Mozilla Labs: Future of the Web
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Web
On Monday, Chris Beard, vice president and general manager of Mozilla Labs, posted a rather vague, yet optimistic, blog entry about opening up Mozilla Labs projects to the Web community at large. The move comes just a week after the company lost Mike Schroepfer, Mozilla VP of engineering, to Facebook.
Beard has coined it a “concept series” and included three videos of products and services currently at a the conceptual level and not yet ready for public consumption. Of the three embedded in Beard’s post, the most buzz-worthy was the mobile version of Firefox, which surfaced two months ago. The other two are a little more out there, with a bookmarks visualiser and what is seemingly the most complicated-looking interface demo ever done by the folks at Adaptive Path for a project called “Aurora” which was unveiled last night.
To get involved, Beard is asking users to keep their ideas structured into one of three buckets:
- Ideas – It all begins with an idea. A sentence, paragraph, or even bullet-points kick-start the process. Ideas can be simple and non-technical. It should be easy for anyone and everyone to help shape the future of the Web. So throw your notions, inspirations, dreams and visions out to the community.
- Mockups – Turn your idea (or someone else’s) into an image, sketch or video. Words are great, but you know what they say about pictures. Mockups offer up a visual and communicate ideas in terms that are just a bit more polished and real. They draw the next person in, tempting them to pick up the concept and run with it.
- Prototypes – A prototype is interactive. Feel, touch and play with developing concepts. Prototypes get ideas across by showing off the moving parts. They aren’t always fully functional or pretty, but they’re more than a static image or two. They’re a dress rehearsal of sorts, with minimal programming. Make a prototype in HTML, Flash, or whatever puts things into action.
Mozilla is also using tags on popular Web services to let people post up their mockups, the first of which have already shown up on Flickr.
I’ve embedded all three concept videos below. The “Aurora” one is in HD if you watch it directly on Vimeo, so click here to see it in it’s full high-resolution glory.
Bookmarking and History Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Firefox Mobile Concept Video from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo.
Tags: firefox, mozilla, Mozilla Labs
IE 8: Features Update
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Web
Microsoft has put out the IE 8 Readiness Report that discusses the new features in the upcoming release of the Internet Explorer browser.
Ajax Improvements
- Ajax Navigation enables users to navigate back and forth without leaving the Ajax application and could be used navigating a page without performing a traditional full navigation. This allows websites to trigger an update to browser components like the address bar by setting the window.location.hash value, firing an event to alert components in the page and even creating an entry in the travel log.
- DOM Storage is a simple-to-use method for storing and retrieving strings of key/value pair data. Data can be stored per tab instance for a session or persisted to the local machine. This allows pages to cache text on the machine which reduces the effect of network latencies by providing faster access to pre-cached data. Several innovative uses are possible. For example, use this in combination with the new network connectivity event to allow a page to cache data if it detects the computer is offline.
- Connectivity Events allow websites to check when the user is connected to the network and receive notification of connectivity changes.
- 6 Connections per Host instead of two for broadband scenarios and a scriptable property allow for more improved performance by allowing parallelisation of downloads in IE8. In addition, this increases functionality by ensuring a request is not blocked by a host if two connections already exist. Websites can optimise their downloads based on a scriptable property.
- XMLHttpRequest Enhancements include a timeout property that can be set to cancel the request if necessary, allowing developers to manage the request better.
- Cross-Domain Request (XDR) allows developers to create cross-site data aggregation scenarios. Similar to the XMLHttpRequest object but with a simpler programming model, this request called XDomainRequest, is the easiest way to make anonymous requests to third-party sites that support XDR and opt in to making their data available across domains. Three lines of code will have you making basic cross-site requests. This will ensure data aggregation for public sites (such as blogs) will be simple, secure and fast.
- Cross-Document Messaging (XDM) APIs allow communication between documents from different domains through IFrames in a way that is easy, secure and standardised.
HTML & CSS
- CSS 2.1 Compliance
- Data URI Support
- Better CSS Printing
- CSS Selector API Support
- Acid2 Support
- Better DOM Core Support
New Features
- Activities are contextual menu options which quickly access a service from any web page. Users typically copy and paste from one web page to another. IE 8 Activities make this common pattern easier to do.
- WebSlices is a new feature for websites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a webpage. WebSlices behave just like feeds where clients can subscribe to get updates and notify the user of changes.
And we also have other feature such as less memory leaks!
What do you think?
Tags: enhancements, ie8, improvements, internet explorer browser, new features
Get IE 8 Beta 1 from Microsoft Now!
Posted by James | Filed under Future, Geek, Web
Microsoft has released the first public beta of Internet Explorer 8 for Windows Vista and Windows XP SP2.
Here are the download links for IE8 mentioned on the Microsoft IE8 Readiness website:
This release is essentially for people who want to make sure their websites or web applications do not break with the upcoming release of IE 8 that contains some key changes.
Update: The links for IE8 downloads are giving a 404 error at the moment, hopefully just a temporary glitch.
Tags: ie8, internet explorer 8, microsoft, public beta
Welcome to Jimmahdigital.com, personal blog of James Simm, Wigan/Manchester-based .Net developer.
