Pages

December 24, 2013

Battle of the Browsers 2014

By Roland Waddilove | PC Advisor | 16 December 13


Microsoft has gone from having around a 90 percent web browser market share to 55 percent or less, depending on whose statistics you read. The problem was that Internet Explorer stagnated and made little progress for years. Firefox and Opera were alternatives that some people used, but even those progressed slowly. The browser market was lifeless until Google Chrome woke everyone up with not only the speediest browser around, but also an equally breakneck development cycle.

See also: What's the best alternative web browser to IE, Chrome and Firefox?
Chrome led the way with performance and support for the latest web standards and other browsers have been trying to catch up ever since with development teams working to produce new versions as fast as they can. Internet Explorer is up to 11, Firefox is now at version 26, Opera is up to 18, and Safari has given up. Of course, it isn’t all about speed and if you are a die-hard Internet Explorer user you should look at the features offered by other browsers because they can do things that aren’t possible in IE.

All the browsers were tested in Windows 8.1, reviewed, and several benchmarks were used to determine their performance, such as BMark, Octane 2, Peacekeeper, SunSpider and others. They highlight some significant differences between the browsers and some browsers have improved over the past year or two, while others haven’t. Who has gained and who has lost? Let’s take a look.

Best web browsers: Microsoft Internet Explorer 11

Microsoft’s web browser situation is a mess. One problem is that there are still a significant number of people running Windows XP. The most recent version of Internet Explorer available for XP is IE8 and that is an awful browser that doesn’t support modern web standards and is terribly slow. If you are running XP you should not use IE8 under any circumstances. There aren’t that many Vista users, but those that still have it are limited to IE9 and that’s a dated browser that is not recommended. It is only Windows 7 and 8 users that can install and run the latest version of Internet Explorer. In contrast, Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Opera work on any version of Windows.

Internet Explorer has a compatibility view and this enables it access websites that are incompatible and don’t display correctly. It loads a web page as if it were an older version of IE. Is this an admission that IE doesn’t work properly? None of the other browsers need a compatibility mode and they work fine without it. Another problem for Internet Explorer is that it is a target for toolbars and extensions that bloat the browser and make it slow. You have to be wary of these when installing freeware software. Although the other browsers have extensions, they don’t suffer from the same problems.

It is difficult to make sense of Internet Explorer’s performance benchmarks. In many tests IE lags behind other browsers (Safari excepted), sometimes by a wide margin. Yet if you go to the IE Test Drive it blows away all competitors with its incredible performance. Take those Test Drive results with a large pinch of salt. Microsoft has written them in such a way as to let Internet Explorer run at full speed while limiting the performance of other browsers. When the code is tweaked to allow Chrome to run at full speed, it runs just as fast.

Microsoft has clearly improved Internet Explorer enormously over recent years and the difference between IE8 on XP and IE11 on Windows 7/8 is huge. It still has some catching up to do. While the test Drive demos look good, JavaScript performance isn’t so hot. Overall it was rated as fourth fastest, but it beat Firefox on some tests.
Internet Explorer’s interface is clean and simple, providing you avoid toolbars. The Favorites button opens a panel on the right, but this can be docked on the left. It also shows RSS feeds and your browsing history. It has Do Not Track and tracking protection features, which is good. It has SmartScreen which warns you about unsafe websites, and settings that are easily configured.


Internet Explorer 11
IE11 does well on graphical demos, but elsewhere performance is ordinary

Best web browsers: Opera 18

Opera is nearly 20 years old, yet in all that time it has struggled to build a market share percentage that couldn’t be counted on your thumbs. The company has tried everything to make the browser more appealing and at one time it was the most feature-packed browser available. The problem is that few people cared. Opera has tried filling toolbars and panels with buttons and functions, it has tried creating widgets that run in the desktop outside of the browser, and peer-to-peer networking with sharing built in. Nothing has worked. This is partly because other browsers offered more speed or more add-ons or both.

With Opera 18, a lot of the clutter has been stripped out and features that were packed into previous versions and it now has a wonderfully clean and simple user interface. This has a single blue bar at the top, with an Opera button in the top left corner and a minimum of buttons either side of the address box. The design is similar to Firefox.

It seems that Opera has taken a leaf out of Chrome’s book and simply gone for speed, web standards and simplicity. Actually, it has done more than copied Chrome, it is Chrome. This version of Opera is based on the Chromium open source browser project, which is the also the basis for Google Chrome. This is the obvious explanation for the near identical performance figures in benchmarks. Opera is a tad slower than Chrome in some tests, but slightly faster in others. The difference between Opera and Chrome is so slight you won’t notice it. So what you have here is Chrome with a different interface and set of menus. This means that it is definitely worth considering and some people may prefer it.

There are hundreds of extensions for Opera and the range and quality is excellent. Features found in other browsers can usually be found in Opera. There is an interesting Off-Road mode and this compresses internet traffic to reduce the bandwidth used and to speed up browsing on slow connections. It could be useful to people with laptops perhaps using their phone as a Wi-Fi hotspot to get online. A Synchronise facility enables browsing data like bookmarks and other information to be synced across computers and devices. At the right of the address box is a heart and clicking it adds the current web page to the Stash. This is a place where pages can be stored and read later when you have more time. Speed Dial displays favourite websites making them quick and easy to access.























Opera 18 is perfect for people that want Chrome’s performance, but don’t want a Google account.

Best web browsers: Apple Safari 5

Apple appears to have thrown in the towel with Safari and has abandoned its Windows version. A few years ago when Internet Explorer and Firefox were stagnating, Apple saw an opportunity to grab the browser market and put high quality Apple software in front of Windows users, perhaps with ambitions of tempting them to switch to Macs. The company brought out Safari for Windows and it was far superior to IE and Firefox (although Firefox had the advantage of a huge library of extensions). Things didn’t quite work out as Apple wanted and Chrome was launched, which offered even greater performance benefits, and Firefox’s developers shifted into top gear and increased development and shortened release times. Safari got left behind.
The latest version of Safari available for download is dated May 2012. That makes it nearly two years old and this is reflected in the performance figures in benchmark tests. In a nutshell, it came last. It wasn’t just slightly slower than rivals, it was a lot slower, often running at one quarter to one third the speed of rivals. Even Internet Explorer can beat it. It didn’t complete all the tests and a couple were skipped because they were unsupported.

Safari 5 is basically 2011 technology and in its day it was an excellent web browser, competing on equal terms with rivals. Surprisingly, it has quite a modern look to it and design-wise it looks great (as you would expect). Although a traditional menu bar at the top of the window is available, it is hidden by default. The Favorites bar with bookmarks can be hidden too and this increases the space for displaying web pages and reduces the clutter. Extensions are available and an option on the menu takes you to the online gallery. Although there are dozens available, the gallery is smaller than the hundreds available for Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

A nice feature in Safari is the Reading List and it is similar to Opera’s Stash. Web pages you don’t have time to read can be added to the Reading List and read later. It is a bit like an alternative bookmark facility, but it stores icons and descriptive titles which are more helpful. Beyond that, there isn’t much to say about Safari: it’s rather dull and unexciting.

Essentially, if you have Safari on your PC you should uninstall it and immediately switch to a more modern browser. Just about any browser is better than Safari for Windows and it has few of the great features that are in Safari for the Mac, such as syncing browsing data between computers and with iPads and iPhones. Indeed, in iCloud Control Panel 3.0 for Windows, there’s no longer support for synching Safari bookmarks. Farewell, Safari for Windows.

Safari for Windows
Apple has given up on Safari for Windows. This Top Sites wall is nice to look at, though

Best web browsers: Google Chrome 31

When Google launched Chrome in 2008 it really stirred up the web browser market. It had a minimal set of features and was really basic, but it had two things going for it. It was very fast and it was compatible with modern web standards. It is now up to version 31, but the number is irrelevant and it is hard to tell the difference between this and version 21. The majority of changes to Chrome are not obvious and they are mostly tweaks to the speed and capabilities of the engine that powers the browser.

Chrome was the fastest web browser when it was launched and it still is. At least on most performance tests. No other browser comes close, apart from Opera and that uses the Chrome engine, so it’s not surprising. Not only is Chrome fast, it runs on XP and Vista, which Microsoft no longer supports. If you are still running one of Microsoft’s older operating systems, Chrome is essential, otherwise you will have endless problems with slow browsing and even websites no longer working properly because they require features not supported in IE8 and 9 on XP and Vista.

It’s hard to list recent changes in Chrome without getting technical. Some are aimed at developers and others aren’t visual. However, recent updates include notifications of new Gmail, right click an image to search for similar ones, and a reset button in advanced settings to restore factory settings. Click the site icon to the left of the URL and you can choose to allow or block automatic downloads.

If you are a Google fan, and not everyone is, Chrome has some great features and it is designed to make the most of Google services like Gmail, Calendar, its online office suite and so on. For example, it automatically syncs browsing data across computers, tablets and phones. Extensions installed on one computer automatically install on others you use, even if it’s a Mac.

Flash is built in so you don’t need it installed in Windows, and plug-ins can be click-to-play, which is great for blocking unwanted content like Flash adverts and auto-playing movies. The range of extensions is excellent and they rival Firefox. People stuck with Firefox in the past mainly because of extensions, but now most of them are in Chrome. There are web apps too and the Chrome Web Store is a great place to find games, office apps and tools. Shortcuts to the apps are added to an app launcher button on the taskbar that displays a pop-up panel. It’s a superb browser, but you have to love Google and use its services to make the most of it. If you don’t, use Opera instead.

Google Chrome 31
Chrome has speed, apps and extensions, but you do need a Google account

Best web browsers: Mozilla Firefox 26

Firefox is around a decade old and before Chrome came along in 2008 it was doing quite nicely. Internet Explorer development had stalled and early versions of Firefox offered an alternative that was stable, fast, and offered features that weren’t in IE, such as an extensive range of add-ons. Development of Firefox was slow until Chrome came along with its fast update cycle and Mozilla had to increase the pace of development. Chrome kick-started Firefox’s development and updates are now more frequent.

Firefox has always been slower than Chrome, but faster than Internet Explorer, sitting somewhere in the middle. Its performance has been good, but rarely the best. Of the five browsers on test here, Firefox is third, bang in the middle again. It is a solid browser that performs well, but Chrome has equalled it or overtaken it in market share, depending on whose statistics you look at. It’s main advantage in the early days was the large range of extensions, but today there are just as many for Chrome and because Chrome is faster, it is hard to recommend Firefox unless there is an essential add-on that isn’t available for Chrome.

Firefox has always been more customisable than other browsers and typing about:config into the address box provides access to a large number of settings. Knowledgeable people can tweak settings to change the way the browser works or enhance it. In the latest version plug-ins apart from Flash are click-to-play, increasing security. MP3 support has been added when running XP, and when loading JPEGs the EXIF information is used to select the orientation. There are also developer and technical changes too. Browsers don’t suddenly change these days, they slowly evolve with tiny changes with each new version.

An interesting feature of Firefox is the custom start page. It has a Google search box, but down at the bottom is a row of buttons that provide access to common features like downloads, bookmarks, add-ons and settings. Firefox Sync enables you to synchronise browsing data like bookmarks between computers and devices. It is a useful feature, but Google does this better than anyone else. Firefox requires you to pair devices by typing in codes whereas with Google you just sign in.

Firefox has a clean interface with minimal distractions and if you need menus then the Firefox button is where to find them. Select Add-ons and you get access to a very nice add-ons gallery. It says 3.5 billion have been downloaded and it’s Firefox’s best feature. Is it worth sacrificing a bit of performance for add-ons? Many people think so and that’s why Firefox has such a large market share. The browser is an average performer with above average add-ons.

Firefox 26
The extensive range of add-ons is the number one reason people use Firefox

Best web browsers: Conclusion

Chrome and Opera share the best browser spot because they are the fastest, they support the latest web standards, and have lots of extensions that add extra features. Chrome is best if you have a Google account, but if you don’t then Opera is fine. Firefox and Internet Explorer are OK and offer similar performance, but Firefox has the advantage of having a large library of add-ons and it works with old versions of Windows. Internet Explorer on Windows 7/8 is much improved and if add-ons aren’t important, it’s as good as, and perhaps better than Firefox.




December 11, 2013

Google’s Road Map to Global Domination

Fifty-five miles and three days down the Colorado River from the put-in at Lee’s Ferry, near the Utah-Arizona border, the two rafts in our little flotilla suddenly encountered a storm. It sneaked up from behind, preceded by only a cool breeze. With the canyon walls squeezing the sky to a ribbon of blue, we didn’t see the thunderhead until it was nearly on top of us.
I was seated in the front of the lead raft. Pole position meant taking a dunk through the rapids, but it also put me next to Luc Vincent, the expedition’s leader. Vincent is the man responsible for all the imagery in Google’s online maps. He’s in charge of everything from choosing satellite pictures to deploying Google’s planes around the world to sending its camera-equipped cars down every road to even this, a float through the Grand Canyon. The raft trip was a mapping expedition that was also serving as a celebration: Google Maps had just introduced a major redesign, and the outing was a way of rewarding some of the team’s members. 

Vincent wore a black T-shirt with the eagle-globe-and-anchor insignia of the United States Marine Corps on his chest and the slogan “Pain is weakness leaving the body” across his back. Though short in stature, he has the upper-body strength of an avid rock climber. He chose to get his Ph.D. in computer vision, he told me, because the lab happened to be close to Fontainebleau — the famous climbing spot in France. While completing his postdoc at the Harvard Robotics Lab, he led a successful expedition up Denali, the highest peak in North America. 

A Frenchman who has lived half his 49 years in the United States, Vincent was never in the Marines. But he is a leader in a new great game: the Internet land grab, which can be reduced to three key battles over three key conceptual territories. What came first, conquered by Google’s superior search algorithms. Who was next, and Facebook was the victor. But where, arguably the biggest prize of all, has yet to be completely won. 

Where-type questions — the kind that result in a little map popping up on the search-results page — account for some 20 percent of all Google queries done from the desktop. But ultimately more important by far is location-awareness, the sort of geographical information that our phones and other mobile devices already require in order to function. In the future, such location-awareness will be built into more than just phones. All of our stuff will know where it is — and that awareness will imbue the real world with some of the power of the virtual. Your house keys will tell you that they’re still on your desk at work. Your tools will remind you that they were lent to a friend. And your car will be able to drive itself on an errand to retrieve both your keys and your tools. 

While no one can say exactly how we will get from the current moment to that Jetsonian future, one thing for sure can be said about location-awareness: maps are required. Tomorrow’s map, integrally connected to everything that moves (the keys, the tools, the car), will be so fundamental to their operation that the map will, in effect, be their operating system. A map is to location-awareness as Windows is to a P.C. And as the history of Microsoft makes clear, a company that controls the operating system controls just about everything. So the competition to make the best maps, the thinking goes, is more than a struggle over who dominates the trillion-dollar smartphone market; it’s a contest over the future itself. 

Google was relatively late to this territory. Its map was only a few months old when it was featured at Tim O’Reilly’s inaugural Where 2.0 conference in 2005. O’Reilly is a publisher and a well-known visionary in Silicon Valley who is convinced that the Internet is evolving into a single vast, shared computer, one of whose most important individual functions, or subroutines, is location-awareness. 

Google’s original map was rudimentary, essentially a digitized road atlas. Like the maps from Microsoft and Yahoo, it used licensed data, and areas outside the United States and Europe were represented as blue emptiness. Google’s innovation was the web interface: its map was dragable, zoomable, panable. 

These new capabilities were among the first implementations of a technology that turned what had been a static medium — a web of pages — into a dynamic one. MapQuest and similar sites showed you maps; Google let you interact with them. Developers soon realized that they could take advantage of that dynamism to hack Google’s map, add their own data and create their very own location-based services. 

A computer scientist named Paul Rademacher did just that when he invented a technique to facilitate apartment-hunting in San Francisco. Frustrated by the limited, bare-bones nature of Craigslist’s classified ads and inspired by Google’s interactive quality, Rademacher spent six weeks overlaying Google’s map with apartment listings from Craigslist. The result, HousingMaps.com, was one of the web’s first mash-ups. 

Google never imagined that its service, which it called Maps, could be co-opted like that: its product was designed to be a Google brand extension, not a database that outside developers could use without permission. “We were faced with a choice,” Mano Marks, one of the engineers responsible for early versions of Google Maps, recalls in a conversation with Rademacher that Google has put on YouTube. “We could either sue him or hire him.” To Google’s credit, Rademacher was hired. 

Rademacher’s mash-up showed Google that the map could be more than just something that people glance at to keep from getting lost. By opening up its map to everyone, Google could perhaps make itself into the one indispensable cog in the giant collaborative computer that was emerging. “HousingMaps was when people realized that making [map] data available to other programmers was incredibly powerful,” O’Reilly says. “Google never looked back.” 

Rademacher helped Google develop and publish what’s known as an application programming interface for Google Maps. Think of an A.P.I. as a programmers-only side entrance into the Google mapmaking machine. No longer did they have to repeat Rademacher’s hack; instead, with access to the A.P.I., developers could combine Google’s free map with their own data and end up with a cool mash-up like HousingMaps — or build an entire company based on Google Maps. The real estate site Redfin, for example, is basically just that: pictures of and information about houses for sale layered over a map from Google. The same goes for AirBnB, but with room rentals. Uber and Lyft, the quasi-taxi services. RelayRides. TaskRabbit. NeighborGoods. They may not be household names (yet), but there’s an entire Google Maps-based ecosystem out there. 

Behind Vincent and me, near the center of the raft and mounted about 10 feet above the surface of the river, was our expedition’s payload: a green orb, about the size of a soccer ball and dimpled with 15 lenses pointing in different directions. This custom-made panoramic camera is what has made Google’s Street View possible. Street View is the feature within Google Maps that allows you to pull up a panoramic photograph taken from a particular spot on a given street. For years now, cars with roof-mounted panoramic cameras have been driving the world’s roads while taking pictures every yard or so. 

There is a version of the car-mounted Street View camera that is designed to be worn like a backpack — that’s the Trekker. For the raft-trip, the Trekker camera-orb was programmed to snap its 15 (virtual) shutters every few seconds. These pictures would be stored in the camera’s computers; tagged with precise coordinates of latitude, longitude and altitude; and then later digitally melded into one 360-degree image. Once the pictures collected on the raft trip are incorporated into Google’s world map, anyone with an Internet connection will be able to access an immersive virtual-reality view from anywhere along the bottom of the Grand Canyon. 

As a light rain started to fall, I wondered aloud if on this trip we had already taken more photos from the bottom of the canyon than all the previous trips combined. Maybe around 20,000 people in a given year run the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and it’s the sort of trip that was all but unheard-of before the 1960s. 

Vincent performed a quick calculation of our trip so far without a calculator or even pencil and paper: two cameras on two rafts, each taking 15 shots every two seconds, for three eight-hour days, versus 20,000 people a year taking snapshots for 50 years.
“Not yet,” he said. “By the end of the trip, I would think so — possibly.” 

As we talked, lightning struck behind us, then to one side, then to the other. The orb and its associated computers and copper cables were all lashed to an aluminum mast, forming a conductive path reaching down to the several inches of water sloshing in the bottom of the raft. The consensus was that the Street View camera would make a decent lighting rod. Word was passed to the boss. 

“That’s why we brought two,” Vincent said, shrugging. 

One perk of being a Google engineer is being encouraged to devote 20 percent of your time to your own project. Back in 2004, Street View was Vincent’s. The idea was to photograph every inch of every street in San Francisco and put those pictures inside the map. It was a big job, and Vincent had a lot of people at Google pitching in to help. (Larry Page, one of the company’s founders, was a trailblazer; in 2001, he collected images by driving around town with a video camera mounted to the side of his car.) Eventually, Street View would become the next breakthrough for Google Maps after the introduction of its programming interface. But Google was not the first company to turn this idea into reality; Amazon was. 

In 2005, A9.com, Amazon’s skunk works for search technology, unveiled an innovative feature called Block View. It was meant to be a newfangled Yellow Pages where you could find the phone number and address of a local business — as well as a photograph of its storefront. Block View was discontinued after only 20 months, but not before Microsoft introduced its own version, Streetside, that was essentially identical, except that Microsoft’s pictures of streets and storefronts were seen through a digitally created framing device. Though the photos were taken from car-roof-mounted cameras, they were presented online as if you were looking through a windshield. The result was dorky, but it was one solution to the vexing problem of coming up with a user interface. How do you move through a map made of photographs? Microsoft’s answer: In a virtual car. 

Google ultimately developed a more elegant user interface. Instead of representing movement along a street as flipping through a filmstriplike series of photographs, as Block View and Streetside did, Google pursued the idea of a panoramic camera — what would become the green orb — and used it to take a panoramic photo every few feet. The effect of hopping from one photo to the next in Street View is one of walking through virtual space.
Microsoft’s Streetside debuted in 2006 with a photographic rendering of parts of Seattle and San Francisco. Google’s Street View arrived a year later, with five cities: San Francisco, New York, Las Vegas, Miami and Denver. Google eventually overwhelmed Microsoft with a more aggressive surveying program. Street View now covers 3,000 cities in 54 countries, and it has gone beyond streets and onto train tracks, hiking trails, even rivers. A section of the Amazon was the first river, appearing last year; the Thames made its debut in October; and the Colorado will be available by the end of the year. “We want to paint the world,” Vincent says. When I asked him what level of resolution we were talking about, he said, “About one pixel to the inch.” 

By threading photograph after photograph along the lines that mark the byways and highways on the map, Vincent and his team are making, in effect, one large photograph of the globe. It’s a neat trick, perhaps even the next conceptual leap for cartography, but like most things Google spends a lot of money on, very likely to be more useful than it first appears. Like most people when they first encounter Street View, O’Reilly used it to check out the photo of his house. But then, he says, he later began to see the potential of the data collected by Google and to imagine more and more uses for it. 

Street View turns out to be incredibly valuable for all sorts of things — but above all for mapmaking. By 2008, Google was ready to wean itself from the licensed data that underpinned the first generation of Google Maps by greatly expanding its database of geographical information instead, which was called Oyster. The team added terabytes worth of raw data tagged to locations, everything they could get their hands on. In the United States, some of the best information is free and comes from the federal government: U.S. Geological Survey and Forest Service reports, census records and the like. Google bought other map data outright, from both the United States and abroad. But in most of the developing world, there was simply no good map data to be had at any price. In places like India, Oyster made do with only poor-quality tracings of the streets taken from satellite photos. 

Creating one big map from hundreds or even thousands of other maps means comparing each map with all the others to see how they line up. They never do. Including crucial details about address and turn-restriction information — necessary for generating driving instructions — has traditionally been a matter of sending cars out to drive the roads in question and waiting for the drivers to file their reports, a process called ground-truthing. Street View provided Google with a shortcut. Not only were the GPS tracks from the Street View cars great for reconciling map data, but the pictures taken by the panoramic camera also made it possible to go into Street View and look around for turn-restriction information. Google can ground-truth its data in virtual space. In Hyderabad, India, Google has a staff of more than 2,000 ground-truthers “driving” through cyberspace every day, cross-referencing map data with the Street View pictures. 

In addition to the human operators, pattern-recognition bots search the archive for addresses: Google’s computer-vision programs look for house numbers, street signs, even the bespectacled face of Colonel Sanders — in which case the bot will flag the corresponding point on the map with a note that there’s probably a KFC franchise located there. “When we started, Street View was just some sci-fi idea,” Vincent says, “but now, it’s the backbone.” 

The rainfall hitting the hot canyon walls produced a vaporous mist that put the entire canyon into soft focus. Vincent called back to the crew working the camera: “These panos, we must keep them. I think they will be quite artistic.” 

During a routine Street View mission, pictures spoiled by rain are rejected. Street View drivers are instructed to drive only in the summer months, when the sun is high, in order to keep the light relatively consistent from region to region. If it rains, they have to pull over and wait out the storm. But a raft trip is a different story. And besides, Vincent was right: the scene before us was incredibly beautiful. Everyone was wide-eyed. “I’m trying to burn these images into my retinas, so I never forget this place,” I said. 

“You never will,” Vincent said, “because Street View is there to help you to remember.”
It was a trippy moment, the realization that I was going to be able to look back at my own outsourced memory one day. It brought to mind the writer Jorge Luis Borges. In a short story entitled “On Exactitude in Science,” Borges tells of a long-ago empire where “the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province.” In Borges’s empire, the importance of the cartographic guild grew as the map grew, until finally the empire was completely covered by a map of itself. 

After the downpour faded, I suggested to Vincent that there was something Borgesian about this project of his. This raft trip was effectively sucking the Grand Canyon into Google’s vast cartographic oyster — indeed, his green orbs were capturing the entire world. “What happens,” I asked, “when Street View grows to be as big as the territory it covers?”
Vincent answered with a question of his own: “How many photos would you need if you wanted one picture taken every 10 meters across the earth’s surface?”
“Um, a googol?” A wild guess. 

“The answer is easy once you know how much land there is in the world.”
I didn’t, so I had no idea how many individual panoramic photos you would need to get the entire planet inside Street View. 

“Well over a trillion,” he said, “and we are nowhere close.”
Vincent went on to point out that the two largest and most populous continents have barely been touched by Street View. “Africa and much of Asia are big holes right now.” And Street View clones are popping up in all the places where Google is not active. “There are three in China, two in Russia, one in Turkey, another in Korea and many others as well.” Vincent doesn’t worry much about competitors like Microsoft, but he takes the clones seriously. “They all have copied our user interface beautifully,” he said, “It’s a form of flattery.” He laughed, but it was clear that he regarded such copycat behavior as a form of theft. “We are behind in those places,” he added. 

Vincent’s Street View cars have already mapped six million miles. Depending on your perspective, that’s either a quite a lot (equivalent to 12 trips to the moon and back) or not much at all (only one-tenth of the world’s estimated 60 million miles of road). Either way, Google’s huge investment in the camera-equipped cars — not to mention trikes, boats, snowmobiles and, yes, rafts — has yielded the most detailed street atlas on earth.
Early last year, Google’s United States market share for where-type queries topped 70 percent, and Google started to get serious about recouping the fortune it has been sinking into making its map, putting a tollbooth in front of its application programming interface. Henceforth, heavy users would be charged for the privilege. (The very biggest users — which Google wouldn’t identify — were already paying.) The use limit was carefully calibrated: it would start at 25,000 map-related requests a day for 90 consecutive days. More than 99 percent of the users of the A.P.I. — small, boutique sites like HousingMaps.com — would be under the limit and thus unaffected. Even so, that left approximately 3,500 sites, companies that actually have a real business dependent on Google’s maps, which would have to pay. The change prompted an exodus.

Foursquare, an urban-exploration app used by 6 percent of smartphone users worldwide, was one of the first big players to leave last winter. Additional high-profile defections followed in the spring: Wikipedia left on what could probably be described as ideological grounds; it simply doesn’t like the idea of proprietary data. Craigslist wanted more control. Apple defected in the summer. Its motive was strategic, even paranoid. The arrival of the tollbooth made it clear that Google saw Maps as a crucial part of an operating system for mobile devices. Could this lead to its having too much power over the iPhone itself?
Those four companies all turned to the same alternative: OpenStreetMap, a nonprofit based in Britain often described as the Wikipedia of mapping. Founded 10 years ago by Steve Coast, a cartography-obsessed computer-science student at University College London who liked to bicycle around town with a GPS taped to his handlebars and a laptop recording its data in his backpack, O.S.M. has since grown into a collaboration among some 300,000 map enthusiasts around the world. The resulting map is one that anyone can contribute to and use, free of charge. But it wasn’t until Google Maps started locking down its data that O.S.M. became what it is now — a potential challenger to Google’s cartographic hegemony.
On the last day of my ride-along, Vincent beached the rafts in order to take the two orbs up to the site of a prehistoric Indian ruin. He and a colleague, Daniel Filip, unstrapped the Trekkers from their masts and restrapped them onto their backs. Each pack weighed 40 pounds; the orbs, fixed at the end of a mechanical stalk, hovered at just above head height. Together the two men started zigzagging up the North Rim, a pair of eyeballs going to see what was at the top of the trail. 

Filip is the most senior engineer on the Street View team. He was the one who came up with the idea of using the 360-degree panoramic camera in Street View, and he built the software engine that allows you to navigate from one panorama to the other. At one point Filip managed to become separated from the group. He didn’t see anything funny about someone on a mapmaking expedition taking a wrong turn. “The trail is just not very well marked, is all,” he said. 

The vista down the Colorado River from the Indian ruin is the same view that appears on the back of Arizona’s 2010 commemorative quarter, and after Filip arrived, Vincent handed him his phone and, his orb still overhead, posed for a portrait. Crouching down for a better camera angle, Filip suddenly lost his balance. The orb puts the wearer’s center of gravity high on the body. For a long moment, Filip teetered. The trail was a mere shelf in the steeply sloping cliff-face, scarcely two feet wide, 700 feet above the canyon’s bottom. His foot slipped, sending a shower of gravel over the side. His arms pinwheeled. It was the closest of close calls. 

For a long while afterward, Filip told me, he couldn’t stop thinking about his son and the long-overdue appointment with his estate lawyer. There are still dangers associated with mapping the world. 

Today, Google’s map includes the streets of every nation on earth, and Street View has so far collected imagery in a quarter of those countries. The total number of regular users: A billion people, or about half of the Internet-connected population worldwide. Google Maps underlies a million different websites, making its map A.P.I. among the most-used such interfaces on the Internet. At this point Google Maps is essentially what Tim O’Reilly predicted the map would become: part of the information infrastructure, a resource more complete and in many respects more accurate than what governments have. It’s better than MapQuest’s map, better than Microsoft’s, better than Apple’s. 

“You don’t see anybody competing with Google on the level or quantity of their mapping today,” says Coast, who now works as a geographic-information professional. But, he adds, “that’s because it’s not entirely rational to build a map like Google has.” Google does not say how much it spends on its satellite imagery, its planes, its camera-equipped cars, but clearly it’s an enormous sum. O.S.M., by contrast, runs on less than $100,000 a year. Google’s spending is “unsustainable,” Coast argues, “because in the long run, this stuff is all going to be free.” 

The O.S.M. map data is free now — but using it comes with a catch. Any improvement, or any change at all, that a developer makes to O.S.M.’s map must be sent back to O.S.M. It’s a clever tactic, forcing competitors of Google Maps to choose between fighting Google alone or joining a coalition that, if it prevails, will ensure that no private company will ever be able to establish a mapping monopoly. 

So far Coast’s coalition is doing pretty well. In some places, he says, O.S.M. has grown to be even more information-dense than Google Maps — in North Korea, for example, but also parts of Europe. One limitation, though, is the questionable utility of some of the details. The cities that O.S.M. has mapped are sometimes charted down to every footpath, bench and tree, yet they can still lack accurate particulars about addresses and traffic rules. It turns out that for the unpaid map nerds who make up the bulk of O.S.M.’s volunteer staff, Coast says, “entering turn restrictions is just not as fun as entering trails.” 

For-profit companies have started contributing data and in some cases even money to the O.S.M. cause. Microsoft was an early supporter, opening up its A.P.I. and giving access to aerial imagery that Coast values at “approximately priceless.” One of the smaller in-car GPS companies, Telenav, where Coast is currently employed, has lately provided turn-restriction data and hired professional mappers to work with O.S.M.’s cadre of amateurs. Foursquare, whose map uses data from O.S.M., has a map-correction app that potentially adds its 40 million users to the O.S.M. coalition. 

Coast is confident that, given time, Google’s map will be surpassed by the O.S.M. map: “You don’t see any proprietary competitors to Wikipedia, right?” 

O’Reilly is more skeptical. “An open-hardware play broke the IBM monopoly, an open-software play broke the Microsoft monopoly, and eventually an open-data play will prevail,” O’Reilly admits, but he points out that those earlier cases were not instances of direct competition between rival companies. “It wasn’t a plug-compatible mainframe clone that dethroned IBM; it wasn’t a free operating system like Linux that dethroned Windows.” Rather, he says, “it was this toy, the personal computer, it was the global operating system that we call the Internet.” 

Google, for its part, is committed to its strategy of having the best map, whatever the cost. Brian McClendon, a vice president who oversees all of Google’s Geo products, disputes even the idea that the free-spending map division is a money loser. Because 20 percent of Google searches produce where-type results, he argues that his team should be credited with a commensurate portion of search revenues. Revenue from ads on local where-type searches, McClendon says, are “already valuable enough to justify the investment — plus, plus.” 

In June, Google bought the popular social-mapping app Waze for close to a billion dollars. The product can be thought of as a Twitter for traffic jams, and the acquisition was widely interpreted as a defensive move — a way of keeping valuable map data out of competitors’ hands. Then in the summer, Google released a new Maps interface, code-named Tactile. The redesign, which Google officially refers to as “the new Google Maps,” is currently accessible in preview mode (and is expected to replace and take the name of Google Maps sometime in the next couple of months). Zoom in on more than a hundred cities around the world and see not simply a photograph of the rooftops, but also the buildings themselves rendered in 3-D and viewable from any angle. Zoom even lower, switch to Street View and you can enter public buildings. Pull back to the stratosphere, and clouds can be seen encircling the earth, rendered from real-time weather data. Pull back even further, and there is the big blue marble at the edge of the Milky Way, our planet rolling like a trackball under your fingertips. 

The new interface is as significant as any change to Google’s mapping products since Maps debuted nine years ago and one that makes Apple’s rejection of Google Maps seem like an understandable business decision. Tactile is beautiful and graceful and poised to dominate its world — Apple-like, inother words. 

In most tellings, Apple was the big loser in its 2012 clash with Google over maps. The public outcry over the many shortcomings of Apple’s Maps — mismarked hospital emergency rooms, whole towns gone missing, twisted and disfigured aerial imagery — prompted a public apology from Apple’s new chief executive, Tim Cook. The Apple executive responsible for mobile software, Scott Forstall, was dismissed. Possibly the most lasting damage was the blemish the episode left on Apple’s reputation: Where was the company’s reliably elegant design? 

At the same time, Google seemed to be blindsided by Apple’s move. Google Maps had been the default map on the iPhone — part of the operating system, not simply an app — but when Apple issued iOS6, its upgrade to the iPhone’s operating system, Google’s map was suddenly replaced with Apple’s homegrown version. Overnight, Google Maps lost 300 million iOS users — approximately 20 percent of the global smartphone market — to Apple, not to mention the data that those iPhone users had been generating for Google. Such data is precious. It can be used to refine the map. It could also be mined for hidden correlations and moneymaking opportunities. It’s possible to imagine an analysis of where, when and how long people shop at some stores compared with others or getting an answer to the question: How many potential customers who are headed to one particular store end up in the competitor’s store across the street? What’s more, the data from iPhones is particularly valuable, because it comes from people who are known to pay a premium for technology and convenience. 

What really made the experience sting, though, was that Google had no contingency plan. After Apple’s surprise switch, iPhone customers were clamoring to dump its product and return to Google Maps, but Google had no external Maps app ready for the iPhone. It took the company three months to make one. Google should have been prepared for this possibility: it had been no secret that Apple was up to something. The first iPhone debuted in 2007 with Google Maps built in, but since then, Apple has been buying up promising little mapping-technology companies. Industry data should have prompted suspicions: “We keep a database of all online job postings,” O’Reilly says, “and I remember seeing a huge spike in Apple hiring developers with mapping expertise.” 

The blows suffered by Google and Apple were seen as opportunities by the other two players still left in the game: Microsoft and OpenStreetMap. Microsoft knows better than most that a monopolistic position in the technology sector is not unassailable. It has itself toppled giants like IBM and seen its own operating system’s dominance unwound by the Internet. 

No one knows what the next new thing will be, but it’s very likely that there will be one, some technological innovation or legal event that shakes up the Internet again. Microsoft is hedging its bets, in case privacy concerns lead to changes in consumer behavior or regulations that upend the communications-technology industry: it asks users to opt in before it collects GPS traces from mobile phones in order to incorporate that data into its maps. Its many businesses — Windows, Office, Xbox, video games, consulting services, mobile phones and advertising — offer potential hedges against unpredictability as well. Google, on the other hand, depends on a single extremely profitable business — selling advertising — to subsidize the rest of its enterprises. Microsoft is betting that its diversified, conservative approach will enable the company to endure and prosper should Google be brought low. 

OpenStreetMap, by contrast, is rushing headlong into Google’s territory. Steve Coast recently showed me the latest innovation: iPhone attachments that look a bit like kazoos or doll-size French horns, made of plastic. “They’re snap-on panoramic lenses,” he said. Coast intends to release an app soon that will enable anyone’s cellphone to function as an open-source version of the Google orb. The resolution of the panoramas it will produce will be nowhere near orb-quality, Coasts conceded, but he claimed that the metric that really matters is the price-quality ratio. “For $60 anyone can have their own Street View vehicle!” He did add, sotto voce, that “the real barrier to entry is that you have to be willing to duct-tape your phone to the top of your car.” 

Coast has a related plan for adding more and better aerial imagery to OpenStreetMap: it turns out to be relatively simple for a computer program to transform snapshots taken from a small plane into what look like extremely high-resolution satellite photos. And sometime this month, Planet Labs, a new space-imaging start-up, plans to launch the world’s largest privately owned network of earth-imaging satellites and make all the pictures they take publicly and freely available. 

Borges’s story ends with the map of the empire becoming so big that it achieves a scale of one to one, at which point it — along with cartography itself — fades into irrelevance. “In the deserts of the West, still today,” Borges writes in his last line, “there are tattered ruins of that map, inhabited by animals and beggars.” 

We’re fast approaching an endgame in which the capacity to read a map could become a lost art. The online-map era started with a flowering: Rademacher’s HousingMaps.com. Foursquare and others took the concept to its logical conclusion. It’s no exaggeration to describe the smartphone as the equivalent of a cursor moving through a one-to-one-scale map of the world. Today, turn-by-turn navigation is the quintessential map app. Already some maps exist as voices that tell you where to go: Turn left, turn right. When cars drive themselves, the map will have been fully absorbed into the machine. 

Right now Google has about 25 experimental self-driving cars on public roads in California and Nevada. So far they have driven more than 600,000 miles without being involved in a serious accident. The self-driving algorithms do not work because there has been some breakthrough in artificial intelligence; they run on maps. Every road that Google’s robo-cars drive on was first surveyed by a human-driven pilot car outfitted with sensors accurate enough to measure the thickness of the painted lines in the middle of the road. Every detail of the road has been mapped beforehand. According to Peter Norvig, Google’s head of research, it’s a hard problem for computer vision and artificial intelligence to pick a traffic light out of a scene and determine if it is red, yellow or green. But it is trivially easy to recognize the color of a traffic light that you already know is there. 

In effect, the robot car is not driving through the real world so much as it is moving through, in Borges’s words, “a map of the Empire, whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it.” When the real world is transformed into a data set, it starts to take on some of the aspects of the virtual. 

Sergey Brin, Google’s co-founder, has promised to release self-driving technology within four years, and Google’s maps will then be a standard feature in its robot cars. Not to be outdone, Elon Musk has promised that Tesla Motors will deliver a self-driving car in three years. It’s too early to know whether Tesla will use O.S.M.’s maps — but the indications are that it will not use Google’s. 

The map, at that point, will just be data: a way for our phones, cars and who knows what else to navigate in the real world. Whose data will that be: Google’s? Ours? Our car company’s? It’s too soon to tell. But onething seems certain, O’Reilly says. In the end, “the guy who has the most data, wins.” 

Adam Fisher lives in San Francisco and has written for Wired, Popular Science, Outside and other publications.
Editor: Dean Robinson
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: December 12, 2013

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/magazine/googles-plan-for-global-domination-dont-ask-why-ask-where.html?pagewanted=1&_r=0&ei=5065&partner=MYWAY

December 10, 2013

30 Best Firefox Add-Ons for Productivity 2013

Today’s article is about the best Firefox extension of 2013 and if you are really looking for some which help you to make you more productive, then we recommend you must check this opinion cover with us.


Best Firefox Addons


Firefox is one of the best web browsers and good alternative to Google Chrome and Internet Explorer which is used by lots of people over the web. All  these are not only browsers, as there are lots of features which make them popular. And one of the important feature is Google Chrome Extension and Firefox Add-Ons. Extensions are extra features and functionality that you can easily add to Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox and other browsers. By using extensions, you can customize Google Chrome, Firefox with features you like.
There are lots of Add-Ons available for customizing your web Browser and to get most out of them and we have compiled list of some Best Firefox Add-Ons which you might love to check:

1. Adblock Plus

Allows you to regain control of the internet and view the web the way you want to use. You can simple Block Flash data and Java object.

2. Video DownloadHelper

To extract web content like capturing Videos and image file from popular website like MySpace, Google videos, DailyMotion, Porkolt, iFilm, DreamHost and others. Also help to convert videos

3. Greasemonkey

Allows you to customize the way a web page displays or behaves, by using small bits of JavaScript.

4. Firebug

Its web developer tool using which you can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page.

5. Personas Plus

Use this to install easy and free skin pack for Firefox. Also provides access to new, popular, and even your own favorite Personas.

6. WOT- Safe Surfing

Set itself as default search engine and gives you safest search results on the web. WOT is fast, easy to use and free

7. Tab Mix Plus

Enhance your tab browsing capabilities featuring  duplicating tabs, controlling tab focus, tab clicking options, undo closed tabs and windows, full session manager and more.

8. Flagfox

Show location of the current website’s server by depicting the country flag and provides a multitude of tools such as site safety checks, Whois, translation, similar sites, validation, URL shortening, and more

9. ImTranslator

Amazing translator which supports more than 50 languages includes online translator, dictionary, text to speech, virtual keyboard, spell checker, Russian decoder, back translation, email service.

10. IE Tab

Use this to check how you page displayed in IE just by one click and then switch back

11. Xmarks Sync

Amazing add-on for backing up and synchronizing your bookmarks. Also you can utilize LastPass to sync passwords

12. FoxTab

It will add innovative 3D functionality to your Firefox

13. Forecastfox Weather

Helps you to provide international weather forecasts straight from AccuWeather.com. Also display them in any toolbar with amazing extensions.

14. PDF Download

Leading tool for handling, viewing and creating Web-based PDF files and lots more powered by Nitro PDF Software

15. Ghostery

Protect your privacy. See who’s tracking your web browsing and block them with Ghostery.

16. FoxyProxy Standard

Amazing Proxy management which more features than SwitchProxy, ProxyButton, QuickProxy, xyzproxy, ProxyTex, TorButton, etc.

17. Evernote Web Clipper

Use this extension to save things you see on the web into your Evernote account

18. Yoono: Twitter Facebook LinkedIn YouTube GTalk AIM

Use this extension to update all your Social media accounts Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, GTalk, AIM under one app.

19. Screengrab

Amazing Mozilla add-on to save Web Pages as images. Great app for bloggers.

20. NoScript Security Suite

Allow active content to run only from sites you trust, and protect yourself against XSS and Clickjacking attacks.

21. LastPass Password Manager

LastPass is a free online password manager and Form Filler that makes your web browsing easier and more secure

22. FoxClocks

Simply put small clock on the sidebar to keep an eye on the time around the world

25. DownloadThemAll

The first and only download manager/accelerator built inside Firefox!

24. Html Validator

Amazing Add- on using which you can do HTML validation inside Firefox and Mozilla. And number of errors on an HTML page is seen in the form of an icon.

25. FineBar Tweak

Anything between simple tweaks such as placing the findbar in the top corner, to the powerful “Find in All Tabs” tool, FindBar Tweak will make your find toolbar “just right”!

26. Cookies Manager+

Cookie manager that allows viewing, edit and create new cookies. It also allows show extra information about cookies and allows editing multiple cookies at once

27. Alexa site info

Official Add- on to get Alexa information for a website.

28. Read It Later

If you are busy and don’t have time to read then simply use this Add- on to Save pages to read later with just one click.

29. Interclue

Interclue tells you everything you need to know before you open yet another tab.

30. SkipScreen

Skips unnecessary pages on sites like Rapidshare, zShare, Mediafire, and mor3.
So these are 30 of the Best Firefox Add-Ons 2013. But if you feel that we forgot to add some of some good name feel free to share with us. You can also share with us add-ons which you’re using on Firefox and other web browsers.

Source: http://nerdsmagazine.com/best-firefox-addons/

December 1, 2013

Mozilla launches Get Australis: invites everyone to install the latest Firefox Australis version


By on October 7, 2013 in Firefox 74

The new Australis interface that Mozilla plans to ship in one of the future versions of the Firefox web browser is as controversial as it can get in the community. While some applaud Mozilla for the fresh modern look that it ships with, others dislike it because of its resemblance to Google Chrome's interface or because of the interface elements that Mozilla will change or remove from the browser in the process.

I have covered the proposed list of changes of Australis previously here on Ghacks, and also tried to highlight why it is not a good idea to remove the status bar add-on bar from the browser.
Things are not as dire as they seem, and this can be mostly attributed to Firefox's add-on support. Browser extensions are in the making that will restore features that were removed in Australis from the browser. While that is not the same as native features, it is the next best thing and probably the only hope of Firefox users who do not want to miss features that Mozilla removes from the browser.

Get Australis



firefox australis 27


Note: the screenshot above is how Firefox looked like when I loaded Australis using my main browser profile. I'm running only eight extensions in the browser, and it already looks crowded in the address bar.
Australis is still only available as a special UX build that is independently updated from all other browser channels that Mozilla makes available. It looks as if the deployment of Australis will get delayed, considering that the nightly version of the browser reached version 27 recently and that Australis was said to be launched way before that.
The Get Australis website aims to promote Australis to users of the browser. It enables interested users to download the latest Australis UX build to their system so that they can check it out and take it for a test ride.
The builds are provided for every desktop operating system Firefox supports, Mac, Windows and Linux.
If you launch Australis for the first time, you will notice several differences to regular Firefox versions.
  • The add-on bar is gone and cannot be enabled again.
  • All add-on icons are placed in the address bar toolbar.
  • The Firefox menu at the top left is gone, it has been replaced with a single Chrome style menu that links to even less options than the Firefox menu did.
  • Tabs are now curved and above the address bar.
  • Only the menu bar and bookmarks toolbar can be displayed, custom toolbars are gone, as is the option to hide the navigational toolbar.
firefox menu

Lets do a menu comparison: old Firefox button menu versus new Australis menu:
Australis menu:
  • New Window
  • New Private Window
  • Save Page
  • Downloads
  • History
  • Find
  • Options
  • Add-ons
  • Help
  • Customize
  • Exit
Old Firefox menu
  1. New Tab (New Tab, New Window, Open File)
  2. New Private Window
  3. Edit
  4. Save Page As
  5. Email Link
  6. Print (Print, Print Preview, Page Setup)
  7. Web Developer
  8. Full Screen
  9. Set Up Sync
  10. Exit
  11. Bookmarks
  12. History
  13. Add-ons
  14. Options
  15. Help (direct access to help pages)
To be fair, it needs to be said that you can customize the new Firefox panel menu. You can add or remove items that you use or do not use from it. If you are a web developer, you can simply drag and drop the developer options back to the menu, or add-on icons so that they do not take up all that space in the address bar.

I'm fairly certain however that the interface change will be highly confusing to many Firefox users. If you look at all the support threads that are caused by minor changes in the browser, it is almost a given that support requests will explode when Australis launches.
Users may want to know where this or that option went, how they can access a particular feature of the browser, or why Mozilla made the decision to remove or change a feature in first place.
Anyway, if you want to test Australis on your system right now, head over to the Get Australis website to get a taste of it. It installs next to any copy of Firefox you have running (but will use the same profile).



Note 2: The installation will use the same profile as your main Firefox installation. While that should not pose any issues, you will notice that it will move a few icons around in the interface as a consequence. That's easily repaired though, but we suggest that you do create a secondary profile instead for the purpose of testing the new Australis version of Firefox.

Update: Mozilla has altered the website and removed the download links that were previously hosted on it. You can download the latest Australis UX build from Mozilla's ftp server.

Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2013/10/07/mozilla-launches-get-australis-invites-everyone-install-latest-firefox-australis-version/


After downloading and trying the latest Firefox Australis build 28.01, I like it very much. It is fast, has a softer clean look, my existing add-ons & plug-ins worked, and the toolbar is better arranged. The influence of Chrome can be seen and appreciated. I think most people will like it. Below is my screenshot on Win7. Enjoy.