browser Archive

I first reviewed the Skyfire mobile browser back last summer (check out the video demo below) and thought it was quite good. Many of you know that I use a Samsung Ace with Windows Mobile. I paid $25 for the Opera Mobile browser but frankly I rarely use Opera and have been using Skyfire nearly 100% of the time.

To be honest, the Skyfire browser freaking rocks. Last week I had a family pickup at the airport and while waiting for them to arrive, I opened Skyfire, loaded up YouTube and Hulu and watched all the videos I wanted in perfect streaming. I’ve written full blog posts in Drupal on Amtrak using Skyfire.  Oddly, I can’t seem to activate the Javascript functionality in WordPress from Skyfire.

Today the company has announced the 1.0 release of the Skyfire browser. The company notes 1 million installed browsers to-date.

The only gripe I had with the browser was that each time you loaded it, it seemed to call home and “authenticate” which meant I lost where I was. This appears to be corrected in the current release.

I still believe that Microsoft would be smart to acquire or partner with Skyfire and replace the nasty IE mobile browser with Skyfire or Skyfire-like browsing. It really makes the Windows Mobile OS much more powerful.

Here’s my video demo from last summer:

Last night I wrote about the new 2.5 release of the Flock social browser. We know that Flock targets the over-sharing crowd but is that in itself enough to make the company very successful? I started to think about how Flock could gain more mainstream acceptance and help push Flock further along in the browser wars. What follows is my suggestion for the company.

Flock should develop a “lite” or “simple” version of their browser. Currently their browser can be overwhelming to the average mainstream Internet user and it frankly probably scares a lot of people away after the initial load. What I’d like to see are three new “lite” versions:

• Flock with Twitter panel
• Flock with Facebook panel
• Flock with Twitter and Facebook panels

That’s it. No MySpace, no Bebo, no Flickr, none of it. Just a browser that includes a sidebar for Twitter and/or Facebook. There are plenty of new social desktop applications like Tweetdeck but these also focus on the over sharing crowd.

Now imagine a browser that takes the simple Twitter.com interface plus a browser and combines them together. Flock 2.5 allows you to easily drag-and-drop items from the browser to Twitter/Facebook and that functionality should remain. That’s what I think Flock Lite should be. Nice and simple which will appeal to the mainstream, average Facebook/Twitter user. I’d also like to see an installation wizard that makes setting up the browser amazingly easy. Over time Flock can move the user to the full Flock browser.

So imagine this… it’s Valentine’s day and you are trying to figure out what to get that special someone (e.g. your sweet thing, your baby momma, baby daddy, cutiepie). Most people usually get lingerie, chocolates, roses, flowers, a nice card, bottle of wine and a movie, etc.

The Flock browser has launched an interesting marketing effort today. They want you to skip all of those things and instead give your sweetie a Flock browser. Flock marketing VP Dan Burkhart notes in a blog post, "This Valentine’s Day, we’d like you to turn your friends on to the browser that helps put people together. Instead of handing off an unoriginal box of chocolates, tell the people you care about to download Flock and you’ll be turning them on to a browser that inspires people to stay connected with the friends and things they care about most in their lives.  Take it a step further and offer a personal tutorial to show this person how to get their accounts set up, and voila – you’ll find that your Valentine will be impressed and amazed by what a guru you are."

Somehow I am thinking if you show up with a usb key with a demo video and a Flock installation, you might head home early. 

It will be interesting to hear from Dan on how the campaign went – since they create customized versions, it might be neat to create a valentine’s day edition where you can create a pre-set layout with images, videos, etc. I give Dan much credit for trying out the idea!

Just a month after the public launch of the Flock 2.0 browser, Flock has announced the addition of OpenID to the Flock 2.0 browser today. I’ve been saying for a long time that if OpenID wants to succeed, they have to get it into the browser so when you hit a site that offers OpenID login, it could be as close to seamless as possible.

MySpace, Flock and Vidoop jointly developed OpenID for Flock which should help the Flock browser gain additional user adoption. OpenID for Flock is now available to all Flock 2.0 users as an alpha extension — my hope is that it becomes part of the default install over time. The companies note, "The MySpace, Flock and Vidoop (OpenID) implementation is a reference design released as open source under GPL, and as such, modifications by developers will be brought together and shared with the wider open source developer community."

Perhaps today’s announcement will push the other major browsers (IE, FF, Safari, Opera, etc.) to start looking at implementing OpenID into the browser as well. I am not talking about an extension or plugin, but rather a full integrated environment. If OpenID is going to gain in popularity and usability, it’s critical that using an OpenID login as easy as possible.

With all of the talk over the last few days about Facebook Connect, it sure does look like eventually we will have an old-style Western duel setup. Facebook Connect vs. OpenID – let’s get it on!

Over the past couple of days I’ve been using a browser plugin called ChunkIt. I wish I had this plugin when I was looking for a new apartment using Craigslist.

Basically what ChunkIt does is go into search results and pulls out content from inside the results so you can scan one page with item title and a good bit of important content before making a decision on which result to jump to. On Craigslist all you see is a long list of links – when searching for an apartment in NYC this list is worthless. The brokers know what lies to put into the title to get you to click. But if you could pull back bits of content based on your search and then decide, it could save a good deal of time.

ChunkIt works with all of the major search engines. The company calls it “x-ray vision” since you can see behind the links before making the jump.

You need a large monitor with a good resolution for ChunkIt to be effective. On my 19" monitor I found it to be ok but not great.

This week they launched a "store" option which allows you to chunk results from online shopping stores including Amazon, BestBuy and Target. I assume this is how they will generate revenue – by grabbing the affiliate revenue from any purchases made through the bar. 

ChunkIt launched last April. Initial reviews included Erick Schonfeld and Phil Bradley who didn’t see much value, Anthony Ha said it was worth trying, and Greg Sterling was neutral on the plugin.

Here’s the company’s video demo on the new store feature:

Flock has announced that they have moved the 2.0 version of their social browser into full public release tonight. Flock initially launched the 2.0 browser in beta back in June. Since then they have added a variety of customized installations including German and fashion versions.

The major updates in the Flock 2.0 release include MySpace integration, Media RSS accessibility. The company also notes that the new version is based on Firefox 3 and has a host of improvements and users should find memory management much improved over the 1.0 release.

Flock VP of Marketing & Business Development Dan Burkhart took me through the new version last week and shared some download stats. To-date there has been 6 million downloads and 3.6 million of the total are from the 1.0 release. I asked Dan who is their target user and he replied that the target user utilizes 2 or more social services and if you do use 2 or more, you will see a benefit by using Flock.

Dan and I also discussed the ad downturn that might be approaching and he noted that the current Flock monetization is double the plan numbers. He also pointed to their Series D raise from 2 months ago of $15 million.

The big push for the company now is the college market. Dan says that the college market could prove very beneficial for Flock as most students are using multiple social services.

I’ve been using the Flock version launching tonight for the last week and I see a performance improvement over the prior versions. Although on my Pentium 4 desktop, I still find it lags behind IE and FF in load times and certainly behind Chrome. Flock reminds me of a new couch. At first it’s hard and a bit uncomfortable but after you sit on it a few times, you find the sweet spot and life is grand. Flock requires a lot of setup but once it’s customized to your needs, it works well. The key for Flock is figuring out how to get users to their sweet spot as quick as possible.

Here are the slides presented today at Google regarding the Google Chrome browser. The first set of six slides below discusses the product itself. The press conference is now discussing the elements of the Google Chrome Browser.