HowtoForge: "Mod rewrite is a part of apache servers that can rewrite requested URLs on the fly. As it supports an endless number of rules that in turn have unlimited attached rule conditions it is very flexible and an important URL manipulation mechanism. It can be used for internet users and for search engine friendly URLs. This increases the chance of the database driven website to be indexed."

Chris Snyder is an online journalist specializing in new media. He writes about the tech biz for Wired.com’s Epicenter blog.

It’s a long road to a victory in the browser wars. Just ask Firefox. The open source browser which launched in 2004 just cracked the 20 percent threshold of the market share for November, according to Net Applications, pushing it a step closer but still miles away from IE.

Recently a few new players have also thrown their hats in the ring, including Google with its much-hyped Chrome and the lesser known, Mozilla-based social web browser Flock, which released its 2.0 version this past October. But do these newcomers even stand a chance?

The Basics

Firefox is gaining ground for good reason: it’s simple, reliable and secure. Its tabbed browsing led to a similar remodel in IE and it has a slew of add-ons that give it a leg up over the competition. It’s slowly becoming the new standard with a steady audience, and that will be hard to beat anytime soon. And its open source platform leaves room for alternatives and experimental niche browsers like Flock.

Flock 2.0 is basically a Firefox with a lot of perks and pre-installed add-ons for those heavy into social networking.  Think of it as a FriendFeed of the browser world, which brings all of your friends from 23 various networks together in a sidebar. It is also one of the first browsers to incorporate media feeds for photos and videos.  Flock is all about sharing what you find on the web as you surf, and it allows you to accomplish this pretty easily by dragging and dropping them either into an email or onto a friend.

Chrome is the polar opposite of Flock, and its big advantage is that it’s even simpler than Firefox, or any other browser out there right now.  The search bar is also integrated into the address bar, which seems to be the wave of the future, at least for those who swear by Google search and don’t need any bells and whistles. Unfortunately, Chrome’s only available for PCs at the moment.

Usability

Chrome wins hands down on getting the job done.  It’s quick and painless with a clear focus of searching for information using Google’s engine.  Dynamic tabbed browsing is a staple now, and if anything crashes, only that tab will go down, not your entire session, which is nice. But if you want a richer web browsing experience stick with Firefox or Flock.  There’s also no easy way to subscribe to RSS feeds from the search bar as there is with Firefox.

Flock can feel a bit overwhelming at times with all of the sidebars of information, but once you get everything set up and get the hang of it, it’s pretty convenient and preferable to keeping a million tabs open for sites like Twitter and Facebook. The drag and drop interface is great.  When you just want to email a YouTube video or picture it’s much easier than copying any URLs, although it does also seem a bit too easy to share something that you might not want shared.

The only other problem with the social networks is that you can’t really fit all of that functionality into a sidebar.  It’s a good way of consolidating friends, but it’s more like a giant address book than anything else. Simple things like posting tweets are a bit confusing, with no clear box for entering in text. When a friend adds content, however, it will open up the profile in the main browser in full view, so you still need to go back to the source.

Speed

Despite the extra features, Flock is surprisingly just as fast as Chrome or Firefox, at least on a medium grade PC.  Looks like they’ve improved upon this concern in the latest release. And Chrome seems to have Firefox beat in this category but the difference isn’t anything drastic.

Privacy

Incognito — aka “porn mode” –  is the new way to surf, as every browser is picking up on this private surfing option that the new IE first initiated.

Chrome has faced some privacy concerns at launch with its Omnibox monitoring and recording too much information, but this can all be prevented by changing the default settings and going Incognito.

Expandability

Chrome doesn’t support any extensions or add-ons yet, so Firefox still dominates in this area.  But if you are looking for simple, you probably don’t want much more than Chrome already offers.

Final Thoughts

Firefox is here to stay, but there will always be a long tail of niche alternatives like Chrome and Flock.  When Chrome moves into Mac realm it could pick up some market share from Safari.  Flock will be there for social network junkies who want to try something new, but the first step to making Flock mainstream will be for more of the social networks themselves to go mainstream. Twitter is on track, but still has a long way to go before it’s a household name. If you’re only on Facebook or MySpace, you probably don’t need to worry about the extra sidebars and features.

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Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Flock Gets a New Boss, Flock 1.0 Coming
Flock Public Beta Now Live
How Can Flock’s Social Browser Play Into the “Open” Movement?
Flock’s Social Browser 1.0 Has Finally Arrived
More is More: Flock 2.0
Flock CEO Jumps Ship
Anxious About Private Browsing in Firefox? Try the Latest Build

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/lifehacker/2008/12/2008-12-01_090803.jpg" height="333" width="522" align="center" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2"/br / Firefox only: Easy DragToGo is a Firefox extension which enables interaction with highlighted text and images via mouse gestures. Text actions are determined by whether or not the highlighted text is a URL or not, and by the variables you assign in the preferences menu. An example setup, and my current one, is that all non-URL text when highlighted and dragged becomes a Google search. Drag up to search in a new foreground tab, drag down to search in a new background tab. You assign gestures to opening new URLs, searching text, and saving images. The amount of movement required to trigger the assigned action in Easy DragToGo is minuscule, which makes for some wonderfully lazy mousing. If you're intrigued by the idea of using mouse gestures to browse, check out how to a href="http://lifehacker.com/software/shortcut-screencast-contest/navigate-firefox-with-mouse-gestures-275510.php"Navigate Firefox with Mouse Gestures/a. Easy DragToGo is free and works wherever Firefox does. div class="related"a href="https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search?q=easy%20dragtogostatus=4"Easy DragToGo/a/div /p br style="clear: both;"/ a href="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=camp;i=bc6f8490c9c5206c2f9be4d56feaa9aeamp;p=1"img style="border:0;" src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/ht.php?t=vamp;i=bc6f8490c9c5206c2f9be4d56feaa9aeamp;p=1" border="0" //adiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=zZFr981u"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=fKX7rKCR"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=LTIrECoH"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=LTIrECoH" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/lifehacker/full?a=zdGSp1tr"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/lifehacker/full?i=zdGSp1tr" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/lifehacker/full/~4/dLGDdbH9ksM" height="1" width="1"/

Flickcurl is a C library for calling the Flickr Web service API. It handles the API signing, token management, and parameter encoding and decoding, resulting in C functions for the Web services APIs. It uses libcurl to call the REST Web service, and libxml2 to manipulate the XML responses. The library supports reading photo, tag, and comments information, the photo upload and searching APIs, and writing tags and comments. It provides utilities such as "flickcurl" to exercise the API and "flickrdf" to get RDF metadata descriptions out of photos, tags, and machine tags. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Support for the new Machine Tags API was added, handling machine tag namespaces, predicates, and values. Support for the updated Places API calls was added with access to ESRI shape data and URLs. Support for the (not announced) flickr.tags.getClusterPhotos was added. Some other minor fixes and improvements were made. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/h4L-1tNEhaEuy2er1PQ7LnO7JaA/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/h4L-1tNEhaEuy2er1PQ7LnO7JaA/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/TyrFLHRxp1s" height="1" width="1"/

Flickcurl is a C library for calling the Flickr Web service API. It handles the API signing, token management, and parameter encoding and decoding, resulting in C functions for the Web services APIs. It uses libcurl to call the REST Web service, and libxml2 to manipulate the XML responses. The library supports reading photo, tag, and comments information, the photo upload and searching APIs, and writing tags and comments. It provides utilities such as "flickcurl" to exercise the API and "flickrdf" to get RDF metadata descriptions out of photos, tags, and machine tags. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Support for the new Machine Tags API was added, handling machine tag namespaces, predicates, and values. Support for the updated Places API calls was added with access to ESRI shape data and URLs. Support for the (not announced) flickr.tags.getClusterPhotos was added. Some other minor fixes and improvements were made. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/2QAB4FXjXvJk5dAOMtEZFEXqCOE/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/2QAB4FXjXvJk5dAOMtEZFEXqCOE/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/TyrFLHRxp1s" height="1" width="1"/

Fluid 0.9.5Fluid... Give your favorite webapps a home on your Mac OS X Desktop.

Are you a Gmail, Facebook, Campfire or Insert_Your_Favorite_Webapp_Here fanatic? Do you have 20 or more browser tabs open at all times? Are you tired of some random site crashing your browser and causing you to loose your (say) Google Docs data in another tab?

If so, Site Specific Browsers (SSBs) provide a great solution for your webapp woes. Using Fluid, you can create SSBs to run each of your favorite webapps as a separate desktop application. Fluid gives any webapp a home on your Mac OS X desktop including Dock icon, menu bar, and logical separation from your other web browsing activity.

How does it work? Fluid itself is a very small application. When launched, Fluid displays a small window where you specify the URL of a webapp you'd like to run in a Site Specific Browser. Then provide a name, click 'Create' and you'll be prompted to launch the new native Mac app you've just created.

Use Fluid to run YouTube, GTalk, Flickr, Basecamp, Delicious, .Mac webmail, or any other webapp as a separate desktop application.

Anytime you click a link to another site in an SSB, the link is opened in your system default web browser, keeping your SSB dedicated to the original site you've specified.
WHAT'S NEWVerison 0.9.5:

• Fluid.app: Fluid.app now correctly prefers "fluid-icon"s or "apple-touch-icon"s explicitly declared via "link" elements over a file named "apple-touch-icon.png" in the web root.
• Fluid.app: Fluid.app no longer allows you to create an SSB with the name of a default Apple application (like "Mail" or "Dictionary", etc.) in the "/Applications" Folder. You can still create an SSB with one of these names, just not in the "/Applications" folder. You can still manually move it to the Applications Folder after creation if you like. This prevents accidentally overwriting default Apple apps.
• FluidInstance.app: Fixed an extremely annoying issue where certain keypresses would cause system Beep (especially bothersome in Google Reader SSB when typing GReader keyboard shortcuts).
• FluidInstance.app: Fixed shortcut recorder bug where the global shortcut would not be registered until the General Preferences Pane is shown for the first time.
• FluidInstance.app: User-selected "Continuous Spell Checking" setting now persists across launches.
• FluidInstance.app: Growl Notifications are now visible while in FullScreen Mode.
• FluidInstance.app: Click-through/non-activattion support added for dragging the favicon from background windows.
• FluidInstance.app: More accurate default User-Agent String (includes correct WebKit version number, OS X version number and machine processor type).
• FluidInstance.app: Shortcuts now also support "$1", "$2" regex-style indexed replacements. e.g.: shortcut: "tu" replacement string: "twitter.com/$1,twitter.com/$2". Type command "tu itod fluidapp" in location bar. This will result in two tabs opening one for the "itod" twitter profile page and one for the "fluidapp" twitter profile page.
• FluidInstance.app: "Search in Google" context menu item now works correctly (it used to open Safari).
• FluidInstance.app: Adding JavaScript fluid.isGrowRunning() method. returns true if Growl notifications can currently be displayed. otherwise false.
• FluidInstance.app: Fixed issue where Gmail SSB would sometimes erroneously close the main window when deferring browsing to your system default browser and 'Hidden' closed windows is enabled.
• FluidInstance.app: Fixed issue where popup windows of a small size (created by window.open() with width and height features specified) would erroneously cause SSB to use that small size when creating the next new window.
• FluidInstance.app: successive clicks on a link with target="foo" will correctly open the exising window with the frame named "foo" rather than creating a new window.
• FluidInstance.app: improved support for window.open() features.
• FluidInstance.app: Added new Safari 3.2.1 and Firefox 3.0.4 User-agent strings.
• FluidInstance.app: Improved behavior for autocomplete/recent URL popup menu in the browser location bar.
• FluidInstance.app: Tab switching via command-{ and command-} is no longer slow. dunno why :O.
• FluidInstance.app: Infinite Loop Detection. If your SSB is your default web browser, it will no longer enter an infinite loop when asked to visit a URL which it will defer to the system default browser.
• FluidInstance.app: MenuExtra SSBs now show installed userscripts in their context menu (the menu that is activated by right clicking the MenuExtra scon in the system status bar). This allows you to more easily activate/deactivate userscripts in a MenuExtra SSB.
• FluidInstance.app: New "Search" Preference Pane offers the ability to enhance Google SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages) with thumbnail image previews of results.
• BrowsaBrowsaPlugIn: Toolbar Icons for Flickr, BrightKite, Google Reader, and FriendFeed.
• BrowsaBrowsaPlugIn: New option for "Navigation Bar is always hidden". Nice for those sites (like Hahlo.com) where the "navbar appears when moused over" option is annoying.
• BrowsaBrowsaPlugIn: Improved UserAgent String behavior and fixed some UAString UI glitches.
• ThumbnailPlugIn: Fixed resolution of URLs beginning with "https://".

REQUIREMENTSMac OS X 10.5 or later.
DEVELOPERTodd Ditchendorf
DOWNLOADS15480
DOWNLOAD NOW (3.6 MB)
More information

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/53379_thumb.png" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" The Zero Install Injector makes it possible for users to install software easily and without the need for root privileges. It takes the URL of a program's interface description and chooses suitable versions of the program and all of its dependencies (also identified by URLs) according to the user's policy settings (eg. "stable", "testing", "minimal network use", etc). The chosen versions are downloaded and cached and the program is run, using environment variables to let it find the components. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Minor bugs were fixed in the code to avoid rechecking a failed feed too often, for selecting source code versions for compiling, and for saving user preferences about preferred versions. The dialog for managing installed applications was improved. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/QXawU0FRgNz4UsD8DzJe7CPNMgY/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/QXawU0FRgNz4UsD8DzJe7CPNMgY/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-global/~4/cKibl1yieVM" height="1" width="1"/

img src="http://c.fsdn.com/fm/screenshots/53379_thumb.png" align="right" alt="Screenshot" hspace="10" vspace="10" The Zero Install Injector makes it possible for users to install software easily and without the need for root privileges. It takes the URL of a program's interface description and chooses suitable versions of the program and all of its dependencies (also identified by URLs) according to the user's policy settings (eg. "stable", "testing", "minimal network use", etc). The chosen versions are downloaded and cached and the program is run, using environment variables to let it find the components. hr / strongLicense:/strong GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) hr / strongChanges:/strongbr / Minor bugs were fixed in the code to avoid rechecking a failed feed too often, for selecting source code versions for compiling, and for saving user preferences about preferred versions. The dialog for managing installed applications was improved. pa href="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/PfdZp7e8HEtSKKPnuf0UAwy_xVA/a"img src="http://feedads.googleadservices.com/~a/PfdZp7e8HEtSKKPnuf0UAwy_xVA/i" border="0" ismap="true"/img/a/pimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/freshmeat/feeds/fm-releases-unix/~4/cKibl1yieVM" height="1" width="1"/

Il est vrai que le module Twitter que propose Violet ne sert absolument à rien à tout Twitter digne de ce nom, soit ayant plus d’une dizaine de comptes qu’il suit. Entre URLs, smileys, twitts en français ou en anglais,...

the title says it all. i'm trying to launch html-based help files in the same directory as my app.

i've tried both LSOpenCFURLRef, as well as LSOpenFSRef, but can only get them to work with www urls but NOT local files like "file:///Developer/help.html". all i get is an OSStatus of -43, which doesn't seem to be in the range of the documented Launch Services result codes.

anyone ever get this to work?