Posts Tagged ‘mozilla’

Mixture of thoughts on Chrome

September 2nd, 2008 by Dave. 2 Comments »
  1. All this browser innovation (not just Chrome, but also Snowl & Ubiquity from Mozilla) are great, but how quickly can this really move.. after all we still have IE.
  2. If we don’t see the innovation from IE, can we bridge it somehow to allow it to gain mass market? IE plugins?
  3. Chrome uses WebKit. It joins, among others Safari, Chrome, Nokia, iPhone, and Android. Is this aimed at all non-WebKit engine? i.e. IE (Trident) & Firefox (Gecko)
  4. So, who is this aimed at?
    • Safari? doubt it.
    • Opera? Did WebKit gaining popularity take care of them.
    • Firefox? Between WebKit (Apple, Google, Nokia) and Microsoft I can’t help thinking maybe their market share is a niche?
    • Internet Explorer? doubt it, too small an aim for the Google
    • Microsoft? Now we’re talking, bring Gears (included in Chrome) into the mix (over all the supported platforms) and you have the framework of an assault on desktop applications, Microsoft’s core business.
    • Facebook? If we’re looking at a push from desktop world into a web application world the phrase ‘WebOS’ appears. Remember f8 acquisition Parakey?
    • On ‘WebOS’, land you get to Google App Engine, Amazon AWS, OpenSocial et al. I’ve previously laid some thoughts on those.
  5. Javascript engines? Chrome uses V8, while Mozilla has SpiderMonkey & Rhine in it’s toolkit. Both IE and Opera also have their own. What will it mean for Javascript?
  6. From Gears, what about Adobe AIR, Prism, Fluid, what will it mean for these bridging technologies?

I’ll leave it there for now. Your thoughts?

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Twitter as a search engine?

July 16th, 2008 by Dave. 6 Comments »

Here’s an experiment. Since Twitter acquired & integrated Summize ($15m Cash+Stock) they’ve had search. A better search then Twitter had previously. So, why not try it as your default search?

For Safari:

  1. Open Terminal
  2. Run:
    perl -pi -e 's/%@.google.com\/%@\?q=%@&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8/search.twitter.com\/search\?no=%@,%@&q=%@/g' /Applications/Safari.app/Contents/MacOS/Safari(this should all be on one line within Terminal)

For Firefox:

Maybe I’ll do a follow up blog with any effects I notice.

Browser wars II & why it won’t happen, yet

June 14th, 2008 by Dave. No Comments »

Given the title I imagine Safari, Internet Explorer, and Firefox have just popped into your mind. Forget 90% of what you’re thinking and consider that more & more browsing is being done on other devices; iPhone; mobiles; Wii; PSP; etc.

How easy is it to install multiple browser and select them as the default browser on those device? For the most part, it isn’t. Wasn’t that the sort of anti-competitive behavior that landed Microsoft in it back in 2000?

Why won’t it happen, yet? When Apple created the iPhone and Safari for iPhone they didn’t knock any iPhone browser businesses’ market share down - there wasn’t any. And although if you dig into the depths of that, and analyze it more broadly, yes I’m sure they dented the market share of RIM, but to the general public these companies are creating new places to browse, on your: TV; gaming console; portable gaming console; virtual world. 

When it’s understood by the lawyers that browsing is browsing is browsing, not browsing is a personal computer function. Who knows, maybe the law suits will appear? Maybe everyone learnt from last time?