Some Isley Brothers now.

Some Elvis Costello. Don’t know this one, though.

And…here’s Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher.

Kara is wearing something that might have been bedazzled. Walt’s wearing Waltwear.

An update on the state of the ATD empire, which is getting much bigger.

Walt brings on Dean Hachamovitch.

Dean, by the way, is wearing a black long-sleeve shirt that says “private” in big white letters. Hope someone asks him about it.

Ah, and Dean has a “private” shirt for Walt, too. We’ll get to privacy in a bit, it seems.

DEAN: Working on IE 9, in beta, downloaded over 20 million times. Most important is its performance. It’s amazingly fast. Also, it blurs the boundary between Web sites and apps. And also, some talk about privacy.

WALT: Okay, that was a nice ad. But please talk about reports that you’ve been eclipsed in Europe by Firefox.

DEAN: Yes, we used to have 90 percent market share back in the ’90s. But now we look at how many people choose to use our most recent versions. “We are delighted that IE 6 market share is going down. We are delighted that IE 7 market share is going down.”

DEAN: And bear in mind how much the Internet is growing. “There are a lot of different factors. It’s a very complex situation.”

WALT: Okay, on to privacy. Safari used to have some kind of privacy feature, but that’s old. Then in IE 8, you introduced a new feature, not by default, which tried to extend that protection to other sites on the Web you traveled to.

DEAN: You were describing “over the shoulder privacy.” But we’re also concerned about tracking. There are two kinds of tracking: “Expected tracking” and “creepy stalking.”

Pandora and Amazon are expected tracking. You want them to know what you’re doing. But the important thing is that you have visibility and control, and you get benefits.

For instance, when I go to Amazon, they know that I bought Spice Girls and Fergie, and they tell me other stuff I should get.

WALT: Some of that tracking isn’t sophisticated enough.

DEAN: Anyway, creepy stalking is bad. Because consumers aren’t aware of what’s going on, and they don’t have control of it.

WALT: We don’t allow slides at our conferences usually, but we’re going to make an exception. Please show us some slides!

Dean is showing people a monitor that shows you what cookies were attached to a certain NPR page, which includes tracking info that comes from Facebook integration.

Now a Fox News page with similar info.

A reminder that cookies, by the way, aren’t the only tracking info involved here. Also pixels, etc.

But even once you root around and look at the pixels and tracking info, you might not really understand what you’re looking at or who is behind them.

WALT: Microsoft is a big Internet advertiser and publisher. Don’t you do some of this stuff?

DEAN: Yes, and in addition to us and Google, etc, there is an amazing ecosystem of information brokers. There’s a huge industry around this.

WALT: So what’s coming?

DEAN: With the new rev of IE 9, first quarter of 2011, you’ll be able to “go to a Web page, click on a button and you’ll be protected from tracking.” Any Web page can do this.

It will block content on that page. It will be an open publishing platform.

WALT: Why would a publisher want to do this? They have a legitmate need to want to know things about you, to serve you better ads, right?

DEAN: We have a lot of interest from a lot of different organizations that want to make lists. Publishers, government agencies, consumer advocacy, etc.

WALT: So, I have to download a list from someone I trust to make this work. Will you maintain this list?

DEAN: No. People will find these lists the same way that they find other things on the Web they like. From Facebook, or friends, or wherever.

We think it’s important to have people exercise judgment in making these lists. The most important thing is that you go off to the Web and find one you have confidence in.

WALT: But why do I have to hope that I go to sites that have these buttons?

WALT and DEAN are trying to explain how the list and button combination will work. Frankly, I’m confused. We’ll have to circle back to this.

WALT: A cynical journalist might suggest that you’re embracing privacy and wearing a shirt because Firefox et al are eating your lunch.

DEAN: Paying Windows customers want a great experience that includes privacy, including through their browser. But another way to view people who use browsers is that they’re objects to be boxed and sold. We don’t believe that. We believe Windows customers should have a great experience with their browser.

WALT: As opposed to?

DEAN: Well, Chrome, for instance, is funded by advertising.

WALT: So is The Wall Street Journal.

DEAN: I think advertising is great. But be careful about connecting advertising with tracking. We have advertising customers, and we want them to be delighted. And we have Windows customers, and we want them to be delighted. We have a unique position on this that gives us an opporunity to lead.

WALT: All the other browsers have a privacy mode.

DEAN: But that’s for “over the shoulder” privacy, not tracking.

WALT: Some of this tracking stuff is very hard to block. Can you really protect a user from all of it?

DEAN: Good question. Flash, for instance, enables tracking “Flash cookies” and they’re inherent in Flash. Only way to turn them off is to turn Flash off.

WALT: So this won’t block Flash cookies?

DEAN: It will if you tell it to.

WALT: But that’s pretty extreme.

DEAN: Yes. We’re touching on the ambiguity to the consumer about what actually is important and worthwhile tracking, and what isn’t.

We want to help consumers make progress being in control, but it’s a work in progress. It’s happening in Berkeley and in Brussels.

WALT: Let’s switch gears. Some people, not mainstream people, are debating whether the future of entertainment and progress and productivity will be on the browser and in the cloud. Google is pushing that via Chrome OS, and they also have Android apps that store local cloud on the device. Where do you come down on that?

DEAN: It’s a great case of “and”–you’ll have local apps and cloud versions. Like with Office mail, etc. We’re doing work on speed and safety so you can feel more comfortable in the cloud. “I think it’s the best of both worlds.”

WALT: So not a religious issue? Just practicality?

DEAN: Yes.

Questions and Answers

Q: What do you think of what the FTC says about privacy?

DEAN: The paper they put out in December is a good framework. And they’ve responded positively to what we’ve put out. They’re in favor of self-regulation, and we’re eager to work with them. I’ve had conversations with them, and what they say makes sense.

WALT: You’ve been talking to competitors about working together on this?

DEAN: We’ve been talking across the industry.

Q: Who is supposed to make banking, etc., more secure? This isn’t just about someone saying something on Facebook, but opening up the wrong window and having your bank account drained.

DEAN: We take it very seriously. “Security is an industry issue. I have to say it that way, because anything that we can talk about here has multiple parties involved.” if your Facebook is hacked, was it using your banking password?

Q: I’m talking about a national security issue.

DEAN: There’s a lot of working going on within the industry, working with law enformecement, to make things more secure.

WALT: But since you have the biggest market share, there’s a lot of responsibility on you. What do you do about that?

DEAN: Well, one thing we do is put out updates every eight weeks, because things change.

But really, “the best thing you can do to remain secure is to keep all your bits updated….That would make such a difference.”

Q: Firefox has plug-ins like AdBlock, that let you block ads. They seem to be effective at blocking things like beacons, too. Are they effective and can you do something analogous?

DEAN: Add-ins require installation, etc. You need a list, too. But we’re building that functionality into IE, so you don’t need to download anything else. We’re also working with people who make lists for AdBlock Plus, and they’re eager to work with IE 9 as well.

WALT: But AdBlock blocks ads, too. You’re not going to do that, right?

DEAN: It comes down to the list. If a list author lists sites that involve ads, then they’ll go away, too.

WALT: So you could surf the Web without seeing ads?

DEAN: It depends on the list.

WALT: I do think ads are good, by the way. [Me too!]

DEAN: Right. “Ads are great!”

But this is one of the reasons the ad industry wants to create lists for this. So they can distinguish tracking from nontracking.

Q: You’ve been talking about desktop browsers. Will these features come to mobile as well?

DEAN: “We’ll be talking about our mobile browser very soon, and I’ll just smile, and you can infer from that.”

Q: How much more value does tracking really add to advertising?

DEAN: Hard for me to answer that. Maybe the next time you have one of these things, you could have someone from the ad industry.

WALT: Good idea.

And we’re done.

http://allthingsd.com/20101202/thinking-outside-the-dropbox-with-minus-a-new-image-sharing-tool/ http://allthingsd.com/20101202/thinking-outside-the-dropbox-with-minus-a-new-image-sharing-tool/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 12:00:51 +0000 Drake Martinet http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=32952

Friction: It keeps our shoes on, it’s a buzzword at product meetings and UX conferences. And in Web apps, it’s the sticking force that keeps money in people’s pockets.

So, reducing it can mean changing the game for an entire arena–just look at eBay’s PayPal and Netflix.

Minus, an image gallery-sharing service, was conceived to do exactly that.

The basic premise is this: Visit its Web site, min.us, highlight a mess of images on your computer (different types and sizes are fine) and drag them into your browser window. Almost instantly, thanks to clever Ajax and cacheing, you have a shareable coverflow-style gallery of all those images, hosted on Minus’s little piece of the Amazon EC3 cloud.

In a matter of seconds (no exaggeration here, probably two or three seconds) you see the gallery, get a short link for sharing, a second that allows editing privileges and a third link to download everything in the gallery as a single zip file.

The minds behind Minus are Carl Hu, a programmer based in Boston, and his partner, John Xie, currently a senior at nearby Babson College. Hu spent the last few years in enterprise software, most recently at a start-up called Spathe. Xie (the college student) has been studying, running a small Web-hosting business and, presumably, doing things that people try to keep off Facebook.

The guys say the whole idea was to make a product that was “super simple and fast.” They picked up the min.us domain before they even knew what product they intended to build on top of it.

But Xie said the whole point was to riff on URL shorteners and create a service that made some sharing process easier. They didn’t even want you to have to log in.

The pair borrowed some code from a demo project called DropMocks (built by Glen Murphy, designer for Google Chrome) and began adding features.

If you head over to DropMocks, the similarities are, um, evident. But the UI (or lack thereof) and basic premise is where the similarities start to fade.

You can think of Minus as a sort of weaponized version of DropMocks: Better security, more options, multiple permissions and, as of last week, an API so other developers can connect their pipe to the Minus backend.

In short, it’s becoming a real product.

Today, Minus works best (meaning with the drag-and-drop functionality) on Google Chrome, Firefox 3.6+ and Apple Safari on Mac. It will still work on the Microsoft Internet Explorer, but you will miss out on the real product. Hu said he hopes consumers will use Chrome, because it’s Adobe Flash-free there, thanks to some new CSS3 gallery tricks.

Minus’s next act, according to Hu and Xie, will be to add sharing for as many file types as possible, making it a sort of a lighter, faster Dropbox.

John says the vision is that users could assemble at a library for a study session or sit down to a meeting and immediately pass around the short link to a shared Web space for the group’s working materials.

The project is a month young and changing about as fast as a baby at that age. They are bootstrapped for now, but Xie says they are already fending off random emails with offers of angel investor cash.

They said they’ve had about 500,000 unique visitors since launch and that they seem to be far better known in Asia and Europe, although they expect the balance to shift back to the U.S. soon.

I spoke via Skype with Hu and Xie, whose thoughts on the progress of Minus are condensed in the video. The second video is a special bonus: A short screen capture of Minus in action, inside Chrome, and narrated by yours truly. You can watch a gallery being built, saved, viewed, shared, visited and downloaded from all in under a minute.

Enjoy:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101202/thinking-outside-the-dropbox-with-minus-a-new-image-sharing-tool/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/#comments Wed, 01 Dec 2010 05:05:26 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1552 It’s official, the holiday shopping season has begun and it’s time to get serious about gift lists. This week, I took a closer look at some online services that could help you—or those shopping for you—find and buy the right gifts.

While there are many services around, I’ll just touch on a handful of them, including some that take advantage of social networking and group buying.

Bing, Microsoft’s search engine, is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List. Starting Wednesday, this feature lets people add items to a saved wish list by simply check-marking an on-screen box in shopping search results. Shopping search results are displayed by clicking the Shopping tab in Bing search results or by selecting Shopping on Bing.com and going from there. Once an item’s box has been checked, a small, in-browser visual of all items added to the wish list is displayed in the lower left corner of the browser window. Lists are saved between sessions, so you can close your browser and open it another time and work with the same saved list.

In addition to collecting a list of wished-for items, the Bing Shopping List lets people share those lists with their Facebook friends, giving them a chance to see and buy items from someone else’s wish list. Or people can use Bing Shopping Lists to select just a couple items, share them with the Facebook community, and ask for friends’ opinions about which product is better. Users may get feedback from friends they wouldn’t otherwise know were experts in certain areas.

A Microsoft spokesman said the impetus for this came from trends the company saw taking place on the Web—specifically, people using Facebook to solicit opinions about what to buy and to tell others what they want.

A downside to the Bing Shopping Lists is that they don’t yet offer a way to share items with only certain people, which might mean sharing a private gift with all your Facebook friends. And you can’t yet create multiple lists. A way to share items with only certain people and options for create multiple lists are on the product road map for next year, according to a company spokesman.

Speaking of social networks, Sears is taking a unique approach to the group-buying concept with Wish Together, a program launched in mid-November. With Wish Together, Sears puts at least one new item on its Facebook page (facebook.com/sears) each day. If enough people click on the item’s “Like” button before a certain time, a steep discount on the item becomes unlocked, like a diamond necklace that originally cost $285 will cost $100 at its Wish Price if it gets the required 200 “likes.” People can see the number of necessary “Likes” and time remaining (down to the second) displayed on the item’s Wish Together Facebook page.Once a Wish Together deal is unlocked, it’s available to everyone—not just those who originally “liked” it. But those who “liked” the item get an email notification from Facebook as soon as the deal is unlocked so they can buy it while supplies last.

Bing is jumping into the wish-list action this holiday season with the Bing Shopping List

The tried and true Amazon Wish List, which has been around for 11 years, can be used to add wish-list items from any website, not just Amazon.com. This works using the site’s Universal Wish List. It can be set up by dragging an “Add to Wishlist” bookmark (http://3.ly/G82n) into your browser’s bookmark bar. Then you just click the bookmark whenever you’re on the specific Web page of an item you’d like to add to your Wish List. A small pop-up menu lets users designate a specific Amazon Wish List or add their own notes about an item. Universal Wish List browser extensions, or shortcuts built right into a Web browser, are available for Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. Some online retailers like ModCloth.com, save you a step by offering “Add To Amazon Wish List” buttons right on their websites. Amazon Wish Lists can be shared to friends through Facebook or Twitter using a link on the list’s webpage.

There are many Facebook apps for creating wish lists and sharing them with Facebook friends. I tried a couple apps, including a basic one called Fulfill My Wishlist (http://3.ly/3u3d). It let me search a shopping portal (that uses Google Shopping in the background) for items to add to my wish list, or let me copy and paste a link for any item to appear in my list. A notes section for each item allows room for describing details like preferred size or style. This list can be emailed to friends or viewed through the Facebook app by friends who use it.

If you’re planning to go in on buying a pricey gift with several other people, a group-gift option like eBay’s might be the right tool for you. EBay introduced its Group Gifts feature (groupgifts.ebay.com) in November. It lets several people pool their money to buy one item without one person chasing down those who owe money.

One person chooses an eBay item and selects the Buy It Now option (auction prices aren’t applicable when you need to tell the group how much they’ll definitely owe). The initiator tells the group how much he or she will pay and then shares the item with others via email, Facebook or Twitter, in hopes of getting contributions. A PayPal account is required for at least one person in the group to ultimately pay for the item, but gift contributors can chip in using credit or debit cards, and they can add their own notes to a gift.

Thanks to technology, there are many ways to direct your friends and family toward exactly what you want for the holidays, taking much of the guesswork out of giving and receiving this year.

Edited by Walter S. Mossberg

Write to Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101130/bing-shopping-list-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/wi-fi-as-an-ad-unit-google-pushes-chrome-for-the-holidays/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/wi-fi-as-an-ad-unit-google-pushes-chrome-for-the-holidays/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:33:18 +0000 Liz Gannes http://networkeffect.allthingsd.com/?p=67 For the second year Google is sponsoring in-flight Wi-Fi from mid-November to mid-January as a sort of benevolent gift for holiday travelers. Last year Google’s free Wi-Fi was offered on Virgin America flights and in a bunch of airports. This year, Google’s not just getting passengers to feel warm and fuzzy about its brand at 30,000 feet, it’s using the opportunity to promote a single product: The Chrome browser.

The crafty little advertising move comes at a time when Chrome needs a boost to take on the Web browser competition. Currently Chrome has 8.5 percent of global users, according to NetMarketShare, compared to 59 percent for Internet Explorer, 23 percent for Mozilla Firefox and 5.4 percent for Apple’s Safari. Yesterday, the new social browser RockMelt launched, and while the only people using it so far are avid followers of tech blogs, the company will obviously need to figure out a way to use some of its $10 million in funding and its investors’ experience building browsers to gain market share. (Interestingly, NetMarketShare says mobile browsing is only 2.8 percent of the market. Room to grow.)

Google’s in-flight Wi-Fi will be on domestic AirTran, Delta and Virgin America flights (which use Aircell’s Gogo service) from Nov. 20 to Jan. 2 (which is sadly 23 days shorter than last year’s promotion).

Image courtesy NASA.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/wi-fi-as-an-ad-unit-google-pushes-chrome-for-the-holidays/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101108/heres-a-better-name-for-rockmelt-the-facebrowser-plus-boomtowns-two-dude-video/ http://allthingsd.com/20101108/heres-a-better-name-for-rockmelt-the-facebrowser-plus-boomtowns-two-dude-video/#comments Mon, 08 Nov 2010 17:08:02 +0000 Kara Swisher http://kara.allthingsd.com/?p=36906

At the end of this video interview with BoomTown about RockMelt–a new social browser that debuted in beta last night via yet another broken news embargo (thus, I have just joined the army of TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington on this irksome issue)–the two founders politely tried to gloss over my calling it a “Facebook browser.”

Except, um, it is.

Sure, as Eric Vishria and Tim Howes correctly note, there are Twitter and other news apps present. And I even like the mantra for RockMelt, which “re-imagines the browser around friends, feeds, and sharing.”

But that would be–for the most part right now–friends on Facebook, feeds from Facebook and sharing with Facebook.

In fact, the whole shebang is essentially–as you can see from the screenshots below–a big wet kiss to Facebook.

Still, RockMelt certainly could cause a bang, since it is funded by Marc Andreessen, via his venture firm Andreessen Horowitz–along with a passel of Silicon Valley luminaries such as longtime exec and mentor to the tech stars, Bill Campbell.

Andreessen, of course, is the legendary entrepreneur who invented the browser and founded the first commercial Internet company–Netscape–16 years ago. (He is also, coincidentally or not, on the board of Facebook.)

Still, with all its pluses, the Mountain View, Calif.-based RockMelt could have a hard time breaking through the crowded browser software market to reach consumers.

Microsoft now dominates the market with its Internet Explorer, followed by other big players, such as Google’s Chrome, Apple’s Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox.

While not the first browser focused on social networking–that would be Flock, which is still around–RockMelt is trying to distinguish itself using these now-popular and innovative services.

You sign on to it using Facebook, natch, and the friends you choose are arrayed down one side vertically, while news and other apps are on the other.

It’s built on Google’s Chromium open source technology, which makes RockMelt a truly Silicon Valley creation.

It will be interesting to see how RockMelt does with its powerful and myriad social connections, but until we find out, here are Howes (who once worked at Netscape) and Vishria talking about their plans:

And here are the screenshots of RockMelt (click on the images to make them larger):

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101108/heres-a-better-name-for-rockmelt-the-facebrowser-plus-boomtowns-two-dude-video/feed/ 6 http://allthingsd.com/20101101/browser-share-chrome-continues-climb/ http://allthingsd.com/20101101/browser-share-chrome-continues-climb/#comments Mon, 01 Nov 2010 16:54:08 +0000 Voices http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=31846 The latest month-to-month changes in Web browser share, as calculated by analytics outfit Net Applications, are measured in tenths of a percentage point, but they’re consistent with the year-to-date trends–namely significant gains for Google’s Chrome, modest gains for Apple’s Safari and slight slippage for everyone else. In October, Microsoft IE held 59.26 percent (off about three points since January), Mozilla’s Firefox edged down to 22.82 percent (down from 24.43 percent in January), Chrome rose to 8.47 percent (up more than three points for the year), Safari crept up to 5.33 percent (eight-tenths of a point better than January) and Opera trailed with a steady 2.28 percent.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101101/browser-share-chrome-continues-climb/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20101012/microsoft-internet-explorer-9-review/ http://allthingsd.com/20101012/microsoft-internet-explorer-9-review/#comments Tue, 12 Oct 2010 22:17:34 +0000 Katherine Boehret http://solution.allthingsd.com/?p=1439 In the continuing tug of war between apps and the Web, Microsoft offered a little bit of both last month in its beta release of Internet Explorer 9, the latest iteration of the world’s most popular Web browser. IE 9, as it’s nicknamed, is designed to make websites look richer, respond faster and behave more like the apps installed on your PC so you forget that you’re browsing the Web.

Alas, you are still browsing the Web and the occasional sluggish behavior doesn’t always magically abate after downloading a shiny new browser.

I tested IE 9 against its rivals, including speed tests with stopwatch in hand, as well as overall use tests to see how this new browser handled websites with complex graphics.

Fast, Sometimes Faster

I found my experience with IE 9 to be fast, and in some tests, faster on average than Google (GOOG) Chrome, Apple’s (AAPL) Safari and Mozilla’s Firefox browser. It also handled graphically rich websites with no trouble. (IE 9 is free for Windows PCs at beautyoftheweb.com.)

I used two Windows 7 PCs for testing, and though one performed without any problems, the other crashed two times while I used IE 9.

After a thorough analysis of the PC, a Microsoft (MSFT) spokesman attributed this to a graphics-driver problem and suggested a work-around of switching settings in IE 9 so it would use software rather than hardware graphics acceleration, which this new browser uses to improve speed and performance. This switch would cause the browser to perform slower than if it had used the richer hardware-accelerated graphics.

Using the four major browsers, I measured the average time for how long it took each to completely open five typical websites: Facebook, Google Gmail, Twitter, WSJ.com and my sister’s WordPress blog. IE 9 opened Facebook fastest and tied with Chrome in opening WSJ.com fastest. Firefox clocked the best time for opening Gmail and Twitter, and Safari opened my sister’s WordPress blog the fastest.

Handling Intense Graphics

But most of these time differences were within tenths or even hundredths of a second. What interested me more were how these browsers handled intense graphics on certain websites written in a rich format called HTML5.

I opened and interacted with websites including Livestrong.com, BMW’s joydefinesthefuture.com and IMDB.com. All the browsers could handle these sites except for Firefox, which couldn’t open the BMW site—a Web page that shows interactive diagrams of car designs. Videos played smoothly in all browsers, but seemed to start a smidge faster, on average, in IE 9.

If users aren’t impressed with IE 9′s enhanced speed and ability to handle graphics-filled websites, they’ll have a harder time ignoring the way this browser melds with Windows 7 to do some pretty cool things. For example, to automatically create a shortcut to a website, click on its representative icon, whether from the browser’s address bar or from a New Tab page, and drag it down and pin it to the task bar.

This pinned site is represented with its own unique icon and can work as a notification feature for a site’s content. Facebook, when pinned to the task bar, displayed a red asterisk when I had new notifications, messages, or friend requests waiting for me.

A Microsoft spokesman says there should be more sites that take advantage of these notification capabilities in coming weeks.

Once pinned to the Windows taskbar, the Livestrong.com site gets its own jump list, or set of commands that can be selected from the task bar.

Getting Pinned

Like anything pinned to the task bar in Windows 7, each of these pinned sites gets its own jump list, a set of commands that can be previewed and selected right from the task bar. Other functions also work from here, like playback commands for websites with videos. And any opened site can be previewed in thumbnail view by mousing over it in the task bar.

IE 9 is visually enjoyable thanks to some small but helpful tweaks.

The browser’s back button, an arrow in a circle, is much larger than other browsers, making it easy to find and use when you want to navigate back to the last page you were on. This back button and the forward arrow button beside it change colors according to the dominant color used in the opened website.

For Gmail, the arrow buttons are red, on AllThingsD.com, the buttons are green and on my sister’s WordPress travel blog, they’re light blue. This artistic touch makes the overall page easier on the eyes.

IE 9 lets people drag website icons down into the task bar for one-click access.

Many sites look the same on IE 9 as they do on other browsers, but some sites look better, filling the screen with slightly bigger illustrations and larger fonts that are easier to digest. I noticed this when viewing Twitter.com and several news websites.

The Birthday Slip

But I missed some of the visual pluses of other browsers. For example, you can’t close one of several opened browser tabs just by clicking on its red “x” icon unless you select—and, thus, view—that tabbed webpage.

Chrome, Firefox and Safari all allow closing of tabs by just mousing over a tab to see an “x” to click to close the website.

Handy shortcuts like this are especially helpful if you’re browsing online for a birthday gift, the intended recipient suddenly appears beside your PC and you need to slyly close a tab.

I’m also not crazy about the New Tab page in IE 9. This uses tiles with names of websites and small icons on each to represent your 10 most visited websites so you can quickly select one of them rather than typing out the page’s URL.

But I prefer the way Google Chrome displays the eight most visited sites as mini web page representations, which are easier to quickly recognize and select.

Likewise, the click of a button in Apple’s Safari browser shows mini representations of your 12 top websites in a concave view that makes you feel like you’re sitting in a round room. And though IE 9 has a handsome translucent border, when I had it opened in front of Google Chrome, I could see Chrome’s tabs behind that translucency, showing just how much more computer screen real estate Chrome offers.

Aside from my unusual PC crashes, IE 9 worked quickly and is smartly designed to handle websites with intense graphics. The Web will continue to fill with more and more of these visually rich, interactive sites, so people will benefit from using a browser like IE 9 that can take the heat.

Email Katherine Boehret at mossbergsolution@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20101012/microsoft-internet-explorer-9-review/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100915/internet-explorer-9-goes-beta-today/ http://allthingsd.com/20100915/internet-explorer-9-goes-beta-today/#comments Wed, 15 Sep 2010 13:15:11 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=48504 Over the past few years, Internet Explorer’s share of the global browser market has slipped to a little over 60 percent from the more than 90 percent share it once held in 2003, according to Net Applications. So the release of Internet Explorer 9 to beta today is an important one for Microsoft, which hopes it will slow the gains of Google’s Chrome and Firefox at a time when more and more consumers are using the browser as a gateway to online services.

The near-final version of IE 9 that we’ll see later this morning is said to be orders of magnitude faster than IE 8. It’s more compliant with emerging HTML5, CSS3 and SVG2 standards. It’s also, in the words of Microsoft, the only browser to use “full hardware acceleration,” the first to really tap into a computer’s graphics chip to fully accelerate content display rendering. In other words, it’s the only browser to really use the whole PC to see the Web and make Web pages behave like native applications. That claim’s already been disputed by Firefox developer Mozilla (“we are faster and we were first”), but that’s beside the point. Because what really matters is that true hardware acceleration is finally here, and that can only help push the Web forward and make it more interactive and more immersive.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100915/internet-explorer-9-goes-beta-today/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100827/meet-extensionfm-the-music-startup-google-should-buy/ http://allthingsd.com/20100827/meet-extensionfm-the-music-startup-google-should-buy/#comments Fri, 27 Aug 2010 15:32:18 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=22920 You’re going to have to wait some time before you can use Google Music, because the service doesn’t exist yet. But if you want a sense of what it should look like, go play with ExtensionFM, an interesting start-up that plays off Google’s Chrome browser.

In a nutshell, ExtensionFM allows Chrome users to temporarily store, and play, most music they come across as they tour the Web. There’s an explanatory video at the bottom of this post, but the easiest thing to do is simply fire up Chrome, add the service to your browser and go surfing. You’ll be particularly happy if you visit MP3 blogs and Tumblrs.

The problem for Dan Kantor’s New York-based start-up is that, for the time being, it’s got a limited number of potential users. Chrome has less then 10 percent of the browser market, and only a subset of those users are comfortable with the idea of adding “extensions” in the first place.

Perhaps that’s why ExtensionFM has just 25,000 users after launching earlier this year–even after Google (GOOG) gave it a boost by featuring it at its I/O developer conference. But Kantor, who has put in time at various start-ups–most notably Delicious–as well as at Yahoo (YHOO), Microsoft (MSFT) and AOL (AOL), says he plans to expand to other browsers–Apple’s (AAPL) Safari browser just got a lot more extension friendly–and eventually the service will move onto mobile platforms, etc.

That’s the bet, at least. Kantor has raised a seed round from high-profile investors like Spark Capital and Betaworks, so they’re expecting this thing to move on from ultra-niche status eventually.

Or Google could just buy the thing outright and plug it into whatever it does launch, whenever that happens.

In the meantime, here’s a recent sit-down I had with Kantor:

And ExtensionFM’s own description of its service:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100827/meet-extensionfm-the-music-startup-google-should-buy/feed/ 7 http://allthingsd.com/20100722/yes-apples-working-on-fix-for-safari-autofill-hack/ http://allthingsd.com/20100722/yes-apples-working-on-fix-for-safari-autofill-hack/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 21:08:17 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=45370 So that Safari AutoFill vulnerability? The one that can reportedly be exploited to pilfer a user’s first name, last name, work place, city, state, and email address? Apple’s aware of it and working to repair it. “We take security and privacy very seriously,” a spokesperson tells me. “We’re aware of the issue and working on a fix.”

When does Apple expect to issue that fix? The company won’t say.

[Image credit: Engadget]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100722/yes-apples-working-on-fix-for-safari-autofill-hack/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100722/apple-crowned-miss-software-insecurity-2010/ http://allthingsd.com/20100722/apple-crowned-miss-software-insecurity-2010/#comments Thu, 22 Jul 2010 18:30:03 +0000 Beth Callaghan http://voices.allthingsd.com/?p=27470 According to a report issued by security firm Secunia, Apple has had more software security flaws than any other vendor in 2010 — not the least of which is a newly discovered, and very nasty, browser vulnerability with the autofill function in Safari. The Safari issue was reported yesterday by WhiteHat Security CTO Jeremiah Grossman, who says that it’s a common point of weakness across all four major browsers.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100722/apple-crowned-miss-software-insecurity-2010/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100624/sports-illustrateds-ipad-app-think-print-not-web/ http://allthingsd.com/20100624/sports-illustrateds-ipad-app-think-print-not-web/#comments Thu, 24 Jun 2010 21:59:54 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20996 Sports Illustrated’s iPad app, which the company first started showing off in concept form last winter, is now in the iTunes store.

No point in going into detail about it when you can see it for yourself.

But it’s basically what editor Terry McDonell promised last fall and what the magazine’s peers are also delivering on Apple’s (AAPL) platform: All of the weekly magazine is there, plus some bells and whistles, like additional photos, an extra story and some videos. (The ads, though, are not the same as those in the magazine, which is different from rival Condé Nast’s strategy.)

In this case, the app it also looks and functions quite a bit like Time magazine’s iPad app, with good reason: Time Warner’s (TWX) Time Inc. unit is using the same outside collaborators, The Wonder Factory and WoodWing Software, for all its magazine apps.

So if you liked the Time app, you may like this one. The price is the same, too: $4.99 an issue, though a subscription plan in the works will end up shaving the per-issue price down a bit.

But here’s the thing: The “magazine plus” app concept, which works nicely for titles like Wired, feels like a liability with Sports Illustrated. Because much of the magazine’s content is dated as soon as hits the page, and SI is happy to let it stay that way on the iPad.

Every mag app grapples with this, of course. And so far all of them are trying to steer away from the Web model, where they’re expected to provide timely updates, but don’t make much money doing so. Better to resell the magazine they’ve already made without having to create much in the way of new stuff.

When you hold a print version of SI, timeliness doesn’t feel like a problem. Presumably because you don’t have any other expectations. But when you’re reading it in digital form, on a device connected to the Web…

Case in point: Today’s issue has a feature story on the U.S. World Cup team’s exploits. But it was written before the thrilling Algeria game. So there’s no mention of that result.

And while the app does have some links into SI’s Web site and the ability to provide updated scores, it does so in a limited way: Right now, it’s only offering up baseball scores. So when the SI team was demoing the app for me this morning, I heard oohs and aahs from a nearby office, where people were watching the Italy-Slovakia game. But the app couldn’t give me the score of that match: If I had wanted to check it out, I’d have had to head out of the app and into Apple’s Safari browser.

The SI guys say this is a very deliberate design choice. McDonell says the app provides readers with a “curated experience” instead of the “firehose” of data flooding from the Web. I’d buy that for some titles, even for a news magazine like Time.

But not here: If Sports Illustrated really wants me to pay up for this one, it needs to plug in, too.

Chris Hercik, the SI creative director, who listened to all of my gripes yet remained good-natured about it, sat down for a quick interview this morning. Apologies for the poor lighting — one thing you get on the SI app that you don’t get here is video made by people who know what they’re doing:

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100624/sports-illustrateds-ipad-app-think-print-not-web/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100609/microsoft-office-simplified-for-the-web/ http://allthingsd.com/20100609/microsoft-office-simplified-for-the-web/#comments Thu, 10 Jun 2010 01:03:00 +0000 Walter S. Mossberg http://ptech.allthingsd.com/?p=1331 I am writing this in Microsoft Word, hardly an unusual way to author a document. But I’m not using Word as you know it—part of the large, complex Microsoft Office suite installed on your computer’s hard drive. Instead, I am using a new, streamlined version of Word that for the first time resides on remote servers you reach through the Internet.

This new version of Word is used inside a Web browser. It works on both Windows PCs and Macs, and via the newer versions of the major browsers, including Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and Chrome. It’s free and it doesn’t require you to have regular Office on your computer.

Word isn’t the only Office component that’s now available in a free online version. Microsoft (MSFT) has created similar simplified versions of Excel, PowerPoint and its OneNote note-taking program as part of the free online suite called Office Web Apps, which is available at office.live.com. To use the new online Office, you’ll need a free account for the company’s broader Windows Live online service.

Microsoft is also releasing a new version of its traditional desktop Office for Windows next week, called Office 2010. But in my view, the online edition is the most interesting new development for consumers in this round of updates. It’s part of the broader trend toward cloud computing—doing tasks online rather than with desktop programs. And it’s meant to help the software giant compete with rival online office suites from competitors like Google (GOOG) and Zoho.

I’ve been testing Office Web Apps on both Windows and Mac computers, and in all four major browsers, and I like it. It has some downsides and is still a work in progress. It lacks many of the more sophisticated features of the local, desktop version of Office. In fact, Microsoft—apparently trying to protect its profitable desktop suite—refers to Office Web Apps as a “companion” to desktop Office, for “light” work.

The Office Web Apps version of Word is used inside a Web browser.

But these are capable, if simpler, programs that look and feel like their desktop counterparts and they will likely meet the needs of many consumers who produce basic documents, even if they don’t own desktop Office. Also, the new Web Apps are connected to a generous 25 gigabytes of free online storage for your documents, via a companion Microsoft online storage system called SkyDrive.

Another big benefit: Microsoft boasts its Office Web Apps produce documents that use the same file formats as the desktop programs and thus, look fully accurate when opened in desktop Office. The company calls this “fidelity.” In my tests, this claim held true, at least on my Windows PC. (A revised version of Microsoft Office for the Mac, tuned to work with Web Apps, is in the works.)

The new version of the desktop Office suite also has many new features, but a lot of these are for power users or corporate users, and, overall, it isn’t nearly as big a change as its predecessor, Office 2007. Among the new desktop features consumers will notice and use are the extension of the consolidated top tool bar called the “Ribbon,” introduced in the 2007 version in most Office programs, to Outlook; a new unified view for printing, sharing and previewing documents, called “Backstage”; and richer graphics. You can also now customize the Ribbon.

In my tests of the streamlined Office Web Apps, I was able to use a variety of fonts and styles, insert and resize photos, and create tables. And I was able to view my documents, though not edit them, on an iPhone and iPad. This also works with other mobile devices.

One glitch I ran into in the Word Web App was that, if you use a tab to start a paragraph, it changes the left margin of each subsequent line. Microsoft says this is a bug and it is working to fix it.

Another downside for some users may be that the Web Apps only directly open documents from, and save them to, your online SkyDrive storage, not your hard disk. So you have to upload files from your hard disk to SkyDrive to edit them in the Web Apps. And, like most cloud-based programs, they can only be used when you’re online.

There are numerous things you may be used to doing in desktop Office that can’t be done in the online version. For instance, you can’t drag photos by the corners to resize them, embed videos, create slide transitions or add new spreadsheet charts.

You can, with one click, open a Web version of your document in the full desktop program, to take advantage of richer editing. However, this only works with certain combinations of browsers and desktop Office versions.

Two of the Web apps, Excel and OneNote, allow multiple users to log on and work on the same document together. The others don’t yet. In fact, in my tests, I couldn’t open a Word document locally until I had closed it online, and vice versa. Microsoft says it is working on expanding simultaneous use to all the apps.

Office Web Apps are a good start for Microsoft at bringing its productivity expertise to the Web, and may be all many consumers need for creating simple documents.

Find Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos, free, at walt.allthingsd.com. Email him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100609/microsoft-office-simplified-for-the-web/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100609/safari-reader-a-dislike-button-for-online-ads/ http://allthingsd.com/20100609/safari-reader-a-dislike-button-for-online-ads/#comments Wed, 09 Jun 2010 21:45:57 +0000 John Paczkowski http://digitaldaily.allthingsd.com/?p=42181 Sure, Apple’s new Safari Reader “removes annoying ads and other visual distractions from online articles.” But does that necessarily make it a threat to ad-supported online publishing or an effort to force advertisers to embrace Apple’s new iAd platform?

Not really.

The reasons for this are quite simple. With less than five percent of the desktop browser market, according to Net Applications, Safari simply lacks the critical user mass to do any harm. And while its share of the mobile browser market is significantly larger (58.2 percent in the U.S.), it is not really much of a threat there either because of its design. Unlike browsers running standard ad blockers, Safari displays Web pages as they were originally intended–ads and all.

It doesn’t eliminate ads.

Only by pressing the Reader button in its address field can a page be stripped of its ads. In other words, every time they visit new articles, Safari requires readers to make a choice about whether or not to view the ads.

This seems to be an elegant compromise between readers and publishers. Activating Reader requires additional navigation and a click of the mouse. In other words, it requires motivation. So as a reader encountering a well-designed page with nonintrusive advertisements, I’m inclined not to bother with it. But if publishers plaster their content with “smack the monkey” banner ads, auto-play videos and whatnot, making it difficult to read, I probably will.

In Reader, Apple (AAPL) is presenting a sort of publisher-consumer contract. And this may inspire publishers to think a bit more about the advertisements they run on their sites and their ad-to-content ratios. As software developer Fraser Speirs recently noted, “Most interesting thing about Safari Reader? It shows how little actual content there is on these busy, long Web pages.”

And then there’s this: People who truly loathe online advertising are surely running ad-blocking software already. Those are the folks publishers should worry about, and to them, Reader won’t be any use at all.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20100609/safari-reader-a-dislike-button-for-online-ads/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20100607/adobe-tries-creeping-back-onto-the-ipad-with-help-from-greystripe/ http://allthingsd.com/20100607/adobe-tries-creeping-back-onto-the-ipad-with-help-from-greystripe/#comments Mon, 07 Jun 2010 15:01:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://mediamemo.allthingsd.com/?p=20197 Steve Jobs says he’s not out to kill Adobe–he just wants nothing to do with its Flash platform. And Adobe appears to be getting the message: The company is working to find ways to get onto Apple devices without resorting to Flash.

Newest example: The software company, along with mobile ad network Greystripe, says it will be creating ads in HTML5 that work on the iPhone and iPad’s Flash-free Safari browser.

The pitch is that advertisers and their agencies can continue to create ads using Flash, the Web’s dominant platform for ad delivery, but that Greystripe will port the ads to Apple-friendly formats.

Apple (AAPL) has banned this kind of cross-compiling for iPad and iPhone apps. But it’s kosher for ads, Greystripe CEO Michael Chang tells me; he says Greystripe has already been doing this for in-app ads on the iPhone. The news here is that his company and Adobe (ADBE) are now trying to get Flash ads back onto Apple’s browsers.

Assuming this does work, that’s good news for Greystripe and Adobe (ADBE). But everyone in the mobile ad business got a lift last week, when Jobs made a point of saying that he didn’t intend to lock out other ad networks from the iPad and iPhone–and that he’d let them use some tracking information from the devices in the process.

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