Mozilla has met a major milestone in its march to Firefox 3.0, developers said yesterday, by adding another chunk of the new Places feature to the alpha set for release late next week.
Places — a complete revamp of the bookmarks and history functions of the browser — was at one point slated to debut in Firefox 2.0, but was yanked a year ago in the run up to that version’s October 2006 release. Instead, it will debut in Firefox 3.0.
“We enabled the Places implementation of bookmarks on the trunk,” said the Places team in a post to the Mozilla developer center blog. “Although there is still much to be done, this is an important milestone for us.” Firefox 3.0 alpha 5 is scheduled to launch June 1.
Because Places uses the open-source SQLite database engine to store and retrieve bookmarks and history entries, it’s incompatible with earlier Firefox editions’ bookmarks. Alpha users must convert their existing entries, Mozilla developers said.
“If you make any changes to bookmarks.html (say, by running Firefox 2 and editing your bookmarks) you will need to manually export them and re-import them into the bookmark-on-places [Firefox 3.0 alpha] nightly,” they said.
Firefox 3.0 alpha 5 the preview, also codenamed “Gran Paradiso,” has been rolled out for Windows, Mac OS X and Linux in past iterations.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Mozilla, Software | No Comments »
After gaining ground for a couple of months, Microsoft’s search business lost market share in April, while Google and Yahoo posted gains, according to statistics released on Monday by Nielsen/NetRatings.
Microsoft saw its share of the market slip to nine percent, down from 10.1 percent a month earlier. Google, meanwhile, increased its lead, accounting for 55.2 percent of web searches, up from 53.7 percent in March. Yahoo grew its share to 21.9 percent, up narrowly from the 21.8 percent share it held in March.
The April results return to a familiar pattern of Google gaining ground at the expense of its chief rivals, although Microsoft had been doing a bit better in recent months. In its January earnings conference call, Microsoft executives indicated that they were not pleased with the company’s search results.
AOL remained in fourth place for April, but saw its share slip to 5.4 percent from 5.8 percent in March, while Ask.com held steady in fifth place with 1.8 percent of search queries.
In an interview at Microsoft’s Strategic Account Summit two weeks ago, a top executive expressed hope that Microsoft was starting to make inroads in search, but said that it might not post gains every month.
“I’m not even going to say it’s a trend yet,” chief advertising strategist Yusuf Mehdi said, referring to the fact that Microsoft had posted share gains for each of the past three months. “I’m not going to predict that that’s the bottom and now it’s all up, but that’s momentum.”
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Internet, Microsoft | No Comments »
There’s a huge announcement buried under all the Facebook Platform buzz today: Facebook is launching a video service to compete with all the major video sharing sites. So not only should MySpace be shaking in its boots, but YouTube also has cause for concern.
The service, which isn’t yet live (we assume today or within the next week), will support video uploading as well as direct webcam recording. The Flash Recorder application also lets you record and send video messages to friends instantly through their Facebook inbox. It supports cellphones, too – send a clip to video@facebook.com to post it to your Facebook profile.
Deep Integration with Facebook
Facebook Video allows you to tag videos with your friends’ names, meaning you can explore all the clips of one particular friend. It’s also integrated with the Facebook news feed, and you can create video threads thanks to integration with your Facebook mail. Max length/size is 10mins and 200MB, and there are privacy controls for the video section.
No Embeddable Player!
Facebook is obviously trying to keep pageviews on its own site, and keep privacy high. But we’re surprised to hear that unlike other video properties, Facebook Video won’t let you embed videos elsewhere – linking, yes, but no embedding. If this is the case, it’s probably the first move by Facebook that we actually disagree with.
MySpace and YouTube – Be Afraid!
Clearly, Facebook is taking aim at MySpace and YouTube. Of those, MySpace has the most to lose: users will continue to embed YouTube clips in their news feeds, but MySpace – formerly the hub for your social life – is seriously under threat today. MySpace’s failure to build a hub for outside developers could be their greatest failing as Facebook moves to embrace the developer community.
Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Internet, Web 2.0 | No Comments »
