A game of one-upmanship is starting to play out in the world of web browsers. Microsoft, having recently released their third platform preview for IE 9, is starting to look serious about browsing again, and interestingly enough Google’s Chrome, and Apple’s Safari, are looking like laggards.
Now, the IE 9 platform preview is not a browser in the conventional sense. It has no URL bar, forward or back buttons, or any of the other features that users would require in order to actually do real work with it. IE 9 platform preview is targeted at developers, and designed to show off what will be “under the hood” in the end user release.
Three things have me excited.
Native hardware acceleration. IE 9 can use the native hardware on your device to accelerate graphics dramatically. Rendered at 60 FPS, it takes IE 9 about 7 seconds to load this flickr explorer page, but Chrome takes over 30 seconds. The potential to change how we interact with the web is dramatically demonstrated here.
Standards support. HTML 5 and CSS 3. Hopefully this means no more coding exceptions for IE. Tellingly, however, IE 9 still lags other browsers on the ACID3 benchmark. Enough said.
Font support. IE 9 will include support for the Web Open Font Format (WOFF), which will dramatically increase the range of typography options available to site developers. You can see an example of IE 9 font support on this web fonts page. It displays correctly when viewed on IE 9 and Firefox, but not on Chrome, Safari or Opera.
by alec on November 19, 2007
Among the legions of legitimate domain holders on the internet are a band of squatters that make a living from holding corporate trademarks hostage. These folks look to snatch the identities of companies by registering domain names that use or mimic that corporations trademarks. Then they ransom these names back to the owner of that identity, sometimes for thousands or tens of thousands of dollars.
That's what we thought had happened last week when we discovered that someone had claimed iotum.mobi. Because the domain was anonymously registered, Howard asked the .mobi registrar to send email to the owner, which they did. Shortly after, he got a reply.
The owner, it turns out, was a "wannabe geek" (in his own words) named Kevin Billingsly. An Indiana steel worker, he also runs several small businesses on the side, including a PC repair business and a promotional products company called ePowerServe, LLC that does embroidery, screen printing, vinyl prints, and other kinds of graphic arts products. Kevin had a vision for a mobile search engine — a small lightweight application which would be the single place for people to search from mobile devices. He thought iotum might be a good name for such an engine, and registered it… in October.
He could have held us hostage. He could have forced us to jump through hoops with the registrar, in hopes that the registrar might agree that we did, in fact, own the iotum name. He could have done a lot of things to make life difficult. Instead, he simply asked where he should transfer the name, and by way of explanation added that he didn't think he had any right to it given how long we had been in business. What an incredible act of honesty, integrity and generosity!
From the team at iotum: Thank you, Kevin Billingsly. And if we need any graphics work done, we'll be sure to give you a call.
