Sacrificing Web Standar...

Editor’s note: Sean Gerety is a user experience geek and Microsoft Regional Director  (a program for independent developers who connect Microsoft with the developer community). Follow him on Twitter @IdeaKitchn . When I saw 4ormat’s TechCrunch post, “ Bootstrapped Startup Saves Over $100K by Dropping IE ,” I first called shenanigans, but then congratulated them on their brilliant marketing ploy. They might as well have titled the article, “Startup Saves Over $100k in Marketing Costs by Pretending not to Work in IE”. I tested 4ormat’s admin site in IE10 and used the IE developer tools to bypass the page block in IE9, and it works just fine. They probably saved another $100k by not testing in Opera (try loading the signup page in Opera). Reading the numerous kudos and criticisms in the comments, it did get me thinking about what browsers you should target for your site. I’ve grown up on a diet of Zeldman’s Web Standards First and that the belief that the web is for everyone. That’s what makes the web great. For someone to advise otherwise is bad for business and short changes the community of the web. I noticed that 4ormat did make the effort to ensure that customers’ portfolio sites do display correctly in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera and IE, so why not go all the way and make the rest of the site work? And I’m not talking about supporting IE6, I’m talking about modern browser support. It’s not that hard to do. Today you can use tools like BrowserStack to load and test a site quicker than you can start up a virtual machine. It’s not that hard. A Dirty Secret Most web developers, myself included, do the bulk of their development and debugging in a single web browser, whether Chrome, Firefox, Safari or IE. They perform quick tests in other browsers, fix some bugs (usually in their favorite client side development tool, e.g. firebug) and then release it to the web or a killer QA team.  Using web standards is the best way to get more mileage for your site. Locking yourself into any vendor, will eventually code your site into a corner that will maroon you into incompatibility. We saw this with IE6, and it feels like we are back on the slippery slope . Bad for Business Tyler claims that his company saved $100k in development and debugging costs over three years by not testing in IE (or Opera).  While plausible, it’s also irrelevant.  The big question is how much revenue did he give up by not supporting IE?  Sites like Tumblr and Dribbble are doing an amazing job by supporting everything.  At last glance, Tumblr have a total of 51,205,107 blogs and is still growing. Designer showcase Dribbble shows what’s possible to when a site is built on web standards and progressive enhancement from the beginning. Dribbble used cutting edge Web standards like CSS3 transforms that had very little browser support at the time, but gracefully handle legacy browsers. Although it launched nearly a year after 4ormat and is still invite-only, Dribbble’s popularity has skyrocketed, with at least an order of magnitude more unique visitors than 4ormat, according to compete.com. At the very least, Dribbble shows that it’s possible to build a large audience among designers by focusing on Web standards and supporting major browsers rather than “Best Viewed With”. Tyler’s experiences might be relevant if he was building this five years ago. However, we now live in a world of modern browsers. He should remove the page block for IE9 and start signing up everyone to take advantage of all the free press that 4ormat.com has received. Make the web for everyone…

Future Versions of Fire...

For a while now, Mozilla has been looking beyond the core browser features to expand Firefox’s capabilities. Last week, the Firefox team showed an interesting new demo at the IETF 83 meeting in Paris. In this demo, the Firefox team shows a new browser-based video chat feature for Firefox that is completely based on JavaScript and other open standards. The most important of these standards for this demo is WebRTC . With WebRTC – which is part of the developing HTML5 standard – developers can enable real-time services, including file sharing, voice calls and video calls right in the browser. This demo also makes use of the organization’s experimental Social API , which sits on top of Mozilla’s Persona browser-based identity service. A partial implementation of WebRTC will only come to Firefox’s experimental nightly builds later this quarter, so it will be a while before you will be able to use these features yourself (though there are, of course, already plenty of Flash-based video chat tools out there). Just like HTML5, the WebRTC standard is still under heavy development. It’s worth noting, though, that all the major browser vendors (Mozilla, Microsoft, Google and Opera) have voiced support for this technology and the Chrome Dev channel, for example, already offers a WebRTC API. For now, this is obviously just a demo and it’s not clear if Mozilla will actually bake this feature directly into Firefox. Given that Mozilla has shown interest in adding all the underlying technologies to the browser, though, it wouldn’t come as a major surprise if it would at least offer its own video chat feature as part of the Persona initiative.

Opera Software Launches...

Just when iOS developers had thought they had heard of every UDID replacement mechanism out there , Opera Software had to go and launch its own, too. Today, the company, best known as the maker of the Opera web browser, is introducing something it’s calling “App-Tribute” – and yes, it’s yet another system providing an alternative to the now deprecated UDID. The UDID, an identification number that’s unique to every mobile Apple device, had been previously used by mobile developers for advertising and user tracking purposes. Following what can perhaps be seen as overuse, and in the worst cases, abuse, Apple announced it was ending support for UDIDs six months ago, in an effort to address ongoing privacy concerns as well as to head off future complaints. UDIDs, unlike web browser cookies, for example, can’t be deleted by users themselves, and users have no options to opt-out from tracking save for simply not using mobile apps. Recently, Apple began rejecting apps  utilizing UDIDs from the iTunes App Store. Meanwhile, a number of workarounds and alternatives have presented themselves for use. And now, you can add Opera’s latest to that growing list. The company is launching “App-Tribute” via its advertising subsidiaries AdMarvel, Mobile Theory, and 4th Screen Advertising. However it was Mobile Theory, a recent Opera acquisition , that came up with the solution. With App-Tribute, like many of the other alternatives, the goal is to protect consumer privacy while still allowing developers the ability to collect user analytics. The product can track and attribute downloads without those having any form of ID mechanism to identify the user. Nor does App-Tribute depend on any ID or the transmission of that information between apps, networks and advertisers, like some of the other alternative solutions. The system contains two parts: the App-Tribute Advertiser SDK and the App-Tribute Publisher SDK. With the former, developers can track successful downloads and subsequent installs of an application, but again, without using any personally identifiable information to do so. Its only server-side communication involves tracking and validating the app installs. The Publisher SDK, meanwhile, can then track the promotion of apps as well as anonymous user interest in designated apps. It also provides the proper attribution to the publishers that promoted and facilitated the downloads of the promoted apps without handing off personally identifiable information in the process. “Since the launch of iOS in 2007 and Android in 2009, we’ve watched both sides of the industry – both developers who want to advertise their apps and those that want to monetize their app traffic — struggle with the thorny issue of promoting and tracking app downloads. We’ve seen schemes that attempted to solve the problem through device and user tracking, many of which raise troubling questions around accuracy and consumer privacy,” explains Mahi de Silva, EVP of Consumer Mobile at Opera Software as to challenges that led up to the development of this system. He also says that the new solution was developed alongside Opera’s publisher customers, and is now being used by some of its and AdMarvel’s customers. Opera can’t specifically name them, but describes the apps as “a personal radio service” and “some leading mobile game publishers.” The Publisher SDK is also being bundled with AdMarvel’s own SDK, for its customers’ use. AdMarvel’s cloud-based ad platform currently reaches over 150 million smartphone users across over 8,000 mobile sites and apps. Opera says more details will become available on its Advertising site at www.opera.com/advertising , but that information has yet to be posted at the time of publishing. UPDATE : Opera says it has posted information about the solution to the website at:  admarvel.com/app-tribute . We also asked the company if it could describe the App-Link system in more detail. Opera says the system fits more closely into the “pasteboard” method (more on that here ), but there are some differences. When someone clicks an app download ad, the phone stores the app information, which creative to attribute the download to, and the first time it occurred. Opera doesn’t know anything else about the device or user, though. When the download happens, the information from the pasteboard is sent to Opera’s server. If no attribution on an app download happens, then nothing is sent to the server. In addition, all the attribution takes place on the device, not the server.

The Internet Has Killed...

It’s hard to tell if the Wikipedia article on April Fools’ Day  is itself an April Fools’ prank. Tidbits of the ubiquitous holiday’s history seem like jokes in and of themselves; “”In France and Italy, children and adults traditionally tack paper fish on each other’s back as a trick and shout “april fish!” in their local language (“poisson d’avril!” and “pesce d’aprile!” in French and Italian respectively).” And this brings me to my point; The Internet has killed April Fools. Back in the day you used to be able to tell your friends you were engaged, pregnant or had Cancer without them gushing all over your Facebook page or Twitter and immediately freaking out people who you didn’t want to prank, like your family. April Fools jokes also used to be less saturated and thus harder to catch: People have been perpetuating the “ Washing of the Lions” prank  (tricking people into arriving places to see a free washing of lions, sort of the trick precursor of a flash mob) from the 17th to the 19th centuries. One reason it won’t proliferate on April 1st in the 21st is that any time you see an ad for a  ”free lion washing” — bear with me, this is a metaphor —  you’re likely to either a) Google “lion washing” and realize it’s a well-worn stunt or b) already be immune to the joke because your April Fool-dar is on Orange alert. Nowadays the Internet bombards you with jokes earlier and earlier,  In order to avoid being suspected, the most savvy pranksters used to pull out their efforts March 31st; Now it’s March 30th. I’m pretty sure the fooling will end up bleeding into April 2nd. And every site and their mother has to participate, straining themselves to be funny when it’s clear they are not. Most April Fools’ jokes are more “har har” jokes than “ROFL” anyways, BUT especially when their powers are combined. The worst thing about April Fools’ is that you get to see how tragically unfunny everyone is. So what’s a genuinely humorous person to do come the first of April (not saying that I am one or anything)? Well keep in mind that the most truly funny pranks are still pulled off in real life, like when you change the background image on someone’s desktop, hide all their files and watch as they click their screen furiously, bemused. That never gets old. Or like when our Admin Greg wrote in my calendar that I had a panel at 2:45 at Fort Mason  today, to talk about startups with Robert Scoble. So I put on work clothes and took a taxi down there on a Sunday to pontificate about tech media and startups, only be told that there was an Opera going on instead of a startup conference. Turns out the Scoble panel is actually on April 2nd! Oh, that was just a mistake? Still, best inadvertent April Fools joke ever. Real life pranks have yet to be overkilled, mostly because humans are lazy and too busy to actually put some elbow grease into them. So the next time you want to inflict your stale humor on someone come the beginning of Spring, think of the immortal words of George W. Bush, “ Fool me once , shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.”

Opera Mini 7 For Androi...

Earlier this month, Opera and Android briefly made headlines together when one analytics firm found that Google’s OS, Android, had finally overtaken Opera as the world’s largest mobile browser. Today, the two are in the news again for a slightly different reason: Opera is releasing the newest version of its popular Opera Mini browser for the platform with added camera, HTML5 and 3D graphics support — one way for Opera to claw back some share on Android, currently the biggest smartphone platform in the world. The new version of the browser is something that Opera had hinted was in the works back in February, when it announced deals to further its reach in the area of mobile payments . As with that news, today’s release is another example of how mobile browser developers are looking to add more features to make their products more like native platform experiences. The release comes at the same time that Opera has also released a new edition of its browser for Symbian . Opera’s title as the world’s largest browser has partly been because it was an early mover and works across a range of feature-phone and smartphone platforms. It says that it is currently used by some 160 million people worldwide. Given that Android is now the biggest smartphone platform around and able to gain ground on Opera simply through that market share, it was essential for Opera to update and go one step further than it had before. New features include the ability to create an unlimited number of bookmarks (“Speed Dials”) to quickly go to your favorite URLs — before there had been a limit of nine. This new version now also includes camera support, as well as better support for HTML5 sites’ functionality through its Ragnarök technology. It is also adding WebGL support, for 3D functionality. WebGL is used in the development of cross-platform games. Opera has long said that one of its strongest points against other browsers — and platforms’ native clients — is its page compression technology, which improves the speed of browsing on the mobile web. In the new version, it’s taking that one step further and claiming that it’s actually cheaper to use it than its competition because it compresses web pages up to 90 percent. Other improvements, it says, include faster panning around sites. Ironically, the most up-to-date figures from StatCounter, the company that said Android had overtaken Opera, show that, in fact, Opera is back on top over Android as the world’s most popular browser. The fact that the rankings change so frequently point to how important it is to keep innovating on features to keep users loyal.