Tag: browser

Update your Chrome browser now

The amount of times I have been on zoom during work, someone shares their own screen and you can see there Chrome browser almost begging the user to hit update.

Most people put these updates off and I have really hard time understanding why, especially because the most updates are done in seconds and you are back to where you left off. Maybe its different on Windows and Mac but on Linux very few updates require a reboot. If a browser required a reboot I would be shocked.

The chrome updates recently have become critical with a number of zero-day exploits running wild.

I found this post explaining the colour differences in Chrome updates.

Get a Chrome update when available

Normally updates happen in the background when you close and reopen your computer’s browser. But if you haven’t closed your browser in a while, you might see a pending update:

  1. On your computer, open Chrome.
  2. At the top right, look at More More.
  3. If an update is pending, the icon will be coloured:
    • Green: An update was released less than 2 days ago.
    • Orange: An update was released about 4 days ago.
    • Red: An update was released at least a week ago.

The amount of the people I have seen with the Red update is incredible. Of course if you are not sure how to update Chrome…

To update Google Chrome:

  1. On your computer, open Chrome.
  2. At the top right, click More More.
  3. Click Update Google Chrome.
    • Important: If you can’t find this button, you’re on the latest version.
  4. Click Relaunch.

The browser saves your opened tabs and windows and reopens them automatically when it restarts. Your incognito windows won’t reopen when Chrome restarts. If you’d prefer not to restart straight away, click Not now. The next time you restart your browser, the update will be applied.

Its that easy…

The future of the browser conference

I was very happy to take part in the future of the browser conference, along with my amazing colleague Jasmine. It was a different kind of conference and this was very clear from the introduction with Amber in the future! (amazing and well worth watching)

Each section started with a really different video from different artists. This was a great move with most conferences, generally starting with a keynote before the conference talks) This conference turned that on its head before jumping into number of deep dives around aspects of the future browser. All the videos are now up online, so go have a watch now.

Since the conference I have installed Brave on my Ubuntu machine now and also Puma on my mobile.

There was quite a few new developments I hadn’t really seen before.

Project fugu

Project Fugu is an effort to close gaps in the web’s capabilities enabling new classes of applications to run on the web. In short things like controlling Zigbee, USB and Bluetooth devices. I heard about this a while ago and thought Living room of the Future controlled via a browser.

Handshake

Handshake is a decentralized, permission-less naming protocol where every peer is validating and in charge of managing the root DNS naming zone with the goal of creating an alternative to existing Certificate Authorities and naming systems. Names on the internet (top level domains, social networking handles, etc.) ultimately rely upon centralized actors with full control over a system which are relied upon to be honest, as they are vulnerable to hacking, censorship, and corruption.
I think that says it all, something which many people have pointed out many times as a major problem with the DNS system.

Handshake is an experiment which seeks to explore those new ways in which the necessary tools to build a more decentralized internet. Services on the internet have become more centralized beginning in the 1990s, but do not fulfill the original decentralized vision of the internet. Email became Gmail, usenet became reddit, blog replies became facebook and Medium, pingbacks became twitter, squid became Cloudflare, even gnutella became The Pirate Bay. Centralization exists because there is a need to manage spam, griefing, and sockpuppet/sybil attacks.

Unlock protocol

As most of you know, I have webmontization enabled on this blog and also on my mixes site. But Unlock is aimed at subscriptions and memberships. This is great news, except its not a standard yet but looks promising.

The coming age of the 402

I had heard Matt talk previously during May’s Manchester Futurists. There is a lot of unexplored areas in the http status codes including 402, which could be used to do new and interesting things like WebMon, which was also covered in Manchester Futurists and the future of the browser.

Better ways to archive and save the page.

Saving the page has been a nightmare for a long while, and I found Webrecorder and ArchiveWeb.page quite interesting solutions. Its also interesting to think about the lengths we have gone through to stop people saving the page.

This is why I like these community driven conferences… Big thanks to @caseorganic, @anselm and all the speakers.

Public Service Internet monthly newsletter (Sept 2020)

Defcon 2020 safemode

We live in incredible times with such possibilities that is clear. Although its easily dismissed seeing the 2020’s worst security breaches so far and asking what changed in the EU?.

To quote Buckminster Fuller “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

You are seeing aspects of this happening with challenges to app stores and seeing people take action over their social data.

My browser never ever consents

Ian thinks: One thing I like is browser extensions. This one is part of a movement to never consent to anything sites want to push us. Try it out and disable it if you don’t like it

More emerging tech from open hardware world

Ian thinks: NODE features a lot here but look out for the Edge of tomorrow exoskelton and the open cardboard robot which turns a smartphone into a low-cost remote telepresence robot.

The Underestimated Threat Vector: Homogeneity

Ian thinks: Right in the middle of the Defcon hacking virtual conference, a well thought-out talk about the threat of homogeneity. Remember not to read the comments. I could have done a whole month of recommendations for Defcon talks. I highly recommend browsing through the Defcon talks by starting at the playlists.

Thank goodness for the Max Schrems of this world

Ian thinks: I have been moving my data into EU servers when Brexit happened and its very difficult. Thanks goodness for the Max Schrems of this world, willing to go to court over this.

Build the resilient future using indigenous wisdom

Ian thinks: Julia Watson’s short TED video is deeply impressive and shows the answers are all out there, in places and communities we tend to ignore.

Paying for privacy, not ideal but interesting

Would you really abandon Google for a paid ad-free search engine? Neeva might be for you? Although I’m happy with Duckduckgo’s non-tracking ad system.

Deepfakes solution needs critical mass

Ian thinks: Its a reasonable idea but relies on people/systems creating and looking for the CAI metadata. I also checked if it was opensource and it is. I look forward to the Gimp plugin very soon.

Fawke your face for protection against facial recognition

Ian thinks: Finally a reasonable way to cloak your face from facial recognition systems like clearview AI. Nice open source which you can run without visually distorting your beautiful face.

Facebook ads under close scrutiny

Ian thinks: We all know how facebook adverts and editorial weighting works but everyonce in a while a experiment really brings it into sharp view. This Vox video is that, although they also point at the little known Facebook Ad Library.

Find the archive here

Google apologizes again for bias results

Google once again was in hot water for its algorthim which meant looking up happy families in image search would return results of happy white famalies.

Of course the last time, Google photos classified black people as gorillas.

Some friends have been debating this and suggested it wasn’t so bad, but its clear that after a few days things were tweaked. Of course Google are one of many who rely on non-diverse training data and likely are coding their biases into the code/algorithms. Because of course getting real diverse training data is expensive and time consuming; I guess in the short term so is building a diverse team in their own eyes?

Anyway here’s what I get when searching for happy families on Friday 2nd June about 10pm BST.

logged in google search for happy families
Logged into Google account using Chrome on Ubuntu
incognito search for happy families
Using incognito mode and searching for happy families with Chrome on Ubuntu
Search for happy families using a russian tor and chromium
Search for happy families using a russian tor node on Chromium on Ubuntu

 

Client side development now?


As they say, Serenity now? Insanity later?

A couple blogs which sum up the current state of front end development it would seem…

Tim’s software in 2014 and Chris’ what sucks about frontend development.

First Tim,

The client-side mess · Things are bad. You have to build everything three times: Web, iOS, Android. We’re talent-starved, this is egregious waste, and it’s really hurting us.

JavaScript is horrible.
> [5, 10, 1].sort();
[ 1, 10, 5 ]
Et cetera. Thus Coffeescript and Dart and other efforts to route around TheElephantInTheRoom.js.

The browser APIs suck too. Sufficiently so that jQuery (or equivalent) is regarded as the lowest level that any sane person would program to; in effect, the new Web assembler.

And from Chris

managing JavaScript dependencies still sucks, and Bower has fundamental flaws that limits it’s utility

table designs are bad, so why are we re-implementing them with non-semantic class names? We should use our CSS frameworks to have only abstract classes that we make concrete by extending them with semantic class names. Also, progressive enhancement isn’t dead and still has value.

…I only feel these issues because I’m comparing it directly to other parts of the software stack rather than considering the front-end in isolation, but front-end development still feels very immature and like the wild west, rather than the engineering discipline we’re striving to be. We need to make it better.

I will admit its been a while since I’ve done any front end development but to be fair I’m also wondering if developers are taking full advantage of whats available to them? For example in my twitter stream I saw someone link to a post about SVG and DOM manipulation for icons. And finally…

More or less everything is expected to talk HTTP, and it’s really easy to make things talk HTTP.
Its easy to under-estimate how great this is, specially as we move towards coding for the mobile, offline, internet of things and exotic screens/devices. REST won out and who was stupid enough to bet against this? Oh yes… where are they now? Dead! Good riddens SOAP and other craziness…

Goo or google Engine?

Goo – Instant Play from Goo Technologies on Vimeo.

Short video clip exemplifying the power of browser based games for virality and instant play. Oh, and yes the game is on HTML5 with no plug-ins or download. Powered by the Goo Engine.

To be honest first time I saw the Goo technologies experiment, I thought it was Google trying to one up Mozilla. Right as the Mozilla Fest is on in London (which I couldn’t attend due to a family funeral).

Goo Engine® is the HTML5 and WebGL based 3D engine capable of powering the next generation of interactive web content. Using Goo Engine enables you to incorporate rich 3D content into your existing website without the need for special browser plugins or software downloads.

It looks impressive and if the editor is as simple to make this stuff, well who knows? Could be great in the right hands, specially hands with lots of time like young people

Firefox 2.0 out now, go get it now

Firefox 2.0 start page

Just updated my Firefox from RC2 to the full 2.0 version. I'm very impressed so far… Everything seems to work as expected and most of my extensions have updated without a problem. Now's a good time to point to the fact that the Mozilla team are asking for ideas on what they should do with version 3.0 and beyond of Firefox. I personally would like to see more Microformat support and real offline reading. Identity, web feed handling, security and privicy occupy the next few slots for me. How about you?

Oh did I forget to mention IE 7 also came out a few days ago? Well don't forget you can download that from ie7.com.

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Firefox 1.5 now out but with limited SVG support

Firefox 1.5 released

Firefox 1.5 is released, hooray! And its the same as Firefox 1.5 RC3 which I've been using for a while now, hooray again… But not with full support for SVG 1.1 Full, Tiny or Basic profiles. This is a crying shame but still marks another step forward for SVG on the desktop. The full version which supports SVG is still in development and should be available in Firefox 3 according to SVG news. At least SVG is doing much better in the mobile space, almost 100 phones and counting.

If you want to see whats possible with Firefox 1.5 and SVG, do check out the Canvas painter demos which are poping up everywhere. Vladimir has a link to the best ones.

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Flock finally revealed to the public

flock logo

So at long last Flock is out in a form that the general internet public can download and play with. And honestly after all the hype and secret squirrel secrecy, its a bit of a let down. Let me outline what it is and what it does differently.

He's my screenshots of the Flock and everyone's Tagged Flock pictures.

It looks to be a Deer Park alpha build of Firefox (might be wrong but its at least a beta) with additional features. What are the extra features? Well…

Add a blogging tool,
Add del.icio.us bookmarking but remove regular bookmarks,
Add a Safari RSS type aggregator and remove livebookmarks,
Add a nice, well designed skin and little tricks here and there.

And you pretty much got Flock.

tagging up star items in flock

I think if Greasemonkey was not available I would be very much more impressed. But lets be clear, its a early alpha and can be steered in different directions. I like that fact they have put del.icio.us bookmarking deeply inside and its certainly better than the firefox plugins you can get which do simlar things. But the flickr intergration feel more like a poor after thought in comparison. Its nice to have a blog app right there, but right click and blog is a little sucky and I couldnt get it working for Blojsom under the Atom, moveabletype or even metaweblog API's at all. Which is strange because I thought at least metaweblog would work. I checked the blojsom logs after David's comment, nothing is coming through from Flock or any other besides my own wblogger client. Oh yeah heres the nasty html error I get. Try and make some sense of that…

So at the end of the day version 0.4 alpha is not bad, I won't replace firefox because Flock is certainly not amzingly stable. People have already took pictures with boxes being cut off and the like. Here's a few of my grumbles. It could be that I'm running Flock on my tabletpc computer but I dont think so. Greasemonkey can do a lot of the little tricks Flock has, but there not as smooth or well thought out. Flock is worth keeping an eye on for later.

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Would you give up your Browser or your Applications?

A Interesting thought around the web as a platform, via jeremy zawodny. Jonathon Schwartz from Sun recently wrote this…

Or finally, as I did last week at a keynote, ask the audience which they'd rather give up – their browser, or all the rest of their desktop apps. (Unanimously, they'd all give up the latter without a blink.)

Like Jeremy and Johathon, I too would easily pick the browser over the rest of the applications. I pose the same question to a few people at work and Tom disagreed and came up with the clever answer of the rest of the applications because he would build his own browser. Deborah alerted me to the fact that Sun are very much in the thin-client space and that this entry may have something to do with that (I believe shes right). But its still a interesting question.

I think with a decent browser such as Firefox with mediaplayer plugins and the ability to install extensions there a much smaller need for the rest of my applications. Realisticly if you include Greasemonkey your able to program any rich applications like how widgets work now.

This whole discussion can be taken a step deeper, but I'll revisit it when I have the time.

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What is flock?

Flock - coming to the party?

Ok Flock isnt the web based aggregator which I still use now and there. Were talking about some invite only social browser which makes use of Web 2.0 values. The current website doesnt say much about Flock. A friend of the developers, Roland Tanglao has a more revealing entry on his blog titled: Flock rocks (or Chris Messina is a demo god)! But theres still not enough. Has anyone else got anything more on Flock?

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