Firefox’s “Awesome bar” turned the humble URL bar into something more. One part web address, one part bookmark, history and open tab search tool, Mozilla keeps looking for ways to add more features to the Awesome bar.
The latest experiment from Mozilla developer Edward Lee is the AwesomeBar HD add-on which combines ideas from Mozilla Labs’ Home Dash and Prospector projects with the existing Firefox 4 awesome bar. Where Home Dash eliminates the URL complete, AwesomeBar HD just gets rid of the dedicated search box, replacing it with a set of search engine links within the URL bar.
if you’d like to take it for a spin, head over to the Mozilla Add-ons site and install AwesomeBar HD.
If you want to search for, for example, Webmonkey, just type in “Webmonkey” and then click the link “search the web” and Firefox will search Google. Click “books” and Firefox will search Amazon; click food and it will search Yelp.
Other categories include weather, maps, news, people, reference and more. Each category has several search provider options, for example, while the books category defaults to Amazon, hover over the link and you’ll find additional options to search Barnes and Noble or Google Books. AwesomeBar HD also works in reverse — click the category you’d like to search in and then start typing.
AwesomeBar HD does nothing you can’t do with a standard Firefox installation, provided you hunt down search engine plugins (or create your own bookmark shortcuts with keywords) for every site it supports. But finding several dozen search engine plugins is a pain and AwesomeBar HD makes it far easier to switch between them with a simple click.
While AwesomeBar HD is an interesting first effort, there are several things that could be improved. For example, the URL of the website you’re currently on is truncated to make room for the links in the URL bar. If you actually click on the URL, AwesomeBar HD will show the entire URL, but not being able to see it at a glance is annoying and potentially raises phishing concerns. Cutting down on the number of search options would leave more room for the URL.
At this early, experimental stage you won’t find any customization features in AwesomeBar HD. You can’t, for example, add more search engines, nor can you delete unused options. AwesomeBar HD also puts the emphasis on the mouse — you need to click to do anything. If you prefer keyboard shortcuts to the mouse, AwesomeBar HD will leave you wanting. Some have suggested adding an option to tab through search engines, but given the number of search engines AwesomeBar HD supports, that would be a rather slow way to select the one you want.
AwesomeBar HD is in it’s infancy and, in addition to being a little rough around the edges, there are some known bugs (we encountered a problem with unresponsive menus on OS X). If you’ve got ideas on how to improve AwesomeBar HD, be sure to let Mozilla know.
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The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has kicked off a new “HTTPS Now” campaign to educate consumers and help “make web surfing safer.”
The new campaign is a two part effort. First the EFF would like to encourage users to install the HTTPS Everywhere Firefox add-on, which will automatically redirect you to https connections. HTTPS Everywhere makes sure you’re always using a secure connection when you visit Gmail, Twitter and several dozen other sites; you don’t need to worry about checking the URL everytime you login.
While HTTPS Everywhere is a good suggestion for users, the primary thrust of the HTTPS Now campaign is aimed at popular websites. After all, HTTPS Everywhere only works if your favorite sites offer secure connections, and an alarming number of sites do not.
The EFF has partnered with Access, a digital freedom activist group, to create the new HTTPS Now website. The new site will keep track of which sites offer HTTPS connections, how much of the site is secure and whether or not the site mixes secure and insecure content.
Why all the fuss about HTTPS? Well, every time you log in to Twitter, Facebook or any other service that uses a plain HTTP connection, you expose your data to the world. It’s a bit like writing your username and password on a postcard and dropping it in the mailbox.
There is a better way, the secure version of HTTP — HTTPS. That extra “S” in the URL means your connection is secure, and it’s much harder for anyone else to see what you’re doing. Think of the extra “S” as the envelop that keeps prying eyes from looking at your postcards.
The problem gets a bit more complicated than just HTTPS though. Most sites already use HTTPS to handle your login info — that’s a good first step — but once you’re logged in the sites often revert back to using an insecure HTTP connection. That means you’re vulnerable to simple attacks like those made possible by the Firesheep Firefox plugin. Firesheep sniffs network traffic and looks for insecure cookies which it then uses to spoof your login credentials to the site. Firesheep allows other people to quickly and easily become you on the web.
So why doesn’t the entire web use HTTPS all the time? The answer is slightly complicated, but the primary reason is speed. HTTPS can’t be cached on CDN networks and there are also some (minor) costs involved with HTTPS certificates.
But obviously neither cost nor minor speed hits have stopped big sites like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail and Flickr from implementing HTTPS. The EFF would like to encourage other sites to follow suit.
If you’d like to see how your favorite sites fair when it comes to protecting your data from traffic snoops, head on over to the HTTPS Now website.
The drive behind the adoption of new web technologies often revolves around experimentation — developers use HTML5 or CSS 3 because it’s something new and exciting. That experimental drive is great for pushing boundaries and discovering cool new possibilities. But there’s another, more practical reason, to start using the newest features of the web, particularly in the case of CSS 3, which can make not only speed up your development time, but make your site faster as well.
Eliminating images in favor of CSS 3 transitions, web fonts and animations means fewer HTTP requests, fewer files for users to download and faster page loads. Examples include replacing rounded corner images with border-radius, ditching faux-shadow images for drop-shadow and replacing images of fancy fonts with the actual web fonts.
In some cases the fallbacks necessary for older browsers will negate the speed gain for those that aren’t using modern web browsers. You need to be aware of your audience and which browsers make up the majority of your site’s visitors before you jump in with both feet, but in those cases where newer browsers dominate, transitioning your site to CSS 3 can provide a significant speed boost.
Our friends at Smashing Magazine recently broke down the process by creating the same page twice, once using CSS 3, and then again using more traditional techniques like background images for buttons and rounded corners. The result is that CSS 3 not only sped up development time, but also made the page load faster in the browser.
Not convinced? Last year Google began using CSS 3 rules to render elements of the Gmail interface in those browsers that can handle CSS 3. The company reports that using CSS 3 sped up rendering times by 12 percent.
Naturally the speed gains possible by transitioning to CSS 3 will vary considerably depending on the design of your site and how well it lends itself to CSS 3’s new features. But even a tiny speed boost, combined with the great flexibility of CSS 3, the ability to build responsive websites and the ability to tweak designs without opening Photoshop, makes CSS 3 not only fun and experimental, but downright necessary.
YouTube has announced it will begin offering HTML5 videos in the WebM codec to web browsers that support it. So far YouTube says that it has encoded 30 percent of its videos in WebM, which accounts for 99 percent of all traffic to the site.
The WebM Project, a partnership between Google, Mozilla, Opera and dozens of other software and hardware makers, provides web developers a way of embedding video and audio in HTML5 pages without plug-ins, and without the need to pay the expensive licensing fees that surround the competing H.264 codec. Currently WebM video works in Firefox 4, Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer (via a plugin). The other main HTML5 video codec, H.264, works on all Apple devices and in Internet Explorer 9.
While YouTube is adding WebM support, it isn’t following Chrome’s lead and dropping H.264. The site will continue to serve up H.264 video to those browsers that support it (in other words, Safari, Mobile Safari and Internet Explorer 9).
Despite the new WebM support, YouTube still isn’t serving up HTML5 videos by default. If you’d like to get in on the new WebM fun, you’ll still need to sign up for the opt-in HTML5 player.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) has kicked off a new “
The drive behind the adoption of new web technologies often revolves around experimentation — developers use HTML5 or CSS 3 because it’s something new and exciting. That experimental drive is great for pushing boundaries and discovering cool new possibilities. But there’s another, more practical reason, to start using the newest features of the web, particularly in the case of CSS 3, which can make not only speed up your development time, but make your site faster as well.
YouTube has 
