Amid heightened anticipation for the launch of its iPad tablet device on Saturday, Apple on Thursday made available numerous iPad-ready applications and began listing Web sites that have been optimized and enhanced for compatibility with the iPad's features.… Read more
After a year and a half, Chrome has come a long way toward matching the features of better-established browsers. Now, with version 5 coming together, a lot of Google's work focuses on advancing the state of the browser art.
The new Chrome 5 is available in beta now for Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux, not that most Chrome users will ever have to know the version number if Google has anything to do with it. Chrome versions are called "milestones"--fleeting waypoints along an unfinished journey to a better browser. But what exactly will moving into … Read more
It's hard to believe that it's been 25 years since the first dot-com domain name was registered. With 668,000 dot-com sites registered each month and an estimated 80 million dot-com names in use today, it's a complete understatement to say that the Web has come a long way in the last quarter century.
Generally speaking, the raw technology that allows us to develop and serve Web pages hasn't changed dramatically in the last 10 years. What's changed is the way users interact with sites and how much easier it's become to publish content … Read more
If 3D is the chicken and the Avatar DVD is the egg, somehow we should all get free chickens or 3D is DOA. Or something like that. We've all still got a bit of a BBQ hangover from our time in Austin, but at least Rafe's here to make a little sense. Oh, wait, he came up with the 3D chicken thing. Anyway, Facebook rules the Web, IE 9 may or may not embrace actual standards, and Droid users are getting 2.1, finally. We're home.
Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) … Read moreBrowser makers, grappling with outmoded technology and a vision to rebuild the Web as a foundation for applications, have begun converging on a seemingly basic by very important element of cloud computing.
That ability is called local storage, and the new mechanism is called Indexed DB.
Indexed DB, proposed by Oracle and initially called WebSimpleDB, is largely just a prototype at this stage, not something Web programmers can use yet. But already it's won endorsements from Microsoft, Mozilla, and Google, and together, Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome account for more than 90 percent of the usage on the Net today.
"Indexed DB is interesting to both Firefox and Microsoft, so if we get to the point where we prototype it and want to ship it, it will have very wide availability," said Chris Blizzard, director of evangelism for Mozilla.
And standardization could come. Advocates have worked Indexed DB into the considerations of the W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium that standardizes HTML and other Web technologies. In the W3C discussions, Indexed DB got a warm reception from Opera, the fifth-ranked browser.… Read more
In an update to the development build of Chrome, Google on Thursday introduced a rough version of the native HTML5 geolocation API. Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Google Chrome dev 5.0.342.1 comes with the geolocation API that Mozilla has supported since it introduced it in last summer's Firefox 3.5.
However, geolocation in Chrome is turned off by default. To activate it, users must go to their Chrome shortcut and add --enable-geolocation to the end of the target line, under the Shortcut tab. To test if it's working, you can go to http://www.browsergeolocation.com. … Read more
Internet Explorer fans can now get a taste of the video elements in HTML5 without having to switch browsers. Through a new in-development plug-in bundled with codecs from Xiph.org, users can activate rudimentary support for OGG-formatted HTML5 video on Windows 32-bit and 64-bit computers.
There are several problems that the plug-in has yet to solve to bring it up to parity with Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and the latest Opera beta, which natively support HTML5 in full. The plug-in leaves out support for H.264, lacks playback controls such as seeking, doesn't offer any HTML5 interface, and requires changing … Read more
One of the biggest criticisms of Apple's new iPad, and of the iPhone, is that it does not support Adobe's Flash, a system that lets Web developers code streaming videos and interactivity into Web pages. Steve Jobs is reported to be a big booster for HTML 5, a new extension of the HTML standard that all Web pages are encoded in. HTML 5 will allow Flash-like features without relying on Flash, which is a proprietary system. Meantime, users are caught in the middle. Only a few browsers support HTML 5, and there are countless Web pages, videos, and games written in Flash already. Not to mention a legion of developers accustomed to creating media in Flash. At stake in this battle: the future of interactive content on the Web.
To discuss this topic on the Roundtable, our guests include CNET's Stephen Shankland. Shankland is author of the Deep Tech blog on CNET News, and covers technology now from London. He recently wrote about this very subject. See HTML vs. Flash: Can a turf war be avoided? And from the New York office of Gizmodo, John Herrman, who recently wrote a great story, Why HTML 5 Isn't going to save the Internet.
Subscribe with iTunes (audio) Subscribe with iTunes (video) Subscribe with RSS (audio) Subscribe with RSS (video) Reporters' Roundtable #20: HTML 5 vs. Flash The battle for the future of the Web… Read moreWith the release of the Opera 10.5 beta, a fourth browser is available that can play video built directly into Web pages with no plug-ins required.
The HTML5 Web pages standard under development lets programmers build video into Web pages so browsers don't need a plug-in such as Adobe Systems' Flash to play it--the way they've been accustomed to doing with JPEG images for years. However, Opera's arrival isn't likely to bridge a video technology divide that's a serious hurdle for adoption of HTML5 video.
Opera 10.5, like Mozilla's Firefox, can play … Read more
A difference of opinion among developers has become a high-profile debate over the future of the Web: should programmers continue using Adobe Systems' Flash or embrace newer Web technology instead?
The debate has gone on for years, but last week's debut of Apple's iPad--which like the iPhone doesn't support Flash--turned up the heat. Before that, Adobe had been saying with some restraint that it's happy to bring Flash to the iPhone when Apple gives the go-ahead.
But Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch took the gloves off Tuesday with a blog post that said Apple's reluctance … Read more
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