Browsers and extensions

What's the best way to improve mobile browsing? Make it as flexible and powerful as desktop browsing, only lighter. Opera, the Norwegian rival to Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, hopes to replicate the familiarity of the desktop experience with the latest version of its mobile browser, code-named Dimension. So far the response has been positive.… Read more

Nearly every time I meet with a representative from one of the Web browsers, the questions of "Which browser do you use?" and "Why?" inevitably come up. The answer to the first is still Mozilla Firefox, like most people I know. The short answer to the second is "extensions," which is an easier way of saying "more functionality and personal customization."

The follow-up question is invariably, "What's your favorite extension?" and that's much harder, because it's not any one particular extension that makes Firefox great--it's the … Read more

The open-source Mono project will show off an early version of Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug-in running on Linux later this week.

Work on the plug-in, called Moonlight, was started only in May, after Microsoft's Mix conference. Moonlight uses version 1.1 of Silverlight, a browser plug-in for displaying interactive Web applications, which is due in the fall.

Once completed, Moonlight will allow Linux users to see Silverlight content on the Web, such as videos, and run rich Internet applications.

According to Miguel De Icaza, Mono project leader and Novell open-source president, Mono engineers have been working 14-hour days … Read more

Category: Browsing

OpenID is a solution for the log-in problem of having multiple identities online. With OpenID, you create one master identity online at a site that you use a lot and tend to remain logged in to--for instance, a social network site or your personal blog. When you need to identify yourself to another new site, you point that site toward your main identity-providing site where you're already logged in. Your main site sends the new site your log-in credentials, so the new site now knows who you are.

In theory, if OpenID was adopted on every Web … Read more

Category: Browsing

StumbleUpon is a toolbar extension for your browser. Its primary button, labeled "Stumble!," takes you to a site in any of the categories you've told the service you're interested in but that you've probably not been to before. If you like the new site, you press a thumbs-up button. If you don't, thumbs-down. Every time you vote, the system recalibrates its site selections for you using social filtering; it attempts to find sites for you that it thinks you'll like because other users with similar preferences also like them.

The site … Read more

Category: Browsing

Yourminis gives you a page that you can modify with your own mix of widgets--RSS feeds, Flickr images, video feeds, weather and time blocks, and so on. The widgets and the Yourminis container page are all in Flash, and the widgets are very pretty to look at and easy to move around on the page. You can also do things with them--such as rotate them arbitrarily, for a scrapbook effect--that you can't do on Ajax start pages.

Yourminis recently rolled out a technology using Adobe's Apollo framework that lets users take the widgets out of their … Read more

Category: Browsing

Safari is Apple's Web browser. It's one of the more speedy browsers around, and it was one of the first Web browsers to introduce a built-in RSS reader. It's currently in its third iteration and recently went cross-platform--leaving its Mac-only status and adding the ability to work on Windows, too.

Safari began as an in-house replacement to Microsoft's Internet Explorer for Mac, which Microsoft didn't update or improve on at the same rate as as it did for its Windows counterpart--and eventually dropped shortly after the release of Safari.

Safari has recently gotten … Read more

Category: Browsing

My Yahoo is a customizable start page that users can fill with a variety of personalized content feeds. Like some other single-page aggregators, My Yahoo centers around its directory, which is filled with all sorts of feeds--some from third-party sources, while others are in-house Yahoo content. Users can mix and match, move things around, and custom tailor their page however they please.

In addition to content, users can also pick from a wide variety of themes to decorate their page. Each of these themes can be customized, down to color and font as well.

Web site: My.Yahoo.com… Read more

Category: Browsing

Google Reader is a Web-based RSS feed reader. Users can subscribe to as many RSS feeds as they want, then browse them in a lean and simplistic two-pane story browser that feels a little bit like Gmail. RSS feeds give users a visually simplified version of Web content. In addition to photos and text, Google Reader will also display embedded video clips from several popular services.

In addition to reading stories yourself, you can also share them with others. Google Reader gives users the option to create sharable feeds of subscribed stories, including the ones they mark as … Read more