Technobabble

Over the past month, several interested parties have revealed their expressions of interest regarding the proposals for the HTTP/2.0 standard. Under consideration are primarily the SPDY and HTTP Speed+mobility proposals. The battle lines have been drawn, and as usual Microsoft wants to push their own agenda. There's also an interesting debate about whether HTTP/2.0 should always use TLS.

The New Tab design for Firefox has been getting several updates less than a week into its public announcement. It has been bumped from version 0.0.18 to version 0.0.23 and the most annoying bug – window losing focus when a new tab is opened – has been fixed. Mozilla is still playing with the layout of the page and the contextual actions have moved to the top of the tab instead of the left. The frequently visited sites and their RSS feeds are looking better with each incremental release. A new feature is the ability to reorder the frequently visited sites simply by dragging and reordering them in a new tab. Here’s how it looks as of version 0.0.23: In related Firefox news, the 3.1 beta 3 is out but if you are tired of betas, try out some alphas :-)

Mozilla Labs have revealed a new design for the New Tab page in Firefox. It’s designed to be zero-configuration and minimally distracting to users. The current version divides the New Tab page into contextual actions on the left and quick-access to sites on the right side. The list of sites is driven by the concept of frecency (jargon for frequent + recent) with support for RSS feeds on sites which appear in the list. Here’s a screenshot of how the Google Reader site appears in the list: The contextual actions are designed like Ubiquity and provide one-click access to a useful action. For example, here’s the one-click to undo a previous Close Tab action: Likewise, with something in the clipboard, the contextual action displays a one-click Search button: In tests so far, there’s one annoying bug – bringing up the New Tab page seems to lose focus from the address bar and from the Firefox window! Other comments on the Mozilla Labs page have also highlighted the privacy issues wi...

Aurora by Adaptive Path is a concept of how future browser interactions might be in terms of collaboration and social networking. Checkout the video showing some of the plans for Aurora: Aurora (Part 1) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo . Aurora (Part 2) from Adaptive Path on Vimeo .

Performancing is a great Firefox extension for Bloggers . It provides a split pane blog editor in the context of a page being viewed. It's very easy to drag and drop content from the page (images, text, links, etc.) onto the blog editor. It works with a variety of blogging services (like Blogger) and also has integration with del.icio.us , Technorati and a handful of pinging services.

Google has several Firefox extensions that make it easier to use its applications. My favorite one is the ability to use Google Suggest in the Firefox search box. The Blogger extension seems interesting too but I don't like the additional markup it's adding to posts.