In addition to new features such as support for HTML 5, geo-location, and a noticeably faster engine, Firefox 3.5 added a new CSS rule that makes Web typography much more attractive.
@font-face is a CSS rule that allows Web designers to reference fonts not installed on end-user machines. Just as you would have a pointer to a server-based stylesheet or JavaScript file in your Web page code, you can now make reference to a hosted typeface.
You'll note that news sites such as CNET News and NYTimes.com are optimized to make Web type more readable and as stylish as possible, but there are many design possibilities via additional downloadable typefaces. (As with any linked asset, there is some level of security risk if a hacker gets their hands on the font file.)
Mozilla's John Daggett explains: Within a stylesheet, each @font-face rule defines a family name to be used, the font resource to be loaded, and the style characteristics of a given face such as whether it's bold or italic. Firefox 3.5 only downloads the fonts as needed, so a stylesheet can list a whole set of fonts of which only a select few will actually be used.
This function is something I would have expected to be commonplace by now (Safari began supporting it in Version 3.1 and Opera in Version 10) but neither have the market share to drive usage the way Firefox and Internet Explorer do. (Note: this function doesn't work in IE.)
Generally speaking, the Web browser has done a terrible job with type. We've been stuck with old standbys such as Helvetica or Times New Roman, and don't forget the oft-loathed Comic-Sans and other delightful Microsoft fonts that are often easy to read but lack any real style (Verdana, for example.)
... Read moreWhether you want to target politicians, your employers, or companies that have done you wrong, there are a variety of sites across the Web that will help you voice your complaints. But beware that not all of them will actually solve those problems.
Lodge your complaints
Anonymous Employee Those having trouble at the office should try out Anonymous Employee. The service allows you to create a user name and password without requiring an e-mail address. After that, you can input the name of your employer, the person you want to contact, and the issue you want to make them aware of. Anonymous Employee automatically sends the message to the recipient without identifying you.
Unfortunately, Anonymous Employee was buggy and at times, it took too long to send a message. That said, I was impressed by the number of options it offered, including complaints about age discrimination, harassment, or wrongful termination. Once it fixes those bugs, Anonymous Employee will be an even more compelling service.
Anonymous Employee keeps you private when you make issues public.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Better Business Bureau The Better Business Bureau site is one of the best places to lodge complaints. Right from the home page, you can access the organization's complaint tool, which allows you to take issue with your vehicle, your cell phone carrier, a product or service outside of those two categories, or a charity. After inputting information about yourself, you can describe your issue on the site. It's then filed with the Better Business Bureau and investigated.
The Better Business Bureau wants to know the nature of your complaint.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)CongressMerge If you're unhappy with what's going on in your state, CongressMerge can help you out. The site provides you with a search field to find all of your elected representatives. Once you find the politician you want to contact, it gives you a listing of all their phone numbers, a map to their office, and even their fax number so you can be sure to get in touch with them. You can also check out your elected representatives' voting records on the site. It's a great way to find all the means of communication you need to have your voice heard in the political process.
CongressMerge helps you contact your representative.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
Technical difficulties forced Google's Web application hosting infrastructure off the air for about four hours Thursday morning.
Customers who run their Web applications on Google App Engine were forced idle Thursday by a series of issues involving "elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates," according to a Google employee posting in the Google App Engine Downtime Notify group spotted by TechCrunch. A Google representative acknowledged the downtime and apologized for the outage.
"Today at 8 am PT datastore access for App Engine applications was affected due to a cluster-wide issue. The team identified and fixed the underlying problem that caused the outage and service has now been restored to all applications. We apologize for the inconvenience and encourage anyone having technical difficulty to visit the System Status Dashboard or the Downtime Notify Group, which are both linked from the Google App Engine Community site."
Google's cloud-computing service allows Web developers who can't afford to host their own applications a place to get their work online. Amazon Web Services does something similar.
One of the biggest news stories in years caught Microsoft's Bing a little off guard.
The flood of traffic on the Internet following reports that Michael Jackson had been rushed to a Los Angeles hospital last Thursday, where he later died, has been well documented: Google at first thought the surge was an attack on its servers. Microsoft released statistics Thursday indicating it, too, witnessed a surge in traffic related to Jackson, but admitted that Bing News could have done a much better job delivering relevant stories during the two or so frantic hours in which searches went through the roof.
"By most reports, Bing did not deliver the best experience for our customers soon after TMZ posted the news on their blog," wrote Jacquelyn Krones, senior product planner for Bing News. "As Search Engine Journal pointed out, we had the story but it was hidden at the bottom of the main page and even deeper in our xRank result." Bing's xRank is supposed to track the most popular people surfacing on the Internet on a given day: Karl Malden currently ranks highest in xRank.
Microsoft has a switch it calls "news go big" that it can throw in the event of a huge breaking news story like Jackson's death. Usually, images are the first thing Bing searchers see when searching for a celebrity such as Jackson, but Microsoft can change the placement of those results in the rare event of a breaking news story that generates "unusual activity."
Apparently, the company feels it could have done that more quickly in the minutes following TMZ's report. "...In the case of breaking news such as this, we will focus on ensuring that the whole experience quickly accommodates the surge in customers' interest," Krones wrote.
Michael Jackson-related searches took off following reports that he had been rushed to the hospital last week.
(Credit: Microsoft)Google has been sued again by a company mad over the use of its trademarks as keywords, but this one comes with a twist.
Ascentive, the company behind those incessant "Finally Fast!" PC support ads, became the latest Google advertiser to sue the company for allowing advertisers to purchase ads using trademarks they do not own as search keywords. It will have to get in line behind Firepond, Rescuecom and several other companies challenging Google's policy, recently expanded to allow some companies to use trademarks they don't own in the text of their ads.
Ascentive takes its suit a step farther, however, also claiming that Google has unfairly removed some of Ascentive's Web sites from its search index. Ascentive's Finallyfast.com Web site and related software are designed to examine your computer for registry errors and spyware that are ostensibly slowing its performance, and the company has battled with StopBadware.org this year over whether its products should be considered a scam for its dire warnings about benign security threats on your computer that lead to an upsell pitch for Ascentive's services.
According to Ascentive, Google dropped it from search results following two warnings from StopBadware.org about its products. Still, even after StopBadware.org removed their warnings about Ascentive's products following some changes, a search for "finally fast" on Google does not return any Ascentive Web site. That search does, however, return a result for a company called "Finallyfast.us" which appears to offer a very similar product but does not appear to have any relationship with Ascentive.
Google declined to comment "on the individual reasons pages may be removed." Eric Goldman, a professor at Santa Clara University who tracks legal issues involving Internet law, doesn't think Ascentive's claims regarding the search results will get very far, according to his blog. "Indeed, as exciting as it would be to see some meaty discussion on the topic of Google's liability (or lack thereof) for deciding who gets into its search index, I'm guessing Google will beat this prong of the complaint quickly and completely," he wrote.
As far as the trademark part of the suit, Google had this to say:
"It's completely normal for a supermarket to stock different brands of cereal on the same shelf or for a magazine to run Ford ads opposite of an article about Toyota, so it doesn't make sense to limit competition online by restricting the number of choices available to users. Just as it's reasonable to expect a range of brands on any shelf in a grocery store, providing users on Google with more than one option when they search for a brand name or other trademark helps them to find the best product at the lowest price."
Updated July 2 at 10:30 a.m. PDT: The full list of supported languages has been added to the bottom of the story.
Toolbars have long been an effective way for software publishers to add several features to a browser at once, and the Google Toolbar has long been among the most popular of these. Google Toolbar for Internet Explorer introduces revamped translation tools, giving users one-click powers of conversion over many languages.
Google Toolbar for IE now offers one-click page translation.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The toolbar now detects your default language setting and using the Translate button will attempt to convert the page to it. Clicking a link will automatically translate the new page, as long as its part of the same domain as the original. Forty-one languages are supported so far, from Spanish, French, Italian, and German to Chinese, Japanese, Hebrew, Hindi, Ukranian, and Vietnamese.
Not all words on a page will be translated, but from my tests that seems limited only to text that's been embedded in logos and other art. If you need a lot of on-the-fly translation, this could be a major time saver. The feature has not been extended to Google Toolbar for Firefox, although Google said on its blog post announcing the feature that it hopes to implement it soon.
The new feature supports Albanian, Arabic, Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Maltese, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian and Vietnamese.
Twitter messages from prominent writers like All Things D's Kara Swisher are now in Bing search results.
(Credit: Bing)Microsoft is trying to get a leg up in the real-time search wars by adding Twitter messages to search results.
Bing will now surface results for certain celebrities (leading to the odd pairing of search guru Danny Sullivan and American Idol host Ryan Seacrest in the same sentence) when users search on their names and "twitter," the company announced Wednesday afternoon. It's not indexing all of Twitter, instead picking "a few thousand people to start" and using Twitter's public API to display those results in a special box among the other search results, such as stories that a person might have written about Twitter.
Amid all the nauseating Twitter adoration of late lies a real trend within the search community: the desire to display search results that contain items from real-time communication services. Right now, this is done haphazardly by the Big Three, although smaller companies are trying to offer this service for those who just can't wait.
Both Google and Yahoo, for example, will return the main Twitter page and a single tweet as the top two search results for "Ryan Seacrest Twitter." They don't call out multiple tweets within a single defined box, as Bing will now do with the new feature.
Bing's Twitter feature is rolling out slowly over the day on Wednesday.
(Credit: Google)Last December we showed you how Google refined its search results for iPhone and Android. The change loaded pages faster and fit the results to the screen width for searches generated from Google.com (plus for the specialized Google widget on Android and the search box on Safari.)
On Wednesday, Google began supporting these optimized results for feature phones--essentially handsets that are not smartphones or PDAs--in 38 languages and in more than 60 countries. The project to revamp search results builds on a March 2009 initiative that included iPhone and Android phones in about 20 countries. After that, it expanded to feature phones in the U.S. and Japan.
The optimized result is a listings page very similar to what you would see on your desktop, that is populated with image, blog, video, news, and product entries that are relevant to your search, often as the first result. An image showing the local weather forecast is one common example; a thumbnail of a Google map or movie showtimes are two others.
The language support includes English (U.S. and U.K.), Spanish, Japanese, Polish, French, Dutch, Korean, Turkish, Italian, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Portuguese (Brazil and Portugal), Thai, German, Russian, Tagalog, Swedish, Vietnamese, Bulgarian, Slovenian, Finnish, Indonesian, Croatian, Catalan, Danish, Czech, Lithuanian, Latvian, Greek, Slovak, Ukrainian, Romanian, Norwegian, Serbian, and Hindi.
You can read the Google Mobile blog for more details.
Yahoo has released a test version of a Delicious social bookmarking extension for Chrome, one of the strongest indications so far that the technology foundation is coming to fruition in Google's browser.
Extensions still must be specifically enabled through a command-line switch on the developer version of Chrome, and Google recently broke extensions compatibility through an update, so the technology clearly is immature. But Google is steadily addressing the concern that its browser lacks one of Firefox's notable features--called add-ons in the Mozilla browser.
"Delicious extension (alpha version) for Google Chrome is now available," said Amit Papnai of the Delicious team in a mailing list posting Tuesday. "This is a light version of the extension and allows you to sign in and post bookmarks to your Delicious account."
... Read moreI really like Opera (Windows | Mac) widgets. They all offer something unique. But I especially like the browser's science and math widgets.
If you're someone who just can't get enough of planets, you love building mathematical graphs, or you enjoy science, these widgets are for you.
Science widgets
Astronomy Picture of the Day Each day, when you load Astronomy Picture of the Day, it displays a picture it gets from NASA. When you click on that image, it gives you an in-depth description of what's being depicted and why it's important. I found it to be extremely informative. Practically anyone who likes astronomy should be pleased with Astronomy Picture of the Day.
Astronomy Picture of the Day gives you some beautiful images.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Chinese Abacus If you want to get some addition, subtraction, multiplication, or division work done, look no further than than the Chinese Abacus widget. Much like the real thing, you can move the blocks up and down to keep count. The abacus will show a tally at the bottom to help you.
Before you start using it, beware that the Chinese Abacus widget requires some knowledge of the abacus to get it to work. Once you get the hang of it, you'll find that it makes performing basic math functions quite simple.
The Chinese Abacus widget is a really cool app.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)Functions 3D Functions 3D isn't for the novice mathematician. The widget lets you create a 3D structure based on a mathematical equation that you devise.
Once you set the X, Y, and Z boundaries, you'll create an equation to develop the figure you want to depict. You can create simple archways or complex statues by changing the equation to fit your needs. Functions 3D is one of the more powerful Opera widgets I've ever used. It's also one of the most difficult to understand.
Functions 3D helps you create 3D models with your equations.
(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)
