Currently, your contacts live in address books that are distributed all over the Internet and your desktop. Because of this, chances are that you have numerous address books on the web that are often "inconsistent and disjointed." Contacts, a new Mozilla Labs project, wants to put an end to this. The Contacts addon creates a local databases for all your email and Twitter contacts that can then be used by your browser and any website that supports Contacts' API.

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Thanks to this, you can now import all your Gmail contacts to the local database and use this contact info to autocomplete forms anywhere on the web. You can also import data about your Twitter friends and if you are on a Mac, you can import your local address book as well. Contacts will also import avatars from Gravatar whenever they are available.

This email autocompletion feature is really just a first step for Mozilla, though. The real mission of this tool is to give users more control over their own data - a mission that is also very much in sync with what Mozilla considers its own mission to be these days. When you import your contacts database on most websites today to check if your friends are already online or to invite them to the service, you have to trust this service that it will keep this data private. Once more sites implement Contacts directly into their services, however, you will be able to control exactly what data a third-party site can access and retain control over this data.

The current version of Contacts consists of four pieces:

• a browser-based database that syncs with your address books. Contacts uses the Portable Contacts format to represent this data in the database.
• a generic importer system that allows developers to create importers for desktop and web-based address books
• an email autocompletion feature
• a Javascript API that third-party sites can use to access all of your data (with explicit permission and the ability to filter the data)

After installing the addon, you can test both the autocomplete and the tool's export features here.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In the first series of comprehensive performance tests comparing Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9 technical preview, released yesterday, to stable Web browsers in current use today, Betanews confirmed superb speed gains by the IE9 chassis in specific categories. Not everything in the new IE9 was faster than IE8, but in the computational department, the development team's Chakra JavaScript engine shows much-needed gains.

In anticipation of IE9, Betanews has been developing a radically improved set of performance tests to complement (and, in a few categories, replace) those we've used in recent months. Our objective is to determine not just how much faster IE9 is, but how much better and more efficient it will be, in computing data, in rendering on-screen objects, and in adapting to varying workloads.

Betanews estimates that the IE9 chassis on Windows 7 offers 9.32 times better raw computational performance than IE8 on Windows 7, on the same machine. That's a welcome number due in large part to vastly improved scores in the widely respected SunSpider battery, as well as high scores in a new set of variable-workload computational tests produced by Betanews. Specifically on the SunSpider, the IE9 preview scored a 44.77 on Betanews' relative performance index, compared to 5.59 for IE8. Our index is based on cumulative relative performance in each category of the test battery, compared against the score posted by an old, slow Web browser: IE7 on Vista SP2. This means, yes, IE9 (thus far) offers almost 45 times the computational speed of IE7 on the older operating system -- easily the single largest surge we've seen between generations.

A recent dev build of Google Chrome 5 on Windows 7 scored a 69.83 on that same SunSpider index, followed closely by the first stable version of Opera 10.5 with 68.64.

As Microsoft embraces HTML 5, it's also managing to eke out some marginal speed gains in the rendering department, although it must be noted that the IE9 chassis is running in an almost feature-less window with very minimal overhead. As of now, the IE9 preview offers 23% better rendering performance (CSS, DHTML, support for the Canvas element in HTML 5) than IE8.

Looking for the good

What Microsoft did yesterday was give outside developers, for the first time, direct access to just the engine of its next-generation Web browser, long before the functionality and usability features are attached to it. The reason, the Internet Explorer 9 product team says, is to elicit real-world feedback so that the product can be fine-tuned.

That describes exactly what we intend to do. Over the last few weeks, Betanews has been compiling a suite of next-generation browser tests, having taken into account the feedback we've received from both our readers and browser manufacturers, Microsoft included. As rapidly as browsers have evolved in just the past year, it's become clear to us that when we compare brands, at one level, we truly are comparing apples to apple trees, or lawnmowers to bulldozers. When we concentrate on the prowess or power angle, with all the adrenaline-rushing metaphors and superlatives, we sometimes forget that sometimes, what the world really wants is an efficient lawnmower.

Last year, IE General Manager Dean Hachamovitch asked me to take a closer, fairer look at Internet Explorer. Specifically, he said that there were architectural efficiencies to be found in the product line, if only we took the time to look for them.

How I opted to respond to that challenge was to focus on one under-appreciated aspect of the Web browser that will become more important as its components are transported to six-core desktop systems on one end, and Snapdragon handsets and netbooks on the other: scalability. Specifically, I started exploring whether there was a way to effectively measure how well a browser handles increasing workloads, of ever higher orders of magnitude.

Mozilla helped to begin making scalability an issue with its introduction of the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine in Firefox. Tracers make problems that appear complex in coding simpler for their processing engines to execute, by pre-processing instructions ahead of time, converting and optimizing long sequences into easily digestible, assembly language-like instructions. Theoretically, the simpler and longer the sequences, the easier the digestive process should become.

So in this new era, it becomes necessary to test the efficiency of a browser's capability to digest those long sequences, to make harder problems simpler for themselves. This is the scalability element which will represent 30% of the score in our revised Relative Performance Index.

Yesterday, Dean Hachamovitch played down the importance of just-in-time compiling as a factor in improving browser efficiency, promoting instead the option of moving the interpreter to a background process. But doing that alone, as we're discovering now, may not effectively combat what has historically been IE's biggest problem as a Web apps platform: the ability to fall off a cliff (see: "stack overflow") when problems get especially difficult. On new tests involving sorting algorithms, for instance, where recursion easily becomes thousands of layers deep, IE8 can spin off into a coma. So far, we have not seen the comatose effect in the IE9 tech preview, which could be the first sign of very good news for Web app developers.

What I was surprised to discover in crafting this new set of tests was that IE was not alone. Chrome can fall off a cliff too, just several orders of magnitude later (after 10 million iterations, for example, rather than 100,000). As the problem gets more and more complex, the gap between Chrome or Safari or the new Opera's performance and that of IE becomes wider and wider...and wider. And that's a problem because you could arbitrarily choose some point out in space, where Chrome is a thousand times faster than IE rather than, say, ten. Wait long enough and you might get 10,000.

And that, as IE proponents assert, would not be fair. It's actually the reason we chose not to include Google's V8 benchmark battery in our tests: because there does not appear to be a real-world correlation between the hundreds of times greater performance the V8 battery can report over IE, and the differences we see in ordinary use.

So the goal of our scalability tests is to recognize that smaller engines can still be efficient in what they do, even when they offer lesser horsepower. Maybe IE can't run a 10-million-iteration test. But the difference between its performance in 100,000 iterations and in 10,000 can be compared to Chrome's difference between 10 million iterations and 1 million. That factor may still be meaningful.

In the very first report of browsers' scalability compared to IE7 in Vista SP2, the IE9 tech preview in Windows 7 scored a 6.57 compared to IE8's score of 1.13. That means, we believe IE9's new "Chakra" interpreter offers 581.4% greater efficiency than IE8 at speeding up when workloads increase. Betanews is applying these new tests to the latest stable browsers from the other Top Five browser makers; and yes, Ross Perot fans, we'll have the charts ready when the numbers come in.

A new website aptly named Videoonwikipedia.org aims to get more users to contribute video clips to Wikipedia by demystifying some of the issues related to the site’s video format. Videoonwikipedia.org was launched today by the Participatory Culture Foundation, which is also known for its Miro video player, in cooperation with the Open Video Alliance, the Mozilla Drumbeat Project and open source video platform provider Kaltura.

The main idea behind the site is obviously to enrich Wikipedia, which currently doesn’t feature many articles with videos, but the Participatory Culture Foundation also sees this as a chance to showcase HTML5 video and the open video codec Ogg Theora. “Wikipedia is the most popular site in the world that posts video exclusively in open formats,” the organization’s co-founder Nicholas Reville wrote in a blog post, adding: “By encouraging more people to post videos in Wikipedia articles, we can bring theora video played in html5 to a very large audience.”

The new site offers its users a quick and very basic step-by-step guide for posting videos on Wikipedia, which includes converting them to Ogg Theora, signing up for a Wikipedia account and enabling video upload capabilities on the site.

The Participatory Culture Foundation aims to simplify the encoding and converting issues with a new and as of yet unannounced tool dubbed the Miro Video Converter. Users of the converter can simply select Theora as the output format of choice, drop a video file onto the application and wait for the file in question to be converted.

Video on Wikipedia has been a long time coming, with the Wikimedia Foundation announcing plans to embrace video in early 2008. However, the site’s strong commitment to open formats has somewhat slowed down the adoption process, as it took a while until browsers capable of playing Flash-free video via HTML5 became available.

However, part of the delay apparently has also to do with internal issues, as representatives from Wikimedia and its technology partner Kaltura told me earlier this year. Kaltura’s VP of Business and Community Development Shay David said back then that Wikipedia editors took a while to get comfortable with video. “People needed to understand that video is an important aspect of Wikipedia,” he told me, adding: “That needed some time.”

Related content on GigaOm Pro: What Does the Future Hold For Browsers? (subscription required)

@Xavier qui écrit "Il faudra encore qu'on m'explique pourquoi firefox utilise theora uniquement, alors que le choix du codec revient clairement au système, pas au browser."

Ca se discute. La vraie raison pour laquelle Mozilla préfère Theora à H.264, c'est que H.264 est propriétaire, bardé de brevets et soumis à royalties. (Contrairement aux standards du Web, dont la gratuité et la liberté ont permis l'explosion du Web et son utilisation très large).

Donc Mozilla ne veut pas de H.264 sur le Web. Ca serait très dommageable pour le Web.

Après, la question de l'intégration du codec dans le navigateur ou l'OS n'est qu'un détail d'implémentation, qui n'a d'intérêt qu'une fois qu'on a réglé la question de principe.

Pour référence, voir aussi http://standblog.org/blog/post/2010... , où j'explique longuement tout cela... (PS : l'achat de On2 par Google a été finalisé. Il y a de la lumière au bout du tunnel !).

Impressions mitigées en effet.
- Le progrès significatif sur javascript et le support de SVG, c'est génial. quasiment tout marche sur ma test suite.
- Hardware accélération sur un PC/Windows 7 récent est bluffant.
- CSS, HTML5, c'est le minimum syndical
- La vidéo en H264 va mettre une pression sur Mozilla pour l'imposer comme un standard de fait. Firefox sera vu comme le vilain canard qui impose le double encodage. Dommage.
- Pas de support Win XP. Incompréhensible.
- Vivement IE9 en auto update

Spencer Dalziel THE INQUIRER

Firefox 3.6 is current

Microsoft has taken a big step toward standards-based web video by announcing support for HTML5 and the H.264 encoding format in Internet Explorer 9, the next version of its web browser. At its MIX10 developers conference, Microsoft became the latest company to throw its weight behind H.264-based HTML video playback, following YouTube and Vimeo.

Using HTML5, publishers will be able to serve video directly into certain modern browsers without an external plugin like Adobe Flash or Microsoft Silverlight. Up until recently, however, most browsers didn’t support H.264 as the default encoding format. Today, users can access HTML5 video encoded in H.264 with Chrome, Safari or Internet Explorer with Google’s ChromeFrame installed. That means that only about 25 percent of users can actually watch HTML5 video encoded in H.264, according to Vimeo. But adding H.264 support to the latest version of Internet Explorer could boost the number of people that will be able to view video in browser without requiring a plugin.

Although Internet Explorer has been losing share for years, it still holds a sizable portion of the browser market — more than 60 percent in February, according to NetMarketShare. Launched about a year ago, Internet Explorer 8 has roughly 22 percent market share, while IE6 still holds a surprising 20 percent, despite being nearly 10 years old. But that could end soon, as multiple sites, including YouTube, are ending support for that version.

While H.264 is slowly becoming the default encoding format for video on the web, it isn’t yet supported by Firefox and Opera. Despite the fact that H.264 licensing body MPEG LA announced that it will extend its royalty-free license of the video codec for an additional five years, Firefox creator Mozilla continues to shy away from supporting H.264. Instead, Mozilla has decided to support video through the Ogg Vorbis encoding format, which is open source and therefore isn’t encumbered by licenses.

While Microsoft’s support of HTML5 and H.264 could potentially give in-browser video viewing a big boost, there are a number of issues that need to be resolved before the standard goes mainstream. In addition to lack of universal browser support, HTML5 also lacks support for advertising, the majority of which is built in Flash.

Related GigaOM Pro content:

What Does the Future Hold For Browsers? (subscription required)

After many months of testing, five beta versions and 2 release candidates, Firefox 3.0 was released in June 2008. The 3.0.x branch was the major stable branch of Mozilla’s web browser for a long time, and it’s been updated to version 3.0.18 so far. Now, however, it reached the end of the line, as Mozilla’s development plans include only one more update for it.

The users who have moved on to the current stable branch, 3.6, are probably wondering what we’re talking about, but many users still use the 3.0.x version; with this move Mozilla is indicating that it wants these users to upgrade, too.

Mozilla has recently been more aggressive about upgrades, reminding users of old versions of Firefox that an upgrade is available. They’re right: the latest stable version of Firefox (3.6) has been around for several months now, and in most cases there’s no reason to stick to the old branch.

Tags: Firefox 3.0, mozilla, web browsers

Mozilla has dropped support for version 1.0 of its four-year-old internet app suite, SeaMonkey....

Offloading malware protection to the cloud

Microsoft vient d'annoncer la sortie d'Internet Explorer 9. Un renouveau pour IE ? Très certainement, cette neuvième version du célèbre navigateur internet a tout ce qu'il faut pour faire partie des "grands", avec Mozilla Firefox, Safari ou Vinageer. Quelles sont les améliorations ? Venez le découvrir...

étiquettes: microsoft, internet, navigateur, web

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The great Mozilla's Firefox Mobile Add-On Challenge has returned! They've announced second mobile add-on challenge, starting on March 11 and ending Monday, April 12.

Add-on developers are challenged to develop a compatible Firefox mobile add-on that shows innovation and considers the mobile context (small screen size, touch screen, out and about, etc.)

At the end of the Challenge period, Mozilla's panel of judges (consisting of members from the Mobile and Add-ons teams) will select ten winners who will rece... .. .