Today, Google have announced in their Official Blog that they have completed the indexing system.

Caffeine provides 50 percent fresher results for web searches than our last index, and it’s the largest collection of web content we’ve offered. Whether it’s a news story, a blog or a forum post, you can now find links to relevant content much sooner after it is published than was possible ever before.

Source: Official Google Blog

Safari Reader

A readability funciton that has been built into the browser.  If you’re browsing a page that Safari detects an article, it presents you with a “Reader icon”  in the Smart Address Field.  When clicked this then presents you with a ‘Lightboxish’, simple and clean way of continuing to read the article, in one long and continous feed.  I love it!

Greater HTML5 Support

With Apple’s continued support and advertisement of support for HTML5 (ahem Adobe), they’ve included even more features for HTML5 support.  Items noted are full screen view and closed captions for <video> tag, and Geolocation

Better Performance

Apple has integrated a faster Nitro engine that makes Safari 5 30 times faster than its previous version, along with DNS pre-fetching and improved caching.

Bing Search

In addition to the default Google search, Safari have now included Microsoft’s Bing search……should you want it?

Enter our saviour, Google Font API!  Why somebody didn’t think of this earlier beats me, but Google have very kindly introduced Google Font Directory and Google Font API, a free web service that allows web sites to display and use other fonts, high quality open-source fonts, outside of the safe fonts that are common place.

Why use Google Font API?  If you have a web site that you think would benefit from a slightly different font, then Google Font API is the perfect solution. Instead of using images, @font-face is a much more SEO friendly solution and it’s unobtrusive meaning that you don’t need to update your existing content, just the CSS file.  Also, using Google’s servers means you’re off-loading your servers work to to dish up the CSS, over to Google’s reliable infrastructure.

To use the Google service, you simply browse the Font Directory (which will undoubtidly grow in size), and find the font that you would like to use.  Once found, you simply add a link to your CSS file:

<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="http://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Font+Name">

Then just use the new font in your CSS file.  Note that I’ve also used a fallback font just in case.  This is known as font stacks.

p {
 font-family: 'Font Name', serif;

}

For my latest “fun” project, www.PredictFootyResults.co.uk, I employed this technique and used the font of ‘Droid Sans’.

Further reading can be found here on Google’s official pages.

My aim is to use the same application afterwards for the English Premier League if successful.  I’ve engineered it, so that it’s easy to update, so expect plenty of those.  What I’d really like to do is also extend the current brief stats page.

I’m also open to any “feature” requests, within reason.

It’s free, and only take a moment to join, so please take a look.

Firefox 3.7 will soon become Firefox 4.  Now to help make some sense of this, let me break it down.  Right now the latest version of Firefox is 3.6.2.  Once Firefox 3.6.4 has been released, then Mozilla’s main development will switch to Firefox 4.  Everything that has been Firefox 3.7 since then will now be re-numbered to Firefox 4.

So right now, other than a new interface – what does Firefox 4 bring to the table?

Overall, it looks like the goals of Firefox 4 will be:

• Fast: making Firefox super-duper fast
• Powerful: enabling new open, standard Web technologies (HTML5 and beyond!),
• Empowering: putting users in full control of their browser, data, and Web experience.

According to Mozilla themselves.  As you can see from the version number fuzzy math from earlier, nothing is set in stone just yet – but soon we should be getting a lot more news about this epic new version of the Firefox browser.

Are you excited yet, or is it still too early?

Source: Firefox Facts

Print it out, stick it on your wall and go moan at IE

Link to CSS3 Cheat Sheet

Today’s new beta release incorporates one of Chrome’s most significant speed and performance increases to date, with 30% and 35% improvement on the V8 and SunSpider benchmarks over the previous beta channel release.

Today’s beta release also includes a handful of new features such as syncing browser preferences, including themes settings, and install extensions while in incognito mode.

Under the hood, today’s release contains the goodness of some new HTML5 features, namely Geolocation APIs, App Cache, web sockets, and file drag-and-drop capabilities. Additionally, this is the first Chrome beta that features initial integration of the Adobe Flash Player plug-in with Chrome, so that you can browse a rich, dynamic web with added security and stability — you’ll automatically receive security and feature updates for Flash Player with Chrome’s auto-update mechanism.

To try out all these new features, download Chrome on the Windows beta channel, or download the Mac or Linux betas.

Source: Google Chrome Blog

Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) web browser, now accounts for less than 60% of the market, down from 95% at its peak in 2003, according to new figures.

Latest statistics, from measurement firm NetApplications, show that IE has 59.9% of the market, with Firefox gaining on it, with 24.5%.

While third-place Google Chrome’s 6.7% share of the market looks tiny by comparison it is rising sharply, up from just 1.7% this time last year.

A new version of IE is imminent.

Microsoft has gradually been losing market share, largely due to concerns over security, experts said.

Measurement firms tend to agree that IE is losing market share although the percentage share of rival browsers is more hotly contested.

In the UK, research firm Nielsen suggests that IE still commands 70% of the market, with Mozilla’s Firefox on 18%. It does not include figures for Apple’s Safari.

It still shows a downwards trend for IE, losing 6% of market share since last year.

This could be due to more awareness of rivals, thinks Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann.

“There are more viable alternatives now. Google has been advertising and there are more people using Macs and Apple’s Safari. There is just a great awareness that there are alternatives,” he said.

Recently people using version 6 of the browser were advised to find an alternative due to large security holes.

It may shift loyalty away from Microsoft, thinks Gartner analyst Jeffrey Mann.

“There were a lot of people using IE6 and some will have said that if they are going to change, they may as well look at some alternatives,” he said.

Microsoft introduced browser choice to European Windows users in March.

This was the result of a ten-year dispute with the European Union over the fairness of IE being installed as the default browser on billions of computers using the Microsoft Windows operating system.

Now customer get the choice of 12 browsers.

But this is unlikely to have affected current market-share figures thinks Mr Mann.

“That is only just beginning to kick in and is likely to have a minor effect overall. It will see some really small browsers getting a lot of prominence,” he said.

For rivals to IE it is going to be a “long, slow rise”, thinks Mr Mann, as Microsoft remains dominant.

And with the release of version 9 of Internet Explorer, the battle could really hot up.

IE9 promises to support HTML5, the next-generation standard for coding web pages, which aims to reduce the need for software plug-ins, such as Flash.

Apple remains a key rival for Microsoft in the browser market and it has seen its Safari browser gain market share but the two rivals are united when it comes to supporting the HTML5 web standards.

Apple sees HTML5 – along with other technologies such as the h.264 standard for video – as a replacement for Flash and has been involved in a high-profile spat with Flash owners Adobe.

Apple has banned the video standard Flash on many of its products.

Source: BBC News

Link to PDF

Source: web directions

The company is today publicly launching a developer community and open API, providing third-party developers access to their facial recognition technology, including the algorithm that powers their Facebook applications Photo Finder and Photo Tagger.

The former app saw one hell of a kick-off, tagging up to 400 million photos in its first month. A year later, Face.com’s Facebook apps have scanned over 7 billion photos in total and identified no less than 52 million faces.

Developers who are interested in building their own facial recognition apps can now get full access to the open Face.com API, free of charge. That basically means developers can tap into Face.com’s face detection and recognition technology and create brand new ways for friends to engage through photos at zero cost. Hard to beat that offer.

Face.com is letting any developer tap into their tech through simple REST API calls, and via Facebook’s and Twitter’s APIs also enable developers to apply their tried face recognition tech to their users’ social graphs.

Here are some examples of ways the Face Open API and database have already been integrated: Celeb-Finder/Twitterazzi, Tagger Widget and PosterYourself.

Soure: TechCrunch