Thursday, July 2, 2009 11:45 AM
Heady days for new web tools and offerings
Karim Bardeesy
The summer’s lures, to get outside and off the computer, are getting a run for their money. In the last few weeks, the Internet’s entrepreneurs have organized a counter-campaign, spinning out all kinds of new tools -- the browsing, E-mailing, searching, and social networking worlds -- that make going back online a more attractive proposition.
Oh, and there’s also The Wire.
But first, the nuts and bolts. Mozilla Firefox and Opera have each released new versions of their browsers. Open-source -based Firefox 3.5 promises to be twice as fast as the previous version, and includes a video interface that doesn’t require an outside plug-in like Real Player. I downloaded Firefox last night -- it was zippier, but not quite twice as fast -- and will report in with more in the coming days.
Opera is less well-known. In exchange for its blazing speed (it’s one of the least memory intensive browsers out there), you often have to sacrifice other kinds of functionality, as some pages don’t load properly on it. The new “Opera United” technology in version 10 could be a game-changing leap, though -- it says it will enable file-sharing, bringing previously underground activity to the masses.
For searching, Microsoft’s Bing tool gained some impressive immediate market share in its first month of operation. And now it’s promising to index Twitter posts in real time, starting with a cadre of especially “prominent and prolific” Twitterers. Bing thus joins an already crowded space, with Twitter itself and a number of Twitter-based applications doing the same thing; but this does give Bing a temporary advantage over Google.
On the web-based E-mail front, Gmail has made its folder labels drag-and-drop . I’ve tried this out in Firefox and it’s great and handy. And it’ll probably get a lot more people using the labels feature, which was previously more trouble than it was worth. This puts one of the most sensible features from desktop-based E-mail programs like Microsoft Outlook into Gmail.
Facebook has tweaked its privacy settings , giving users more control over who sees what (going in the opposite direction of Twitter, which has very few controls). It’s also doing away with regional networks. If you have an account, best to dip in and fiddle around before the defaults make you broadcast too widely (or narrowly) for your liking.
And what will you do while whiling away time on the Internet? The folks at Apple Canada want you to tune in to the forbidden fruit of HBO programme offerings via iTunes. Entourage, The Wire, and The Flight of the Conchords are all now available for $2.49 per episode.
