When Mike reviewed social bookmarking, research and collaboration service Diigo last year, he liked its simplicity, its connections with other services, and its wealth of features. Since then, the social bookmarking field has continued to mature; witness the recent purchase of Friendfeed by Facebook, and the numerous ways that bookmarks can be shared on social networks. Even MySpace is getting into the act by syncing posts with Twitter!
So how can a lesser-known app like Diigo compete? The latest version of Diigo has just gone live, and from what I can tell, it’s growing beyond social bookmarking and going for the “kitchen-sink” approach: Add as many features as possible, so that no matter what a user wants, it’ll be there. Among the list of new features are a few that caught my eye: Read the rest of this entry »
Statistics from the exo.performance.network indicate that over half of computer users (50.6 percent) are now using the Firefox browser, InfoWorld reports. Despite this, Internet Explorer is still widely used, with 84 percent of users still turning to it “regularly.”
These numbers indicate that a large number of people use more than one browser. This is hardly surprising, given the addition of newer browsers like Google Chrome and Safari for Windows, and the recent upgrade of Opera.
It’s evident that web designers and developers will continue to need to support multiple browsers, and while modern browsers are generally more compatible than they have been in the past, developers will need to plan testing of their applications accordingly.
Which browsers do you test your sites for?
This week brings several pieces of significant news on the browser front, about Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer (IE) 8. As covered on the OStatic blog, Google has announced a new, stable version 3.0 of Chrome. It’s downloadable here, and if you’re already using it, you’ll get an automatic update. Meanwhile, Mozilla announced new tools, and Internet Explorer — which has been steadily losing market share, to Firefox in particular — bested all other browsers in an interesting set of tests.
Read the rest of this entry »
As web workers, sometimes we have to walk a fine line between keeping clients happy, and providing the best possible services. For web developers like me, the issue of whether to continue supporting Internet Explorer 6 is becoming a major headache.
It would seem to be a no-brainer to ditch support for a browser that is slow, prone to malware attacks, and incompatible with modern standards. Those of us who design and maintain web sites have to resort to all sorts of time-consuming (thus expensive!) tricks to make the sites we create work with IE6 — a browser that is now almost nine years old.
Unfortunately, up to a quarter of web users still use IE6, and in big companies, the percentage is even higher. According to Forrester Research, “60 percent of companies use Internet Explorer 6 as their default browser.” Read the rest of this entry »
Microsoft’s latest attempt to get people to use Internet Explorer is a competition, being run by Microsoft Australia, that promises $10,000AUD ($8,000) to the winner. In order to win, you need to “upgrade” your browser from the “old” Firefox and follow clues to find a page that’s only viewable for IE users, ironically harking back to the bad old days when web sites were “optimized” for either IE or Netscape and not accessible to users of the other browser. Is this competition — which is highly unlikely to make anyone switch to IE long-term — a sign of desperation in the face of diminishing market share for the once-dominant browser vendor? Read the rest of this entry »
There were several important updates on the browser front this week, from Mozilla, Microsoft and Google. From where I sit, there is very healthy competition going on in the browser market right now, and if you’re a web worker who favors only one browser, there may soon be some prompts for you to switch or mix up your usage.
Die-hard Internet Explorer users will have to wait until 2009 for a final version of Internet Explorer 8, Microsoft confirmed. There won’t even be another release candidate until the first quarter. It offers malware protection and other improvements, but is taking a relatively long time in development.
Read the rest of this entry »
A month ago, I reviewed Zemanta, the blogging extensions service company that provides contextual images, links, latest articles or blog posts and tags to your blog posts. I was a little harsh on the somewhat lack of relevant images and sometimes even irrelevant links that Zemanta offered up to me in their feature bar that appeared neatly embedded in my Typepad and Blogger publishing tools. I think my exact words were “all hell broke loose.”
Since then, I’ve still not incorporated Zemanta suggested items into this WWD blog but have used them more and more often on some of my other blogs, particularly my personal blogs where I have less stringent writers guidelines to follow and anything goes because they’re mine. Now Zemanta has added a few more features that have caught my attention.
Zemanta says their tools can help increase traffic to your blog because of:
1. better annotation of posts, links, images with actual crawlers for Google and Yahoo can rate the post higher and glean more context from your post; and
2. placement of links to related posts across blogosphere helps get more track back for the post which can also increase traffic. Read the rest of this entry »
When Mike reviewed social bookmarking, research and collaboration service Diigo last year, he liked its simplicity, its connections with other services, and its wealth of features. Since then, the social bookmarking field has continued to mature; witness the recent purchase of Friendfeed by Facebook, and the numerous ways that bookmarks can be shared on social networks. Even MySpace is getting into the act by syncing posts with Twitter!
So how can a lesser-known app like Diigo compete? The latest version of Diigo has just gone live, and from what I can tell, it’s growing beyond social bookmarking and going for the “kitchen-sink” approach: Add as many features as possible, so that no matter what a user wants, it’ll be there. Among the list of new features are a few that caught my eye: Read the rest of this entry »
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
