Safari for iOS captured 61.79 percent of all mobile browser Web traffic in March, according to Net Applications.* That was a nice jump from the 55.41 percent it grabbed in February — enough to reaffirm Apple’s dominance of the space for the time being.

Not that it particularly needs reaffirming; mobile Safari certainly isn’t in danger of losing its lead any time soon. Even Google’s Android browser, despite the legion of devices on which it runs, only managed to capture a 21.86 percent share. It was trailed by Opera Mini, which claimed 8.4 percent. Bringing up the rear? Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, with a 1.99 percent share, and BlackBerry, with a piddling .91 percent.

Why does iOS generate so much more traffic than Android when Android has a a greater share of the smartphone market? The most obvious answer is that there are quite a few Android phones out there that simply don’t see much use as smartphones. In other words, iOS users may be generally more engaged with their mobile devices. Or, as Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster speculates, Web browsing on iPad could be spiking mobile Safari’s market share.

“We believe that iOS’s contribution from tablets, which are likely to generate more traffic than a smartphone, is greater than Android’s,” Munster theorizes. “We believe that iOS is likely to continue to lead in mobile traffic generation in the U.S. for at least the remainder of the year.”

*Net Applications’ mobile browser data encompasses 160 million visits to more than 40,000 websites each month. You’ll find more details about the company’s methodology here.

Mozilla’s recent announcement to block all third-party cookies by default in the new version of Firefox has sparked renewed interest in these topics, and as you would expect, opinions vary wildly depending on perspective and priorities. Reactions from those representing the ad industry predominantly have been critical, while many privacy advocates have applauded the decision. My reaction was one of frustration for several reasons, but one in particular that is relevant to this discussion — my company builds and sells a product that is used by advertisers and ad agencies to “track” what is happening online.

Common Theme, Different Issues

To adequately discuss privacy, you must first define what it is you’re discussing. Currently, there are two major movements being debated, both of which involve the way Web browsers and providers of online content (predominantly publishers and advertisers) exchange and store information.

First, the Do Not Track (DNT) HTTP header was designed in conjunction with the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and is intended to provide consumers with a standard way to indicate to Web applications, digital advertisers and publishers they do not wish to have their behavior tracked across Web properties. All major browsers currently support this feature and the industry is moving toward adopting it as a standard; however, last year Microsoft announced that beginning with Internet Explorer 10, it would enable DNT by default, subsequently causing widespread confusion since the header was designed to be opt-in, not opt-out. For this reason, the vast majority of publishers and advertisers currently ignore all stated DNT preferences, including Google, Facebook and Yahoo.

Mozilla’s recent announcement involves a separate debate about whether or not browsers will accept third-party cookies. For the uninitiated, cookies are small files that include data that allow your computer to interact with the websites you visit. Third-party cookies traditionally are set by advertising companies and analytics firms, such as mine, to help understand what is happening on a website over a certain period of time. Prior to Mozilla’s announcement, only Safari blocked third-party cookies by default among the major browser providers. However, Mozilla’s market share (approximately 20 percent according to Net Applications) is much larger than Safari’s and represents “critical mass,” thus the renewed interest in this topic.

Why We Track

Companies track information online for different reasons. In the analytics world, our business is one of scale. Unlike behavioral targeting, our business model is predicated on the ability to identify correlation across millions of advertising “events” and making recommendations based on huge data sets across large-scale media campaigns.

Typically, advertisers purchase huge inventories of ads across a large number of sites their desired audiences frequent. Each of these ads has a different price associated with it, which increasingly is determined by demand and effectiveness. To make sure they get what they pay for, advertisers often choose to work with an analytics firm to better understand which ad campaigns and channels (search, display, etc.) are more effective and why. As a simple example, browser cookies allow us to determine which advertising is resonating with consumers and how many times that message should be displayed before it gets annoying and loses effectiveness, allowing advertisers to avoid waste and poor experiences.

Unintended Consequences

By most estimates, the first online ad appeared roughly 20 years ago. As a technology, cookies have been used for almost as long. They also serve as a fundamental component that underpins the economics of the open web. Small and upcoming publishers rely on the data provided through third-party advertising technologies to quantify and price the “real estate” accompanying their content, often selling ad inventory as part of large-scale networks that provide reach and attract larger advertising customers. Without these networks, it’s difficult to see these publishers attracting ad revenue necessary to compete and offer high-quality, ad-supported content. Paywalls will also become more prevalent for those publishers that have sufficient resources and audiences to support them.

Also, by eliminating the ability for publishers/advertisers to price and purchase higher-quality placements based on relevance, you can expect a return to “spray and pray” tactics where ad inventory prices plummet and the total number of ads displayed and purchased rises drastically. In other words, if you think some ads are disruptive today, get ready to see much more aggressive tactics employed.

Lastly, while cookies are a relatively mature technology with existing browser controls, industry opt-outs and comprehensive privacy policies, there are alternate tracking approaches that don’t have the same level of consumer control. These alternate methods — including device fingerprinting, flash cookies, local storage, etc. — represent the Wild West of tracking technologies. They are very difficult to detect, lack proper controls and can be abused by fringe tracking companies. None of them represent progress or improvement for the customer.

Choice

The advertising community takes privacy seriously and we agree with the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB), National Advertising Initiative, Digital Advertising Alliance and other organizations advocating for the continued development of existing consumer-choice mechanisms. We welcome participation from Mozilla and other browser vendors that seek to deliver easy and transparent privacy solutions to consumers; however, these need to be developed in concert with both advertisers and publishers to be effective.

Paul Pellman is the CEO of Adometry, Inc., a marketing analytics provider that generates insights about the performance of marketing campaigns through combining and interpreting advertising data from online and offline channels. Prior to joining Adometry, he was executive vice president of marketing for Hoover’s.

If I say “iOS users overwhelmingly use the Safari browser, here’s the stats”, you’d say “okay, that’s interesting, what can I learn from that, and what opportunity does it represent to the industry?” But if I say “minorities in the tech industry overwhelmingly have this experience, here’s their examples”, you don’t say “Okay, what can I learn and what’s the opportunity?” you start by saying “that’s not true!”

– From Anil Dash in a comment on a blog post by Jason Calacanis entitled “Doing the Right Things,” which was in response to a blog post about racism in tech writing by Jamelle Bouie http://allthingsd.com/20130105/yahoos-new-homerun-homepage-is-rolling-out-more-widely-across-several-browsers/ http://allthingsd.com/20130105/yahoos-new-homerun-homepage-is-rolling-out-more-widely-across-several-browsers/#comments Sun, 06 Jan 2013 07:41:33 +0000 Kara Swisher http://allthingsd.com/?p=282676

Yahoo appears to be rolling out the newest version of the redesign of its homepage even more extensively across several major browsers, including Google Chrome, Apple Safari and Mozilla Firefox.

As AllThingsD has previously reported several times, the Silicon Valley Internet giant has been working on a new homepage look, designed to improve its declining consumer usage.

The latest look has been present on all my browsers all day, rather than cycling off to the old version as before. The design is cleaner, with a more touchscreen tablet approach, new icons, and a scrolling news feature. With a more mobile feel, it’s slightly different than previous new versions that Yahoo has been testing over the last few months.

After redoing its Yahoo Mail and Flickr photo-sharing service, sources inside the company said that Yahoo is now close to launching the new homepage. It’s part of an effort called Project Homerun and also a larger effort called Project Zed, which will also include more personalization and a focus on bringing in a range of third-party content.

More on what that means soon …

Until then, here are three different screenshots from tonight from Chrome, Safari and Firefox:

Christened Baidu Mobile Browser, the software is intended as a direct competitor to Safari, the default browser on Apple’s iOS devices; to Chrome, which serves the same function on Android devices; and to UCWeb’s UC Browser. And Baidu has high hopes for its success. During a Monday briefing with reporters, company executives said they hope to see the Baidu Mobile Browser preinstalled on 80 percent of smartphones sold in China by the end of 2012.

That’s a tall order, but then Baidu’s services are enormously popular in China. The country’s share of the Chinese search market is about 80 percent, according to Analysys International. Is it reasonable for Baidu to expect to duplicate its search market success in the mobile browsing space by the end of the year? We’ll know in a matter of months.

Now it seems that RSS feeds on mobile Safari in iOS 5 are unavailable, as well.

A series of tests conducted by AllThingsD earlier today on different iPhones showed that RSS feeds usually accessible through .Mac Reader (reader.mac.com) on mobile Safari were unavailable on devices running iOS 5.

Attempts to view RSS feeds for news Web sites through reader.mac.com resulted in consistent “Service Unavailable” notifications.

And according to checks on Down For Everyone or Just Me and Websitedown, reader.mac.com appears to be down.

It’s not the first time reader.mac.com has suffered service interruptions. This time, it has been down for more than a few hours.

When asked about its mobile RSS reader, Apple declined to comment or offer insight into whether this is a temporary service glitch or if Safari RSS is gone for good from iOS 5.

With the launch of its new desktop operating system, OS X Mountain Lion, late last month, Apple released an update to its Safari Web browser that doesn’t support RSS feeds within the browser. It has since been reported that in iOS 6, which is currently available in beta for developers, mobile Safari “no longer registers” for the common RSS or Atom feed. The user is now prompted to view Safari RSS feeds in a separate, dedicated app.

A couple workarounds have been created — like this Subscribe to Feed button and this Automator workflow — but the bigger question, aside from how to get your feeds in Safari, is whether RSS as a content delivery tool is slowly being put out to pasture.

If that’s the case, Apple isn’t alone in its RSS phase-out. Google Chrome used to display RSS as a raw source file, but it now prompts the user for an external app to view RSS feeds.

Of course, with the new iOS being a work in progress, and with Apple currently planning an event at which the company is widely expected to debut a new iPhone model, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that Apple could introduce a new notification system that pushes feeds through in a different way.

Or maybe the polite suggestion that users, for now, find a dedicated reader for their RSS feeds is really just that — and a new RSS solution isn’t necessarily on the horizon.

We’ll update as we have more information on .Mac Reader on iOS.

Update: It appears now that .Mac Reader is back up and and running. Apple hasn’t offered an explanation for what caused the service interruption for several hours today.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Teknoswag.)

What’s interesting is that the fine hasn’t even been levied yet, but the process has played out very much in public.

Literally every step of the process has been leaked. In March, The Wall Street Journal — which first brought the issue to light – reported that regulators were looking into the matter. In April, the San Jose Mercury News reported that Google was likely to be fined by the FTC. Then, in July, it came out that a settlement of $22.5 million was near. Yesterday, Reuters said members of the FTC had voted to approve the settlement, and it would come out in days.

While neither the FTC or Google is admitting to any leaks, Google seems to have gotten so fed up with the coverage that it has made the rather unusual move of commenting specifically on the ongoing case.

The company now tells any reporter who asks, “The FTC is focused on a 2009 help center page published more than two years before our consent decree, and a year before Apple changed its cookie-handling policy. We have now changed that page and taken steps to remove the ad cookies, which collected no personal information, from Apple’s browsers.”

Translation: The only issue they are pinning on us is that a help page was out of date. Please stop using scary words like “bypass” and “tracking.”

The FTC, meanwhile, says it does not comment on ongoing cases.

The “consent decree” Google is talking about is the agreement it made with the FTC over Google Buzz in 2011, in which it promised not to mislead users on privacy for 20 years, or else face consequences. So the FTC is upset that this outdated help page said one thing, while Google was doing something else (the specifics have to do with Google figuring out a trick to put little personalized “+1” buttons on ads).

The context for this is that Google faces all sorts of international regulatory scrutiny over various privacy incidents, some of them “inadvertent,” and some of them more complicated.

But as the Safari case moves behind (partially) closed doors to the court of public opinion, some stakes are very high and others are very low. While $22.5 million is small change in Google bucks, it would be the largest fine the FTC has exacted on a single company.

Plus, it doesn’t appear that Google will have to admit any wrongdoing. That might seem strange, but it’s actually standard practice. The Buzz agreement was the same way. The FTC has made a practice of securing no-fault settlements, something that has recently been contested in court for not being strong enough to defend consumers.

Given that Google won’t have to admit fault or pay a significant fine, the consistent press coverage of the company’s privacy slip-ups is probably the worst repercussion of the whole incident.

These privacy incursions are bound to keep happening, considering just how much data companies like Google have about all of us, and how complex their organizations have become.

So is this what the future of tech regulation looks like? Company gets in trouble, agrees to be audited but doesn’t admit fault, and then for years, regulators extract ticky-tacky fines over “inadvertent” errors? And then the cycle repeats itself.

The iPhone and iPad browser, announced earlier on Thursday and now available from the App Store, features some of its most popular features, including a private incognito mode and the ability to view open tabs and pages from other devices.

But, under the hood, Chrome for iOS isn’t Chrome. It’s using Apple’s browsing engine. What’s worse, it isn’t even the fast Nitro JavaScript engine used by Safari, but rather Apple’s older engine, known as UIWebView.

“Chrome for iOS provides the same fast, secure and stable web browsing experience you’ve come to enjoy when using Chrome on your desktop or Android device, while also adapting to platform specific technical specifications,” Google said in a statement. “Rendering and the javascript engine are provided by iOS through UIWebView, so Chrome for iOS does not use Chrome v8 JS engine.”

That’s a lot of jargon, but it boils down to this: Chrome for iOS will be slow — significantly slower at many tasks than Apple’s built-in browser.

This isn’t unique to Chrome. All browsers are required to use Apple’s browser engine, whether it is Dolphin or Yahoo Axis or any number of other third-party browsers.

The browser, due to show up in the App Store later in the day, offers signature features of Chrome, including synchronization across devices and an anonymous “incognito” mode. Presumably, though, it uses Apple’s WebKit-based browser engine under the hood, as required by Apple’s terms.

Usage of Google’s Chrome browser has soared in the past year, with more than 310 million active users, up from 160 million a year ago.

That equates to 60 billion words typed and one terabyte of data downloaded each day, according to Chrome head Sundar Pichai.

Google made the announcement at the start of day two of its I/O developers conference in San Francisco.

Much of Google’s Chrome effort now centers around taking Chrome from being a desktop browser into one that is used on mobile devices and even on its own as an operating system in the company’s Chromebooks.

Google released a test version of Chrome for Android in February. With the new Nexus 7, Chrome is, for the first time, the default browser in an Android device. Chrome requires at least Android 4.0.

Beyond just having versions of Chrome on different devices, the company has focused on allowing users to take not only their bookmarks and settings, but also on letting users keep the same tabs open across multiple devices.

Thursday’s keynote is still going on. Click here for AllThingsD’s live coverage.

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IE captured a 53.83 percent share of the worldwide browser market in March, up from 52.84 percent in February. A minuscule gain, but — importantly — one that was won at its rivals’ expense. During the same period, Firefox’s share of the market slipped to 20.55 percent share from 20.92 percent. Meanwhile, Google Chrome’s market share fell to 18.57 percent from 18.90 percent — the third consecutive month it has declined — and Apple’s Safari dropped to 5.07 percent from 5.2 percent.

“With a gain of .99 percent last month and a net gain of 1.2 percent global usage share over the last five months, Internet Explorer has stabilized and even reversed its usage share declines of the last few years,” Net Applications researchers explained.

For IE, which once held well more than 70 percent of the browser market, this turnabout is a welcome trend. Could its slump finally be over?

The investigations — which span U.S. federal and state agencies, as well as a pan-European effort led by France — could embroil Google in years of legal battles and result in hefty fines for privacy violations. The Journal in February reported that Google was using special computer code to install tiny tracking files, or “cookies,” on some people’s computers, iPhones and iPads, even if the devices were set to block this kind of tracking.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

In a blog post written by Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Internet Explorer, the software giant alleges that Google is using similar methods — though the actual bypass mechanism is different — to get around default privacy protections in Internet Explorer and track IE users with cookies.

By default, Microsoft says, Internet Explorer blocks third-party cookies, unless the site presents a “P3P Compact Policy Statement” indicating how the site will use the cookie and that ultimately the site won’t track the users.

“Technically, Google utilizes a nuance in the P3P specification that has the effect of bypassing user preferences about cookies … By sending this text, Google bypasses the cookie protection and enables its third-party cookies to be allowed rather than blocked,” the post reads.

Microsoft said it has contacted Google and asked them to commit to Microsoft’s standard privacy settings for browser users.

In the post, Microsoft also offered a Tracking Protection List that Internet Explorer 9 users can add as a protection, “in the event that Google continues this practice.”

Google has responded by saying that Microsoft has omitted important information in its blog post.

“Microsoft uses a ‘self-declaration’ protocol (P3P) dating from 2002 under which Microsoft asks websites to represent their privacy practices in machine-readable form,” Google’s statement reads. “It is well known — including by Microsoft — that it is impractical to comply with Microsoft’s request while providing modern web functionality. We have been open about our approach, as have many other websites.”

Google went on to point out that in 2010, a research report from Carnegie Mellon University found that more than 11,000 of 33,139 Web sites were not issuing valid P3P policies as requested by Microsoft.

“Today the Microsoft policy is widely non-operational,” Google said.

The Wall Street Journal reported Google’s bypass of Safari’s privacy settings late last week, and after being contacted by the Journal, Google disabled the code that had allowed it to track Safari users. Three U.S. lawmakers have since called on the FTC to investigate the search giant over the privacy gaffe.

(Photo courtesy of Flickr/Si1very)

Apple says it is working to put a stop to the practice. And Google, which had been tracking users after exploiting this loophole to put Google +1 buttons in ads, stopped the practice after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

But in the meantime, to stop such tracking by other advertising companies, the only options available to Safari users are problematic.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

The companies used special computer code that tricks Apple’s Safari Web-browsing software into letting them monitor many users. Safari, the most widely used browser on mobile devices, is designed to block such tracking by default.

Google disabled its code after being contacted by The Wall Street Journal.

Read the rest of this post on the original site »

This is part of a user sign-in feature that is now part of the stable Chrome 16 release, which came out Wednesday. The main intent of the feature is to help people sync their bookmarks across multiple devices, and to separate saved passwords and extensions for multiple people who use a single computer.

(And, of course, some day these Chrome profiles may well be tied into that whole unified Google+ identity system they’re attempting to pull off.)

But, oh man, this could have a greater and more immediate effect on those of us who have personal Gmail accounts and professional Google Apps accounts.

If you use a different email provider, or prefer desktop mail clients, this may not seem quite as cathartic as it does for me.

But for those of us who maintain multiple Google Web mail accounts and use various Google services, Google seems to be perpetually confused about who we are. The various capabilities Google offers for switching accounts are constantly breaking, and when they fail, they often log users out of everything.

The solution that many people — including Google executives! — have found themselves using is to keep multiple browsers open for their different Google accounts. So, for a long time, Safari was my work mail browser, and Chrome or Firefox was for everything else.

One prominent Google exec recently admitted to me that he always has a development version of Chrome and the current release running, so he can keep his personal and professional accounts separate.

But in the new Chrome, users can configure multiple accounts. Then each new window they open, and all the tabs within it, are associated with one of the accounts.

Yesterday, after I downloaded the new Chrome, I created an “ATD” and a “personal” profile, and associated a little cartoon image with each. Now each of my browser windows has one of the icons in the top right corner. And if I open up a Google site like YouTube in an ATD window, it’s logged into that account. Then, over in a personal window, I can have a different self logged into YouTube simultaneously. Whoa!

I know I sound kind ridiculous right about now, but this used to be so hard!

Also, I should say I’m not sure how easy and natural it will be to deal with this extra identity layer. At the start, at least, it feels awkward. Maybe some keyboard shortcuts to toggle between my personas would be nice.

Here’s Google’s explanation of how to set this up:

To try it out, go to Options (Preferences on Mac), click Personal Stuff, and click “Add new user.” A fresh instance of Chrome will open, ready to be customized with its own set of apps, bookmarks, extensions and other settings. A badge in the upper corner lets you know at a glance that this new Chrome browser belongs to you, and you can customize the name and badge as you like. Clicking this badge drops down a menu of all the users on that computer, so you can easily switch between them. In addition, each user can sign in to Chrome to access their own personalized Chrome across all their computers.

A spokeswoman for Google said she didn’t know how many people have both Google Apps and personal Google accounts. However, more than four million businesses use Google Apps, and I think it’s safe to say many of their employees use Gmail, too.

Safari accounted for 5.02 percent of global browser usage for September, according to Net Applications. That marks the first time that its share has topped five percent, the firm said.

The Mac itself now accounts for 6.45 percent of Web access worldwide, rising from just over six percent in August (the first time that Apple’s computers had accounted for that level of Web usage). Apple typically gains in September, Net Applications said, pointing out that September marks the start of the back-to-school season.

In the U.S., Apple’s share of the operating system market hit 13.7 percent, the firm said.

Globally, Windows still accounts for 92 percent of the desktop market, while Linux accounted for just over one percent.

On the browser side, Internet Explorer had 54 percent of the market, followed by Firefox with 22 percent and Google’s Chrome with 16 percent. That marks another in a long run of gains for Chrome, while Internet Explorer lost share for the seventh month in a row. Firefox was down just slightly from August.

Flickr, which has 68 million registered users, is “for people who care about photos,” said product head Markus Spiering.

So the Android app puts special emphasis on retaining high-resolution images, even if photo filters are added, and offers options to modify the flash, ratio selection, and shutter focus from within the viewfinder. Users can also scroll through their libraries of photos — though like on the Web, non-paying users can only see their 200 most recent photos.

Flickr previously released an iPhone app in 2009, which will be updated soon, said Spiering.

The other new Flickr feature, called “Photo Sessions,” helps users set up URLs they can share with rooms of 10 people where everyone can flip through, zoom in on and draw on photos in real time. So, for instance, a family could set up a time to virtually flip through an album of photos together and text-chat about them. Photo Session URLs last 24 hours and are only available in Safari (including on iOS devices), Firefox and Chrome. It’s kind of like Google Hangouts, without the video.

Yahoo’s Steve Douty, who is VP of applications and mobile product management, pitched the new Flickr features as part of a larger Yahoo strategy toward building an “interest graph” for its users and giving them “deeply personal digital experiences.” Yahoo had been a part of the Facebook platform announcements last week, and is now offering a personalized view of Yahoo News that shows users what their friends are reading.

Consider the wall of apps in this photo of the company’s new shop-in-a-shop in Italy’s Centro Sicilia, which appears to feature not only the iOS icon for Apple’s mobile Safari browser, but the icon for the company’s iOS App Store — three instances of it.

Embarrassing, particularly given Apple’s allegations that Samsung “slavishly” copied the design of its iPhone and iPad devices. It’s hard to imagine there’s a reasonable explanation for this. Samsung phones don’t support iOS apps and I can’t imagine Apple is making the company a version of Safari.

Now it’s possible this was a display left over from some other event or product, but still.

Samsung has not yet responded to a request for comment.