Google has recently released a plugin for Internet Explorer that renders web pages using Google Chrome. The plugin, called Google Chrome Frame, is open-source and the code is publicly available.
By looking at the code, it's obvious that the plugin is not limited to Internet Explorer. There's also a NPAPI plugin, which should work in browsers that support NPAPI: Firefox, Safari, Opera and other browsers. Here's a comment from one of the Chrome Frame files:
"ChromeFrameNPAPI: Implementation of the NPAPI plugin, which is responsible for hosting a chrome frame, i.e. an iframe like widget which hosts the the chrome window. This object delegates to Chrome.exe (via the Chrome IPC-based automation mechanism) for the actual rendering".
A post from the Chromium blog explained the purpose of Google's plugin: "With Google Chrome Frame, developers can now take advantage of the latest open web technologies, even in Internet Explorer. From a faster Javascript engine, to support for current web technologies like HTML5's offline capabilities and <canvas>, to modern CSS/Layout handling, Google Chrome Frame enables these features within IE with no additional coding or testing for different browser versions."
Instead of asking users to download a different browser, Google and other companies that develop complex web applications can ask users to install Google Chrome Frame. This way, Google Chrome runs invisibly inside another browser.
Google Maps Place Pages
When you perform a search in Google Maps and click on "more info" next to a search result, Google opens a new page that aggregates useful information about places and local businesses. Until now, Google showed an expanded bubble directly on the map.
The new Google Maps pages have user-friendly URLs like http://maps.google.com/places/fr/paris-city and they include a lot data: photos and videos from Panoramio and YouTube, user-generated maps, reviews, related web pages, information from Wikipedia, Street View imagery.
"We think Place Pages will make searching much easier (and hopefully more fun!) for our users, but we're also excited about what it means for business owners. By default, users looking for local businesses can easily view ratings for your business, reviews, related maps, find nearby transit options showing them how to get to you, and take a look at your business with a Street View preview - and it's all on one page," says Google LatLong blog.
While new Place Pages look nice, they have a big drawback: when you click on "more info" next to a search result, Google Maps opens a new page and you lose the context, so it's difficult to compare the results. To go back to the list of results, you need to use your browser's back button.
The new Google Maps pages have user-friendly URLs like http://maps.google.com/places/fr/paris-city and they include a lot data: photos and videos from Panoramio and YouTube, user-generated maps, reviews, related web pages, information from Wikipedia, Street View imagery.
"We think Place Pages will make searching much easier (and hopefully more fun!) for our users, but we're also excited about what it means for business owners. By default, users looking for local businesses can easily view ratings for your business, reviews, related maps, find nearby transit options showing them how to get to you, and take a look at your business with a Street View preview - and it's all on one page," says Google LatLong blog.
While new Place Pages look nice, they have a big drawback: when you click on "more info" next to a search result, Google Maps opens a new page and you lose the context, so it's difficult to compare the results. To go back to the list of results, you need to use your browser's back button.
Google Sidewiki
Last year, Google launched a feature called SearchWiki that allows users to customize search results. If you are logged in, you can remove search results, promote them at the top of the search results page and enter comments. While the feature is useful to personalize the results for frequent queries, the "wiki" component was only an afterthought.
Check the SearchWiki page for "google" and you'll realize that the 27511 notes recorded by Google aren't very useful. Comments aren't helpful, even though Google tries to rank them by usefulness.
A similar feature is now available in Google Toolbar. Google Sidewiki lets you enter comments about any web page and shows some of the best comments in a sidebar. The feature is integrated with Google Profiles, so you can find more information about the author and read other Sidewiki comments.
Google notifies you if there are comments about the current page, so you need to send your browsing history to use the feature.
Sorting the comments by date wouldn't be a great idea, because spam and silly comments like "lol" or "cool site" would be prevalent. That's why, Google developed a ranking algorithm that takes into account many signals: user votes, author's authority, text analysis. Danny Sullivan says that "Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports".
Learning some information about a site, finding if a certain company is reputable or reading a comment that corrects some errors from an article - all are use cases for Sidewiki, but it remains to be seen if Google manages to rank comments properly.
As with Knol, Google encourages experts to post comments in Sidewiki: "What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web?" Unfortunately, experts don't have an incentive to post comments and isn't always easy to distinguish experts from opinionated users.
Larry Page once said that Google wasn't supposed to be a search engine. "We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank."
Check the SearchWiki page for "google" and you'll realize that the 27511 notes recorded by Google aren't very useful. Comments aren't helpful, even though Google tries to rank them by usefulness.
A similar feature is now available in Google Toolbar. Google Sidewiki lets you enter comments about any web page and shows some of the best comments in a sidebar. The feature is integrated with Google Profiles, so you can find more information about the author and read other Sidewiki comments.
Google notifies you if there are comments about the current page, so you need to send your browsing history to use the feature.
Sorting the comments by date wouldn't be a great idea, because spam and silly comments like "lol" or "cool site" would be prevalent. That's why, Google developed a ranking algorithm that takes into account many signals: user votes, author's authority, text analysis. Danny Sullivan says that "Google has a language sophistication detector now, and one that works in the 14 different languages that Sidewiki supports".
Learning some information about a site, finding if a certain company is reputable or reading a comment that corrects some errors from an article - all are use cases for Sidewiki, but it remains to be seen if Google manages to rank comments properly.
As with Knol, Google encourages experts to post comments in Sidewiki: "What if everyone, from a local expert to a renowned doctor, had an easy way of sharing their insights with you about any page on the web?" Unfortunately, experts don't have an incentive to post comments and isn't always easy to distinguish experts from opinionated users.
Larry Page once said that Google wasn't supposed to be a search engine. "We built a ranking system to deal with annotations. We wanted to annotate the web--build a system so that after you'd viewed a page you could click and see what smart comments other people had about it. But how do you decide who gets to annotate Yahoo? We needed to figure out how to choose which annotations people should look at, which meant that we needed to figure out which other sites contained comments we should classify as authoritative. Hence PageRank."
A Slippery Slope
Now that Google launched a Chrome plug-in for Internet Explorer, users will see dialogs that suggest to install the plug-in. The first Google service that will show this message is Google Wave.
"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin. Or, you can use one of these browsers: Google Chrome, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5. If you want to continue at your own peril, go ahead."
I'm not an Internet Explorer user and I understand that developers hate it because they have to spend a lot of time finding workarounds for IE, instead of adding new features, but this message is misleading.
"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin." That's simply not true: Google Wave works in Internet Explorer, even though there are some features that require Google Gears or work better in other browsers.
"Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use -- each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations -- further complicates building rich Web applications. In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind," explains Google.
Just because you can't offer the same experience in all browsers is not a reason to mislead users. You can inform users that your application runs faster in Google Chrome or certain features are only available if you install a plug-in or a more recent browser.
It's a slippery slope and I hope Google doesn't drop support for Internet Explorer just because it's a good opportunity to promote its own browser. Especially now, when even Microsoft builds applications that don't require Internet Explorer.
"Graceful degradation is an important principle in Web design. It means that, when you put in features designed to take advantage of the latest and greatest features of newer browsers, you should do it in a way that older browsers, and browsers letting users disable particular features, can "step down" to a method that still allows access to the basic content of the site, though perhaps not as snazzy in appearance," explains Dan Tobias.
"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin. Or, you can use one of these browsers: Google Chrome, Safari 4, Firefox 3.5. If you want to continue at your own peril, go ahead."
I'm not an Internet Explorer user and I understand that developers hate it because they have to spend a lot of time finding workarounds for IE, instead of adding new features, but this message is misleading.
"To use Google Wave in Internet Explorer you need to install the Google Chrome Frame browser plugin." That's simply not true: Google Wave works in Internet Explorer, even though there are some features that require Google Gears or work better in other browsers.
"Google Wave depends on strong JS and DOM rendering performance to provide a desktop-like experience in the browser. HTML5's offline storage and web workers will enable us to add great features without having to compromise on performance. Unfortunately, Internet Explorer, still used by the majority of the Web's users, has not kept up with such fairly recent developments in Web technology. Compared with other browsers, the JavaScript performance is many times slower and HTML5 support is still far behind. Likewise, the many different versions of IE still in use -- each with its own set of CSS quirks and layout limitations -- further complicates building rich Web applications. In the past, the Google Wave team has spent countless hours solely on improving the experience of running Google Wave in Internet Explorer. We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind," explains Google.
Just because you can't offer the same experience in all browsers is not a reason to mislead users. You can inform users that your application runs faster in Google Chrome or certain features are only available if you install a plug-in or a more recent browser.
It's a slippery slope and I hope Google doesn't drop support for Internet Explorer just because it's a good opportunity to promote its own browser. Especially now, when even Microsoft builds applications that don't require Internet Explorer.
"Graceful degradation is an important principle in Web design. It means that, when you put in features designed to take advantage of the latest and greatest features of newer browsers, you should do it in a way that older browsers, and browsers letting users disable particular features, can "step down" to a method that still allows access to the basic content of the site, though perhaps not as snazzy in appearance," explains Dan Tobias.
Blogger App for iPhone
BlogPress Lite is the free version of a blogging app for iPhone that supports Blogger, WordPress, TypePad and other platforms. The free version only works for Blogger blogs and it's the only free Blogger app available in the App Store.
The setup is awkward: after entering your Google credentials, the application asks you to enter your Picasa credentials. This is unnecessary since Blogger and Picasa Web Albums are two services connected to the same Google account. Instead of adding the photos to the same album used by Blogger, the application lets you choose one of your albums.
BlogPress Lite lists all the blogs from your account, has a landscape mode with a wider virtual keyboard and an option to label your posts.
Despite promising to offer a rich-text editor, the application only lets you add plain text and upload photos. BlogPress Lite resizes the photos before uploading them, but the resizing algorithm is pretty poor and resulting images are very small.
After writing your post, BlogPress Lite provides two options: publish the post or save it as a draft. Unfortunately, saving the post as a draft doesn't upload it to Blogger, it only saves the post locally. To upload the post the post as a draft, you need to click on the arrow next to the title and disable publishing.
To sum app, BlogPress Lite has a poor interface, doesn't include a rich-text editor, but it's a better way to edit posts on a mobile phone than using Blogger's web interface and it's the only free blogging app from the App Store that supports Blogger. The application has been developed by InfoThinker, with Google's support.
How to find the application? Search for BlogPressLite in the App Store or use this link. BlogPress Lite requires iPhone OS 3.0 or a later version.
{ via Rick Klau }
The setup is awkward: after entering your Google credentials, the application asks you to enter your Picasa credentials. This is unnecessary since Blogger and Picasa Web Albums are two services connected to the same Google account. Instead of adding the photos to the same album used by Blogger, the application lets you choose one of your albums.
BlogPress Lite lists all the blogs from your account, has a landscape mode with a wider virtual keyboard and an option to label your posts.
Despite promising to offer a rich-text editor, the application only lets you add plain text and upload photos. BlogPress Lite resizes the photos before uploading them, but the resizing algorithm is pretty poor and resulting images are very small.
After writing your post, BlogPress Lite provides two options: publish the post or save it as a draft. Unfortunately, saving the post as a draft doesn't upload it to Blogger, it only saves the post locally. To upload the post the post as a draft, you need to click on the arrow next to the title and disable publishing.
To sum app, BlogPress Lite has a poor interface, doesn't include a rich-text editor, but it's a better way to edit posts on a mobile phone than using Blogger's web interface and it's the only free blogging app from the App Store that supports Blogger. The application has been developed by InfoThinker, with Google's support.
How to find the application? Search for BlogPressLite in the App Store or use this link. BlogPress Lite requires iPhone OS 3.0 or a later version.
{ via Rick Klau }
Picasa 3.5 Adds Face Recognition
If you liked the feature from Picasa Web Albums that detects the faces in your photos and clusters them, it's now available in Picasa 3.5. Face recognition works locally, without sending data to Google's servers.
For some reason, the feature is enabled by default and it starts to process your photos right after installing the software. It's pretty slow and the accuracy is far from perfect: you might see multiple clusters for the same person and different people addded to the same cluster.
If you sign in using a Google account, you can choose people from your contacts when you're asked to add names for each group of photos. There's also the option to download the name tags from Picasa Web Albums if some of your photos are stored online.
"As with Picasa Web Albums, your reward for trudging through your photos to add tags is better organization, which for a massive library of old, archived shots can be hugely helpful," thinks Josh Lowensohn, from CNet.
Another new feature in Picasa 3.5 is geotagging using Google Maps. Until now, you had to install Google Earth to add locations to your photos. The latest version of Picasa has a "places" sidebar that lets you drag photos to a map.
Three years ago, when Google acquired Neven Vision, a blog post mentioned the goal of the acquisition: improving the way you organize photos in Picasa. "It's not always easy to search through your personal photos, and it's certainly a lot harder than searching the web. Unless you take the time to label and organize all your pictures (and I'll freely admit that I don't), chances are it can be pretty hard to find that photo you just know is hidden somewhere deep inside your computer. We've been working to make Picasa (Google's free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos — to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we've found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google."
Update: For now, this is an English-only release, so it's not available if you set a different language for the Picasa page. Here are the direct download links for Picasa 3.5:
Windows: http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa35-setup.exe
Mac: http://dl.google.com/photos/picasamac35.dmg
For some reason, the feature is enabled by default and it starts to process your photos right after installing the software. It's pretty slow and the accuracy is far from perfect: you might see multiple clusters for the same person and different people addded to the same cluster.
If you sign in using a Google account, you can choose people from your contacts when you're asked to add names for each group of photos. There's also the option to download the name tags from Picasa Web Albums if some of your photos are stored online.
"As with Picasa Web Albums, your reward for trudging through your photos to add tags is better organization, which for a massive library of old, archived shots can be hugely helpful," thinks Josh Lowensohn, from CNet.
Another new feature in Picasa 3.5 is geotagging using Google Maps. Until now, you had to install Google Earth to add locations to your photos. The latest version of Picasa has a "places" sidebar that lets you drag photos to a map.
Three years ago, when Google acquired Neven Vision, a blog post mentioned the goal of the acquisition: improving the way you organize photos in Picasa. "It's not always easy to search through your personal photos, and it's certainly a lot harder than searching the web. Unless you take the time to label and organize all your pictures (and I'll freely admit that I don't), chances are it can be pretty hard to find that photo you just know is hidden somewhere deep inside your computer. We've been working to make Picasa (Google's free photo-organizing software) even better when it comes to searching for your own photos — to make finding them be as easy as finding stuff on the web. Luckily we've found some people who share this goal, and are excited that the Neven Vision team is now part of Google."
Update: For now, this is an English-only release, so it's not available if you set a different language for the Picasa page. Here are the direct download links for Picasa 3.5:
Windows: http://dl.google.com/picasa/picasa35-setup.exe
Mac: http://dl.google.com/photos/picasamac35.dmg
Use Google Chrome in Internet Explorer
If you can't install Google Chrome and you must use Internet Explorer, there's a way to use Google Chrome's rendering engine inside IE: Google Chrome Frame. After installing the plug-in, you can test it by adding cf: in front of any URL from the address bar.
Google Chrome Frame is an interesting option for the developers that write web applications and use HTML or CSS features that are available in any modern browser except IE. They can add a meta tag at the top of a web page and enable the Google Chrome plug-in:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
Google also provides some JavaScript code that prompts users to install the plug-in. It's not very pleasant to ask users to install a plug-in if they want to use your applications, but it's easier than asking them to change their browser.
Tip: After installing the plug-in, bookmark cf:http://mail.google.com/mail/ to speed up Gmail in Internet Explorer. You should also try to use the applications from the Chrome Experiments page.
Google Chrome Frame is an interesting option for the developers that write web applications and use HTML or CSS features that are available in any modern browser except IE. They can add a meta tag at the top of a web page and enable the Google Chrome plug-in:
<meta http-equiv="X-UA-Compatible" content="chrome=1">
Google also provides some JavaScript code that prompts users to install the plug-in. It's not very pleasant to ask users to install a plug-in if they want to use your applications, but it's easier than asking them to change their browser.
Google Chrome Frame is an early-stage open source plug-in that seamlessly brings Google Chrome's open web technologies and speedy JavaScript engine to Internet Explorer. With Google Chrome Frame, you can:
* Start using open web technologies - like the HTML5 canvas tag - right away, even technologies that aren't yet supported in Internet Explorer 6, 7, or 8.
* Take advantage of JavaScript performance improvements to make your apps faster and more responsive.
Tip: After installing the plug-in, bookmark cf:http://mail.google.com/mail/ to speed up Gmail in Internet Explorer. You should also try to use the applications from the Chrome Experiments page.
Push Gmail for iPhone and Windows Mobile
Two years after Yahoo surprised everyone by launching push Yahoo Mail for iPhone, Google adds push support for Gmail. And it's not limited to iPhone, it also works for Windows Mobile devices.
"Push e-mail is used to describe e-mail systems that provide an "always-on" capability, in which new e-mail is instantly and actively transferred (pushed) as it arrives by the mail delivery agent (MDA) (commonly called mail server) to the mail user agent (MUA), also called the e-mail client. E-mail clients include smartphones and, less strictly, IMAP personal computer mail applications," explains Wikipedia.
Instead of periodically fetching new messages, mail clients receive notifications as soon as there's a new message. Applications no longer waste bandwidth and you're able to read a message shortly after it was sent.
"Using Google Sync, you can now get your Gmail messages pushed directly to your phone. Having an over-the-air, always-on connection means that your inbox is up to date, no matter where you are or what you're doing. Sync works with your phone's native email application so there's no additional software needed."
If you're already using Google Sync to synchronize your calendars and contacts, it's easy to edit the settings and enable it for mail, as well.
Unfortunately, there are some downsides to this feature, so you should only enable push support for Gmail if you really need it. "Depending on your device, any push connection may use more power than fetching content at intervals. In some cases the difference in power usage may have a noticeable impact on your phone's battery life," mentions Google.
Google explains the difference between using Google Sync, IMAP and Gmail's web application for mobile phones. "Google Sync synchronizes Gmail, Google Calendars, and contacts with your mobile phone. You can use the Google services directly in the built-in Mail, Calendar and Contacts application on your phone. Google Sync offers some advantages over using IMAP on your phone. Most importantly, it allows for content to be pushed to your phone within seconds after changes occur on the server. On the other hand, using Gmail Drafts from your phone is not possible via Google Sync. On iPhone and iPod Touch devices, the Gmail web application offers the most comprehensive features and the best experience for most users. But for users who prefer using the native Mail application, Google Sync offers an alternative way to access their Gmail account."
While Google Sync is also available for Blackberry, Nokia S60 devices and other mobile phones, push Gmail only works for Windows Mobile and iPhone devices that support ActiveSync. At least for now.
"Push e-mail is used to describe e-mail systems that provide an "always-on" capability, in which new e-mail is instantly and actively transferred (pushed) as it arrives by the mail delivery agent (MDA) (commonly called mail server) to the mail user agent (MUA), also called the e-mail client. E-mail clients include smartphones and, less strictly, IMAP personal computer mail applications," explains Wikipedia.
Instead of periodically fetching new messages, mail clients receive notifications as soon as there's a new message. Applications no longer waste bandwidth and you're able to read a message shortly after it was sent.
"Using Google Sync, you can now get your Gmail messages pushed directly to your phone. Having an over-the-air, always-on connection means that your inbox is up to date, no matter where you are or what you're doing. Sync works with your phone's native email application so there's no additional software needed."
If you're already using Google Sync to synchronize your calendars and contacts, it's easy to edit the settings and enable it for mail, as well.
Unfortunately, there are some downsides to this feature, so you should only enable push support for Gmail if you really need it. "Depending on your device, any push connection may use more power than fetching content at intervals. In some cases the difference in power usage may have a noticeable impact on your phone's battery life," mentions Google.
Google explains the difference between using Google Sync, IMAP and Gmail's web application for mobile phones. "Google Sync synchronizes Gmail, Google Calendars, and contacts with your mobile phone. You can use the Google services directly in the built-in Mail, Calendar and Contacts application on your phone. Google Sync offers some advantages over using IMAP on your phone. Most importantly, it allows for content to be pushed to your phone within seconds after changes occur on the server. On the other hand, using Gmail Drafts from your phone is not possible via Google Sync. On iPhone and iPod Touch devices, the Gmail web application offers the most comprehensive features and the best experience for most users. But for users who prefer using the native Mail application, Google Sync offers an alternative way to access their Gmail account."
While Google Sync is also available for Blackberry, Nokia S60 devices and other mobile phones, push Gmail only works for Windows Mobile and iPhone devices that support ActiveSync. At least for now.
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