techno.blog("Dion")

Aaron Boodman was probably right in thinking that me wanting OpenID in the browser makes more sense as a browser feature, or separate plugin. This is a consumer level feature more than a developer focused one.

As I ruminate in the world of wishful thinking, I started to wonder about Jabber, and how it would be interesting to have XMPP as a native browser protocol.

We do have Jabber plugins, and there are JavaScript libraries that implement Jabber, but shouldn’t this be in the browser?

Jabber seems to be popping up all over the place. It started off as the IM protocol, and now has become a generic, scalable, messaging system. If XMPP was native and reliably in browsers, imagine how it could help the chat in Gmail? It could also transform the chat relationship with the Web. Social browsing as Me.dium does it could become more integrated. For example, I could have a trivial way to enable group chat on Ajaxian. I would love to be on the site and have others who are on there tell me how things are going, give me tips, and have comments feed into the same system. I shouldn’t have said “enable” as I wouldn’t have anything to do with it.

At an API level, we could also access XMPP from JavaScript.

Hmm, actually, is there a way in which this could tie into single sign-on and OpenID? Could XMPP be the way to login?

When I was looking over Brad Neuberg’s Paper Airplane thought experiment I noticed the single sign on feature, where you login to the browser, and then you are done.

I realized that this is what I actually want. Having one signon via OpenID is really nice. It allows me to plug in “http://almaer.com” as my identifier. However, I always have to go around finding the OpenID option (if it exists) and put that in.

What I really want is for the browser to do that work for me. If a site groks OpenID the browser should be able to pass that over without having me intervene at all. It could hide the entire login process if we came up with a microformat to let all sides know what is going on.

It would be a breath of fresh air to be able to jump through sites leaving comments on blogs, and checking out my todo list, all without me once having to actually login.

I wonder if a Gear could be made with a complementary microformat / server side handshake that could then give us single sign-on in all of the browsers.

As Brian McCallister suggests:

<link rel="openid-auth" href="..." />

Other Future APIs

• Services / Daemon API
• Notification API
• Crypto API
• Developer Tools
• Factory API updates
• Blob API
• Logging API
• Messaging API
• Location API
• Desktop Shortcut API
• Image Manipulation API
• Introduction to the series

Disclaimer: This is me rambling about APIs and tools that I would love to see in Gears, or the Open Web as a whole. Do you have ideas for cool Gears that make the Web better? Let us know!.

It is fantastic to see IE8 up the ante on concurrent connections from 2 to 6. I would love to know how they made the call for 6. It sounds reasonable. You don’t want too many else you could end up sucking down so much content at once it could freak out the browser (e.g. imagine a bunch of video on a high speed line).

This should mean, for some situations, that you may not need to deal with www1, www2 type hacks to split up your domains. Of course, sometimes you will still run into the limit and it will be required.

I do wish that Twitter would up their ante too. Maybe not by changing the 140 char limit itself, but maybe by supporting #hashtags so they don’t “take up the room” and instead get moved down below to the metadata layer etc.

I have talked a few times about how much I am liking Firefox 3b2 on the Mac. I had given up on Firefox 2, as it was too slow and ate too much memory. Firefox 3 is a different beast. It also barely ever reminds me that it is in beta. It has been very stable indeed; the only issue coming when I am on flaky wireless.

Of course, only a few plugins are working on Firefox 3 (or maybe most work but they don’t update their file / I don’t force update it). This means that I am not loading a bunch of plugin code that slows down Firefox. Thus, I do wonder how it will fare when Firefox 3 is out in full force and so are the plugins.

If FF3 can continue to match Webkit (well, almost) AND give me the plugins I love? Good luck to ‘em.

I was at my in-laws house and my blog wouldn’t show up in IE 7 on their computer. Hmm. It would just sit there and spin, and all you would see is a blank page.

After some digging, this isn’t a rare thing:

Symptoms

When you open a Web page in Windows Internet Explorer 7, the page is blank. However, if you refresh the Web page, its contents may appear.

Cause

This problem may occur when either of the following conditions is true:

• The Web page uses the <SCRIPT> tag.
• The Web page uses multibyte character set (MBCS) characters. For example, the Web page contains Japanese characters.

To fix the bugger I actually reinstalled Windows Script Host, rebooted, and all worked.

However, how many people are going to work that out / bother. Ouch.

Brad was speaking on a panel at a recent conference and asked a couple of questions, and the answers visually said it all:

Raise your hand if your business relies on the Web in some way:

Raise your hand if you think that the Web is moving fast enough as a development platform:

I do a lot of uploading to sites such as YouTube, and the Web interface leaves a lot to be desired for bulk manipulation. Watching the uploading rotating image on YouTube makes me want to scream sometimes (no feedback, unlike Vimeo and FB).

A fellow Googler and all around good guy, Matt Waddell, pointed me to Firefox Universal Uploader, a Firefox add on that supports:

• Picasa
• YouTube
• Flickr
• Box.net
• Facebook
• Webshots
• OmniDrive
• SmugMug

Features

• It shows the local folders and remote folders which enables you to upload files by single click.
• You can upload any number of files at a time.
• You can upload files to multiple websites using a single interface (using only one extension).
• Ability to add multiple accounts and upload files to each account independently.
• Site specific features are also included and will be improved in the coming versions. eg. Box.net: giving public/private access to files.

For obvious reasons, people are often assuming that Google Gears == Offline. To me, this isn’t the case. Gears happens to have three initial APIs (LocalServer, Database, WorkerPool) that can lend themselves to offline work. However, some people are grokking that WorkerPool and even Database are very useful even if your application never goes offline.

Segue: I am really excited to have Brad Neuberg of Dojo, Rojo, and other non-ojo projects fame, working with me at Google. It is a real pleasure to see the group growing, with great new hires such as Joe Gregorio, and others that haven’t made it official yet :)

I was having a chat about Gears with Brad, and he was talking about how he saw it as a way to update the Web in place. He got it.

Let’s use a really corny analogy that breaks down. We get to drive a few makes of cars (browsers) on the (information) highway. When we want new features, we have to wait for a new model to come out, and recently it feels like Cuba. The top selling car is a 1950’s Chevy. As drivers that are passionate about the driving experience, the Gears team is trying give everyone a foundation to replace the engine, even as you drive.

The goal is to give you the foundation. If it happens through other work too (e.g. other manufacturers step up to the plate), we think that is great. We want to make sure that every car on the road has a base platform to keep the highway performing well though, so we are hear to back you all up, and to keep innovation going.

Alex Russell is talking about innovation as he aims to stop us from going into pure standards hell. We are lucky that with HTML 5, we are pushing forward again. The devil is in the details though, and I am waiting to see what cars come out in 2008. If you are left with an old clanger, we are here to help though.

To make this more obvious, I will start posting about some of the exciting APIs that may be coming!

I am in a weird hybrid browsing situation at the moment. I have Firefox running as my Firebug client. WebKit nightly gets downloaded every day, and it is my general browser of choice due to its speed. I have also experimented with Opera, and I have to say I am quite impressed there too.

The real shame is that although WebKit is fast, I still prefer the Firefox experience. I would love to see a world that conjoined Firefox the browser with WebKit the renderer and Tamarin/other super duper JavaScript VM for long living apps.

What do I prefer about Firefox as a browser?

• Tab implementation: I am a keyboard user. That doesn’t mean that I am disabled as Apple seems to claim all over their documentation. The way I navigate tabs is via Apple-NUMBER. I load up windows with tabs with constant order. I know that Apple-1 is my email on “that” kind of window. I also jump to the end for Apple-9. I never iterate through my tabs, as I have to do when I am in WebKit/Safari via Apple-[ / Apple-]. This seems like such a small thing, but I really miss it.
• Greasemonkey: Using Gmail without Mihai’s scripts is painful. The same goes for the subtle little tweaks that I have made on other sites. I miss not having “my Web”.
• Del.icio.us: The del.icio.us toolbar add-on is fantastic. Using Safari bookmarks again? Ugh.
• AdBlock: Nuff said.
• Misc: There are other tiny random add-ons that I like.

I know that you can get some features via Safari add-ons such as Stand, but I have never found quite the same feel.

Although many are moving to Safari for its speed, it is still lacking in features, so Mozilla has room to maneuver. Apple also seems to really dislike keyboard shortcuts which drives me nuts.

What if Mozilla started a new browser project to do experiments? Zoomable UI, Vertical tabs, and totally rethink the browser as we know it.

Man I love Firebug. How can you do web development without it? Unfortunately it does seem to slow down my general browsing experience now and then. Even when I have it disabled I see Firefox sucking down more memory, and taking longer to open new tabs and the like.

When I went to my Gmail account today I saw:

Which links too Firebug can make Gmail slow:

If you’re using a Mac

Please note that if you’re using a Mac, you’ll continue to experience performance problems unless you disable Firebug for Gmail. To disable Firebug for www.google.com, please follow the steps below:

1. Click the green or red icon in the bottom right corner of the browser window to open Firebug.
2. Click the bug icon in the top left corner of Firebug and select ‘Disable Firebug for mail.google.com.’

If disabling Firebug for Gmail doesn’t improve performance results, you may have to entirely disable Firebug.

On Windows and Linux it suggests to turn off XHR logging (Firebug puts in a proxy XHR object to do all of the work). I wish that I could load up an instance of FF with it on, and one with it off…. I need to look into profiles again.