Third Party Mobile Browsers – part 1: Opera Mini

Published on 19 May 2011 at 9:26 pm. 1 Comment.
Filed under Mobile.

This is the first in a series of posts on interesting third party browsers for the mobile Web.

Introduction

If you have been listening to the media you’re probably aware of the war between Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android operating systems for dominance the mobile market. You may even see the occasional article reminding you about Microsoft’s Windows Mobile phone and Research in Motion (RIM)’s BlackBerry. All of these devices together make up the majority of what people think of when they think of mobile devices.

Every device has their own default mobile browser. The latest version of Windows Mobile phone has an IE7/IE8 hybrid (with an update coming later this year to update to IE9), while iOS, Android, and the latest offering BlackBerry run some version of WebKit (the engine powering Google Chrome and Safari). But most of these devices allow you to install additional browsers. This series seeks to inform you of the most important and the most interesting of third party mobile browsers.

Opera Mini

You may or may not have heard of the Opera Web browser. Opera hails from a Norwegian company of the same name and is actually most innovative browser of all the major browsers. It is the first browser to offer great features such as tabbed browsing, mouse gestures, and what later became HTML5 forms (something that Firefox and Chrome are just now beginning to offer today when Opera had support for most of these features back in 2007). While their North American market share is not much to gloat about, they are actually pretty popular over on the eastern hemisphere, as well as embedded devices such as the Nintendo Wii and mobile phones. In fact, Opera is the most used mobile browser in the entire world. While its usage is lower in North America, in today’s global economy it is not wise to discount where your next client may come from.

Opera’s splits their mobile offerings between two products: Opera Mini, and Opera Mobile. This article covers Opera Mini, and I will discuss Opera Mobile in another article.

Opera Mini is supported against a plethora of mobile devices: iOS, Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry, Symbian/S60, and Java based phones. It is a lightweight browser that is geared for low powered phones or users with poor internet connections or expensive data plans. Unlike most mobile browsers that directly access the Internet, Opera Mini instead connects to an Opera server where it sends a compressed version of the Web page back. In most real world situations this compressed version tends to load pages much faster than any other browser, but sites does tend to look slightly off compared to other browsers.

Some cool features include:

  • The aforementioned compressed page using Opera Turbo so users get pages faster and uses less data (saving users time and money)
  • Very low power usage, so users can browse longer without killing their battery
  • Quick access to your favorite bookmarks with Opera Speed Dial
  • Save pages for offline viewing
  • A cursor (if your device comes with something that can be used as such, like the D-pad on the Motorola Droid)
  • SSL encryption with Server Name Identification (making it more secure than the browser on all Android based devices currently on the market)
  • Support for CSS media queries allowing you to style the page in both portrait and landscape mode (though seems a bit buggy in my experience)

Some drawbacks to consider:

  • No ability to install plug-ins such as Flash
  • Limited design features:
    • No italic text
    • No native rounded corners (i.e. border-radius)
    • No native drop shadows (i.e. box-shadow)
  • Verylimited JavaScript abilities. This includes:
    • JavaScript animation
    • time based interactions may not behave as expected
    • Ajax based interaction is severely limited because it is not sending/receiving data from the true Web server
  • Limited ability to tailor sites for individual users
  • No HTML5 features

This post was originally published as Third Party Mobile Browsers – part 1: Opera Mini for The BrandBuilder Company.

Don’t be dirty

Published on 12 May 2011 at 5:38 pm. Comments Off on Don’t be dirty.
Filed under Mobile.

I am a huge fan of my Droid. It does everything I need it to and it keeps on getting better as apps get updated. Better navigation than my TomTom, easier to transfer files like mp3s than my iPod touch, and great integration with all of my Google accounts. I’m happy.

That being said over the last few months I’d noticed that the touch screen seemed to be getting less responsive. I have my Droid in a case and have a thin screen placed over my screen to protect it that I purchased from the Verizon store when I bought my phone in March of 2010. I was starting to think that all of these updates were taking their toll on my poor Droid. 🙁

So I was walking in the mall walking by the Verizon store and I decided to take it in and look at new models, look at the Xoom, and in general browse around. One of the salesmen walked up to me and we started to chat. I brought up the issue about the responsiveness and he asked to take a look at my Droid. He pointed out that I should occasionally change the protective screen as it felt like I had some build up going on that was difficult to remove. After purchasing the a new package of covers and allowing the salesman to replace the cover the response problem went away. The phone works great again. I am happy.

Let that be a lesson to everyone. Technology is really sensitive to things like dirt and dust. This holds true with your PC. You’re occasionally clearing the dust off the exhaust fans on the back of your PC so that it runs smoother, right? Don’t get dirty and your tech will love you back.

This post was originally published as Don’t be dirty for The BrandBuilder Company.

Forecasting for Firefox 4.0

Published on 22 Jan 2011 at 3:12 am. Comments Off on Forecasting for Firefox 4.0.
Filed under Informative.

By Brian LePore

Firefox 4.0 is scheduled for release in February and we here at The BrandBuilder Company felt that you might like to hear how this new version will make your web browsing experience better.

One of the biggest changes you’ll notice right away is that Firefox is faster than ever thanks to a new feature called hardware acceleration, which we’ll talk about later.

The obvious change is to the interface, which has been greatly simplified to remove clutter and show users more of the Web site on a screen. Here’s a quick summary:

  • The default position of tabs has moved to the Title Bar (the bar that runs across the top of any application). There is a custom option that allows users to revert back to the old style by right clicking on any empty space in the application area at the top of the screen and unchecking ‘Tabs on Top’.  This change makes it look like Google Chrome.
  • Windows Vista/7 users have had the Menu Bar (the bar that runs across below the title bar and usually says something like File, Edit, View, etc) hidden by default, and a new Firefox button added to the top left corner. Clicking on that button brings up a menu of the most used features from the old menu bar. The old Menu Bar can be brought back temporarily by clicking on the alt button on your keyboard, or permanently by checking ‘Menu Bar’ on the same screen as the ‘Tabs on Top” option mentioned below.
  • The Status Bar (the bar at the bottom of the screen) has been eliminated and replaced with something called an Add-on bar. The Status Bar was used to display the URL of a link when you placed your mouse over a link. This functionality has been moved to the address bar as a second URL that is displayed. Unfortunately there is no option in the default build of Firefox 4.0 to turn this feature back on, but you can install a Firefox extension that provides the same exact functionality. You can download this extension at: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/235283/

Firefox 4 also includes a number of new features that allow content providers to deliver better Web sites. Some highlights include:

  • The ability to watch high quality WebM video, something Chrome will be switching to exclusively, and better viewing of YouTube video.
  • The ability to validate URL’s and e-mail addresses in Web forms before a form is submitted to the server.
  • New transition features that allow page elements to fluidly transition from one state to another. Just check out our Help Center and mouse over the navigation to see an example of this in action.
  • 3D graphics, which can be a great way to add impact to your site.

Most of the speed improvement comes from a new feature I mentioned called hardware acceleration. Basically this means that it uses hardware that is present in modern computers to speed up the rendering of a page. This feature is only present in Mac OS X, and Windows Vista/7. There are other speed improvements that have been done to the engine, so Windows XP users will still see some improvement.

This post was originally published as Forecasting for Firefox 4.0 for The BrandBuilder Company.

IE9 predictions

Published on 14 Mar 2010 at 9:22 pm. .
Filed under Web stuff.

My predictions for Internet Explorer 9

  1. Microsoft will officially make an announcement for it at Microsoft MIX 2010.
  2. Border-radius support!
  3. At least a portion of the SVG spec will be supported.
  4. Native support for newly introduced HTML5 elements. They may not actually function, but no longer will one need JavaScript in order to style them.
  5. Native Drag-and-drop
  6. DOM2 events.
  7. DOMContentLoaded support.
  8. Box-shadow and text-shadow
  9. @font-face to support truetype fonts
  10. opacity

Stretch predictions:

  • CSS gradients
  • CSS transitions and transforms
  • W3C Ranges/Selection
  • Video element to support H.264 and ogg vorbis
  • Audio element to support mp3 and ogg.
  • DOM3 events
  • Web Forms 2.0

Local Load

Published on 14 Feb 2010 at 9:20 pm. .
Filed under Life,Politics,Web stuff.

Just wanted to post here that I have created a new Web site dedicated to my new Firefox extension Local Load.

Phase one of Local Load is to allow developers to speed up the loading of their Web sites and to save on bandwidth by loading a copy of the most popular JavaScript frameworks on the net (currently I choose all the extensions hosted on the Google AJAX Library API) from the local disk, rather than loading the file from the Web.

Phase two of Local Load will be to allow users to install their own scripts that can be replaced by Local Load. The believe is that when this is coupled with the Mozilla Build Your Own Browser (BYOB) project (or something similar) will allow developers to deliver enterprise solutions using Web technologies with the near speed of a local application.

RIP XHTML 2.0 We never knew thee

Published on 3 Jul 2009 at 9:47 pm. .
Filed under Web stuff.

Recently the W3C announced that it will no longer focus its time on the development of XHTML 2 in order focus its efforts on the widely heralded HTML 5 specification. This is something that I am very honestly surprised took this long to happen. XHTML started out as an XML serialization of HTML. XHTML2 barely had anything to do with XHTML 1.1 or XHTML 1.0 and was not even remotely backwards compatible with the current state of the Web.

HTML 5 does not have this problem. HTML 5 is an extension of what already exists on the Web. It is because of this that browser makers have jumped on this effort and have already begun working on the features for this. All modern browsers, even IE8, support at least SOME features of HTML 5. Unfortunately there are too many people out there today that are not using browsers that support these features, and every browser maker has picked various parts of HTML 5 to implement first, but we are seeing progress on this. XHTML 2 has been in the works for a number of years longer than HTML 5. And as far as I am aware no browser supports anything that was being planned for such. The only exception possibly being XForms (which Opera has the best support), and I’m not even sure if that was a part of XHTML 2.

I don’t know a single developer that has ever attemptd to write anything using said language. Maybe I’m just not listening to the right people, but I do spend a signficant portion of my life following the works of industry leaders such Peter-Paul Koch (ppk), Eric Meyer, and Molly Holzchlag, as well as the development blogs for the Internet Explorer team, the JScript team, Google Code, and the Yahoo Developer Network. I can’t believe that between all of that those groups that I would not once have ever heard about something interesting happening with XTHML 2.0 support if there was really something going on. For years I considered it an intellectual challenge rather than something that was ever going to be taken seriously. That intellectual challenge has met its unfortunate end. XHTML 2.0 we never knew thee.

Hey that was my idea…

Published on 2 Jul 2009 at 10:22 pm. .
Filed under Web stuff.

Google recently created a new site dedicated to making the Web faster. This site site contains a few articles and video tutorials that are a very helpful resource that gathers advice by experts in the field of Web development. It was the Life’s Too Short – Write Faster Code video that I found particularly interesting. At the 38 minute mark the speaker brings up a module that is used by the dojo library to load Google Analytics faster. The snippet that he shows is a dojo version of the same type of code I posted in the Google Analytics forum for non-blocking GA load and later reitterated on SlashDot.

Do I think they ripped off my idea without any credit? No, I doubt that is the case. In fact looking at the Dojo Google Analytic revision page it seems that they came up with the idea in on August 17, 2008. I don’t recall when we deployed our version at work, but it was months before I posted the version on the Google Analytics forum. Regardless, the ideas were conceived independently from one another which I find fascinating. I don’t think I am a bad programmer by any means, but I didn’t know that I was so good that the techniques I have come up were considered good enough to present to the masses. 🙂

Collectability

Published on 2 Jul 2009 at 9:49 pm. .
Filed under Comics.

In a recent Cup O’ Joe article on Comic Book Resources a reader named Kristen had a particularly sad story to ask Joe Quesada, the head of the publishing division of Marvel Comics. Her brother had recently passed away and she had discovered his comic book collection dating back 60 years. This collection had numerous comics of great shape, but was dumbfounded upon the discovery of the first 14 issues of Spider-Girl was vacuum sealed to preserve the comic in mint condition.

The first issue of Spider-Girl has a cover date of October 1998, and despite a very vocal and loyal following (of which I am a part of said following and have every appearance of said character) the comic faced cancelation on numerous occasion only to be saved due to various campaigns across fandom or the use of publishing gimmicks to up sales on the book. It got to the point where Spider-Girl was finally officially cancelled and new stories of the character was moved to Marvel’s digital/online comic imprint where her stories are printed a few weeks later in the Amazing Spider-Man Family anthology comic. While there is some value to these 14 issues, everyone (including Quesada) agrees that this set of comics is an interesting choice of comics to preserve, presumably considering the value of other comics in there vastly exceeding these comics.

After speaking out on the negative stigma that collectability received due to the speculator boom in the mid-90’s Quesada had this to say:

For someone like Kristin’s brother who was an obvious fan of the medium, there is a whole other aspect to collectability. It sounds to me that he was like so many of us, who keep our comics or collect certain comics because we have an emotional attachment to them and or they remind us of a particular moment in time in our lives. I have a very small collection. It’s a collection that isn’t particularly worth much money. They’re mostly torn up books, not necessarily hallmark issues, but they mean something to me. I have the first three comics that my father bought me. They were three Spider-Man comics, and they’re all torn up and in terrible shape. I didn’t really keep them very well but I always kept them very close to my heart. They’re comics that I will give to my daughter, and hopefully she can give them to her kids if they last that long.

So, with respect to “Spider-Girl,” I don’t know what the market value is on those books, but it’s probably not a lot, but there are readers out there who do treasure May Day’s adventures. Perhaps Kristin’s brother may have taken extra care preserving them because perhaps those stories had a particular emotional connection with him or he saw something in those books that he wanted to preserve for a later date. Maybe he was saving them for a special moment – perhaps to hand them down to someone he thought might get a lot out of these comics.

While I have not gotten to the point where I have ever vacuum sealed any comics — in fact I do not yet have every one of my comics bagged and boarded, though every comic I have purchased for the last 6-7 years has been and I have worked my way up my collection to the “S”s bagged and boarded — I do indeed have numerous comics that I think back of fondly that do not have significant value. Interestingly enough, many of them coming from the Spider-Girl writer Tom DeFalco.  It was during his run on Fantastic Four that I began truly collecting and not just buying random issues I came across and thus why I am so lenient on that era of Fantastic Four, despite it being considered a poor run by many Fantastic Four fans. Which then explains why I was also a fan of DeFalco’s Spider-clone fiasco.  *

I must have read the story where Spider-Man’s gained the powers of Captain Universe about a dozen times when I was a child. It was such a novel concept for me as a child. Here we have Spider-Man, a down to Earth guy who is remarkably driven by guilt/responsibility (despite not being Catholic) who cracks jokes to make up for his own inadequacies and because a situation was so dire he was chosen as the random recipient of cosmic powers to battle a Tri-Sentinel. Honestly, it sounds corny as all heck, but I loved it back then. I didn’t get many comics at the time, but a comic shop did open up around me. At the time that time Marvel recent some trading cards. My Grandpa bought me a pack and it contained hologram card of cosmic powered Spider-Man! I went back and bought as many packs as I could because the holograms were so cool. I then read the stats and the background history on the characters and I was hooked. It got me back in and buying actual comics. I really wish I did not write on a few of those cards. 🙁

The Spider-Girl is a run of comics that means a great deal to me. These stories were told in a contemporary manner that harken back to many elements from the silver/bronze era. They are stories that work on numerous levels. They are stories that are appropriate for children that are intellectual enough that a young adult (or the adult collector) can consider them entertaining. I do feel that they would be great stories to read to a daughter to give her a great role model.

* This may seem like I am implying DeFalco was a bad writer, but this is not the truth. Unfortunately the speculator boom hit Marvel very hard and it was on the brink of or had to file bankruptcy during these eras and thus Marvel was forced to run wild with any concept that started to sell even relatively well. This meant that writers were being forced to keep coming up with ideas for something that may have legitimately only had a limited shelf-life. The Spider-clone storyline is considered the most infamous of such conundrums.

The new state of video on the Web

Published on 2 Jul 2009 at 8:34 pm. .
Filed under Web stuff.

The recent release of Mozilla Firefox 3.5 seems to have sparked a great deal of discussion about what codecs browsers should support with the newly added <video> element that was introduced in HTML5.

The believe behind the video element is that video has become so fundamental to the Web that it no longer makes sense to require users to install plug-ins such as Flash or Silverlight in order to watch files. The video element allows for sub elements such as a link to a file that the browser will play if it knows how to play it. It allows you to place other content inside of the tag as a fall back in case nothing can play it, or the browser does not support the video tag to begin with. This means that you could embed Flash (or Silverlight) to play the video if the video tag as a fallback, and barring that you can reference just the little bit more.

The OGG Theora codec is a royalty-free codec, while H.264 (as seen in mp4) is a proprietary codec that offers a higher quality video at a lower bitrate than OGG. Opera and Mozilla are hesitant about supporting H.264 due to licensing and distribution issues, while Apple does not seem to be interested in implementing OGG claiming they are worried concerned about patents. Google (who owns YouTube, which serves out files using H.264, but no OGG) actually supports both file formats in Google Chrome.  Microsoft’s recently released IE8 has no support for the video element.

To help keep things clear, here is a Venn diagram. 🙂

Venn diagram showing support for the video element.

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