A fresh take on the browser. The breaking news is of course all about the new browser that Google is producing in the next few hours in a beta version that's designed to take on the world. The link goes to the brief mention in the Google Blog, which doesn't say a great deal really. There's a link to their 'comic' which goes into more detail on what we can expect.
I've waded through it, and while I'd encourage you to take a gander yourself (though because of the way it's put together it's painfully slow to get through) there are a few key elements that I think are particularly important. Firstly they're paying great attention to the idea that each tab is independent. With current browsers if one tab is loading something and there's a problem it might bring down the entire browser. If each tab and process can be treated as unique units if a page/process crashes then that tab will break, but the browser will remain stable. This makes lots of sense, and also has various other implications - saving on memory being one for example.
It's initially only being released for Windows - Mac and Linux users will have to wait.
There's a bunch of technical stuff included in the comic from about page 10 to 17. You can skip past that and get onto page 19, which is about search and the user experience. Each tab is going to be much more independent, as previously mentioned, which means that it will be able to offer suggestions for searches, top pages, popular pages and so on.
Searchers will also have a full text search option on the browsing history. The example they give is that if you found a good site yesterday for digital cameras you don't need to bookmark it, you can just type 'digital camera' to bring up pages that you looked at. No details yet on how far back this option will work, or over how many pages. I think there's going to be a knock on effect here with things like FURL and delicious, but it's pushing the net (and searching obviously) back towards the personalisation angle.
We're promised autocompletion on the location bar, which isn't one of my favourite things, but we're told it will 'never flicker, never flash... perfectly aesthetically non-distracting.' Moreover, if you search places like Amazon or Google, those search boxes will be captured to your local system, allowing search from the address bar.
Another interesting option is a new start/home page. This will be a tab of your nine most visited sites - it's unclear if this is just going to be a simple thumbnail or something automatically updated, and there will also be a link to the sites you search most. There will also be links to recently bookmarked material and recently closed tabs. This is going to be an interesting challenge for the start/home page market - although it doesn't look as flexible or useful it's certainly a push in that direction. It's also adding more to the personalisation angle as well.
There will be another 'incognito' tab, with any content that's displayed there being deleted at the end of a session - nothing is stored or remembered and when the tab is closed the cookes from that session are wiped out. Can you say 'porn'? Yes, I thought so as well. This is clearly going to have implications for libraries and patrons searching for material. While on the one hand it may mean that it's going to be difficult/impossible to prove what someone has been searching for and looking at, it means that if the police come knocking it's going to also make it that much harder to provide access to what a user has been doing.
Popups will be limited to the tab that spawned them, which is a great idea and may well get over the annoyance of finding all those nasty little boxes with nasty little content. Similarly, it's going to be more difficult for malware to get into your system, so that while the process can compute it's not going to be able to write to your hard drive, read content and so on.
If you're interested in reading the 'comic' yourself - it's 38 pages long.
I've waded through it, and while I'd encourage you to take a gander yourself (though because of the way it's put together it's painfully slow to get through) there are a few key elements that I think are particularly important. Firstly they're paying great attention to the idea that each tab is independent. With current browsers if one tab is loading something and there's a problem it might bring down the entire browser. If each tab and process can be treated as unique units if a page/process crashes then that tab will break, but the browser will remain stable. This makes lots of sense, and also has various other implications - saving on memory being one for example.
It's initially only being released for Windows - Mac and Linux users will have to wait.
There's a bunch of technical stuff included in the comic from about page 10 to 17. You can skip past that and get onto page 19, which is about search and the user experience. Each tab is going to be much more independent, as previously mentioned, which means that it will be able to offer suggestions for searches, top pages, popular pages and so on.
Searchers will also have a full text search option on the browsing history. The example they give is that if you found a good site yesterday for digital cameras you don't need to bookmark it, you can just type 'digital camera' to bring up pages that you looked at. No details yet on how far back this option will work, or over how many pages. I think there's going to be a knock on effect here with things like FURL and delicious, but it's pushing the net (and searching obviously) back towards the personalisation angle.
We're promised autocompletion on the location bar, which isn't one of my favourite things, but we're told it will 'never flicker, never flash... perfectly aesthetically non-distracting.' Moreover, if you search places like Amazon or Google, those search boxes will be captured to your local system, allowing search from the address bar.
Another interesting option is a new start/home page. This will be a tab of your nine most visited sites - it's unclear if this is just going to be a simple thumbnail or something automatically updated, and there will also be a link to the sites you search most. There will also be links to recently bookmarked material and recently closed tabs. This is going to be an interesting challenge for the start/home page market - although it doesn't look as flexible or useful it's certainly a push in that direction. It's also adding more to the personalisation angle as well.
There will be another 'incognito' tab, with any content that's displayed there being deleted at the end of a session - nothing is stored or remembered and when the tab is closed the cookes from that session are wiped out. Can you say 'porn'? Yes, I thought so as well. This is clearly going to have implications for libraries and patrons searching for material. While on the one hand it may mean that it's going to be difficult/impossible to prove what someone has been searching for and looking at, it means that if the police come knocking it's going to also make it that much harder to provide access to what a user has been doing.
Popups will be limited to the tab that spawned them, which is a great idea and may well get over the annoyance of finding all those nasty little boxes with nasty little content. Similarly, it's going to be more difficult for malware to get into your system, so that while the process can compute it's not going to be able to write to your hard drive, read content and so on.
If you're interested in reading the 'comic' yourself - it's 38 pages long.
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This is clearly going to have implications for libraries and patrons searching for material. While on the one hand it may mean that it's going to be difficult/impossible to prove what someone has been searching for and looking at...
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Working as library IT I can tell you that we can track anything a person has been accessing via a browser.
All web requests still need to go through a proxy server, router and firewall where they are all still recorded against a datestamp and IP address. Once they log in we has a time and IP address and the rest is just matching up logs.
Posted by: Michael | September 02, 2008 at 02:47 PM