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  1. Sep03

    The story behind Google Chrome

    Ben Goodger and Google Chrome

    Google released its second web browser yesterday afternoon, adding additional headroom for web applications stretching the limits of what it's possible to accomplish within a web browser. The Google Chrome team assembled domain experts in various fields over the past six years, both through direct hires and acquisitions, to create a new browser and its critical components from scratch. GMail and Google Maps pushed the Web to its limits, taking advantage of browser technologies invented in Redmond but left dormant for far too long. Contributing to Firefox's core, writing browser extensions, and championing HTML could only take the $150 billion company so far: they needed to own the full browser to push their Web efforts forward at full speed.

    1. Growing Frustrations
    2. Acquisition Boost
    3. A New Browser from Scratch
    4. Rev your JavaScript Engines
    5. Meet the Team
    6. Summary

    Growing Frustrations

    Brian Rakowski joined Google in July 2002 as the company's first associate product manager. His first assignment? Launch GMail with features and responsiveness to rival desktop mail clients. Gmail tapped into relatively dormant browser features such as XMLHttpRequest, sockets, prefetch, and more to create a web applications stretching the limits of what was possible inside web browsers of 2004. Today's Gmail continues to run into a browser's limits, setting minimum requirements of Internet Explorer 7+ and Firefox 2+. Google web apps teams such as Maps and Mail continually bump their heads against the latest capabilities of web browsers and in some cases invent their own runtimes.

    Ian Hickson first learned the inner workings of web browsers while an intern at Netscape. After working on Opera for a few years and creating tests for Firefox Ian joined Google to continue his work on new browser features. HTML5 and browser compliance "acid" tests are significant attempts by Ian and others to redefine Web browsers through specs, test, and implementations but until now Google could only offer development help and browser extensions such as Gears to accelerate browser capabilities.

    Google extended what it could not immediately add to the browser core. Gears for new application functionality on multiple browsers. Browser Sync to synchronize browser settings and data across multiple computers. Safe Browsing to create more web trust. Teams from each of these extensions are now working on Google Chrome.

    Acquisition Boost

    Google released its first official Web browser on August 18, 2008 with the beta release of the Android mobile operating system. Google acquired Android in August 2005 to establish a foot-hold on the fastest growing computer (and Web) market: mobile handsets. Android highlights Google's web properties through its WebKit-based browser and dependent applications. Google acquired Ottawa-based Reqwireless and its mobile web browser in the summer of 2005 to team up with the Android team on its web interface. Web views are an integral part of Android and Google Chrome shares much of Android's code, including its graphics engine.

    Google Chrome and Android both take advantage of the Skia vector graphics library developed by a small company in North Carolina Google acquired in 2005. The Skia team formerly worked on Openwave's popular mobile browser's graphics engine. Google Chrome browser includes Skia graphics engine ports for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

    Google acquired application security company GreenBorder in May 2007. GreenBorder technology automatically sandboxes web code and network traffic by creating a bridge between applications. The GreenBorder technology isolated Internet Explorer or Firefox instances into a "sandbox" inside virtual machine instances. These sandboxes form the code isolation layers of Google Chrome, protecting other tabs and the parent operating system from the code executing on each web page.

    A New Browser from Scratch

    Ben Goodger, Google Chrome's tech lead, is best known for assembling the Firefox web browser out of Mozilla's SeaMonkey application suite. Manticore, Camino, and later Firefox were all attempts in 2001 to rethink the Web browser for the modern age. Browsing took center stage away from a communications suite, user interfaces reimagined for Web efficiency, and (some) legacy cruft tossed to the side. Google hired Ben in 2005 to strengthen its own browser contributions and eventually fully rearchitect a web browser for the modern Web.

    Google hired top Firefox developers in 2005 and 2006 such as Darin Fisher, Pam Greene, and Brian Ryner. In Spring 2006 the team began work on a new browser prototype built on top of WebKit designed for broadband-connected, always-on, web applications such as Gmail or Google Maps. Could the browser experts give web apps some breathing room?

    Modern computers feature multi-core multi-gigahertz CPUs, gigabytes of memory, megabits of bandwidth, and bulky hard drives. Our web browsers should separate browser tabs into their own processes, multi-thread all communications with the operating system, boost cache sizes, and not be afraid to command more bandwidth when available. Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3.1, and Apple Safari are taking fresh approaches to web browsers for modern machines but Google Chrome has the advantage of a fresh start to achieve some features not currently possible in other browser architectures.

    Features such as tab-isolation and task monitoring are difficult tasks to add inside an existing browser architecture of shared run-times and window models (as John Resig mentioned). Internet Explorer 8's Loosely Coupled IE partially abstracts browser tab instances and the industry is generally headed in this direction.

    Web application-specific resource monitoring should motivate more websites to reduce their browser bloat now that they've been identified. Individual users can also compare web application resource usage directly with their desktop counterparts.

    Rev your JavaScript Engines

    Lars Bak and his team in Århus, Denmark have spent many years writing virtual machines: the run-times that translate programming code into machine code. Lars wrote Sun's Java VM, HotSpot, and later slimmed down the VM for J2ME (CLDC HI project Monty). A few years ago Lars and his team in Denmark began work on a new interpreted JavaScript engine optimized for x86 and ARM architectures.

    The V8 engine is specifically tuned for recursive JavaScript tasks, optimizing commonly used components of your application. V8 is multi-threaded, opening up new parallel processing on multiple computing cores. V8 guesses how you might use your JavaScript code, and backtracks over any faulty assumptions. It's just one of the new engines we'll see inside our web browsers by the end of 2008.

    Google Chrome could have used the same JavaScript interpreter as its WebKit rendering engine (JavaScriptCore, SquirrelFish) but the team had an opportunity, and the funding, to rewrite an interpreter from scratch for desktop and mobile runtimes.

    The V8 engine enables new feature sets for Google's web applications such as Gmail and Google Maps. Web application developers avoid adding features that visibly slow down browsers or cause processing pauses in your application experience. New speed in new areas adds functionality to existing apps. Google programmers should create more efficient code, tested against multiple interpreters, and optimized for modern computers as a result of V8. Even if Google Chrome gains no significant browser market share I still expect it will be the best single-site browser for Google web applications.

    Google Chrome adds additional JavaScript functionality through Gears. Gears is bundled with every Chrome install, adding new features to the web browser faster than previous plugins. The Gears libraries include support for new local cache structures, local databases, location data, background tasks, and file handling. Chrome boosts the available Gears footprint for web developers, including Google's own apps such as Google Reader and Google Docs (and my blog). The current Gears code included in Chrome replicates V8 and sqlite code already present in the browser, a bolt-on that will hopefully be integrated in the near future.

    Chrome, V8, and Gears will be a new testing ground for Google's HTML5 efforts, winning a new seat at the table as an implementor with upstream standards groups such as W3C.

    Meet the Team

    Google Chrome team leads

    I am tracking at least 20 people involved in the Google Chrome project across Google. I'm sure Chromium commit logs will reveal even more (update: more complete list here), but below is a quick summary of Chrome staff.

    Brian Rakowski, Lead Product Manager
    Brian was Google's first associate product manager in 2002, assigned to Gmail. He later worked on the Google Browser Sync Firefox plugin.
    Ben Goodger, Software Engineer
    Ben is the former Firefox 1.0 project lead. He also authored the Firefox extensions system. He joined Google as 2005.
    Mike Pinkerton, Technical Lead
    Mike is one of the Google team members responsible for bringing Chrome to the Mac. Mike worked at Netscape and later on the Gecko-powered AOL client before co-founding the Camino project. Mike joined Google in September 2005 and continues to lead Camino development.
    Darin Fisher, Software Engineer
    Darin was a frequent contributor to the Firefox codebase. He specialized in network libraries, cookies and permissions, and the Netscape Portable Runtime. Darin joined Google in 2005.
    Lars Bak, Software Engineer, V8
    Lars was the core developer on Java HotSpot VM and Monty VM in J2ME for Sun. He co-founded object-oriented VM companies for embedded devices before joining Google. Lars worked on V8 from a farm in Århus, Denmark before moving the team to university offices.
    Kasper Lund, Software Engineer, V8
    Kasper shares a long history with Lars Bak working on virtual machines.
    Brian Ryner, Software Engineer
    Brian is a former contributor to Firefox where he added mousewheel support, tweaked the Gecko rendering engine core, password management, and Linux installers.
    Pam Greene, Software Engineer
    Pam is a long time Firefox contributor. She added OpenSearch to the browser and contributed to full-text search in Places/AwesomeBar.
    Ian Fette, Product Manager
    Ian is a former Firefox contributor who worked on anti-phishing, anti-malware, spelling correction, and the Safe Browsing API.
    Arnaud Weber, Software Engineer
    Arnaud is a former Director of Research and Development at Netscape and Borland before joining Google to work on a "secret project" in September 2006.
    Brett Wilson, Software Engineer
    Brett formerly worked on the Google Toolbar. He contributed to Firefox history and bookmarks functionality.
    Mike Belshe, Software Engineer
    Mike helped write an Outlook add-on called Chrome for Lookout Software before being acquired by Microsoft. Mike also formerly worked at Netscape and Good Technology.
    Huan Ren, Software Engineer
    Huan works on network flow control, negotiating browser interactions with network resources. Huan formerly worked at Microsoft.
    Erik Kay, Software Engineer
    Erik formerly worked on the AvantGo browser, Qurb anti-spam software for Outlook and Outlook Express.
    Glen Murphy, Software Engineer
    Glen specializes in user interface design. He previously worked on user interface. Firefox extensions. Google Browser Sync, Google Blog Search
    Evan Martin, Software Engineer
    Evan writes automated testing tools for Chrome and the Web.
    John Abd-El-Malek, Software Engineer
    John is part of the Windows specialist team at Google bringing Google Desktop, Google Talk , and Breakpad onto Windows XP and Windows Vista.
    Amanda Walker, Software Engineer
    Amanda is one of the people responsible for Chrome's upcoming Mac version.
    Mark Mentovai, Software Engineer
    Mark was heavily involved in moving Firefox for Mac to its current Intel-based architecture. He has worked on the Breakpad project and many levels of Chrome's code.
    Carlos Pizano, Software Engineer
    Carlos formerly worked on GreenBorder and continues to work on Chrome sandboxing.
    Mark Larson, Program Manager
    Mark is also formerly of GreenBorder and its sandboxing specialties.
    Aaron Boodman, Software Engineer, Gears
    Aaron improves user experience with JavaScript. He's best known for his work on Gmail, Greasemonkey, and Gears.

    Summary

    Google Chrome logo Google's business depends on the speed and availability of Web access to search, advertising, and applications. Chrome is Google's second attempt to better control the front-door to its content with full applications optimized for its heavy apps. Google Chrome builds on top of the work of Android by adding individual applications to already popular operating systems. Google has flirted with the idea of its own web browser for many years but has only recently released working implementations of its own full browser applications.

    Android, Chrome, and Gears will continue to grow in unison and extend individual pieces into established operating systems. Google is building a new suite of application extraction layers that should have strong leverage across Windows, Mac, and Linux to directly control the company's destiny on these platforms.

    It's an exciting time for new browser technologies as Internet Explorer, Firefox, and WebKit each compete over standards implementations and performance. Officially adding Google Chrome to the browser space only strengthens Google's position strengthening the future web and delivers strong single site browsing experiences for their core web applications.

  2. Oct10

    Widgets Live! conference in San Francisco on November 6

    The first ever conference dedicated to widgets, gadgets, and modules will take place on Monday, November 6, in San Francisco. The one-day conference will capture and summarize the emerging widget economy and allow developers, business leaders, and content producers to collaborate and better understand how they might participate in syndication at the edge of the network.

    Widget endpoints

    A small web loosely joined.

    I am organizing a conference named Widgets Live! next month in partnership with Om Malik to capture the emerging webspace of widgets. There's so much happening in the fast-moving widget space right now it's a bit difficult to keep track of it all. Feed your Chia Pet on your desktop. Let your blog visitors play Hangman using popular words of the day. Consult your calendar from your homepage. Check the weather from your coffee maker. There is so much activity in the customizable web powered by widgets we felt it was time to bring together the major players for a one-day industry overview and tutorial. We hope you can join us.

    Tickets are only $100 and available now. I'll blog more details about what it's like to plan a conference and the decisions made by organizers at a later date as everyone I've talked to so far has been intrigued at the behind-the-scenes operations of the industry, from $13 for a cup of coffee to the real reasons why conference WiFi is often horrible. The faster the conference sells out the more time I'll have for those posts! ;)

    Previous related posts:

  3. Sep28

    Data launchpads of the cloud wars

    Google data center circa 2004

    The war of the data clouds will really start to heat up in 2007 as large Internet companies such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft open huge data centers in the Pacific Northwest fueled by cheap power and bandwidth. Our digital lives continue to be fueled by the cloud, with new data services and software that replace or complement desktop tasks coming online every month. Software as a service is the new development push, and custom build outs next to a few large dams and fiber highways are a sign of what's next.

    Internet giants are building up their server farm arsenals in a race to be the center of our digital lives. If you build it, and millions of customers come, where will you put it all? Farms previously covered with apple trees are being converted to modern data centers full of lasers, copper, and more air conditioning than most of the county. The growth of online services is partially limited by the ability to deliver large amounts of data over low-latency connections to a growing user base. The data grids deployed by large multinational Internet companies will continue to grow as our demand for online software and storage is fueled by new services in the cloud.

    What would you do with infinite computing resources, storage, and bandwidth? Huge data centers coming online in the next year may provide part of the modern answer.

    Microsoft

    Microsoft data center under construction

    Microsoft is building a new data center on 74 acres in the town of Quincy in central Washington. The six-building complex will include about 1.5 million square feet covered in rows of server racks to power current and future online services. The site includes a electrical substation and a diesel-powered generator for backup power just in case there is an interruption in the 48 megawatts of power drawn from the local power grid.

    Power and fiber is provided by Grant County, one of a few counties near the Columbia River with its own hydroelectric dam and fiber networks. Unlike big cities and existing hubs of activity these counties are special economic zones with tax incentives for research and development spending.

    Microsoft's new data center is over 8 times the size of 365 Main, a large data center in San Francisco housing companies such as Technorati. It's a little less than three football fields full of server racks drawing a power equivalent of about 50,000 homes. Electricity rates from these county-owned power grids are over 8 times cheaper than you might pay to plug-in your computer at home.

    Other large build-outs

    Microsoft is not the only large Internet company opening large data centers next year. Yahoo! has a 50-acre site and a smaller office complex and hosting space just up the river at Wenatchee. Yahoo! has contracted about 42 megawatts to power their main facility and about 5 megawatts to power its smaller location in the Confluence Technology Center, right on top of a fiber terminus.

    Google is building out a 30-acre site in The Dalles, Oregon. The site is located next to a hydroelectric dam providing cheap power for Google's growing server base. Construction is wrapping up on the first two buildings with about 34,000 square feet of space in each.

    Software as a service

    All this construction and contract negotiation with municipalities, data providers, and local employee bases provides large Internet companies with advantages startups can only dream of. Once the new data centers come online I expect to see new services spring up from the big players ready to take advantage of the new space and capacity. After all, you wouldn't want to see three football fields wrapped in fiber and power go unused, would you?

  4. Sep12

    Adobe introduces online photo and video sharing

    Uploading a gallery in Adobe Photoshop Elements 5

    Adobe will bundle online photo and video sharing into the latest versions of Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements. The Photoshop Showcase site will be powered by Flash of course, and includes support for geotagging photographs (U.S. only), tagging, creating easily shared albums, and sending your photos to a digital picture frame or photo printer.

    Geotagging in Adobe Photoshop Elements 5

    Adobe views a photo, video, or gallery as one "share." The fist 1,000 shares are free and users can upgrade to 5,000 shares for $3.99 or unlimited shares for $7.99.

    I have not seen many details released about the Photoshop Showcase product's online presence, but integration into popular desktop software combined with a strong brand name in photography and video should give Adobe a strong start as they roll out the service next month. The new Showcase service could compete with sites such as Flickr and YouTube for professional and amateur content once it launches.

  5. Sep04

    Narrowcasting with customized homepages

    Personalized homepages have been around for over 10 years and recently have gathered increased attention as a new generation of personalized homepages enter the space. The programmed personal homepage is changing, with cobrands and individual users increasingly taking command of their own content. Users might customize their homepage with cookie-stored preferences, a logged-on account, an affinity group such as a Dell computer, a broadband connection from AT&T, or a membership in the Sierra Club. In the future these pages might change over time, adapting to the changing online interests and behavior of each user. In this post I will provide an overview of current popular customizable homepages in the United States, point out some trends, and peek into future offerings.

    Each popular homepage is centered around search, the common gateway to the web, but provides a glimpse into popular content as well as "narrowcasted" personal content from news to local sports scores to a quick game or puzzle.

    Users in charge

    Modern consumers expect some form of customization in the products they love and use everyday. The consumer is in charge, tweaking, altering, and personalizing their favorite products. Whether it's a V-Chip or a TiVo, tassels on a bicycle or bumper stickers on a Honda Civic, or choosing custom wallpapers and ringtones on a mobile phone, we are able to customize a mass-market offering for our personal needs and habits. The same principles of customization and personalization hold true online, with a few different companies competing to be your personal information dashboard and online starting point.

    Logged-in Personalization

    My Yahoo! launched in July 1996 as a personal homepage for Yahoo! users wanting to customize their favorite Yahoo! content on a single page. The current My Yahoo! includes 12 content sections summarizing changing news published within the last three days. 11 out of 12 default content sections contain content from Yahoo! properties such as Yahoo! News, TV, or Weather. Logged-in users can customize the page with syndicated content (RDF, RSS, and Atom) from news sources around the Web.

    My Yahoo! is news-focused, bringing you the latest headlines from Yahoo! properties supplemented by other Web content if you desire. Most users don't realize technologies such as RSS deliver the content from The New York Times or Wired News to their personal homepage, but enjoy being able to piece together their own newspaper front page with just a few clicks.

    Yahoo! can tap into its audience of 500 million users combined with partnerships with large ISPs such as AT&T to deliver a homepage personalized by ZIP code and personal news from across the network such your latest mail messages, Yahoo! 360 activity, or calendar data.

    Cookie personalization

    Google, Microsoft, and Netvibes have launched new homepage products within the last year utilizing browser cookies to persist a user's preferences over multiple sessions on a single machine. Each visitor has the option of registering for an account and persisting that data across machines and more reliably throughout time, but a large number of users don't go through the trouble of logging-in or signing up. A logged-in user can access personal content from a single sign-on throughout the network, such as recent mail messages or buddy status in a chat window.

    Microsoft's Live.com is at the center of its Windows Live strategy and the jumping off point for its current and future services. Page configuration is divided into four categories: basics, news, sports, and entertainment. Each category is displayed in a tab within the page, allowing users to jump between content modes within the page before leaving the site.

    Live.com is an introduction point for Microsoft's various online consumer services. The company continuously releases new search and consumer products under the Live brand, and these new services may be immediately featured on Live.com or a short click away.

    Users may customize their homepage by navigating a content directory or by supplying a custom URL. In the example above a user looking for the latest soccer news has six pre-selected choices or more advanced users can add their own. Content modules screened and selected by Microsoft appear in this directory view and might be hosted on Live.com for fast access and the ability to interact with other gadgets on the page such as a calendar gadget influencing a map gadget's content. The most downloaded Microsoft gadget is a Google search box.

    Google offers similar personalization through its iGoogle service. iGoogle provides 16 quick customization options including gadgets from Fox, Disney, and a few smaller companies. The most popular iGoogle gadgets include moon phases, PacMan, a to-do list, and famous quotations.

    Netvibes is an independent player in the personal homepage space and has gathered a user base of millions by combining the most popular timely content from around the web. YouTube, Gmail, Kelkoo, Flickr, and Boing Boing co-exist on the same default homepage, reaching a target demographic of the tech savvy. The most popular Netvibes modules include soccer scores, instant messaging, games, and cartoons.

    Netvibes users can add collections of content to a new tab with just one click. A topic curator might select the top Ruby on Rails resources or 25 photoblogs for anyone to add as a section of their personal page and maintain the list of topical resources over time.

    Cobranded personal homepage

    iGoogle has created collections of Google Gadgets and page layouts for easy cobranding with companies or affinity groups. Pictured above is a custom Google homepage for U.S. government workers. Google powers custom homepages for computer manufacturers Dell and Gateway as well as local ISP Current Communications.

    Pre-built yet customizable homepages become more valuable the closer they are to the end-user and his or her preferences. Companies might be able to use Google as a corporate dashboard and ISPs can serve up local news and useful help links for their user base. There is little doubt a large Internet service such as Google can handle the additional traffic, but independent providers such as Netvibes will have to prove their ability to scale and deliver solid performance before larger customers partner with their technology. Independent companies may be able to create a business out of personalized homepages behind the firewall, deploying their software code and providing more options and useful productivity enhancements.

    Adaptive personal homepage

    Most users don't change their default homepage, search engine, or homepage module configuration. Customizations might be free, but there are computer users in the world like my mom afraid to change anything and "wreck" the computer. I believe portal players understand the inability of a large portion of the Internet population to change their settings, resulting in applications such as instant messenger clients and toolbars changing settings across the entire desktop to the portal's own properties. It is possible for companies to watch to a user's general browsing behavior through desktop software or actions within a web property and tailor personal homepages based on continued and timely usage statistics.

    Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft love to tie their web presence to the desktop through browser toolbars or desktop search. Toolbar searches currently account for over 10% search originations for Yahoo! and Google, who combined account for more than 95% of the total U.S. toolbar market according to ComScore. Older users are more likely to use desktop search according to Hitwise, who appreciate being less likely to lose something.

    Google Desktop browse history

    Desktop software could track each visited web page visited with the added support of anti-phishing or index a browser's entire history on the desktop. The software already exists today, but the big search players are not leveraging this attention data in their web properties to better target content such as a search result, advertisement, or homepage module.

    Claria PersonalWeb creates a personalized homepage by watching the real-time browsing behavior of its users through a desktop application. The personal homepage is accessed on the user's personal computer, resulting in faster rendered content as its web service analyzes a user's browser behavior to pick out patterns.

    Toolbar and desktop search software from big portals may develop better personal usage profiles in the future, allowing better content suggestions for personal homepage users. Users have already trusted these companies will full indexing of hard drives and the tracking of entire web and chat histories, so that rich index may as well be put to good use if companies can establish user trust.

    Summary

    Add to Live.comAdd to iGoogleAdd to Add to

    Custom personal homepages are undergoing a transformation powered by modern improvements in browser technologies and the availability of Web content through feed syndication. The popularity of the feed aggregator has enabled new modes of common consumption, including scaled-down experiences of a personal homepage with the 10 most timely pieces of information for each user. If the number of "add to X" personal homepage buttons on pages across the web is any indication, there is a change in reading behavior as new users turn on their personalized experience and add new content once they understand what's possible.

    The growth of the personal homepage faces a few challenges for companies in the space. How do you convert cookied temporary users into user accounts? How can such websites help users discover and add new content to their pages, increasing the usage value and collecting valuable ad profiling data along the way?

    I believe personal customized homepage services will continue to be successful as they move from a page full of populist content such as top news stories and gossip to personalized pages combining direct user input and observed behaviors. Customized personal homepages can achieve a quick middle-ground through cobrands deploying module bundles for their users quickly and easily, allowing the "long tail" of affinity groups and businesses to turn on their own custom solutions simply and in partnership with established web brands.

    Personal homepages make money from search origination fees for major search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Microsoft, through priority placement of gadgets in a browsable directory, and through advetisements shown on each page. Web businesses may be able to partner with these large traffic originators to be the preferred data provider in a sector (weather, sports scores, etc) or to deliver content and/or code hosted on the site's local servers. In some cases personal homepages can provide the content and organization, allowing a cobrand to plugin their own advertising for a share of the revenue.

    The personal customized homepage space will continue to change as companies look for optimal load times, better suggested content, and increased user loyalty across their offerings. The user is in charge and loving it, and intelligent software and services can help guide the way as small pieces of timely content makes its way into each new browser window.

  6. Sep01

    Programmed personal homepages over the last 20 years

    The web is changing, but it all starts with your personal home page. What is the first thing you see when you start your browser? Is it useful and tailored to you, or a collection of advertisements and meaningless promotions for portal services? The recent $15 million funding of one-year-old startup Netvibes combined with the ramp-up of Microsoft's Live.com and iGoogle are changing the worldwide web doorway into a customized experience combining many brands and services. In this post I'll summarize the history of pre-programmed start pages and take a look at where we might be headed in the near future. I'll follow-up with customizable start pages in another post.

    Online Welcome Pages

    Q Link Welcome Page

    In the beginning there were welcome pages from online services such as Quantum Link (pictured above). The site broke your available in-network options into easy to understand categories such as shopping, news, and chat. At connection speeds of 1200 bit/s and limited online content there were few options available.

    AOL Welcome page 1999

    As the web gained steam online welcome pages were able to add a few topical links such as the news of the day. The image above is taken from AOL dial-up in 1999 and shows links to popular features such as e-mail, people, and the Internet. The page contains two advertisements, one seasonal message, and two news of the day entries for AOL's 20 million users. Every user of the service is logged-in and personally identifiable down to their street address and phone number.

    Portal pages

    Yahoo homepage 1994

    Early portal pages such as Yahoo! (pictured above) organized the web into categories for easy discovery. The site did not produce much content of its own, but served as a guide and filter to the growing Web. Almost everything was new and users could suggest a new site for inclusion in the directory.

    Yahoo homepage 2006

    Twelve years later there are billions of documents on the web and over 100 services offered by Yahoo. The new homepage highlights the Yahoo! services you use the most and featured dynamic content from around the network such as top news and trends float to the top. The page contains two advertisement blocks, one text and one graphical, but all other content keeps you within the network.

    Programmed personalization

    Websites are able to collect information about a user's location such as zip codes for a logged-in user or an approximate location based on an IP address for anyone. Personal accounts on websites commonly collect birth date, gender, marital status, and geographic location for ad targeting, but such information can also be used to target other content such as a weather report, news, or sports scores.

    Yahoo information about you

    The new Yahoo! homepage includes mail and weather info buttons unique to a logged-in user, providing a peek into your personal Yahoo. This customized information is placed directly above the most valuable advertising spot on the page.

    Summary

    Programmed personal homepages are a lightweight way to summarize site features and dynamic content for a large amount of users. Customization takes a bit of heavy lifting, and programmed personal homepages can scale well with the same content available for hundreds of millions of users accessing a site such as Yahoo! or MSN.

    Will the programmed homepages survive as users move to pages they build themselves or pages pre-loaded with content from a specific community? That's a topic for a separate post, so stay tuned.

  7. Aug31

    Watching a Firefox beta rollout

    Mozilla signage

    I visited Mozilla HQ this afternoon to discuss product strategy and positioning with a few full-time staffers. My visit happened to coincide with the release of Firefox 2 beta 2, giving me a brief glimpse into a world where your every move is both public and frequently reported (accurately and inaccurately) to a tech news hungry audience.

    A few news sources read the Firefox 2 status meeting notes from Tuesday and noticed beta 2 should go live today, August 31. Each release includes internationalization into 40+ languages, so rollouts are handled in stages as each piece is integrated and pushed to the server. British English might be available before US English for example. The first releases were spotted early this morning and the news rose to the top of Digg. Slashdot posted the news closer to the actual full release of the beta.

    Slashdot drives more Mozilla downloads than Digg. BusinessWeek positions Firefox against Internet Explorer and somehow thinks "Mozilla isn't giving many details" on Firefox 2, even through there is a Firefox 2 wiki available to anyone in the world.

    Even if the world is given access to lots of information about your company, including all your product code, speculation and rumors still remain. I think that's pretty telling for the corporate world as it tries to deal with similar issues and what to make public or keep private: loosely managed perfect information creates an environment where misinformation and speculations can still creep through.

  8. Aug08

    Open Source Lab Rackathon

    The Open Source Lab at Oregon State is having a fundraising drive to continue their existing work and take on a few new projects. OSL serves up hosting and download space for Apache, Debian, Drupal, Eclipse, GNOME, KDE, Mozilla, OpenOffice, PHP, PostreSQL, and many others.

    OSL rack

    A $20 places your name in 10-point font on a piece of paper attached to the server cage for a whole year! Each additional $20 donated increases your font size by 1 point size. OSL sysadmins will have to look at your name for a full year and you'll be helping a good cause. You can even watch sysadmins at work through the OSL webcam.

  9. Jul02

    Firefox in the next 9 months

    Mozilla Firefox logo

    I heard a few questions yesterday about the future of Firefox and its product goals, differentiating factors, and its positioning against Microsoft and its Internet Explorer browser. I've been following the Firefox process intermittently so I'll outline some of what I know in an attempt to spark community involvement and feedback on behalf of Mozilla and the Firefox team.

    The Firefox planners is divided into a few different functions such as planning, development, user interface, test, internationalization, and quality assurance, just to name a few. The product planners are currently engaging the community to determine what should be the differentiating factors of Firefox over the long-term (version 4, 5, 6, etc.). What is Firefox's role as a browser? What is its role as an application enabler, powering application features through HTML rendering, XUL, or a general handler of all things HTTP. You can follow that thread on the mozilla.dev.planning mailing list if you're interested.

    Firefox 3 roadmap

    Current plans for the Firefox browser include a v2 release by the end of September and a v3 release by March of next year. The next version of Firefox, 2.0 aka "Bon Echo" includes features such as OpenSearch support, better feed handling including a browser-friendly render of a feed and better pass-through to other applications, and UI improvements on Windows Vista, OS X, and Gnome. You can read about some of the new features on the Firefox 2 requirements page and you should be able to download the first beta version next Tuesday.

    Firefox 3 is focused on improved memory handling, performance, and stability, improved XUL, and new core components such as application data stored in SQLite. Firefox 3 could break a few existing extensions and applications built on top of Firefox, and it will definitely include new optimizations if you like to build on the popular browser. Firefox 3 should have additional JavaScript and SVG features if you're into that sort of thing.

    Mozilla has also realized it has a sizable chunk of revenue from search engine deals and is starting to look at new ways to spend that money. It could mean more books and documentation, user/developer conferences, or more tutorials and other efforts to build the platform.

    That's my mini-summary of what's going on at Firefox, from an outsider's point of view.

  10. Jun06

    Online spreadsheets in the real world.

    Google Spreadsheets main view

    Google officially launched its Spreadsheet product in its alpha labs, allowing a small user base to poke around and experience the new ideas and integration. I can see the immediate benefit from online spreadsheets integrated with a portal experience such as Google. I'll give you two concrete usage examples: my soccer team and my mom.

    First, realize that although Microsoft's Office suite is probably the best selling piece of packaged software in the market, it's not a staple of every household. Microsoft created a special basic version of Office 2007 to increase sales from home users. My mom doesn't use Office and I don't have full adoption across a team of 20+ players.

    The announcement from Google has been way too overhyped as the latest strike in the blow-by-blow epic battle between Google and Microsoft. Office Live will have online spreadsheets too, and you can signup for an account there today and play around a bit with that experience if you'd like. Neither product is an Excel-killer and that's not what these new announcements are about. Online mail applications and other portals into personal information exchanges need to increase the number of file attachments they can render and possibly produce if they want to provide a good user experience. Gmail users could now have a new option of rendering a spreadsheet from their mail message, make a quick edit, and on to the next task. Hopefully all big online mail services are looking at how they can better manage our daily personal information flow and help users view the most popular attachment types on each system.

    My soccer team

    I produce team schedules and contact lists to share among about 20 people. Things change frequently throughout the season. A game is rained out, a player moves or gets a new phone number, or the game location may change. I would create an HTML table, upload it to my private hosting account with a custom domain for our team, and anyone with a web browser can view our latest information. I am the only one who can edit and upload, and in the case of a team contact list, I'll put it behind a username and password prompt to keep things private.

    Google Spreadsheets save view

    Not exactly a good solution for the average user. With online spreadsheets and user-level rights management anyone can edit, auto save, and view the latest data in a variety of formats. Most people already have an account with a major portal, and if they do not it's not too much of a hassle for them to sign up and use the account for multiple services.

    My mom

    Getting my mom to download a free Excel viewer is tough enough. She interacts with most new files as they arrive inside her Yahoo! Mail account (fairly typical I believe). She can now take action directly within the mail message, make a few changes, and have the confidence she did everything right.

    A major portal might also integrate new change alerts for spreadsheets and other collaborative data sources into a personalized home page so my mom can keep track of what's going on without needing an e-mail message regarding updates.

Niall Kennedy Niall Kennedy is a web technologist in San Francisco, California in the United States. I am very interested in the world of... MORE »

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