“We built IE9 from the ground up for HTML5 and for Windows to deliver the most native HTML5 experience and the best Web experience on Windows,” says IE Corporate VP Dean Hachamovitch. “IE10 continues on IE9′s path, directly using what Windows provides and avoiding abstractions, layers, and libraries that slow down your site and your experience.” “We’re about three weeks into development of IE10, and based on the progress we’ve made, we want to start engaging the development community now,” he said. “At the MIX conference today, we showed the new browsing engine along with several new browser test drives that anyone on the Web can try out.” The test drives can be viewed here. New HTML5 demos include: strict mode, tweet columns, Griddle, CSS3 Flexbox Flexin’ and The Grid System. Internet Explorer 9′s adoption rate has been five times higher than that of IE8′s according to the Microsoft. The browser is facing rampant competition these days. Firefox 4 is doing pretty well (currently with nearly 80 million downloads) and Chrome’s market share continues to grow. Mozilla and Google have both boosted their release process to launch more versions at a faster pace.Microsoft Shows Off New Native HTML 5 Support
With all the privacy concerns over the last year, it is not really surprising thatSocial Networking User Bill of Rights have been proposed. Although the idea of this type of Bill of Rights has been around for some time, no idea has ever had the power to stick. Do you like the idea of a social networking user bill of rights? Tell us why or why not. A group of people representing various constituencies began to pen the Bill of Rights at the Computers, Freedom, and Privacy Conference last year. Christina Gagnier, Partner with Gagnier Margossian LLP, is among the advocates of the proposal and said that they thought the rights would be an effective way to communicate the message since Americans are accustomed their own federal Bill of Rights. Privacy is tricky because many privacy laws in place today are specific to individual industries, such asHIPAA for the health industry. The online sector is especially difficult because it would be hard to determine whom the legislation directly impacts. For example, would it strictly be for social networks, or would corporations be included as well? At this point, there are 14 Social Networking User Bill of Rights. Users can visit its site and vote in favor of them or against them. Additionally, they can propose new rights for review. “I think we’ve jumpstarted the conversation, and so we just want everyone else to be involved,” said Gagnier. How would such a Bill of Rights impact users?Rights are drafted and are awaiting approval
Since the controversy blew up around a video of GoDaddy CEO Bob Parsons killing an elephant, the video has been edited heavily. Parsons is still in the video, but gone are the series of stills of Parsons posing proudly with the elephant’s carcass (as pictured above). Also gone are various pieces of text and captions that appeared over the actual footage of the elephant being shot. For example, the captions used to read, “Bob Parsons fires first,” then “Bob Parsons fires again. Both shots hit home. One bull is killed. The rest stampede out of the field unhurt.” The video used to begin with the text, “Of everything I do this is the most rewarding. This video shows one typical night and day.” That’s now gone. Also gone is the incredibly bizarre use of the AC/DC song Hell’s Bells, which used to play over top of footage of the villagers slaughtering the elephant’s corpse. Also gone are the close-ups of many of the villagers wearing GoDaddy hats. This was all detailed when we initially covered the incident. Parsons says he expected the backlash. He is quoted by a Fox channel in Phoenix as saying, “I kind of figured that this might happen. So be it, I’m not ashamed of what I did. All these people that are complaining that this shouldn’t happen, that these people who are starving to death otherwise shouldn’t eat these elephants, you probably see them driving through at McDonald’s or cutting a steak. These people [Zimbabwe villagers] don’t have that option.” If he’s not ashamed, it seems odd that the video has been mysteriously edited to this extent. If it is just a matter of PR, it also seems very odd that GoDaddy hasn’t issued a press release on the matter.Gone: GoDaddy Hats, Bob Parsons Posing with Carcass, AC/DC Soundtrack, And More
A caption that appears now, is, “The plan works. Only one bull is killed. The rest stampede out of the field unhurt.”
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237
Some people are reportedly seeing a new Twitter homepage with some new user discovery elements. In fact, some people even reported seeing other people’s timelines in a hiccup in Twitter’s implementation. Hiccups are pretty commonplace for Twitter, so that’s not too shocking. The new elements of the homepage, however, reflect Twitter’s ongoing quest to convince new users to stick around, and other users to keep finding more reasons to stick around. TheNextWeb has a screenshot. Twitter also updated its search feature this week, in a manner that follows this theme. Users can now search for topics and find accounts relevant to the topic, as opposed to how it worked previously, when such a search would have returned accounts that have the specific term in their name or username. The feature can be utilized by clicking on the “people” section of the search results page or by searching from the “who to follow” page. As I noted in an article about that, our own Twellow and TwellowHood ar pretty good for finding interesting people to follow based on category and location. This focus on user discovery seems to be coming on strong since the recent return of co-founder Jack Dorsey to day-to-day operations around Twitter product. Here’s a snippet of what Dorsey said (based onPeter Kafka’s account) at Columbia University last week: We have a lot of mainstream awareness, but mainstream relevancy is still a challenge. It’s something that people can’t immediately get their head around: “Why is Twitter valuable?” The answer is it’s not that Twitter is valuable, it’s that you can follow what’s unfolding in Egypt right now. That’s valuable. You can follow your favorite company or organization. You can also mix that in with your family and your social network and talk about all these interests in real time. That’s the value, not the brand “Twitter.” Twitter just provides the venue for it. So we need to refocus on the value. That’s my goal in the next few months. It looks like this as already been heavily approached in his first week. At this rate, Twitter’s value should be come evident to just about everybody in a few months’ time. Hopefully they can reduce the aforementioned hiccups in the user experience to a great extent. __________________________________________________________________________________________________Twitter Homepage Continues Trend of Discoverability
We’ve been around for five years now and we’ve built a lot of interesting technology. I think we need better lines around the products, so it’s more approachable, so that people can get into it immediately, and it’s extremely relevant right way.
Chris Crum has been a part of the WebProNews team and the iEntry Network of B2B Publications since 2003. Follow WebProNews on Facebook or Twitter. Twitter: @CCrum237
