary, of course, and I still use Firefox every day, too.

• Speed. It's fast to start up, though not quite as snappy as it once was now that it's not so bare-bones, and rivals are making progress. It's also fast loading Web pages and running JavaScript programs on them.

• Tabs. I spawn innumerable new tabs all day long, and when it takes a long time (I'm looking at you, Internet Explorer), I get infuriated. I also like the order in which new tabs arrive, a style Firefox is mimicking.

• The omnibox. It's a single bar that merges the utility of an address bar and search bar. I hit Ctrl-L (on Windows) or Command-L (on Mac) to pop my cursor up there, and start typing. One nice--if somewhat obscure--feature is fast site search on some domains, so for example I can type A, M, tab, and up pops an Amazon.com icon; what I type afterward is entered as a search on Amazon. That conveniently gets me straight to the search results so I don't have to see yet another Kindle ad.

• A minimal user interface. When browsing, I like my user interface to step aside and make way for the Web page. Scrolling was a wonderful innovation in computers a few decades ago, but I like to avoid it when I can. Chrome puts tabs in the real estate ordinarily devoted to a program's title bar and shuffles the menu controls off to the right of that tab strip (though the Mac version gets a regular menu bar).

Another potential perk: avant-garde Web technology, including WebGL and O3D for accelerated 3D graphics and Native Client for speeding up Web apps with direct access to a processor, are being built into Chrome. Another such Google project, Gears, is already built into Chrome--though Gears doesn't work on Mac OS X 10.6.

There are things you might miss--the full panoply of Firefox extensions, toolbars from Google or others, print preview. And the "browser not supported" error messages on various Web pages are annoying, though in my experience there's rarely an actual compatibility problem. Overall, I like it.

Is Google spying on me?
If you're worried about what new data Google will be able to harvest on you, I recommend a close read of Google's Chrome privacy page. This doesn't worry me much, but I may be insufficiently paranoid. In my opinion, the biggest thing is that Google stores 2 percent of the data it gathers when people type text into Chrome's combination search and address bar, called the omnibox.

That means Google can see not only what you're searching for (as it would for any Google search), but what Web site addresses you're typing as well. The data is anonymized within 24 hours, Google said.

Also, Chrome has a feature called DNS pre-fetching that tracks down the Internet server addresses on Web pages in anticipation that you'll be clicking links on the page. So Chrome--and Google, too, if you're using Google Public DNS--retrieves this information from the Internet.

Updated at 12:30 p.m. PST and 1:20 p.m.. Added further detail.

Microsoft has begun a campaign to actively urge users of its 8-year-old Internet Explorer 6 browser to upgrade.

After launching IE 8 in March, Micosoft has concurred with critics that IE 6 is outdated. Many people have dropped the older browser, but the remaining users are often the tough cases--those who don't have a choice because of corporate computing policy or who aren't tech-savvy enough to realize there's a reason to move on.

This eBay 'Web slice'--basically a live bookmark in Internet Explorer 8--is part of Microsoft's effort to get people to upgrade from IE 6.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

It's this latter population Microsoft is targeting with a campaign that runs through June 2010 that touts its own IE 8 as a better alternative. The campaign's first visible elements are a video aimed at online holiday shoppers and a Web slice to promote daily deals at eBay. Web slices are basically live bookmarks that can show miniature Web pages in the browser.

"What we're doing with the outreach is help users understand how to protect themselves against social engineering threats that exist and to help people understand how Internet Explorer 8 puts people in control of their own privacy online," said Ryan Servatius, senior product manager for Internet Explorer. Security was one of the big problems with IE 6, and Microsoft now boasts that security features in IE 8 block 2 million malware sites a day.

According to Net Applications' statistics, Internet Explorer 6 is still the most widely used browser, with 23.3 percent share of usage in October, followed by IE 7 at 18.2 percent and IE 8 at 18.1 percent. The newer browsers are gaining on IE 6, but so are rivals including Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Google's Chrome.

Web developers often gripe about having to support IE 6, which doesn't support many modern features for more sophisticated Web sites and even applications. Microsoft acknowledges that it's holding back development of the Internet, too.

"The best thing a user can do to advance the Web is to help move people off IE 6," Servatius said.

Of course, many will upgrade to IE 8 by buying Windows 7. IE 6 was the browser that shipped with Windows XP, which remains entrenched, but there are signs Windows 7 is a more compelling successor than Windows Vista. That could help the corporate customers move away from IE 6, Servatius said.

"As enterprises migrate from whatever operating system they're using today to Windows 7, that's going to help deprecate IE 6," he said. "What we're doing is working both with consumers worldwide and IT professionals to help them understand what the benefits of a modern browser are."

Sometimes it's the little things that count.

The most prominent feature of Firefox 3.6 is Personas, which let you reskin the browser with thousands of different looks. But my single favorite change is a subtler change to the open-source browser's user interface.

Specifically, when you open a link in a new tab, it appears immediately to the right of the active tab. Before, the new tabs would appear to the far right of the strip of tabs.

Yup, that's it. For those of us who spend hours a day in a browser, though, the new tab behavior helps group related tasks together. I constantly shuffle among dozens of tabs, and the new approach automatically brings some organization to my cluttered life.

However, I know it's not everybody's favorite browser behavior. So along with explaining why I like it, I'll also take some potshots and share instructions on how to get the old way back.

Why it's better
The more things I do with a browser--and the number has increased steadily for years now--the more important it becomes to be able to find different tasks amid the chaos. Microsoft and Apple understand this, as evidenced by the new taskbar features in Windows 7 and dock expose in Mac OS X 10.6, aka Snow Leopard. Those features make it easier to pluck out the one window you need from among the many you may have open.

There's a pattern to how I spawn the dozens of tabs I use as a day progresses. On a variety of pages--Gmail, Google Reader, Yahoo Finance, somebody's blog post--I'll encounter a host of links to other pages. I'll middle-click my mouse button to open interesting pages as background tabs, then use Ctrl-Tab to switch to the new pages when I'm ready. I repeat this pattern many times a day.

With the old behavior, each tab appeared to the far right of the tab strip. That's fine when getting started, but when I've moved halfway across the list and want to open another batch, I want the new ones--call them children--to open next to their parent tab. When I go away and come back, or when I lose place juggling tasks, it's easier to find my bearings again.

It's like being in a library. When you're in the European history section, you don't want to find books on rewiring your house and on vegetarian cooking.

As a longtime Firefox user, I didn't realize tab positioning could be better. When I started using Google's Chrome, which introduced the new tab behavior to me, the scales were lifted from my eyes. I immediately could get to the next tab with a quick press of Ctrl-Tab on the keyboard rather than have to use the mouse to click over to the far end of the list. I use both browsers daily, but until the Firefox 3.6 beta arrived, the new-tab position had become a sore point for me when in Firefox.

The change is actually a big deal in a couple ways. First, even seemingly minor changes in software can be disruptive. Old habits die hard, and computer users wrestling with constant change can get angry when more is foisted upon them.

Second, though, browsers are assuming an ever greater role in what people do in their personal and professional lives, and keeping one's bearings is commensurately important. That's especially true for those people for whom a gaggle of browser tabs represents a collection of chores going on in parallel.

Internet Explorer 8 categorizes related tabs by color.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

How the competition handles it
Tabs are now universal among browsers, but new-tab behavior isn't. Firefox and Chrome handle it the way I like best, but how do others tackle the issue?

First, let's look at Internet Explorer 8. Microsoft showed it understands some of the challenges of tab management in its latest version of its browser by coloring child tabs the same hue as their parents, but I have a gripe with how it works. Specifically, although child tabs get the same color as their parents for easy grouping and arrive to the right, grandchild tabs are the same color as child tabs. Similarly, grandchild tabs appear to the far right of the whole group of child tabs.

In my mind, I consider grandchild tabs a separate group from the child tabs. But with IE, grandchildren get the same color and position treatment as children. The only way to get a new color is to start a fresh empty tab There's no easy way to give grandchildren a new color without causing some confusion, though--should the child be the same color as the original parent or change color to be grouped with the grandchildren?

Next is Opera, which gives users a choice. By default, it opens new tabs to the far right, which I don't like, but in the Advanced|Tabs section of the preferences dialog box, you can check "Open new tab next to active." Huzzah!

There's a subtle change here I don't care for, though. Tabs always appear immediately to the right of the active tab. I'd rather have all one tab's children appear in sequence to the right. For example, if a parent tab is in position 1, then the first child would be in position 2, the second in position 3, and the third in position 4. Opening three child tabs in Opera leaves the parent in position 1, the third child in position 2, the second child in position 3, and the first child in position 4.

Last, there's Safari. It does it the old way I loathe with no option to change. Too bad.

Firefox can show thumbnail previews of new tabs, but I find them hard to recognize in front of busy Web pages.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Why it's not enough
Most browser makers are excited about the fact that their software is subsuming more and more computing tasks that previously ran on computer operating systems. But as browsers inherit this central importance, they also inherit some of the hassles.

The new tab positioning behavior in Firefox is a step in the right direction, but there's more that needs to be done. Moving from one tab to a related adjacent one, whether through a keyboard command or mouse clicking, is a minor change. But things get harder when you need to switch from one group of tabs to the next.

There's work under way here. Opera is perhaps the leader with the ability to show thumbnails as you use Ctrl-Tab to cycle your list of open tabs.

Firefox has been noodling with the approach too. It tried then dropped tab thumbnail previews earlier, but the technology is still present. Using the about:config system for tweaking the browser (more on this later), you can change the "browser.ctrlTab.previews" setting to "true."

But for reasons that aren't clear to me, I don't find this effective either in Firefox or Opera. Perhaps I haven't used it enough, or the thumbnails are too small to be immediately recognizable, or they're just hard to see against the noisy background. There's a good reason that Apple dims the background most of the way to black when using Expose.

Aero Peek in Windows 7 lets the task bar show a glimpse of Firefox and IE tabs.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

Windows itself is helping, too. The new taskbar in Windows 7 can show individual tabs, once browsers support the feature. It's in Internet Explorer 8, and it's in the new Firefox 3.6 beta.

Add-ons such as Firefox Showcase can further tweak Firefox. (Indeed, for a wealth of options, check Mashable's handy Firefox tab management guide.)

More interesting to me, though, is work under way to expand Firefox's "awesome bar" abilities. Today, typing in it opens Web pages and retrieves ones you've already visited or bookmarked. In the future, it could be able to move you to another open tab, too. I'm a keyboard guy, so particularly appreciate this idea.

You can get a taste of the idea now. If you've enabled the "browser.ctrlTab.previews" option, hitting Ctrl-Shift-Tab will not only show you thumbnail previews, but will put a cursor in a search box.

Typing the letters of the Web page name will winnow down the thumbnails. For example, typing "netap" will cull my open tabs so only Net Applications and NetApp show. If you have a bunch of similar tabs all open, this might not help much, of course.

However, the feature only works with the tabs of one browser window, so if you can't use it to search among other browser instances.

How to get the old way back
Perhaps I've convinced you that the new approach is better. But perhaps not--in which case I encourage you to share your thoughts in the comments so people will hear more than my opinion.

For those who don't like the new tab positions, you can revert to the old method.

To get the old style back for new tab position, use Firefox's about:config system.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

First type "about:config" in the Firefox address bar. You'll get a warning that you're tinkering with Firefox's innards and you should be careful, but this isn't brain surgery, so don't be frightened. Click the "I'll be careful, I promise" button, and you'll see a big list of all the browser settings that can be tweaked.

Next, in the text box labeled "Filter:", type "tabs.insertRelatedAfterCurrent"; you should see just one entry below. In the column marked "Value," double-click on the word "true" to change it to "false." You're done.

But I'd encourage you to at least give the new way a try. If you don't like it, you can always change back.

The World Wide Web Consortium has published a draft of an interface that browsers can use to manipulate files better, one of a series of steps aimed at gradually improving the sophistication and polish of Web site interfaces.

The draft File API (application programming interface) defines a number of ways that browsers and Web sites can handle files better. One big part of it: being able to select multiple files for upload, such as on photo-sharing sites or Web-based e-mail, a task that often relies on Adobe Systems' Flash today.

But there are other aspects, too. For example, the Files interface governs the use of "blobs," or packages of raw binary data such as video files. Google has touted blobs for its Gears browser plug-in as a way to divide large videos into small chunks so that uploads can be more easily resumed if a network problem interrupts the process.

Another benefit: files are handled asynchronously, which means the browser won't freeze up while a file is being uploaded or otherwise handled, and the browser reports progress on file transfers.

The technology is one example of work to transform the Web into a better foundation for interactive applications, a move that usurps some power from computer operating systems such as Windows and that's embodied most boldly in Google's Chrome OS project.

Here's one example of use of the Files interface provided by Mike Smith, who works for the W3C on matters relating to HTML--Hypertext Markup Language, the language used to describe Web pages:

A user uses a Web-based application for reading and sending e-mail. She wants to attach multiple files to particular messages. The Web application provides an user interface that allows her to select multiple files to attach at the same time. After she selects the files, they are uploaded to the Web application asynchronously, allowing the user to perform other actions while they are uploading (for example, finishing the rest of the message she was composing before you added the file attachments). As the attachments are uploaded, the Web applications shows progress bars to indicate how much of the contents of the files have uploaded thus far.

The interface can work in conjunction with various standards including the drag-and-drop support in the HTML 5 now under development and the Web Workers technology that lets browsers better perform multiple operations simultaneously.

The interface also can help Web applications process the contents of files. For example, Smith describes a lyrics finder:

A user has on her local file system a playlist file from her favorite desktop music player. The playlist contains a list of song titles and information, and she wants to be able to easily fetch the lyrics for particular songs without needing to manually search for the lyrics on the Web. So a site can provide a Web-based application that allows her to upload her playlist. The Web application then parses the file and then presents a user interface to her, show in the contents of the file as a hyperlinked, sortable list. She can then retrieve the lyrics for any given song just by clicking on a particular song title.

Arun Ranganathan, Mozilla's standards evangelist and chairman of the WebGL working group, wrote the specification, according to Chris Blizzard, Mozilla's director of developer relations.

Standards for the Web are advancing rapidly with W3C representatives including Microsoft working in conjunction with a parallel effort, WHATWG. New standards require actual implementation in browsers before they are accepted as finished, a fact that can lead to some chaos but that helps ensure the new ideas are tested in the real world.

Firefox 3.6, in beta testing now, will support most of the Files API, according to Blizzard.