With the recent announcements that YouTube and Vimeo are both releasing HTML5-based video players, one has to wonder about the impact of those moves on Adobe. Adobe’s Flash had been (and is) THE standard for delivering multimedia content over the web, capturing something like 99% of internet users. HTML5 allows many Flash-like animations/videos/experiences without the need for a seperate plugin or buffering (that’s right – skip to a different point in that YouTube video without waiting for it to load!).
Adobe doesn’t derive much revenue from Flash – so this isn’t going to crimp their cashflow necessarily – but it is a major part of their broader brand recognition. (For the curious, Flash and other platforms generate about 6% of Adobe’s revenue, but half of that comes from Mobile solutions that likely don’t include Flash. Creative software is the bulk of the revenue stream, forming about 60% of the total.). I’m curious what indirect impact it could have on the rest of the company.
For that matter, Microsoft’s Silverlight — the Flash alternative that powers the excellent Bing Maps — doesn’t have nearly the market share of its competitor. Where does this leave it?
Flash, Silverlight and other proprietary delivery systems are essentially browser replacements. They deliver web experiences which browsers on their own can not. To the extent we can move away from plugin multimedia and incorporate it directly into the web standard, that’s a good thing in my mind. Unfortunately, browser support for HTML5 is minimal – just the latest version of Safari and the nightly Webkit builds (including non-production versions of Chrome). Plugins, by contrast, are widely supported and bring content to potentially any browser. It’s hard for me to imagine why people wouldn’t want the latest, fastest, and most secure web technology available… but then again, I’m constantly surprised by the number of TGR visitors using IE6!
And a special message for those visitors: please click here to download Google Chrome.
Google Chrome for Mac has finally been released (in beta, but who’s complaining?) and I’ve been testing it as my primary browser. It’s already my top choice on Windows (this development making it all the more sweeter) and I have to say – once you use a combined address/search bar, there’s absolutely no going back.
So far, so good:
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And while we’re comparing Safari 4 to its beta, I had also noticed various progress bars that were available in the beta. The final release has gone with none of them, choosing instead a more radically visible indicator:
My immediate reaction is that I preferred the subtlety of the beta indicator (eventually preferring it to the Safari 3 one), but it’s not a bad choice. In the Windows version of Safari, however, I think that the indicator is too bold (it has a darker color than on a Mac) and appears to float above the address bar rather than nestle inside it.
The other big change is that the tabs have moved back down below the address bar, a la Safari 3. Their temporary displacement in the beta was most likely a response to Chrome’s tab placement. One strange side effect is that the tabs appear to run into the address bar, rather than the page itself:
Curious.
When the Safari 4 beta came out, I observed that having more than one tab open would break any resize bookmarklets. I can confirm that this is still the case in the stable release of Safari 4.
Cody Robbins commented on my original post and noted that the problem has been filed as a WebKit bug. This means it may be indicative of larger problems with WebKit’s JavaScript framework. Which is a shame, because Java screams in Safari 4.
Interestingly, I couldn’t get any resize bookmarklets to work in Google Chrome, which is also based on WebKit, even though I use other bookmarklets in Chrome on a daily basis. The mystery lives on…
Reviews of Microsoft’s new search engine Bing keep rolling in – and are utterly disappointing. I’m talking about the reviews, not the engine. Invariably, the reviewing site searches for itself followed by a few key words the site finds relevant. The most “helpful” reviews show side by side screenshots of Google and Bing.
Forgive me for doubting if a handful of words and a screenshot can sum up the quality of an index covering billions of quieries, particularly when quality is such a subjective evaluation. By design, the sample searches are artificial, and it is impossible to ascertain whether the results are relevant. One user’s search for “technology” is not the same as another’s and such methods in no way account for the intent of the user.
But even more, I find it funny that people would listen to “reviews” of something like a search engine, which has literally zero cost of trying. Even worse are the video reviews – why would anyone watch someone else doing something which they could do just as well themselves with absolutely no training?
Which is why, starting today, I have made Bing my default search engine in Chrome. Over the next few days I will use it as my search page. If I like it, I’ll stay. If I miss Google, I’ll go back. Inherently, this method of assessing Bing is far more comprehensive than making a decision based on just one or two sample searches. Already, I’m impressed by some of the features – video autoplay, search result preview, even the option to open searches in a new window.
But after saying all that, I did a comparison search for “Bing review”. Google’s results discuss the new search engine exclusivly. Bing’s results don’t include the site at all.
Go figure.