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.
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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.
With Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft showed Wednesday it's trying to retake the browser initiative.
IE remains the Net's dominant browser. But perversely, it became something of a technology underdog after Microsoft vanquished Netscape in the browser wars of the 1990s and scaled back its browser effort.
That left an opportunity for rivals to blossom--most notably Firefox, which now is used by a quarter of Web surfers, but also Apple's Safari, which now runs on Windows as well as Mac OS X, and Google's Chrome, which aims to make the Web faster and a better foundation for applications.
Microsoft has been pouring resources back into the IE effort, though, and at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, some fruits of that labor were on display. In particular, Windows unit president Steven Sinofsky showed off IE 9's new hardware-accelerated text and graphics.
The acceleration feature takes advantage of hitherto untapped computing power in a way that's more useful than other browser-boosting technology--Google's Native Client to directly employ PC's processor and Mozilla's WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics, for example--according to Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer.
"This is a direct improvement to everybody's usage of the Web on a daily basis," Hachamovitch said in an interview after Sinofsky's speech. "Web developers are doing what they did before, only now they can tap directly into a PC's graphics hardware to make their text work better and graphics work better."
... Read moreTwo prominent Web-based programming advocates have left Mozilla for Palm, arguing that the time has come to use browsers to bypass Apple's controlling role in mobile applications.
Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, who help run the Ajaxian site for elaborate Web interfaces and who worked on Mozilla's Web-based Bespin tool for collaborative programming, announced their move to Palm on Friday.
Palm is a logical place for them to go. The Palm Pre has won accolades as a competitive mobile phone, and its foundation for applications is a WebKit-based browser, meaning that Palm programs are essentially Web programs.
"I will be joining Ben, my best friend, partner in crime, and fellow Ajaxian, as we take a new role as directors of the Palm Developer Relations team. We will have the responsibility of the developer experience with Palm. We will be trying to create a rich connective tissue between the company and the Web developer community that we love," Almaer wrote on his blog.
Web-based programs are typically slower and less capable than alternatives that run natively on a computing device. But they have one big potential advantage: written once, they can run on any device with a browser and hardware up to the task.
Although Galbraith and Dalmaer are excited by the possibilities of Web applications and the new era of mobile computing ushered in most notably by Apple's iPhone, Galbraith appears to be concerned about the control Apple exercises over the applications people can use on their phones.
"Clearly, a revolution in hardware is taking place, and it doesn't take a prophet to work out that the future of computing lies along this new trajectory," Galbraith said. "However, my enthusiasm for this amazing new world is tempered by some unfortunate decisions made by some of the players in this space. It seems that some view this revolution as a chance to seize power in downright Orwellian ways by constraining what we, as developers, can say, dictating what kinds of apps we can create, controlling how we distribute our apps, and placing all kinds of limits on what (we) can do to our computing devices."
He didn't mention Apple by name, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, but who else besides Apple could Galbraith be referring to? The programmers and Apple didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Apple exerts its control to try to give iPhone users a simple, stable, and useful experience. But that control can be at odds with what programmers and users want, as was most clearly illustrated in Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application--though Apple said it hasn't actually rejected the application.
Meanwhile, as it did with its Latitude location application for the iPhone after Apple rejected a native version of that software, Google is working on a Web-based interface for Google Voice. It also offers a Web-based Gmail application for the iPhone.
What's curious is that the Palm Pre, the Google Android operating system, and the iPhone OS all use a browser based on the WebKit project, and Apple is among those working hard to advance the state of the art for Web application programming through its WebKit work. So there is some philosophical agreement along with the differences.
The technology preview of Office Web Apps allows users to edit Excel spreadsheets and PowerPoint presentations and view (but not edit) Word documents.
(Credit: Microsoft)Microsoft plans on Thursday to start public testing for the first browser-based version of Office, although the technology preview is at least as notable for what it doesn't include as what it does offer.
The limited test of the so-called Office Web Apps includes versions of Word, Excel and PowerPoint, but not the OneNote note-taking application. And while Excel and PowerPoint offer the ability to edit and create documents, the current Web-based version of Word can only be used to view documents, essentially the same capability it already offers as part of its current Office Live Workspace product.
Microsoft said the Web versions of OneNote and Word share "the same editing surface," and that the technology is still being worked on.
"We made the hard decision to turn off editing in the Word Web App at Tech Preview, in order for people to have the best experience at this early stage," Microsoft said.
Microsoft plans to offer the Web Apps preview first to users of Windows Live SkyDrive, giving them 25GB worth of storage.
The Office Web Apps are scheduled to be launched along with Office 2010--the next version of Office, with both browser-based and desktop programs due out in the first half of next year. The Office Web Apps will be made available to consumers as a free, ad-supported part of Windows Live, while businesses will be able to offer them to workers via their own SharePoint servers or through the Microsoft Online subscription service.
Microsoft said it will have editing abilities for Word and a version of OneNote by the time the Office Web Apps launch in final form. The current technology preview will be made available to tens of thousands of users, with a broader beta planned for later this fall. However, Microsoft would not commit to offering editing abilities for Word by the beta release.
Once finished, the browser-based versions will all offer editing, though not all of the capabilities of their desktop counterparts. Excel and OneNote will feature live co-authoring abilities, while all the Office Web Apps will work only while a user is connected to the Internet.
Microsoft also takes a different approach when it comes to sharing documents than do its rivals. While Google Apps lets users share a document directly, Office Web Apps enables sharing at the folder level--meaning that to share a document, a user must save it into a folder on Windows Live SkyDrive and then share that folder.
Forrester analyst Sheri McLeish said that the Office Web Apps do appear to be more complicated than rivals such as Google Docs or Zoho Office.
"Google and Zoho are very easy to get started on today, requiring just a step to register before being able to work on a document or spreadsheet," McLeish said. "Microsoft's Office Web Apps do not seem to match that level of ease to get started."
On the plus side, McLeish noted that Office offers a depth not found in its online rivals.
"Once you are in the Web Apps the experience is very much the same as the desktop suite," McLeish said. "And for enterprises, deployment choices to host the Web Apps themselves on-premise is a big differentiator from Google and Zoho."
As for the current release, Microsoft noted that it is still in pre-beta form and has a number of known issues.
"It's still going to be rough around the edges," said Ural Cebeci, a senior product manager in Microsoft's Office unit.
The Office Web Apps are being certified to work in Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, and may also work in Google's Chrome--although Microsoft isn't guaranteeing Chrome compatibility.
Microsoft had previously indicated on several occasions that the Safari compatibility meant that users would be able to edit documents on their iPhone, but Cebeci said that iPhone users will only be able to view documents--capability similar to that offered on other smartphones.
Satisfied that its security underpinnings are solid, Google has promoted its open-source Native Client technology to accelerate Web applications out of its research phase and is taking steps to build it into the Chrome Web browser.
"Based on our experience to date, we believe that the basic architecture of our system is sound and the implementation is supportable. So now we are undertaking a number of tasks to transition Native Client from a research technology to a development platform," said Brad Chen, Google's Native Client engineering manager, in a mailing list announcement Wednesday.
Brad Chen, engineering manager of the Google Native Client
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Native Client, called NaCl for short, is a mechanism to run software downloaded over the Web directly on x86 processors such as Intel's Core line. The key motivation is to attain the speed of regular "native" software installed on a computer rather than the much slower JavaScript environment that sophisticated Web sites use today. It's one part of Google's broad effort to evolve the Web from a collection of relatively static sites into foundation for more powerful applications.
Executing native code from the Web is easy--until you start trying to worry about security risks. To this end, Native Client examines software before it runs to block software that takes a variety of prohibited actions, an idea called static analysis, and it runs the software in a protected sandbox.
"We recognized the underlying technology to be ambitious and risky, and felt strongly than a generous measure of public scrutiny was appropriate before we committed to any definite plans," Chen said. Satisfied that Native Client passed muster, Google will remove various security constraints such as the inability to execute Native Client software downloaded from the open Internet, he said.
Native Client was first introduced in December a browser plug-in, but Google doesn't like that approach.
"We recognize that there is well-justified resistance to installing browser plug-ins. For this reason we have a strong preference for delivering Native Client pre-installed or built into the browser, and we'll be focusing on that as our main strategy for delivering Native Client to users," Chen said.
And now we see one reason why Google is interested having a browser of its own available: "Careful readers may have already noticed evidence of integration into Chromium in the Native Client source," Chen said, referring to the open-source project that underlies the Chrome browser.
Google touted Native Client at its Google I/O conference in May, showing off a Web-based photo editor as an example of the processing power the technology offers. Google also is trying to pair Native Client with another company project, O3D, which lets browsers take advantage of hardware to accelerate 3D graphics.
In an interview Monday, Microsoft senior vice president Chris Capossela said that, at least initially, the browser based versions of Excel, Word and PowerPoint won't have an offline mode.
"In the first generation we are certainly looking at having them be connected," he said. "For offline usage of course the Office suite is incredibly powerful." (See YouTube video below for his full comments on the matter. Apologies in advance for the bad sound quality.)
Google has been working to add an offline ability to Google Docs, while Zoho was even earlier to add the ability to work within a browser while offline.
Capossela's comments came following the launch of Microsoft Online, the company's hosted versions of Exchange and Sharepoint.
Microsoft confirmed at last month's Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles that it was bringing to market browser-based versions of its Office applications. The company has said that a technology preview version should be available still this year.
A Microsoft blog reiterated this week that the Web-based version of Office won't be tied to either Windows or Internet Explorer.
In a blog posting on its Channel 10 site, a Microsoft blogger noted that, owing to support of Firefox and Safari, the forthcoming Office Web Applications will run on Linux and the iPhone.
The blogger, Microsoft's Sarah Perez, also noted that Microsoft won't be mandating use of Silverlight, its rival to Adobe's Flash.
"Silverlight is not required," Perez said in the Q-and-A posting. "Using Silverlight will enhance the user experience, resulting in sharper images and improved rendering. Also, the Office Live Workspace has integrated Silverlight technology into the multi-file upload function for a better experience."
Microsoft has said a technical preview of the Web-based Office apps will come later this year. Microsoft hasn't explicitly said there will be a free version, though executives have said the apps will be part of Office Live, which comes in both free and subscription flavors. Perez takes that to mean--as do I--that there will be both free and paid options.
On the corporate side, Microsoft has said the Office Web Applications will be tied to SharePoint.
The forthcoming Web-based version of Microsoft Word, like online versions of Excel and PowerPoint, won't be limited to the PC, Microsoft says.
(Credit: Microsoft)
Apple has put together a list of 204 Web-based applications for the iPhone in hopes of giving hacking-averse users some additional options for their phones.
Face-
book's iPhone app
The list, spotted by Daring Fireball, highlights a Facebook Web app as a "staff pick" by Apple. During Steve Jobs' presentation to Apple's developers in June, he also called out a Facebook application as an example of all the things developers can create without native access to the iPhone.
Roami's iTunes controller
(Credit: Apple)For most iPhone users, this list will satisfy the itch for additional utilities on their phones. For example, they'll be able to order movie tickets from Fandango, dictate thoughts to be recorded as text via an application called reQall, and remotely control the iTunes library with an iPhone or iPod Touch through the Roami application. But I get the feeling a few were added to pad the list, such as the Tip Calculator for iPhone (which already has a calculator on the home screen); The Wheel, for calculating "a baby's due date and the baby's gestational age anytime during pregnancy," and Coin Flip, which, well, flips a coin.
To be fair, most of the Web applications on the list seem pretty useful. However, it's not the same as having native applications written for the device, which we'll probably see up and running again soon now that the iPhone has been hacked once again. One day, we might do everything through a Web browser, but today is not that day, and the EDGE network is not that network.
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