At present windows XP is considered as the most accepted OS for PCs which introduced us with XP home and XP professional. The first one is designed for home users who do not need to run heavyweight commercial applications like a web server. On the other hand, windows XP professional can be used to optimize your installation. There are a lot of windows tricks and tweaks which include registry entries, broadband settings, and other underutilized apparatus of Win XP. Among them windows XP registry tweaks will give you the most important guide of discussing win XP performance and efficiency. The most important thing you can do for increasing the win XP performance of your computer is make it free from viruses, Trojans, spyware, and other pieces of software that could serve to slow down.

For doing this job you need an always on broadband connection to install a firewall that helps locks down the software entry points. When ports are combined with your internet protocol address creates a channel of network communication. A few ports can be open like the port 80 which allow the web HTTP communication to take place and the others should be locked unless they are needed by a legal program. A firewall can able to chunk all vacant ports and the Win XP user need to make a decision which ports he/she want to open although Win XP service pack 2 contains a firewall that is on by default.

To install antivirus and anti spyware software is an extra part of this class of Windows XP tweaks. These programs can apparent up the malevolent pieces of software that tap of your Win XP machine’s performance. Once you have put into practice the fundamental windows XP tweaks but now you need to give attention of other efficiency based phases which you can use in your personal computer. In Win XP programs the Win XP registry is a centralized data structure that includes the Win XP itself the use of store configuration data.

The registry becomes packed within a short time and become slower to explore. If you want to remove the excess programs that do not uninstall properly from your computer it might affect the registry that can cause registry searches too slow. There are lots of free and shareware programs available that can help you to cleanup your Win XP registry. It is not suitable to muck around the registry yourself just try to back up your registry before making any changes

One more important group of windows XP registry tweaks is to keep defragmented your hard drive. When application programs save different parts of files in different places on your hard drive then it becomes fragmented and this problem can easily solved by registry tweaks. As for example, Win XP may decide to save part of your file in different places on the hard drive in order to maximize available space. This indicates that entry time for that file will become slow. Over time accumulate many fragmented files and generally become a mess and this will make your computer slow down greatly.

Adobe has released Flash Player 10.2, an update that focuses primarily on speed and performance improvements. New in Flash 10.2 is something Adobe calls “Stage Video hardware acceleration,” which the company claims will “decrease processor usage and enable higher frame rates, reduced memory usage, and greater pixel fidelity and quality.”

The Stage Video hardware acceleration means that Flash Player 10.2 can leverage your graphics card for not just H.264 hardware decoding (which works in Flash Player 10.1) but also color conversion, scaling, and blitting.

To try out the new Flash Player 10.2 beta, head over to the Adobe download page. If you’re using Google Chrome, which bundles Flash Player with the browser, look for an update to arrive in the near future.

The Flash Player 10.2 beta gave us mixed results when it came to speed and the final release is no different. Windows users will see the biggest speed bump, particularly with 1080p video that has been optimized with the Stage Video hardware acceleration. Mac users will need to be on OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard in order for Stage Video to take advantage of hardware acceleration.

For the beta I ran some test on the Mac platform (using Firefox and Chromium) using several 1080p videos on YouTube. The beta put CPU usage down to the 18-22 percent range, but the final release tops that, rarely climbing over 12 percent CPU use. On Windows (again in Firefox and Chromium) the story is even better, with the numbers hovering in the low single digits.

That’s good news for watching Hd video online, but it also means less drain on your laptop’s batteries, one of the main complaints leveled at Flash Player. Keep in mind though that in order to take advantage of the new Stage Video tools, sites like YouTube and Vimeo will need to alter their video players. So, it may be some time before the full benefit of Stage Video’s improvements makes it to your day-to-day web browsing.

Other new features in Flash Player 10.2 include support for fullscreen mode with dual monitors — meaning that you can have a movie on one screen and keep working on another — and some sub-pixel text rendering improvements which should make Flash text more readable.

As for Flash Mobile, where the benefits of lower CPU usage and less battery drain are even more welcome, Adobe says to “hang tight.” Adobe plans to talk about new versions of Flash Player for Mobile at the Mobile World Congress next week.

See Also:

• New Flash Player 10.2 Goes Easy on the CPU
• Adobe Revamps Flash Player for Netbooks, P2P, Private Browsing
• Adobe Flash Player 10.1 Arrives

View full post on Webmonkey

Google is celebrating Jules Verne’s birthday with a logo that pays homage to the author’s famous 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea. The doodle, which marks Verne’s 183rd birthday, transforms the usual Google letters into submarine portals looking out at the sea.

The effect was created using the powerful transform tools in CSS 3 to layer together an animated diving sequence using nothing more than standard HTML and a few transparent images. If you’ve got a device with an accelerometer built-in (any iOS device, recent Macbook or Android device), you can even control the doodle just by tilting down to dive or side to side to move forward and back.

If you’re on a desktop or don’t have an accelerometer in your laptop, you can steer the Nautilus with a control stick. While the doodle worked in most browsers, it’s smoothest and fastest in Google Chrome and Firefox 4 beta.

Other Google doodles have used HTML5’s canvas element, along with some CSS 3, to create the bouncing balls experiment and the awesome, playable version of Pac-Man.

See Also:

• Write Your Name in Bouncy Google Balls
• Transform Your Site With CSS 3
• Slick Web Design Gets Easier Thanks to CSS 3’s Transform Tools
• Chrome 9: Faster 3-D Graphics, Instant Search and an App Store

View full post on Webmonkey

Google has updated the stable channel of its Chrome web browser. This release is technically labeled Chrome 9, though Google ceased focusing on version numbers some time ago, opting for a rolling, every-six-weeks update schedule.

If you’d like to take the latest version of Chrome for a spin, head over to the Chrome downloads page. If you’re already using Chrome, the update will arrive automatically.

If you’ve tested the beta release of Chrome 9, there won’t be anything new to see in this update. But for those that prefer to stick with the stable channel, Chrome 9 brings several features from the beta channel to prime time — notably, support for 3-D WebGL hardware acceleration. This release also adds support for the new Chrome Web Store, and Chrome Instant, a tool that loads web pages as soon as you start typing in the URL bar.

WebGL, which was originally developed by Mozilla, acts as a bridge between the browser and the desktop hardware acceleration tool OpenGL. The WebGL project gives web developers a way to connect the HTML 5 Canvas tool, which can be used to display complex graphics in the browser without plug-ins like Flash, to the operating system’s native, hardware accelerated graphics engine — in this case, OpenGL. The result is much improved performance for 3-D apps on the web. Google notes a couple of demos you can try out, the Google Body experiment in particular does a nice job of showcasing the power of WebGL.

This release is also notable for being the first stable version of Chrome to include access to the new Chrome Web App Store (U.S. users only). To check it out, just click the new link on the New Tab page.

Chrome Instant mimics Google’s instant search feature when you type a search in the URL bar. If you type a web address, Chrome Instant will start loading the page as you type, which makes getting to your favorite sites a bit faster. The only catch is that Chrome Instant is disabled by default. To turn it on, head to the “basic” tab on Chrome’s preferences page and check the “Enable Instant” option under Search.

See Also:

• Chrome Add-on Kills Tracking Cookies
• Chrome 10 ‘Obliterates’ Your Browsing History
• Chrome 8 Adds Google Instant to the URL Bar
• Chrome Gets New ‘Crankshaft’ Engine, Syncing, WebGL Support
• Firefox With WebGL Brings Powerful 3-D Graphics to the Web

View full post on Webmonkey

The word “server” is enough to send all but the hardiest nerds scurrying for cover.

The word usually conjures images of vast, complex data farms, databases and massive infrastructures. True, servers are all those things — but at a more basic level, they’re just like your desktop PC.

Running a server is no more difficult than starting Windows on your desktop. That’s the message Dave Winer, forefather of blogging and creator of RSS, is trying to get across with his EC2 for Poets project. The name comes from Amazon’s EC2 service and classes common in liberal arts colleges, like programming for poets or computer science for poets. The theme of such classes is that anyone — even a poet — can learn technology.

Winer wants to demystify the server. “Engineers sometimes mystify what they do, as a form of job security,” writes Winer, “I prefer to make light of it… it was easy for me, why shouldn’t it be easy for everyone?”

To show you just how easy it is to set up and run a server, Winer has put together an easy-to-follow tutorial so you too can set up a Windows-based server running in the cloud. Winer uses Amazon’s EC2 service. For a few dollars a month, Winer’s tutorial can have just about anyone up and running with their own server.

In that sense Winer’s EC2 for Poets if already a success, but education and empowerment aren’t Winer’s only goals. “I think it’s important to bust the mystique of servers,” says Winer, “it’s essential if we’re going to break free of the ‘corporate blogging silos.’”

The corporate blogging silos Winer is thinking of are services like Twitter, Facebook and WordPress. All three have been instrumental in the growth of the web, they make it easy for anyone publish. But they also suffer denial of service attacks, government shutdowns and growing pains, centralized services like Twitter and Facebook are vulnerable. Services wrapped up in a single company are also vulnerable to market whims, Geocities is gone, FriendFeed languishes at Facebook and Yahoo is planning to sell Delicious. A centralized web is brittle web, one that can make our data, our communications tools disappear tomorrow.

But the web will likely never be completely free of centralized services and Winer recognizes that. Most people will still choose convenience over freedom. Twitter’s user interface is simple, easy to use and works on half a dozen devices.

Winer doesn’t believe everyone will want to be part of the distributed web, just the dedicated. But he does believe there are more people who would choose a DIY path if they realized it wasn’t that difficult.

Winer isn’t the only one who believes the future of the web will be distributed systems that aren’t controlled by any single corporation or technology platform. Microformats founder Tantek Çelik is also working on a distributed publishing system that seeks to retain all the cool features of the social web, but remove the centralized bottleneck.

But to be free of corporate blogging silos and centralized services the web will need an army of distributed servers run by hobbyists, not just tech-savvy web admins, but ordinary people who love the web and want to experiment.

So while you can get your EC2 server up and running today — and even play around with Winer’s River2 news aggregator — the real goal is further down the road. Winer’s vision is a distributed web where everything is loosely coupled. “For example,” Winer writes, “the roads I drive on with my car are loosely-coupled from the car. I might drive a SmartCar, a Toyota or a BMW. No matter what car I choose I am free to drive on the Cross-Bronx Expressway, Sixth Avenue or the Bay Bridge.”

Winer wants to start by creating a loosely coupled, distributed microblogging service like Twitter. “I’m pretty sure we know how to create a micro-blogging community with open formats and protocols and no central point of failure,” he writes on his blog.

For Winer that means decoupling the act of writing from the act of publishing. The idea isn’t to create an open alternative to Twitter, it’s to remove the need to use Twitter for writing on Twitter. Instead you write with the tools of your choice and publish to your own server.

If everyone publishes first to their own server there’s no single point of failure. There’s no fail whale, and no company owns your data. Once the content is on your server you can then push it on to wherever you’d like — Twitter, Tumblr, WordPress of whatever the site du jour is ten years from now.

The glue that holds this vision together is RSS. Winer sees RSS as the ideal broadcast mechanism for the distributed web and in fact he’s already using it — Winer has an RSS feed of links that are then pushed on to Twitter. No matter what tool he uses to publish a link, it’s gathered up into a single RSS feed and pushed on to Twitter.

Dave Winer’s RSS-centric vision of a distributed web image by dave winer via flickr

Winer will be first to admit that a distributed system like he imagines is still a little ways off, but as they say, the longest journey starts with a single step. For Winer EC2 for Poets is part of that first step. If you’ve never set up your own server, don’t even really totally understand what a server is, well, time to find out. Head on over to the EC2 for Poets site and you’ll have a server up and running fifteen minutes from now. The distributed web awaits you.

View full post on Webmonkey

The new Readability pays the sites you read

Readability, a browser tool which isolates the text on a webpage making it easier to read, has announced it’s moving beyond its humble beginnings to become a “full-fledged reading platform.” Readability will now offer iOS apps and, more importantly, it’s no longer a free tool.

The new Readability will cost you a minimum of $5 a month, with 70 percent of that fee going directly to the writers and publishers whose sites you visit.

Readability and similar tools, like Apple’s Safari 5 web browser have been criticized for cutting into publishers’ bottom line by eliminating online advertisements. The new non-free Readability is at least in part a way to address this concern. As readers, most people want a clean, distraction-free reading experience. At the same time no one wants to deprive their favorite websites of the income necessary to keep the site going. Readability’s new pricing plan is an attempt to find some common ground and keep everyone happy.

Not only does the new Readability give readers an option to hide ads and view a more readable page (which they may well be doing anyway), it provides a new source of income for the site. Even better, that additional revenue comes from the actual content, rather than simply the ads surrounding the content.

Ironically, in testing the new Readability, I realized that most sites I read regularly already have clean designs, nice typography and uncluttered layouts — sites that don’t really need Readability. But the new payment system can help those sites too. Readability’s payment system turns the service into something more than just a reformatting tool — it’s a bit like a roving micropayments system, handing out money to sites you enjoy.

Here’s how it works: The minimum fee is $5 a month, though Readability encourages you to spend more if you can afford it. The money is then split up between articles where you use Readability. Visit only one site and it will get all of your money; visit several dozen and each will see only a few pennies unless you up your monthly payment. You can use the Readability web interface to see where your money is going. It’s like micropayments, but all the transaction details are handled behind the scenes by Readability.

Of course you aren’t just paying the writers and publishers. Thirty percent of your monthly fee money goes to Readability, which has some new browser extensions, web badges, an API and some nice looking (though as-yet-unapproved) iOS apps built around the popular Instapaper.

The Instapaper contribution means that in addition to the “Read Now” button, which gives you a more readable version of the current article, there’s also a new “Read Later” button. Read Later works just like it does in Instapaper, saving the article to your account for when you have more time to read. Unfortunately, right now there’s no way to actually integrate your Instapaper account with Readability.

The “Read Now” and “Read Later” buttons can come from either the Readability browser extension, bookmarklet or from the site itself using a new embedded button (there’s also an API for more sophisticated integration).

Despite the integration tools and new payment system, it’s unlikely most sites will ever get rich from Readability. Of course it’s unlikely most sites are making much from Google Ads either, and it certainly never hurts to have another form of income, even if it is measured in pennies.

[Update: For those worried that Readability is no longer free at all, we should note that you can keep using the bookmarklets and browser extensions without paying for the service.]

See Also:

• Design for Readability First
• Safari 5’s ‘Reader’ Simplifies the Web

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla Labs is retiring its Prism project in favor of the new Chromeless experiment. Prism allowed you to create desktop-like apps out of individual websites. Chromeless is a similar, though much more ambitious web-to-desktop project.

Because of the overlap between the two, Mozilla Labs has decided to stop developing Prism. If you’re a fan of Prism, rest assured that you can still use any apps you’ve created with Prism, but there won’t be any further development on the project. It’s unclear what that will mean in the long run for apps like Zimbra, which rely heavily on Prism.

The Chromeless project, which was announced last year, also aims to bring web development to the desktop. But where Prism essentially captured a website and isolated it as a standalone app, Chromeless adds a new set of APIs that allow apps to interact with the desktop like a native application.

One of Chromeless’ lofty goals is to allow desktop apps to be written using standard HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Using the same underlying code that powers Firefox, along with a few extra APIs to interact with the underlying operating system, the Chromeless project may one day make it possible to author desktop applications that are indistinguishable from applications written with OS-native tools.

For now though Chromeless is still a very experimental effort and a long way from complete. If you’re interested in learning more, head over to the Chromeless page on Mozilla Labs.

See Also:

• Prism Update Makes Creating Desktop Apps as Simple as Installing a Firefox Add-on
• Mozilla Prism: Refracting The Web Onto Your Desktop
• Fluid Brings Web Applications to Your Mac Desktop

View full post on Webmonkey

Microsoft has announced a plug-in for Google’s Chrome web browser that allows Chrome on Windows to play H.264 web video through the HTML5 <video> tag. The new plug-in comes on the heels of Google’s decision to remove H.264 support from Chrome and focus on the company’s competing WebM video codec.

You can grab the new Chrome plugin from Microsoft. Microsoft previously released a similar H.264 plugin for Firefox, which also only supports WebM video.

The video move is the latest sign of a collision between the two tech giants, who now compete directly in search, courtesy of Microsoft’s Bing initiative and mobile, where Google’s Android is taking market share and the new Windows Phone 7 is struggling for a foothold. Google has also launched various cloud-based applications that take aim at Office. This week, the two threw punches over search, with Google claiming Microsoft copies its results, and Microsoft complaining the Google perpetrated a sting worthy of a spy novel.

Now the two are sparing over web video. Google has thrown its weight behind the WebM codec, which the company owns, while Microsoft supports H.264. However, Microsoft says that, provided Google makes some changes, it may be willing to support the WebM codec as well.

While HTML5’s video tag promises a native way to watch video in your browser, video codec support among browsers is divided. Firefox, Opera and Chrome support the WebM codec while Apple’s Safari and Microsoft’s IE9 support H.264. As it stands there is no “it just works” solution, which means most websites still use Flash video players.

Microsoft’s H.264 plug-ins for Firefox and Chrome are part of the company’s attempt to be pragmatic — since Windows includes native support for H.264, users should be able to watch H.264 video even if the browser doesn’t support it. On the other side of the coin, Internet Explorer 9 will be able to play WebM video through a similar third-party plug-in.

However, while Microsoft isn’t including native support for WebM in the next version of IE, it doesn’t appear to totally rule out the idea. As part of the plugin announcement, Dean Hachamovitch, corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, outlines some of Microsoft’s problems with the WebM codec. The main problem is that Microsoft is concerned about WebM’s potential patent risks.

Google insists that it owns all of the patents covering WebM and the VP8 video codec. But the company offers no indemnification for costs incurred should a patent lawsuit arise. That means that anyone distributing WebM/VP8 could be on the hook for any patent-related fees that might come up.

Some have dismissed Microsoft’s patent worries as an example of Microsoft spreading “fear, uncertainty and doubt” about WebM, but Microsoft does have history on its side in this case. As Hachamovitch points out, such patent lawsuits often don’t arise until a technology is in widespread use. So just because no one is suing over WebM now, doesn’t mean they won’t in the future. Hachamovitch cites the JPEG photo compression format, pointing out that JPEG was around for ten years before the first patent lawsuits appeared. Eventually the patents in question were ruled invalid, but not before millions of dollars were spent defending and licensing JPEG.

Of course the same patent threats potentially hang over H.264, but the MPEG-LA consortium — the governing body that oversees the patents surrounding H.264 — provides a kind of legal buffer between H.264 licensees and any lawsuit.

Surprisingly, Hachamovitch says that, if Google is willing to indemnify WebM users against patent lawsuits, “Microsoft is willing to commit that we will never assert any patents on VP8.” Of course that doesn’t mean other companies won’t, but it would be a huge step forward for WebM if Microsoft jumped on the bandwagon. Google did not respond to a request to comment in time for this story.

For now at least Microsoft has chosen a pragmatic approach — plugins. There will be a WebM plugin for Internet Explorer and H.264 plugins for Firefox and Chrome. In the end, Windows users will be able to watch just about any video on the web regardless of which browser they’re using. It might not be an ideal solution, but it is one that, from the user’s point of view, just works.

See Also:

• Microsoft Adds H.264 Video Support to Firefox
• Google Dropping H.264 Codec from Chrome Browser [Updated]
• Major Browser Vendors Launch WebM Free Open Video Project
• Microsoft Says Web Video in IE9 Is All About H.264

View full post on Webmonkey

Mozilla is wasting no time putting its proposed “Do Not Track” HTTP header onto the web. The latest Firefox nightly builds now include support for the new header and it may even make the final release of Firefox 4, due later this month. The new HTTP header, which Mozilla announced last week, is designed to tell online advertisers to stop tracking your web browsing habits.

If you’d like to see how Mozilla has implemented the header, grab the latest Firefox nightly build. There have been a few changes since Mozilla first announced its plan, including renaming the header to simply “DNT.”

To turn the header on, open Firefox’s preferences panel and select the Advanced tab (eventually Mozilla will add the option to the more appropriate Privacy tab). There you’ll see a new option to “Tell websites I do not want to be tracked.” Of course even if you turn the header on today and broadcast “DNT: 1″ to the web, it won’t do anything.

For the header to actually protect your privacy, websites and online advertisers will have to support it. While there’s plenty of debate as to whether they ever will, it definitely won’t happen until the feature is widely available. Mozilla is hoping that including the new header in Firefox 4 will spur advertisers to support it.

For now, broadcasting “DNT: 1″ will be, as Alexander Fowler, the Global Privacy and Public Policy Leader at Mozilla, puts it, “akin to displaying EFF’s Blue Ribbon campaign.”

The current plan is to test the privacy header in the next beta release of Firefox 4 and then, assuming there are no bugs, roll it out with the final release of Firefox 4 later this month.

See Also:

• Mozilla Plans ‘Do-Not-Track’ Privacy Tools for Firefox
• Chrome Add-on Kills Tracking Cookies
• New Privacy Icons Aim to Save You From Yourself
• Warning: This Site May Be Sharing Your Data

View full post on Webmonkey

The new Readability pays the sites you read

Readability, a browser tool which isolates the text on a webpage making it easier to read, has announced it’s moving beyond its humble beginnings to become a “full-fledged reading platform.” Readability will now offer iOS apps and, more importantly, it’s no longer a free tool.

The new Readability will cost you a minimum of $5 a month, with 70 percent of that fee going directly to the writers and publishers whose sites you visit.

Readability and similar tools, like Apple’s Safari 5 web browser have been criticized for cutting into publishers’ bottom line by eliminating online advertisements. The new non-free Readability is at least in part a way to address this concern. As readers, most people want a clean, distraction-free reading experience. At the same time no one wants to deprive their favorite websites of the income necessary to keep the site going. Readability’s new pricing plan is an attempt to find some common ground and keep everyone happy.

Not only does the new Readability give readers an option to hide ads and view a more readable page (which they may well be doing anyway), it provides a new source of income for the site. Even better, that additional revenue comes from the actual content, rather than simply the ads surrounding the content.

Ironically, in testing the new Readability, I realized that most sites I read regularly already have clean designs, nice typography and uncluttered layouts — sites that don’t really need Readability. But the new payment system can help those sites too. Readability’s payment system turns the service into something more than just a reformatting tool — it’s a bit like a roving micropayments system, handing out money to sites you enjoy.

Here’s how it works: The minimum fee is $5 a month, though Readability encourages you to spend more if you can afford it. The money is then split up between articles where you use Readability. Visit only one site and it will get all of your money; visit several dozen and each will see only a few pennies unless you up your monthly payment. You can use the Readability web interface to see where your money is going. It’s like micropayments, but all the transaction details are handled behind the scenes by Readability.

Of course you aren’t just paying the writers and publishers. Thirty percent of your monthly fee money goes to Readability, which has some new browser extensions, web badges, an API and some nice looking (though as-yet-unapproved) iOS apps built around the popular Instapaper.

The Instapaper contribution means that in addition to the “Read Now” button, which gives you a more readable version of the current article, there’s also a new “Read Later” button. Read Later works just like it does in Instapaper, saving the article to your account for when you have more time to read. Unfortunately, right now there’s no way to actually integrate your Instapaper account with Readability.

The “Read Now” and “Read Later” buttons can come from either the Readability browser extension, bookmarklet or from the site itself using a new embedded button (there’s also an API for more sophisticated integration).

Despite the integration tools and new payment system, it’s unlikely most sites will ever get rich from Readability. Of course it’s unlikely most sites are making much from Google Ads either, and it certainly never hurts to have another form of income, even if it is measured in pennies.

See Also:

• Design for Readability First
• Safari 5’s ‘Reader’ Simplifies the Web

View full post on Webmonkey

First 37Signals announced it would drop support for OpenID. Then Microsoft’s Dare Obasanjo called OpenID a failure (along with XML and AtomPub). Former Facebooker Yishan Wong’s scathing (and sometimes wrong) rant calling OpenID a failure is one of the more popular answers on Quora.

But if OpenID is a failure, it’s one of the web’s most successful failures.

OpenID is available on more than 50,000 websites. There are over a billion OpenID enabled URLs on the web thanks to providers like Google, Yahoo and Microsoft. Yet, for most people, trying to log in to every website using OpenID remains a difficult task, which means that while thousands of websites support it, hardly anyone uses OpenID.

OpenID promised to solve two problems. First, it would offer an easy way to log in to any website without needing to create a new account. And, second, it would enable you to have a consistant identity across the entire web. This worked well with the limited audience of bloggers and tech-savvy users that were part of the original vision.

But then as the vision of OpenID grew to encompass, well, everything, it became bogged down in the details. Despite widespread support, there is no uniform user experience. Every site that supports OpenID does it slightly differently, which only further confuses the majority of people.

The main reason no one uses OpenID is because Facebook Connect does the same thing and does it better. Everyone knows what Facebook is and it’s much easier to understand that Facebook is handling your identity than some vague, unrecognized thing called OpenID. That’s why, despite the impressive sounding billion URLs and 50,000 sites supporting OpenID, it pales next to Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect has been around less than half the time of OpenID and yet it’s been adopted by some 250,000 websites, is available to the hundreds of millions of Facebook users and has the advantage of Facebook’s brand familiarity.

Facebook also added a key ingredient that helped drive other sites to adopt Facebook Connect — sharing user data. One of the reasons more sites support Facebook Connect is that they get a piece of the user pie.

Web publishers never warmed to OpenID since it allows a user to log in to a website and leave a comment on a story, a blog post or a photo while essentially remaining anonymous to the publisher. That anonymous aspect has made OpenID less attractive to publishers who want to collect more data about their readers or interact with them — whether that means following them on Twitter, connecting with them on Facebook or sending them e-mail.

The OpenID Connect proposal aims to solve this shortcoming by using OAuth to allow publishers to request more information from a user when they log in using OpenID. But so far there has been very little support for OpenID Connect. Facebook Connect is still far more popular.

However, not everyone wants to tie their website’s login structure to a single company like Facebook. If 37Signals is the poster child for OpenID failure, Stack Overflow is the poster child for its success. The popular programming Q&A site abandoned traditional username/password based accounts in favor of OpenID and declared the experience a resounding success.

Government sites are also looking to use OpenID rather than tie themselves to Facebook. And the Obama administration has announced plans for an Internet identity system that sounds a lot like OpenID, though the exact details have yet to be revealed.

Eventually OpenID will likely disappear from the web, not because it was a failure, but because identity will be managed in other ways. Mozilla is hard at work putting identity in the browser. It’s not hard to envision Firefox managing your OpenID credentials for you, just as it does today with your passwords. In that sense OpenID may end up like RSS (another tool routinely declared dead), invisibly powering features behind the scenes, essential, but unnoticed. Eventually online identity may even come full circle and move back into the real world — chips in your phone, tokens that generate random codes or biometric devices.

The legacy of OpenID may well be that it was ahead of its time, but that hardly makes it a failure.

See Also:

• New ‘OpenID Connect’ Proposal Could Solve Many of the Social Web’s Woes
• Facebook Adopts Open Standard for User Logins
• Twitter Switches on @Anywhere

View full post on Webmonkey

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), the standards body that overseas HTML, CSS and other web technologies, has release a rough draft specification for touch screen devices. The spec is far from complete, but eventually it could give developers a set of standards for creating touch-based interfaces.

Thus far touch screen devices have primarily mimicked mouse behaviors. But the rise of multi-touch gestures and the larger screens available on tablets, mean that touch screens of the future may offer design possibilities far beyond the mouse-based world that exists on today’s web. The goal of the W3C’s touch-based spec is to help define standard behaviors and events that developers can translate into touch-friendly interfaces.

Like much of the W3C’s work, the new touch-screen spec starts with existing specs, in this case Apple’s iOS touch event spec. The W3C’s draft adds several more events like X and Y radii for touch areas and a “force” property. The later, while rather vague at the moment, could give developers a way to emulate mouse-rollover events. For example, a light touch could trigger a rollover, while a hard touch clicks a link.

Mobile platform consultant Peter-Paul Koch calls out a few minor problems and undecided issues — for example, no units are specified for the radius or force properties — but overall says the spec is a step in the right direction.

The Touch Events Specification is a long way from done; it doesn’t even have a real URL on the W3C site yet. And, other than the events cloned from Apple, the spec is not supported anywhere in the wild. Still, touch screens clearly need an expanded set of standards to go along with desktop standards and it’s nice to see the W3C stepping up to the plate.

See Also:

• Make a Big Splash on Tiny Screens With Media Queries
• Damn the W3C, HTML5 Is Already Here
• Slide Show Time: Rethinking the Mobile Web
• Can WAI-ARIA Build a More Accessible Web?

View full post on Webmonkey

Your favorite sites ready to go with Home Dash

Mozilla Labs has cranked out an interesting new experiment dubbed Home Dash, a Firefox add-on that removes the standard web browser interface — the location bar, search bar and tabs — and leaves behind just a Firefox logo. Click the logo and you’ll be presented with a dashboard where your most-visited sites are found.

It’s not an entirely new take on browsing, but Home Dash is definitely an extreme departure from the traditional web browser interface. In its current form, Home Dash is a bit like the idea pioneered by Opera’s Speed Dial feature — present a user’s most visited sites and eliminate the need to search. But Home Dash goes further and eliminates most of the browser chrome as well.

If you’d like to take it for a spin, head over to the Firefox add-ons site and install Home Dash (you’ll need to be using a Firefox 4 beta release for Home Dash to work). For some tips and help with Home Dash, see Mozilla’s follow-up post.

The idea behind Home Dash is to move from a search or recall-based browser to a “browse-based” browser. The web browser as we know it is primarily a recall-based experience. Much like the command line of yesteryear, it’s up to you to remember URLs and websites (or create bookmarks and shortcuts). But a browse-based interface works on recognition rather than recall — you see a thumbnail of where you want to go; you click on it. The burden of remembering names and URLs, or even creating shortcuts, is removed. Mozilla’s Head of User Experience, Alex Faaborg, has a nice piece with some more background on the difference between these two approaches.

With Home Dash you browse to the sites you like, rather than typing in URLs or search terms to find them. For now that means Home Dash pulls up your twenty-four most visited sites as thumbnails. When you hover a thumbnail the actual site will load in the background, but for anything beyond your most-visited sites you’re back in the search bar, recalling. The usefulness of Home Dash will depend entirely on how you use the web. For those that typically visit the same sites over and over, Home Dash may be a better interface. But if you more frequently search new information, and land on new sites, Home Dash may get in the way.

Eventually, the team behind Home Dash is planning to let you customize the dashboard by adding and removing websites, as well as resizing the thumbnail previews the way you see fit. Plans also call for Home Dash to broaden the range of “sites” so you can add web apps, widgets and even people. For now though Home Dash is very experimental and limited.

Home Dash is also buggy, UI elements flashed and occasionally disappeared in our testing and overall experience felt more like a step backward than anything else. In fact, it may well be that the URL bar is the command line perfected and we don’t need a browse-based experience. After all, once you’ve moved beyond your twenty-four sites, Home Dash offers nothing you can’t already do with the URL and Search bars.

However, while the traditional desktop experience may not be the ideal setting for Home Dash, it isn’t hard to see the appeal on touch screen devices like the many Android-based tablets that are due to arrive in the near future. The Mozilla Labs announcement makes no mention of tablets, but a touch-based version of Home Dash seems inevitable.

If you’d rather not install something as experimental as Home Dash, check out the video below which covers the basics (requires a WebM-video-capable browser):

Posted in Technology0 Comments