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Paul Merrell

Join Opera's journey to reinvent the Web - 1 views

  • Opera today released Opera 10.10 with Opera Unite, a powerful technology for personal content sharing directly between all your devices. Opera Unite is available as a standard feature in Opera 10.10, available free from www.opera.com.To mark this release, Opera is inviting the world to join our journey to reinvent the Web. By wrapping both a Web browser and a Web server into one package, Opera Unite challenges the conventional, semi-private methods of sharing the content that really matters to people everywhere."We promised Opera Unite would reinvent the Web," said Jon von Tetzchner, CEO, Opera. "What we are really doing is reinventing how we as consumers interact with the Web. By giving our devices the ability to serve content, we become equal citizens on the Web. In an age where we have ceded control of our personal data to third-parties, Opera Unite gives us the freedom to choose how we will share the data that belongs to us."
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    Playing with the software now. Unite is a cloud integration, with a directory on your system identified as a directory to be shared with the cloud storage. Haven't really got into it yet, but I see options to keep the data in the folder private, to share it with those who know the password, and to publish the directory to the world. There are roughly 25 Unite applications not discussed in the press release here. http://unite.opera.com/applications/ My first thought was that Google will have to respond in kind, while Microsoft --- which doesn't get the power of "free" --- will respond but with a less generous offering.
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    Opps. I was wrong. There is no online storage. It is as stated in the press release, an integration of a server with the Opera browser. The shared content is served by the local machine. Which means that the local machine must be running in order for others to access the shared content. But according to the Unite FAQ, this also means that there are only practical limits on the amount of content shared, e.g., hard disk capacity and bandwidth. Why bother with setting up a LAN or VPN if you can share files over the internet using Opera? And how will Google and Microsoft respond?
Gary Edwards

Google Chrome 5 WebKit - Firefox - Opera Comparisons - BusinessWeek - 0 views

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    Chrome runs as close as any browser can to the bleeding edge of Web standards. Though it uses the same open source WebKit rendering engine as Safari, it doesn't reliably support the controversial, proprietary CSS3 transformation and animation tricks that Apple's built into Safari. However, like every browser I tested, it earned a perfect score in a compatibility test for CSS3 selectors, and it joined Safari and Opera with a flawless score of 100 in the Acid3 web standards benchmark. Chrome 5 also supports both Apple's H.264 codec and Mozilla's preferred open source Ogg Theora technology for plugin-free HTML5 video, and it beautifully played back HTML5 demo videos from YouTube and Brightcove. In XHTML and CSS tests, Chrome was surprisingly slower than Safari, despite their shared rendering engine -- but the race was close. Safari rendered a local XHTML test page in 0.58 seconds to Chrome's 0.78 seconds, and a local CSS test page in 33 milliseconds to Chrome's 51 milliseconds. Note that Chrome still rendered XHTML more than twice as fast as Opera (1.67 seconds) and left Firefox (12.42 seconds--no, that's not a typo) eating its dust. In CSS, it also beat the pants off Opera (193 milliseconds) and Firefox (342 milliseconds). But Chrome shines brightest when handling JavaScript. Its V8 engine zipped through the SunSpider Javascript benchmark in 448.6 milliseconds, narrowly beating Opera's 485.8 milliseconds, and absolutely plastering Firefox's 1,161.4 milliseconds. However, Safari 5's time of 376.3 miliseconds in the SunSpider test beat Chrome 5 handily.
Paul Merrell

Opera: Web standards could eclipse Flash - ZDNet.co.uk - 0 views

  • The next revision of the HTML web language will make Adobe's Flash technology largely redundant, according to the chief executive of browser company Opera. The open web standards included in HyperText Markup Language version 5 (HTML 5) provide a viable alternative to Adobe's proprietary Flash for the delivery of rich media web content, Jon von Tetzchner told ZDNet UK on Wednesday.
  • Von Tetzchner said that HTML 5's handling of rich media meant that Flash — Adobe's ubiquitous, proprietary multimedia platform for the web — is becoming largely unnecessary. "You can do most things with web standards today," von Tetzchner said. "In some ways, you may say you don't need Flash."
Paul Merrell

Haavard - 300 million users strong, Opera moves to WebKit - 0 views

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    And so there will be only three major web page rendering engines, webkit, mozilla's gecko, and MSIE. with only webkit in the ascendancy. 
Paul Merrell

We're Halfway to Encrypting the Entire Web | Electronic Frontier Foundation - 0 views

  • The movement to encrypt the web has reached a milestone. As of earlier this month, approximately half of Internet traffic is now protected by HTTPS. In other words, we are halfway to a web safer from the eavesdropping, content hijacking, cookie stealing, and censorship that HTTPS can protect against. Mozilla recently reported that the average volume of encrypted web traffic on Firefox now surpasses the average unencrypted volume
  • Google Chrome’s figures on HTTPS usage are consistent with that finding, showing that over 50% of of all pages loaded are protected by HTTPS across different operating systems.
  • This milestone is a combination of HTTPS implementation victories: from tech giants and large content providers, from small websites, and from users themselves.
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  • Starting in 2010, EFF members have pushed tech companies to follow crypto best practices. We applauded when Facebook and Twitter implemented HTTPS by default, and when Wikipedia and several other popular sites later followed suit. Google has also put pressure on the tech community by using HTTPS as a signal in search ranking algorithms and, starting this year, showing security warnings in Chrome when users load HTTP sites that request passwords or credit card numbers. EFF’s Encrypt the Web Report also played a big role in tracking and encouraging specific practices. Recently other organizations have followed suit with more sophisticated tracking projects. For example, Secure the News and Pulse track HTTPS progress among news media sites and U.S. government sites, respectively.
  • But securing large, popular websites is only one part of a much bigger battle. Encrypting the entire web requires HTTPS implementation to be accessible to independent, smaller websites. Let’s Encrypt and Certbot have changed the game here, making what was once an expensive, technically demanding process into an easy and affordable task for webmasters across a range of resource and skill levels. Let’s Encrypt is a Certificate Authority (CA) run by the Internet Security Research Group (ISRG) and founded by EFF, Mozilla, and the University of Michigan, with Cisco and Akamai as founding sponsors. As a CA, Let’s Encrypt issues and maintains digital certificates that help web users and their browsers know they’re actually talking to the site they intended to. CAs are crucial to secure, HTTPS-encrypted communication, as these certificates verify the association between an HTTPS site and a cryptographic public key. Through EFF’s Certbot tool, webmasters can get a free certificate from Let’s Encrypt and automatically configure their server to use it. Since we announced that Let’s Encrypt was the web’s largest certificate authority last October, it has exploded from 12 million certs to over 28 million. Most of Let’s Encrypt’s growth has come from giving previously unencrypted sites their first-ever certificates. A large share of these leaps in HTTPS adoption are also thanks to major hosting companies and platforms--like WordPress.com, Squarespace, and dozens of others--integrating Let’s Encrypt and providing HTTPS to their users and customers.
  • Unfortunately, you can only use HTTPS on websites that support it--and about half of all web traffic is still with sites that don’t. However, when sites partially support HTTPS, users can step in with the HTTPS Everywhere browser extension. A collaboration between EFF and the Tor Project, HTTPS Everywhere makes your browser use HTTPS wherever possible. Some websites offer inconsistent support for HTTPS, use unencrypted HTTP as a default, or link from secure HTTPS pages to unencrypted HTTP pages. HTTPS Everywhere fixes these problems by rewriting requests to these sites to HTTPS, automatically activating encryption and HTTPS protection that might otherwise slip through the cracks.
  • Our goal is a universally encrypted web that makes a tool like HTTPS Everywhere redundant. Until then, we have more work to do. Protect your own browsing and websites with HTTPS Everywhere and Certbot, and spread the word to your friends, family, and colleagues to do the same. Together, we can encrypt the entire web.
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    HTTPS connections don't work for you if you don't use them. If you're not using HTTPS Everywhere in your browser, you should be; it's your privacy that is at stake. And every encrypted communication you make adds to the backlog of encrypted data that NSA and other internet voyeurs must process as encrypted traffic; because cracking encrypted messages is computer resource intensive, the voyeurs do not have the resources to crack more than a tiny fraction. HTTPS is a free extension for Firefox, Chrome, and Opera. You can get it here. https://www.eff.org/HTTPS-everywhere
Paul Merrell

'Let's Encrypt' Project Strives To Make Encryption Simple - Slashdot - 0 views

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    The blurb is a bit misleading. This is a project that's been under way since last year; what's new is that they're moving under the Linux Foundation umbrella for various non-technical suoport purposes. By sometime this summer, encrypting web site data and broadcasting it over https is  slated to become a two-click process. Or on the linux command line: $ sudo apt-get install lets-encrypt $ lets-encrypt example.com This is a project that grew out of public disgust with NSA surveillance, designed to flood the NSA (and other bad actors) with so much encrypted data that they will be able to decrypt only a tiny fraction (decryption without the decryption key takes gobs of computer cycles).  The other half of the solution is already available, the HTTPS Everywhere extension for the Chrome, FIrefox, and Opera web browsers by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the TOR Project that translates your every request for a http address into an effort to connect to an https address preferentially before establishing an http connection if https is not available. HTTPS Everywhere is fast and does not noticeably add to your page loading time. If you'd like to effortlessly imoprove your online security and help burden NSA, install HTTPS Everywhere. Get it at https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Gary Edwards

Does It Matter Who Wins the Browser Wars? Only if you care about the Future of the Open... - 1 views

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    The Future of the Open Web You're right that the browser wars do not matter - except for this point of demarcation; browsers that support HTML+ and browser that support 1998 HTML. extensive comment by ~ge~ Not all Web services and applications support HTML+, the rapidly advancing set of technologies that includes HTML5, CSS3, SVG/Canvas, and JavaScript (including the libraries and JSON). Microsoft has chosen to draw the Open Web line at what amounts to 1998-2001 level of HTML/CSS. Above that line, they provision a rich-client / rich-server Web model bound to the .NET-WPF platform where C#, Silverlight, and XAML are very prominent. Noticeably, Open Web standards are for the most part replaced at this richer MSWeb level by proprietary technologies. Through limited support for HTML/CSS, IE8 itself acts to dumb down the Open Web. The effect of this is that business systems and day-to-day workflow processes bound to the ubiquitous and very "rich" MSOffice Productivity Environment have little choice when it comes to transitioning to the Web but to stay on the Microsoft 2010 treadmill. Sure, at some point legacy business processes and systems will be rewritten to the Web. The question is, will it be the Open Web or the MS-Web? The Open Web standards are the dividing line between owning your information and content, or, having that content bound to a Web platform comprised of proprietary Microsoft services, systems and applications. Web designers and developers are still caught up in the browser wars. They worry incessantly as to how to dumb down Web content and services to meet the limited functionality of IE. This sucks. So everyone continues to watch "the browser wars" stats. What they are really watching for though is that magic moment where "combined" HTML+ browser uptake in marketshare signals that they can start to implement highly graphical and collaboratively interactive HTML+ specific content. Meanwhile, the greater Web is a
Gary Edwards

In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It. - washingtonpost.com - 0 views

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    I disagree with the authors conclusions here.  He misses some very significant developments.  Particularly around Google, WebKit, and WebKit-HTML5. For instance, there is this article out today; "Google Really is Giving Away Free Nexus One and Droid Handsets to Developers".  Also, Palm is working on a WiMAX/WiFi version of their WebOS (WebKit) smartphone for Sprint.  Sprint and ClearWire are pushing forward with a very aggressive WiMAX rollout in the USA.  San Francisco should go on line this year!   One of the more interesting things about the Sprint WiMAX plan is that they have a set fee of $69.00 per month that covers EVERYTHING; cellphone, WiMAX Web browsing, video, and data connectivity, texting (SMS) and VOIP.  Major Sprint competitors, Verizon, AT&T and TMobile charge $69 per month, but it only covers cellphone access.  Everything else is extra adn also at low speed/ low bandwidth.  3G at best.  WiMAX however is a 4G screamer.  It's also an open standard.  (Verizon FIOS and LTE are comparable and said to be coming soon, but they are proprietary technologies).   The Cable guys are itneresting in that they are major backers of WiMAX, but also have a bandwidth explosive technology called Docsis. There is an interesting article at TechCrunch, "In Mobile, Fragmentation is Forever. Deal With It."  I disagree entirely with the authors conclusion.  WebKit is capable of providing a universal HTML5 application developers layer for mobile and desktop browser computing.  It's supported by Apple, Google, Palm (WebOS), Nokia, RiMM (Blackberry) and others to such an extent that 85% of all smartphones shipped this year will either ship with WebKit or, an Opera browser compatible with the WebKit HTML5 document layout/rendering model.   I would even go as far as to say that WebKit-HTML5 owns the Web's document model and application layer for the future.  Excepting for Silverlight, which features the OOXML document model with over 500 million desktop develop
Gary Edwards

Ericom Launches Pure HTML5 RDP Client -- Campus Technology - 0 views

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    Wow!  This reads like a premature press release, but if true it's breakthru technology.  I wonder though why Ericom is targeting education?  Seems this innovation would be of immediate importance to enterprise and SMB businesses struggling with the great transition from desktop/workgroup productivity systems to Web Productivity Platforms. excerpt: Ericom has released AccessNow, a pure HTML5 remote desktop (RDP) client that runs within a Web browser without the need to install anything on the client device. AccessNow provides accelerated remote access to applications and desktops running on Windows Terminal Services, remote desktop services (RDS), and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), including applications, remote desktops, VMware View desktops, virtual desktops running on Microsoft Hyper-V, and other hypervisors. AccessNow works on any device with an HTML5-capable browser, such as Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Opera, and others, without the use of browser plugins, Java, Flash, ActiveX, Silverlight, or other underlying technology. Internet Explorer is also supported, although it does require the Chrome Frame plugin. AccessNow uses only the standard Web technologies: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This approach helps IT administrators maintain centralized control of school resources. It also enables students and staff to use any Internet-enabled device, including smartphones, tablets, and Chromebooks, to do their work anywhere and anytime.
Gary Edwards

On Mobiles, There's No Stopping Webkit - 0 views

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    Great title, no substance.  But who can pass this up?  Even if it's been obvious since the 2007 release of the iPhone.  WebKit Rules the Edge of the Web today!   Tomorrow, the greater Web will follow. Excerpt: There are a lot of brave souls out there making mobile browsers, hoping to gain traction with the phone makers. But most of them are fighting a losing battle, for the mobile browser war is increasingly being fought between two camps - the Webkit-based browsers camp, which includes Safari on the iPhone, the Google Android Browser, the Palm browser and the Nokia browser; and the Opera camp.
Paul Merrell

The Chrome Assault: IE's Walls Are Crumbling | ConceivablyTech - 0 views

  • Net Application’s numbers for October show another loss for IE, down 0.39 points or 0.65% to 59.26%, the lowest number in, as far as we know, in at least 12 years. Firefox dropped as well, down to 22.82%, which is a 15 month low for Mozilla. The clear winner in October was Google, which saw its Chrome browser blow past the 8% barrier and landed at 8.47%, a gain of 0.49 points or 6.14% over September. Safari gained slightly and is now at 5.33% and Opera continued its zig-zag pattern and was down a bit to 2.28%.
  • StatCounter is also out with market share numbers. As usual, the numbers deviate from Net Applications’, but the trend is comparable. Chrome, by the way, is listed by StatCounter with 12.39% market share, Firefox with 31.24% and IE with 49.22%. The interesting part about StatCounter is the geographic breakdown. While North America still loves IE, Europe does not – and this is critical for Microsoft as there are more Internet users in Europe than in North America. On these shores, there is a good distance between IE and Firefox, but Firefox has caught up with IE in Europe, even if Firefox has turned into a slight decline over there as well. IE is now a 39.53% in Europe and Firefox at 38.65%. Firefox is losing market share not quite as fast as IE and could become Europe’s most popular browser by the end of the year. The big winner, however, is also Chrome – which is now listed at 12.28%.
Paul Merrell

First official HTML5 tests topped by...Microsoft * The Register - 0 views

  • The Worldwide Web Consortium has released the results of its first HTML5 conformance tests, and according to this initial rundown, the browser that most closely adheres to the latest set of web standards is...Microsoft Internet Explorer 9. Yes, the HTML5 spec has yet to be finalised. And yes, these tests cover only a portion of the spec. But we can still marvel at just how much Microsoft's browser philosophy has changed in recent months. The W3C tests — available here — put IE9 beta release 6 at the top of the HTML5 conformance table, followed by the Firefox 4 beta 6, Google Chrome 7, Opera 10.6, and Safari 5.0. The tests cover seven aspects of the spec: "attributes", "audio", "video", "canvas", "getElementsByClassName", "foreigncontent," and "xhtml5":
  • The tests do not yet cover web workers, the file API, local storage, or other aspects of the spec.
Paul Merrell

Thousands of HTML5 tests planned by Web consortium - 0 views

  • W3C is warning against drawing any conclusions based on the early tests, saying thousands of more HTML5 tests are planned. The goal of the tests is not to declare one browser a winner, but rather to help vendors and Web application developers ensure interoperability across all browsers, W3C says.
  • "We do expect to have tens of thousands of tests," says Philippe Le Hegaret, who oversees HTML activities for the W3C. 
  • the purpose of the HTML5 test suite is to help vendors and developers ensure that HTML5 applications work across all browsers. For example, a developer might check the test results before enabling a certain feature in an application, just to make sure it will work across IE9, Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera. Developers can build HTML5 applications today, but they have to keep in mind that they are early adopters and act accordingly, Le Hegaret says. "If you think HTML5 is perfectly stable today and you can use it without worrying about interoperability issues, I think you're going to fool yourself," he says. Although the first round of HTML5 tests focused on desktop browsers, Le Hegaret says HTML5 compatibility is advancing more rapidly on mobile devices such as iPhones and Androids.
    • Paul Merrell
       
      Note the continuing, indeed, escalating abuse of the term "interoperability" by W3C. "Interoperability" has both a legal and (happily, coinciding) technical meaning that involves round-tripping of information. ISO/IEC JTC 1 Directives defines the term in precisely the same terms as the European Union's Court of First Instance did in the landmark Commmission v. Microsoft antitrust case; "interoperability is understood to be the ability of two or more IT systems to *exchange* information at one or more standardised interfaces and to make *mutual use* of the information that has been exchanged." Web browsers do not do "interoperability;" there is no "exchange" and "mutual use" of the information exchanged. Web browsers do "compatibility," a one-way transfer of information that is broadcast from web servers; i.e., web browsers cannot send web pages to web servers.
Paul Merrell

Google to slip SVG into Internet Explorer * The Register - 0 views

  • Microsoft might be hesitating on Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) in Internet Explorer 8, but Google's pressing on. The search giant's engineers are building a JavaScript library to render static and dynamic SVG in Microsoft's browser. Google promised that the library, a Javascript shim, will simply drop into IE.
  • SVG has a huge presence on the web. This facet of the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML 5 spec is supported in Firefox, Safari, Opera, Chrome, and Apple's iPhone, and is used in Google Maps and Google Docs. It also topped a list of features wanted by developers in a OpenAJAX browser wish list last year.
  • There's suspicion, though, that the reason has more to do with Microsoft's internal politics, with the company wanting graphics and drawing in IE done using Silverlight instead. SVG Web is more than an answer to Microsoft's foot-dragging, however. Google has declared for HTML 5 on the web, proclaiming last week that the web programming model has "won". Support for graphics capabilities in HTML 5 should also be seen as Google's partial answer to Adobe Systems' Flash. Google has complained that Flash is not open source and its development is not driven by the community. Google said the benefit of SVG Web is that it would sit inside the DOM whereas Flash "sits on top of the web, it's not part of the web"
Paul Merrell

HTML5's Flash and Silverlight 'killer' potential chopped * The Register - 0 views

  • Much has been made of how HTML5 will "kill" proprietary media tools and players from Adobe Systems and Microsoft. The idea has been partly predicated on the fact those working on HTML5 would enshrine a baseline spec for audio and video codecs everybody could agree on, buy into, and support.
  • But the hope of a universal media experience is now dead, at least for now. Apple, Mozilla, Opera, Microsoft, and - yes - Google could not agree on a common set of audio or video codecs for use in the proposed HTML5 spec. That means major browsers and media player will continue to implement the codecs and APIs ordained by their owners as they’ve always done, leaving developers and customers to pick a side or go to the additional cost and effort of supporting different players.
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