Beware of Posting Pics Online via Your Phone

Watch this video --- it's potentially that important. You have no idea how vulnerable you or your family and friends can be by posting photos taken by a cell phone and posted on social media websites. Can you say G-P-S!

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Browser Wars: Chrome vs. IE9 vs. Firefox

Web browsers are converging. Since the arrival of Google Chrome nearly three years ago, all browsers have come under its influence, and they've all moved in the same three-pronged directions—speedier page loading, cleaner user interfaces, and greater support for new Web standards. All of the major browsers—Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari, and Opera—have made significant strides in each of these three dimensions. The first two qualities are pretty much universally desirable, but the "standards" support piece, while also desirable, gets sticky: Each browser seems to support a different subset of the many features that fall under the label HTML5. All you have to do is check out each browser's HTML5 demo site. Apple's HTML5 demos, for example, flat out won't function unless you're browsing with Safari. So much for "standards."

The Speed of the Web
Along with new standard support, all browsers have posted massive improvements in page-rendering and script execution speed. You just have to look at the often-cited SunSpider JavaScript benchmarks to see this. Even Chrome, already described as "lightning fast" in December of 2008, has sped up on the test from a time of 881ms to 267ms in version 12 on my 2.6GHz dual-core laptop—that's less than a third of the time! The rest of the browsers have followed suit, clustering around the same level of performance. Mozilla and Google have built their own Javascript speed tests, Kraken and V8, respectively. When these first came out,
the maker's own browsers widely outpaced competitors, but results on these tests are also evening out.


A summary of the latest speed test results are:

Google V8 (v.6) Test: #1=Chrome 12, #2 = FireFox 5, #3 = Opera 11.50
Mozilla Krakan 1.7 Test: #1=Chrome 12, #2 = FireFox 5, #3 = Opera 11.50
SunSpider 0.9.1 Test: #1=Internet Explorer 9, #2 = Chrome 12, #3 = FireFox 5

The next frontier in browser performance is about graphics hardware acceleration. In this area, Internet Explorer and Firefox are ahead of Google Chrome, Opera, and Safari. Microsoft was the first browser maker to make an issue of hardware acceleration in the buildup to its releasing IE9. The company's site for its browser, called IETestdrive.com, sports a slew of demonstrations that show off hardware acceleration, which you can try running in any browser. On these, you can clearly see IE and Firefox's lead in hardware acceleration.

On the FishIE demo, which uses Canvas and Javascript to display swimming tropical fish, Chrome delivered 40 frames per second with 20 fish and 5 FPS with 500 fish. Since both Firefox 4 and IE9 use hardware acceleration for more than just future 3D content, they score the maximum 60 FPS with 20 fish, but IE still beats Firefox with 500 fish. Chrome was, however, better than Opera, which only mustered 20FPS and 3FPS.

Another IE9 demo, Psychedelic Browsing, spins a color wheel and plays spacy sounds, reporting RPM as a result. Surprisingly, Firefox beats Microsoft at its own game here by a tad, though it doesn't play the required sound. Chrome, however, plays the test's required sound, but fares far worse in the revolutions per minute result.

One final test of hardware acceleration comes from Mozilla, its Hardware Acceleration Stress test, which spins a spiral of photos in the browser window and reports a score in frames per second.

A summary of the latest hardware acceleration test results are:

FishIE (w/20 fish) Test: #1 = Internet Explorer 9, #2 = FireFox 4, #3 = Chrome 12
Psychedelic Browser Test: #1 = FireFox 4, #2 = Internet Explorer 9, #3 = Chrome 12
Mozilla HW Accel Stress Test: #1 = FireFox 4, #2 = Internet Explorer 9, #3 = Chrome 12

Additional information about browser HTML 5 Standards support, Privacy and Security, and Extras and Goodies (extensions) are discussed in the PC magazine article by Michael Muchmore upon which this blog content is based and that can be found @ http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2389249,00.asp

In the end, I will continue to develop websites that firstly conform to Internet Explorer (IE) standards. This is because IE continues to be the browser used buy the majority of people accessing the Internet. The increasing popularity and growth in usage of Chrome and FireFox can not be ignored and I will make every effort to insure the best possible compatibility with these browsers as well.

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ICANN Approves New Top-Level Domains --- Prepare For .Whatever

A number of not very descriptive top-level domains (TLDs): .com, .net, .org, as well as country-specific TLDs are what the web is currently made of, but this is about to change drastically.

ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), the international authority over top-level domain names, has approved the expansion of generic TLDs which will allow companies and organizations to create domains for their brands (such as .coke) or simply create generic names (such as .car or .green).

This option won’t come cheap, though: The application fee alone is $185,000, and the annual fee is $25,000. Still, you can imagine large corporations spending millions on these very soon. If you’re in the business of making phones, owning a “.phone” TLD sounds like a great idea — if you can afford outbidding other phone manufacturers.

“ICANN has opened the Internet’s addressing system to the limitless possibilities of the human imagination,” said Rod Beckstrom, president and CEO of ICANN. “No one can predict where this historic decision will take us.” We can safely predict one thing: Expect lots of legal disputes over company trademarks with regard to new TLDs.

Applications for new generic TLDs will be accepted from January 12, 2012, to April 12, 2012. New domains should appear within a year.

This will become a game changer for sure. The cost is high for a individual or small business, but for a major corporation it is chump change. The ability to set up a social network, community with your own TLD is priceless! Marketing directors around the WORLD are salivating right now.

Once you own a TLD, can you sell URLs to third parties? I imagine the person who swoops in and buys “.beer” or “.fashion” will have a lot of offers…

Based on a 6/20/11 article by Stan Schroeder

Factors Contributing to Poor Websites

Here are a number of factors that will contribute to poor websites, most especially if any of these factors appear on ones home page. Remember you can’t undo first impressions.

1. Image maps/icons unfamiliar to viewers
2. Drop-down menus that obscure important information
3. Inconsistent use of Caps and lower case
4. Using too many colors
5. Distracting images with barely legible text overlaid on them
6. Poor formatting and vertically scrolling links
7. Tiny screen-shots
8. Unclear/vague link/menu titles
9. Bad use of or too much white space
10. Using a long sentence/paragraph as a link
11. Too much text distracting from images/links
12. Too many varied fonts
13. Too many blue links
14. Too busy/distracting background images
15. Text heavy and shadow-boxed graphics (dated…)

If your website suffers from any of these conditions, APT Web Design can help apply remedial action in order to improve the quality and perception of your website.

Basic Search Engine Optimization Tips

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the key to gaining more traffic to your website. When people search for information today, they don’t open up the phonebook, the dictionary or the newspaper. Whatever they are trying to find out, they head straight to the search engines. Therefore, if you want to improve your business’s presence it’s all about getting found in the results of the search engines.

That’s what SEO is designed to do. Basically, search engine optimization incorporates everything related to getting your site’s positioning improved within the search engines. If you can make it to the first page of Google, and eventually the number 1 spot on the page, you will see a whirlwind of traffic to your site. You’ll have more prospects and new customers than you know what to do with.

So how do you go about using SEO for your site in order to see better results? While the concept itself seems simple, there are actually many individual components that you have to consider. In addition, the world of search engine optimization is fluid, dynamic and constantly evolving. That means you have to stay on top of all of the latest changes and trends if you want to experience and maintain success.

The first step to the SEO process is researching your market. You need to find the keywords and key phrases that people use to search for information related to the products you sell, the industry that you’re in or the general market that you serve. These keywords are the foundation of what you will be doing with SEO, and you have to find the ones that are popular and widely used without being overly competitive.

Another step of research pertains to looking into your competition. You have to see how much competition there is in your market and for specific terms and phrases, and you have to see how strong that competition is. In addition, you should browse your competitors’ websites to see what you like about them and don’t like about them. Don’t be afraid to borrow from their strengths and learn from their mistakes when creating or optimizing your own site.

Now that you have performed the research itself, you actually have to go about the search engine optimization process. There are many different tactics and strategies here. The most basic of which is incorporating those keywords you found into the content of your page. Be careful not to stuff them in there excessively because you’ll end up looking like spam both to the search engines and to your visitors. Instead work your keywords in naturally so that you can become associated with those specific phrases.

There are also many offsite optimization steps you need to take to really maximize your results. These include establishing your presence in online communities related to your business and also link building. The more links you have, and the better they are in terms of where they come from, the more credibility your website will gain. This will raise your site’s ranking dramatically in the search engines.

This is just a basic overview of some of what’s involved in SEO. The foundation of good SEO work is really research, researching both your market and your competition. From there you’ll have many different factors to consider, including keyword inclusion and link building. Ultimately, proper SEO holds the key to your business succeeding in the online environment.

Reports of Windows' Death Greatly Exaggerated

Much of the talk about the immenent death of Microsoft Windows is mostly based on sales figures for all end-user devices and relative numbers of page reads by different browsers and operating systems. If Information Technology's responsibilities were based on the number of end-user devices sold and on browser page reads, this would be interesting information.

IT's responsibilities, though, have a lot more to do with applications business users rely on to get work done. When you look in this direction, you get a very different bead on things. Let's check out infrastructure first -- in particular, the server OS, DBMS, app server, Web server, development kit, email, and content/document management solution. While IT has choices for all of these, Microsoft doesn't just continue to matter here; rather, it's probably the most innovative force in the industry in this space right now -- except in its ability to explain itself. The infrastructure story for Microsoft is excellent products coupled with incoherent storytelling.

Then there's the end-user computing environment (what's usually mislabeled the "client"). What a lot of analysts miss is quite simple and basic: Microsoft Office file formats are the industry de facto standard, and no amount of de jure standards setting will change that any time soon. Thus, any business that has to exchange documents with other companies has to use Microsoft Office, because the best any competitor can say is that its product can read and write Microsoft Office files.

That isn't the same thing as rendering them properly, and the fact of the matter is, no matter which Office competitor you use, it will scramble Word documents that do any serious formatting at all. As for PowerPoint, you have no idea just how bizarre the results can be until you try running a PowerPoint animation in a competitor's piece of software.

Every version of Windows Mobile so far has been at least one step behind the industry, and there's no hint yet that Microsoft has the ability to leapfrog its competition in the mobile arena. It's natural to figure Microsoft's presence in mobile computing is and will be limited to laptops, which will remain the portable devices of choice for those who plan to do serious work that requires a keyboard for quite a while.

Bottom-line: The increased importance of other platforms represents an expansion of what IT will be responsible for, not a substitution. Windows and Microsoft will be important for a number of years yet -- but so will other platforms and players..

Adapted from Bob Lewis’s story, originally published at InfoWorld.com 3/11/11

Most Browsers Have Known Vulnerabilities

Roughly 80% of browsers today are insecure, owing to their having a known vulnerability either in the browser itself, or due to a vulnerable plug-in, such as an outdated version of Shockwave, Flash, the Java runtime environment, or QuickTime.

That finding comes from research conducted by vulnerability management and security policy compliance vendor Qualys. The results are based on the 200,000 people who, over the past 6 months, used the company's free BrowserCheck tool, which looks for known vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera browsers, running on Windows, Mac OS X, or Linux machines.

Interestingly, but not surprisingly, more than half of browser vulnerabilities stem from plug-ins. "The number was very high for the plug-ins, higher than I had expected," said Wolfgang Kandek, CTO of Qualys, in an email interview.

The most common insecure browser plug-ins in use are (in order): Java, Adobe Reader, QuickTime, Flash, Shockwave, and Windows Media Player. Many of these plug-ins are widespread -- 97% of computers have the Adobe Flash plug-in installed, and 95% have one for Windows Media Player.

Meanwhile, only about 20% of browsers are insecure due to the native browser application (not counting plug-ins). Kandek said that's testament to browser makers' structured approach to updates, which includes alerting users or simply updating browsers automatically when a new version becomes available.

Unfortunately, few plug-ins auto-update. Accordingly, it's up to IT departments to secure them. "Focus attention on the plug-ins of the browsers, determine if plug-ins are actually necessary, [and] look for plug-ins that have an update program," said Kandek.

Some good news from this study, while 80% of consumers today are using insecure browsers, that's down from a high of nearly 90% in June 2010. What accounts for the improvement? "A number of factors play a role for the small decline, but we have seen good acceptance of the new Adobe Reader X, which has reduced the exposure for PDF users in general," said Kandek.

Adapted from Mathew J. Schwartz article, InformationWeek Feb. 23, 2011