The Google Search Appliance Gets Twitter Results

Real-time search is the hot topic right now, especially since Google has rolled out a full-blown service inside the main search engine. Bing has been doing it for more than a month now, Yahoo has just revealed it will integrate tweets as well, and now real-time search is moving to enterprise search as Google has announced that it will serve results from Twitter with its Google search appliance for businesses.

“Real-time information is becoming an increasingly important part of searching online – both for business and consumer search users. Yesterday we announced the launch of real-time results on Google.com, and today we're announcing that the Google Search Appliance (GSA) can show users tweets from Twitter next to their internal Search Appliance results,” Cyrus Mistry, product manager, Google Enterprise Search wrote.

The announcement is clearly related to the real-time features Google introduced to the search engine, but there are some notable differences between the two products. Whereas real-time results are thrown in among the regular ones, on the main search engine, they are relegated to a section on the right of the page on searches with the GSA.

This separation is important and it makes sense that Google chose this path. When doing a regular search online, you expect to get the most relevant results, regardless of their origin. With the GSA though, you expect to get results from internal company sources, it is an intranet search service after all, so the main search results come exclusively from inside the company.

But web results can sometimes be important even when using the internal search engine, so Google also serves results from the main search engine on the right hand site of the interface, where the ads would normally sit. Now, admins can configure the GSA to show results from Twitter, and only Twitter not any other real-time source, above the normal web results.

“Customers have told us that placing web results next to intranet ones often allows employees to think differently about a particular topic and approach it in new ways. By integrating enterprise search with more of the information that exists in the cloud, like tweets, employees can more easily leverage the wisdom of the crowd,” he added.

 source: www.softpedia.com

Google Chrome's Brilliant, New Video Ad

Now that Google Chrome is becoming a viable option for most users with the launch of the beta version for both mac and linux and the new Extension Galleery which is quickly picking up momentum, the company is apparently more determined than ever to promote it to the public at large. And what better way to do that than with an ad, after all Google is pretty much an advertising company, despite what it may look like.

Google has certainly proven that it knows advertising, it makes the bulk of its less than modest revenue from ad sales, but it's mostly stayed at the “receiving end” of the market. The few times that it has ventured out and actively promoted one of its products it has proven that it can do the other side of the business just as well, like with the Going Google campaign that is still running online. 

The latest proof of the company's advertising genius is a series of new Google Chrome ads, which show off the browser's main advantages. What's great about the ads is the way Google chose to present the features, by using a somewhat low-tech and definitely analogue approach. The ads go through Chrome's main selling points by using some very interesting animations, all done with real-world contraptions, though a little bit of digital trickery is likely to have made its way in the finished product. 

The ads are now available on Google Chrome's UK You Tube Channel, where else, stitched together into a four-minute-long video. The video has been recently uploaded and Google hasn't made any official announcement just yet, but it is already picking up steam and will likely go viral in a very short time, judging from the buzz it is generating, all measurable with the new Google real-time search features. There's no point talking about it too much, you really have to see it to believe it.

source: www.softpedia.com

Firefox 3.7 vs. Internet Explorer (IE9 ) – Windows 7 DirectX 11 Hardware Acceleration

The race between Mozilla and Microsoft is on yet again to establish positions such as innovation leader and follower, when it comes down to Firefox and Internet Explorer. And it will most probably fall on the two company’s next generation browser releases to help label the two software makers as either leading the wave in innovation or bringing to the market features that are already sported by the rival product. In this regard, Firefox 3.7 and Internet Explorer 9 are currently neck-in-neck at the start line toward the adoption and implementation of hardware acceleration.

Last week, at the Professional Developer Conference 2009 in Los Angeles, Steven Sinofsky, president, Windows and Windows Live Division, demonstrated a very early, just three weeks old copy of Internet Explorer 9, touting hardware acceleration as one of the major enhancements coming to IE users. In the video embedded at the bottom of this article, you will be able to get an insight into IE9 hardware acceleration possible because of Windows 7’s DirectX 11 graphics technology.  

“We’re changing IE to use the DirectX family of Windows APIs to enable many advances for web developers. The starting pointis moving all graphics and text rendering from the CPU to the graphics

card using Direct2D and DirectWrite. Graphics hardware acceleration means that rich, graphically intensive sites can render faster while using less CPU. Now, web developers can take advantage of the hardware ecosystem’s advances in graphics while they continue to author sites with the same interoperable standards patterns they’re used to,” explained Dean Hachamovitch, general manager, Internet Explorer.

However, Microsoft is matched by mail competitor on the browser market, Mozilla, in regards to kicking the browser up a notch by better leveraging underlining hardware resource. Mozilla is, unlike Microsoft, offering an early, preview build of Firefox 3.7 which already makes use of Direct2D and DirectWrite.

“Although the investigation and implementation are still in an early stage, we can conclude that things are looking very promising for Direct2D. Though older PCs with pre-D3D10 graphics cards and WDDM 1.0 drivers will not show significant improvements, going into the future most PCs will support DirectX 10+. PCs in the future could allow providing extremely smooth graphical experiences for web-content like SVG or transformed CSS. Interestingly, Microsoft has also announced IE9 will feature Direct2D support as well only shortly ago. Feel free to download and try a build of Firefoxhere,” said Mozilla’s Bas Schouten. (via DeepTech)

This is not valid for Internet Explorer 9. Despite dogfooding and demoing IE9, Microsoft did not serve any bits to users outside of Redmond. In addition, Microsoft did not even provide a clue as to when it plans to make the first build of IE9 available for early adopters. Mozilla’s open source development model wins yet again in this respect.

“First of all why is GPU acceleration important? Well, in modern day computers, it's pretty common to have a relatively powerful GPU. Since the GPU can specialize in very specific operations (namely vertex transformations and pixel operations), it is much faster than the CPU for those specific operations. Where the fastest desktop CPUs clock in the hundreds of GFLOPS(billion floating point operations per second), the fastest GPUs clock in the TFLOPS(trillion floating point operations per second). Currently the GPU is mainly used in video games, and its usage in desktop rendering is limited. Direct2D signifies an important step towards a future where more and more desktop software will use the GPU where available to provide better quality and better performance rendering,” Schouten explained. with Direct2D support

source : www.softpedia.com

E Card

E-card
An e-card is similar to a postcard or greeting card, with the primary difference being that it is created using digital media instead of paper or other traditional materials. E-cards are made available by publishers usually on various Internet sites, where they can be sent to a recipient, usually via e-mail. It also considered more environmentally friendly compared to traditional paper cards. E-card businesses are considered environmentally friendly because their carbon footprint is generally much lower compared to paper card companies and because paper is not used in the end product.
E-cards are digital "content", which makes them much more versatile than traditional greeting cards. For example unlike traditional greetings, e-cards can be easily sent to many people at once or extensively personalized by the sender. Conceivably they could be saved to any computer or electronic device or even viewed on a television set, however e-card digital content has not yet progressed as far as digital video or digital audio in terms of varied usage.

Usage
Typically an e-card sender chooses from an on-line catalog of e-cards made available on a publisher's web site. After selecting a card, the sender can personalize it to various degrees by adding a message, photo, or video. Finally the sender specifies the recipient's e-mail address and the web site delivers an e-mail message to the recipient on behalf of the sender.

Printed e-cards
Some e-cards are intended to be printed out rather than sent via e-mail; to most people, however, these are not considered e-cards, but are simply home-made greeting cards. The advantage to this over a traditional greeting sometimes can be cost savings, or sometimes simply the ability to "create" something for the recipient rather than choosing a fully completed paper card.

Technological evolution
E-card technology has improved significantly since 1984[citation needed], about the time of its inception. One technical aspect that has remained mostly constant is the delivery mechanism: the e-mail received by the recipient contains not the e-card itself, but an individually coded link back to the publisher's web site that displays the sender's card exactly as it was originally configured.

Postcards
"Postcards" use static (non-moving) images. These were the first type of e-card in use. The recipient sees a single artistic image, accompanied by a personalized greeting message.

animation
This type of e-card is based on two-dimensional vector animation controlled with a scripting language. The format is proprietary to Adobe; however, widespread usage of Adobe's software allows this type of card to be easily viewed on most of today's computers. The recipient sees an animated short usually 15–30 seconds in duration. The animation often appears to have a cartoon style due to the nature of the content, though some Flash creations can be quite sophisticated and realistic. A sound track which may contain speech or music usually accompanies the animation.
Flash animated greeting cards can include interactivity, for example, asking the viewer to choose a picture to animate; however, most Flash e-cards are designed to convey the sentiment of the sender through simple observation.
Flash animated cards are offered today by almost all major e-card publishers and are consequently the most common format used.

Video ecards
"Video ecards" use a combination of personalized text and video to convey the message to the recipient.

Mobile E-Cards
With the advance in mobile technologies, Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS) which is basically picture SMS, became more popular. E-cards can now be sent to mobile devices and phones. Mobile e-cards or 'MCards' as they are more commonly known are then offered by different mobile content providers and carriers. Similar to e-cards, mCards can contain multiple pictures, music and text messages.
One of the first companies that created MCards is a Dutch Company called Mgreetings (established in 2003). MCards can be sent from a PC in a similar way as sending ecards. Users can go to a website online, select a card enter the recipient's mobile number, and that card will be sent to the recipient's mobile phone as an MMS.

Web based multi-media ecards
The web-based card creation has been evolving becoming more creative. The user can create greeting cards online choosing backgrounds, drag and drop images, animations, smileys and write text that look like handwriting. The ecard may contain videos and music as well.

Face Upload ecards
Flash 10 technology now enables sites to develop bespoke applications which can upload photos, manipulating them and cut out the head from it. The user can then embed it onto an animation so as to achieve a much higher level of personalisation.

History
The greeting card metaphor was employed early in the life of the World Wide Web. In 1995, E-Cards.com began hosting online greetings featuring nature and wildlife photos - the site was one of the first "E" named sites,[citation needed] so named to evoke both the electronic and environmental nature of its cards. By Valentine's Day 1996 online greetings were popular enough to be documented. That year, Valentine's cards were offered by Infobahn.com and Sony Entertainment, among others.
In October 1999, Excite@Home bought the web site Blue Mountain Arts for $780M (which represent a price of $71 per unique monthly user).[citation needed] The transaction has been referenced by CNN and Business 2.0 as evidence of the Dot-com bubble. On September 13, 2001, three weeks before filing for bankruptcy on October 1, 2001, Excite@Home sold BlueMountain.com to American Greetings for $35M, or $3.23 per unique monthly user.[citation needed] The web site BlueMountain.com remains a large web site, primarily focused on e-cards. In June 2008, JustAnotherDotCom.com purchased the free e-card site Greeting-cards.com and added it to their own greeting card site, which made them one of the largest e-card sites in the world[citation needed].
Originally, most e-cards were free, by virtue of being sponsored by advertising. While free greeting cards are still the most prevalent and popular, some sites charge for either all e-cards or special premium e-cards. Others charge an annual membership which enables members to send cards for the duration of the membership.[citation needed]
Several non-profit organizations offer free ecards as a way of having a supporter introduce the organization to another individual. In 2006, SOS Children's Villages - USA began offering free ecards for many occasions such as birthdays, thank yous, and Mother's Day.

Security
Since many e-card companies are privy to the e-mail address of the recipient and often also the sender, and whether the recipient reads the card, spammers can use e-cards for finding active e-mail addresses.
Sending an e-card to a given recipient invariably involves giving that recipient's email address to the e-card service – a third party. As with other third-party email services (such as mailing-list companies), the operator has the chance to misuse this address. One example of misuse is if the e-card service sends advertisements to the recipient's address. Under anti-spam rules used by major ISPs, such advertisements would be spam, since the recipient never asked ("opted in") to receive them. The e-card sender as well as the service could be held responsible for the act of spamming, since while the service sent the spam, the e-card sender provided the address
In some cases, it may be illegal for an organization or business to use an e-card service to send greetings to its customers. For instance, data privacy laws may forbid a business from disclosing information about customers to a third party – including names and email addresses
In late June 2007 a spat of emails with the subject line "You've received a postcard from a family member!" and other similar subjects, was seen making their way across the internet. Unfortunately most of these emails contained links to malicious web sites where Javascript was used to exploit the browser in order to compromise a system, or contained a link to a malware file masquerading as an e-card.

source: www.wikipedia.com

Windows Live Mail

Windows Live Mail (formerly named Windows Live Mail Desktop, code-named Elroy) is an e-mail client from Microsoft's Windows Live set of products. It is intended to be a successor for Outlook Express on Windows XP and Windows Mail on Windows Vista. The Windows Live Mail version numbering starts at 12 because this application is an advancement of Outlook Express/Windows Mail, not an entirely new application. Windows Live Mail is developed by the same team that wrote Windows Mail.

The application is available for download via the Windows Live Essentials suite

History

Version 12

The first version of Windows Live Mail was released on November 6, 2007.

Windows Live Mail has all of the features of Windows Mail. It also adds the following new features:

• Support for Web-based e-mail accounts including Windows Live Hotmail, Gmail/Google Mail, and Yahoo! Mail Plus.

• A different user interface which matches the other Windows Live "Wave 2" applications

• Synchronization with Windows Live Contacts

• Support for RSS feeds. Notable features include the ability to reply directly via email to the author of an item that appears in an RSS feed, and the ability to aggregate multiple feeds into a single folder. The RSS functionality requires Internet Explorer 7.

• Multi-line message lists, as in Outlook

• Emoticons can be used in e-mails and other functions

• In-line spell checking

• Separate inbox folders for different POP accounts

• Improved support for sending picture files in e-mails through the Photo email feature which uploads pictures to a web-based service and sends the URL and thumbnails in the mail. It can also perform basic photo correction and apply different border effects to pictures.

Version 14

A beta version of Windows Live Mail was released in September 2008. It features a new user interface which, in common with the other Windows Live "Wave 3" beta applications released at the same time, has no icons on the toolbar buttons. It also features a new calendaring function. Calendar events automatically synchronise between Windows Live Mail and the Web-based Windows Live Calendar. A "beta refresh" version of Windows Live Mail was released on December 15, 2008, and this version was officially released as the final version on January 8, 2009.

Version 14 still contains the same MIME problem with signed mail that Outlook Express has.

Differences from Windows Mail / Outlook Express

• Ability to view and edit HTML email by source has been removed.

• Scripted stationery is not supported.

• In version 14, toolbar icons are absent.

• Locally installed help documentation is not available.

• The Identities feature is not available.

• Supports using different mailboxes with separate folders (inbox, junk and so on).

• Supports DeltaSync, a proprietary protocol for access to Windows Live Hotmail e-mail accounts.

• Supports the WebDAV HTTP-based protocol (web-based e-mail accounts). Outlook Express supported WebDAV but Windows Mail did not.

• Supports full-text index-based search if Windows Search is installed.

Source : www.wikipedia.com

HTML e-mail

HTML e-mail is the use of a subset of  HTML (often ill-defined) to provide formatting and semantic markup capabilities in email that are not available with plain text.
Most graphical e-mail clients support HTML e-mail, and many default to it. Many of these clients include both a GUI editor for composing HTML e-mails and a rendering engine for displaying received HTML e-mails.
HTML mail allows the sender to properly express quotations (as in inline replying), headings, bulleted list, emphasize text, subscripts and supercripts, and other visual and typographic cues to improve the readability and aesthetics of the message, as well as semantic information encoded within the message, such as the original author and Message-ID of a quote. Long URLs can be linked to without being broken into multiple pieces, and text is wrapped to fit the width of the user agent's viewport, instead of uniformly breaking each line at 78 characters (defined in RFC 5322, which was necessary on older text terminals). It allows in-line inclusion of tables, as well as diagrams or mathematical formulae as images, which are otherwise difficult to convey (typically using ASCII art).

Adoption

Since its conception, a number of people have vocally opposed all HTML e-mail (and even MIME itself), for a variety of reasons.^[2]. The ascii ribbon campaign is an internet phenomenon advocating that email should continue to be sent in Human Readable ASCII text format. While still considered inappropriate in many newsgroup postings and mailing lists, its adoption for personal and business mail has only increased over time. Some of those who strongly opposed it when it first came out now see it as mostly harmless.^[3]
According to surveys by online marketing companies, adoption of HTML-capable email clients is now nearly universal, with less than 3% reporting that they use text-only clients.^[4] A smaller number, though still the majority, prefer it over plain text.^[5]

Compatibility

As HTML mail is more complex than plain text, it is also more prone to compatibility issues and has problems with rendering consistently across platforms and software.
Some popular clients do not render consistently with W3C specifications, and many HTML e-mails are not compliant, either, which may cause rendering or delivery problems, especially for users of MSN or Hotmail.^[4]
In particular, the tag, which is used to house CSS style rules for an entire HTML document, is not well supported, sometimes stripped entirely, causing in-line style declarations to be the de facto standard, even though they are not optimal from a semantic web point of view.^{[6][dead link]} Although workarounds have been developed,^[7] this has caused no shortage of frustration among newsletter developers, spawning the grassroots Email Standards Project, an acid test which grades email clients on their rendering of an acid test, inspired by those of the Web Standards Project, and lobbies developers to improve their products.^[8] To persuade Google to improve rendering in Gmail, for instance, they published a video montage of grimacing web developers, resulting in attention from an employee.

Style

Some senders may excessively rely upon large, colorful, or distracting fonts, making messages more difficult to read.^[9] For those especially bothered by this formatting, some user agents make it possible for the reader to partially override the formatting (for instance, Mozilla Thunderbird allows specifying a minimum font size); however, these capabilities are not globally available. Further, the difference in optical appearance between the sender and the reader can help to differentiate the author of each section, improving readability.

Multi-part formats

The default e-mail format according to RFC 5322 is plain text. Thus e-mail software is not required to support HTML formatting. Sending HTML formatted e-mails can therefore lead to problems at the recipient's end if it is one of those clients that do not support it. The recipient may see the HTML source code or nothing at all.
Many e-mail clients are configured to automatically generate a plain text version of a message and send it along with the HTML version, to ensure that it can be read even by text-only e-mail clients, using the Content-Type: multipart/alternative, as specified in RFC 1521.^[10][11][12] The message itself is of type multipart/alternative, and contains two parts, the first of type text/plain, which is read by text-only clients, and the second with text/html, which is read by HTML-capable clients. The plain text version may be missing important formatting information, however. (For example, an equation may lose a superscript and take on an entirely new meaning.)
Many^{[citation needed]} mailing lists deliberately block HTML e-mail, either stripping out the HTML part to just leave the plain text part or rejecting the entire message.^{[citation needed]}

Message size

HTML e-mail is larger than plain text. Even if no special formatting is used, there will be the overhead from the tags used in a minimal HTML document, and if formatting is heavily used it may be much higher. Multi-part messages, with duplicate copies of the same content in different formats, increase the size even further. The plain text section of a multi-part message can be retrieved by itself, though, using IMAP's FETCH command.^[13]
Although the difference in download time between plain text and mixed message mail (which can be a factor of ten or more) was of concern in the 1990s (when most users were accessing e-mail servers through slow modems), on a modern connection the difference is negligible for most people, especially when compared to images, music files, or other common attachments.^[14]

Security vulnerabilities

HTML allows for a link to have a different target than the link's text. This can be used in phishing attacks, in which users are fooled into believing that a link points to the website of an authoritative source (such as a bank), visiting it, and unintentionally revealing personal details (like bank account numbers) to a scammer.
If an e-mail contains web bugs (inline content from an external server, such as a picture), the server can alert a third party that the e-mail has been opened. This is a potential privacy risk, revealing that an e-mail address is real (so that it can be targeted in the future) and revealing when the message was read. For this reason, some e-mail clients do not load external images until requested to by the user.
During periods of increased network threats, the US Department of Defense converts all incoming HTML e-mail to text e-mail.^{[15][DOD bars use of HTML e-mail, Outlook Web Access dead link]}
The multipart type is intended to show the same content in different ways, but this is sometimes abused; some e-mail spam takes advantage of the format to trick spam filters into believing that the message is legitimate. They do this by including innocuous content in the text part of the message and putting the spam in the HTML part (which is what displays to the user).
Most e-mail spam is sent in HTML for these reasons, so spam filters sometimes give higher spam scores to HTML messages

source : www.wikipedia.com

Detecting Spam an Email

Checking words: false positives

People tend to be much less bothered by spam slipping through filters into their mail box (false negatives), than having desired e-mail ("ham") blocked (false positives). Trying to balance false negatives (missed spams) vs false positives (rejecting good e-mail) is critical for a successful anti-spam system. Some systems let individual users have some control over this balance by setting "spam score" limits, etc. Most techniques have both kinds of errors, to varying degrees. So, for example, anti-spam systems may use techniques that have a high false negative rate (miss a lot of spam), in order to reduce the number of false positives (rejecting good e-mail).
Detecting spam based on the content of the e-mail, either by detecting keywords such as "viagra" or by statistical means, is very popular. Such methods can be very accurate when they are correctly tuned to the types of legitimate email that an individual gets, but they can also make mistakes such as detecting the keyword "cialis" in the word "specialist"; see also Internet censorship#"By-catch". The content also doesn't determine whether the email was either unsolicited or bulk, the two key features of spam. So, if a friend sends you a joke that mentions "viagra", content filters can easily mark it as being spam even though it is neither unsolicited nor sent in bulk.

Lists of sites

The most popular DNSBLs (DNS Blacklists) are lists of IP addresses of known spammers, open relays, zombie spammers etc.
Spamtraps are often email addresses that were never valid or have been invalid for a long time that are used to collect spam. An effective spamtrap is not announced and is only found by dictionary attacks or by pulling addresses off hidden webpages. For a spamtrap to remain effective the address must never be given to anyone. Some black lists, such as spamcop, use spamtraps to catch spammers and blacklist them.
Enforcing technical requirements of the Simple Mail Transfer Protocol (SMTP) can be used to block mail coming from systems that are not compliant with the RFC standards. A lot of spammers use poorly written software or are unable to comply with the standards because they do not have legitimate control of the computer sending spam (zombie computer). So by setting restrictions on the mail transfer agent (MTA) a mail administrator can reduce spam significantly, such as by enforcing the correct fall back of Mail eXchange (MX) records in the Domain Name System, or the correct handling of delays (Teergrube).


source : www.wikipedia.com

 

iGoogle

iGoogle (formerly Google Personalized Homepage and Google IG), a service of Google, is a customizable AJAX-based startpage or personal web portal (much like Netvibes, Pageflakes, My Yahoo!, and Windows Live Personalized Experience). Google originally launched the service in May 2005. Its features include the capability to add web feeds and Google Gadgets (similar to those available on Google Desktop).

On April 30, 2007, Google renamed "Google Personalized Homepage" to "iGoogle".^[2] As of 17 October 2007 (2007 -10-17)^[update] Google had made the service available in many localized versions in 42 languages, and in over 70 country domain-names

Gadgets

iGoogle gadgets interact with the user and utilize the Google Gadgets API. Some gadgets developed for Google Desktop can also be used within iGoogle. The Google Gadgets API is public and allows anyone to develop a gadget for any need.^[5]

Google also allows all users to create a special gadget that does not require the use of the Gadgets API. The gadgets are designed to be shared with friends and family. The special gadgets must be created using an online wizard and must belong to one of the following types:

• "Framed Photo" – displays a series of photos.
• "GoogleGram" – creation of special daily messages.
• "Daily Me" – displays user's current mood and feelings.
• "Free Form" – allows the user to input text and an image of their choice.
• "YouTube Channel" – displays videos from a YouTube channel.
• "Personal List" – allows the user to create a list of items.
• "Countdown" – countdown timer.
• "Daily Literary Quote" – displays literature-related quotes served up by ModeRoom Press.

Some of the developer-made gadgets include:

• "Meteo-si": displays the current weather and the weather forecast for selected area(s)
• "Ebay gadget": searches for items on Ebay

Throughout 2009, iGoogle released a sidebar at the side of the home page which also altered the overall appearance of the iGoogle pages. It allows users of Gmail to chat from their homepage without going to gmail.com along with organising the iGoogle tabs vertically instead of horizontally along the top. The addition to this sidebar feature upset many users of iGoogle, many voicing their opinions in the Google Forums, as currently there is no way to opt-out of the change to the site design.

 

Themes

With iGoogle, users can select unique themes for their Google homepages: some themes designed by Google itself and others by the userbase

Artist themes

In April 2008, Google began offering a choice of themes by professional artists

 

Experimental iGoogle

On July 8, 2008, Google announced the beginning of a testing period for a new version of iGoogle which alters some features, including replacing the tabs with left navigation, adding chat functionality, and a canvas-view gadget for RSS.^[7] Users were selected for this test and notified when they logged in by a link to a brief description and further links to forums. On the forums, it was explained^{[by whom?]} that there was no opt-out, as a control for the test. Further, there was no information on how long the test would continue. Many expressed dissatisfaction with the new version and with the inability to opt-out.^[8]

On October 16, 2008, Google announced the release of this new version of iGoogle and retired its older format. The release did not initially include the persistent chat widget. It does include the left navigation in place of tabs as well as a change to widget controls, however.^[9] The stated purpose is to prepare for OpenSocial, with the new canvas view stated as playing an important role in that.^[10]

On October 17, 2008, InformationWeek^[11] reported "a vocal group of users" as unhappy with the changes. They^[who?] point out that many users don't want change forced on them, and that this is a general problem with cloud software under a service provider's control.

A workaround to restore the original tab layout was found by attaching "?gl=all" to the end of the iGoogle URL. On June 4, 2009, this workaround was eliminated. Within days, another workaround was discovered. Simply changing the URL ending to "?hl=all" would again restore the original tab layout, with some missing links across the top of the home page, including "Maps" and "more".

On November 18, 2009 this workaround was again eliminated resulting in the tabs being placed on the left and with the links still missing. This led to an immediate resurrection of the controversy over user choice, both in the UK and world-wide, as many people unhappy with the new layout imposed on US users had switched to the UK Google site where the workarounds still worked. Within hours, the most frequently asked question on the help forum was how to restore the old layout, and there was a large number of feature suggestions to the same effect on the Google product ideas page. Other solutions have come to the fore, which require adds-ons, greasemonkey scripts or bookmarklets

Source : www.wikipedia.com

 

Web Browser

A Web browser is a software application for retrieving, presenting, and traversing information resources on the World Wide Web. An information resource is identified by a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) and may be a web page, image, video, or other piece of content.^[1] Hyperlinks present in resources enable users to easily navigate their browsers to related resources.

Although browsers are primarily intended to access the World Wide Web, they can also be used to access information provided by Web servers in private networks or files in file systems.

The major web browsers are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, and Opera for Windows and Apple Safari, Mozilla Firefox and Opera for Macintosh.

 

History

The history of the web browser dates back to the late 1980s, when a variety of technologies laid the foundation for the first web browser, WorldWideWeb, by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991. That browser brought together a variety of existing and new software and hardware technologies.

The introduction of the NCSA Mosaic web browser in 1993 – one of the first graphical web browsers – led to an explosion in web use. Marc Andreessen, the leader of the Mosaic team at NCSA, soon started his own company, named Netscape, and released the Mosaic-influenced Netscape Navigator in 1994, which quickly became the world's most popular browser, accounting for 90% of all web use at its peak (see usage share of web browsers).

Microsoft responded with its browser Internet Explorer in 1995 (also heavily influenced by Mosaic), initiating the industry's first browser war. By bundling Internet Explorer with Windows, Microsoft was able to leverage its dominance in the operating system market to take over the web browser market; Internet Explorer usage share peaked at over 95% by 2002.^[3] As of October 2009 Internet Explorer has 65% browser usage share as of October 2009 according to Net Applications.^[4]

Opera debuted in 1996; although it has never achieved widespread use, having 2% browser usage share as of October 2009,^[4] it has a substantial share of the fast-growing mobile phone web browser market, being preinstalled on over 40 million phones. It is also available on several other embedded systems, including Nintendo's Wii video game console.

In 1998, Netscape launched what was to become the Mozilla Foundation in an attempt to produce a competitive browser using the open source software model. That browser would eventually evolve into Firefox, which developed a respectable following while still in the beta stage of development; shortly after the release of Firefox 1.0 in late 2004, Firefox (all versions) accounted for 7.4% of browser use.^[3] As of October 2009, Firefox has a 24% usage share.^[4]

Apple's Safari had its first beta release in January 2003; as of October 2009, it has a dominant share of Apple-based web browsing, accounting for just over 4% of the entire browser market.^[4] Its rendering engine, called WebKit, is also running in the standard browsers of several mobile phone platforms, including the iPhone OS, Google Android, Nokia S60 and Palm WebOS.

The most recent major entrant to the browser market is Google's WebKit-based Chrome, first released in September 2008. As of October 2009, it has a 4% usage share

 

Function

The primary purpose of a web browser is to bring information resources to the user. This process begins when the user inputs a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI), for example http://en.wikipedia.org/, into the browser. The prefix of the URI determines how the URI will be interpreted. The most commonly used kind of URI starts with http: and identifies a resource to be retrieved over the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP). Many browsers also support a variety of other prefixes, such as https: for HTTPS, ftp: for the File Transfer Protocol, and file: for local files. Prefixes that the web browser cannot directly handle are often handed off to another application entirely. For example, mailto: URIs are usually passed to the user's default e-mail application, and news: URIs are passed to the user's default newsgroup reader.

In the case of http, https, file, and others, once the resource has been retrieved the web browser will display it. HTML is passed to the browser's layout engine to be transformed from markup to an interactive document. Aside from HTML, web browsers can generally display any kind of content that can be part of a web page. Most browsers can display images, audio, video, and XML files, and often have plug-ins to support Flash applications and Java applets. Upon encountering a file of an unsupported type or a file that is set up to be downloaded rather than displayed, the browser prompts the user to save the file to disk.

Information resources may contain hyperlinks to other information resources. Each link contains the URI of a resource to go to. When a link is clicked, the browser navigates to the resource indicated by the link's target URI, and the process of bringing content to the user begins again.

 

Features

Available web browsers range in features from minimal, text-based user interfaces with bare-bones support for HTML to rich user interfaces supporting a wide variety of file formats and protocols. Browsers which include additional components to support e-mail, Usenet news, and Internet Relay Chat (IRC), are sometimes referred to as "Internet suites" rather than merely "web browsers".^[5][6][7]

All major web browsers allow the user to open multiple information resources at the same time, either in different browser windows or in different tabs of the same window. Major browsers also include pop-up blockers to prevent unwanted windows from "popping up" without the user's consent.^{[8][9][10][11]}

Most web browsers can display a list of web pages that the user has bookmarked so that the user can quickly return to them. Bookmarks are also called "Favorites" in Internet Explorer. In addition, all major web browsers have some form of built-in web feed aggregator. In Mozilla Firefox, web feeds are formatted as "live bookmarks" and behave like a folder of bookmarks corresponding to recent entries in the feed.^[12] In Opera, a more traditional feed reader is included which stores and displays the contents of the feed.^[13]

Furthermore, most browsers can be extended via plug-ins, downloadable components that provide additional features

 

User interface

Most major web browsers have these user interface elements in common:^[14]

• Back and forward buttons to go back to the previous resource and forward again.
• A refresh or reload button to reload the current resource.
• A stop button to cancel loading the resource. In some browsers, the stop button is often merged with the reload button.
• A home button to return to the user's home page
• An address bar to input the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) of the desired resource and display it.
• A search bar to input terms into a search engine
• A status bar to display progress in loading the resource and also the URI of links when the cursor hovers over them, and page zooming capability.

Major browsers also possess incremental find features to search within a web page.

 

Privacy and security

Most browsers support HTTP Secure and offer quick and easy ways to delete the web cache, cookies, and browsing history. For a comparison of the current security vulnerabilities of browsers, see comparison of web browsers.

 

Standards support

Early web browsers supported only a very simple version of HTML. The rapid development of proprietary web browsers led to the development of non-standard dialects of HTML, leading to problems with interoperability. Modern web browsers support a combination of standards-based and de facto HTML and XHTML, which should be rendered in the same way by all browsers.

Source:www.wikipedia.com