Tag Archives: web browser

Faster is better

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When it comes to the Internet, faster is better, just about always. I have been thinking a lot about this since reading a post about this issue in the Official Google Mobile Blog a few weeks ago. In that post the author wrote about how Google used analysis of their search logs to see the dramatic effect of improving search response time for mobile users. If things are slow, they lose users. If things are fast, users want to use their service more.This one simple reality has so many big implications for me and for library technology. In an environment in which I feel constantly unable to satisfy user demands, where there is so much work that needs to happen in order to create a good user experience, it behooves me to focus more on this one thing. Make things go faster for users. Faster = happier users.I have spent time thinking about how true this is in my own experience. I am a bit of a new technology gadfly, willing to try new things and jumping from one to the other. Take for instance my web browser habits. I have used just about every web browser there has ever been, and also just about every version or iteration of them there ever has been. Overall I am most satisfied with Firefox and that has been my main browser of choice for a very long time. But I have tried Flock, Opera, and of course Internet Explorer. I know that IE is my absolute least favorite. So, OK: Firefox is mostly my favorite, IE is my least favorite. Sounds simple. But it isn’t. I can’t stop myself from jumping around to try others or different iterations of all of the above. For example I have used all different kinds of browsers on my mobile devices, different ones on my home computers, and still others on my work laptop. I am not 100% satisfied for long with any of them. Why? Well, there are a variety of reasons but one constant issue I have is speed. I want lightning-fast response time. Period. No matter what. Any delay is frustrating.This is why I have always played around with Safari, both for Mac and Windows. The earlier iterations of Safari for Windows were just awful. But even so, it was lightning fast, faster than anything else I’ve ever tried. I hate that I can’t customize it like I can Firefox. But I’m at the point now where speed trumps “like to haves”. Last night after reading some good reviews of the latest version of Safari for Windows (3.1), I decided to once again take the plunge and try. I am really happy with it so far. It’s early days yet and perhaps my fickle heart will eventually tire of it. But it is stable, and lightning fast, and that really counts for a tremendous amount in my book.So…I do believe faster is better, even with some caveats. It’s like the time back in the late ’90s when I moved away from dial-up to cable Internet access. I have never looked back nor wanted anything else but the fastest connection. I can’t imagine going back.We who work in libraries, especially with technology, would do well to simply try to make things work faster for our users. I bet we’d have a lot more happy ones if we emphasized this aspect of our online services more.

Zotero on steroids

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I’m a big Zotero fan.  Anyone who has access to the Firefox web browser and needs or wants to keep track of bibliographies, websites, and other material used for research should use it instead of the bloated, overly expensive, difficult to use commercial citation managers such as Reference Manager, RefWorks, ProCite, and the like.  Zotero does everything you need and more, and does it better than the competition.  Did I mention it’s free?!

Today in the Chronicle of Higher Education there is an article (it’s freely available, you don’t need a subscription to access it) about a proposal made by the creators of Zotero to put it on steroids.  Put simply, they intend to make Zotero the tool of choice for researchers, scientists, professors, and others to load their research works into a shared database hosted by the Internet Archive.  The article notes the general failure (oh wait, I mean, lack of success) that libraries have had with doing this on an institution-by-institution basis using tools such as DSpace.  There is a scathing review about so-called institutional repositories and their use by libraries by one of the people I’d deem to be a foremost expert on utilizing DSpace, Dorothea Salo. It is well worth reading.

Anyway, I think this whole idea — actually, it’s more than that because the Mellon Foundation just dished out hundreds of thousands of dollars to make it a reality — has many beneficial implications and I hope Dan Cohen and his team at the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University have all the success they hope for with it.  (Thanks to Wally Grotophorst for the mention.)

Some new feature goodies

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Lots of nice improvements have been made recently in web-related software and services that I regularly use. Here is a list of the ones I can think of that are worth mentioning:

  • coComment: This service just keeps getting better. Now it allows me to track conversations via webpages or comments on individual postings. Cool! Even better is the fact that I can be notified when someone has commented on a webpage or posting or comment by seeing the coComment icon in my webbrowser change color. When there has been some activity on something that I have tracked in coComment, the blue coComment icon in my web browser’s status bar adds a red-bordered envelope. Another cool feature is that if I navigate to a webpage that anyone else is tracking via coComment, the coComment icon turns orange to let me know that others are discussing it. All in all, very nice!
  • Meebo: I have been using Meebo for a little over a month now and have found it to work quite well for the IM accounts I use, including Google Talk, AOL, and Yahoo! Messenger. A few days ago they really hit the ball out of the ballpark, in my opinion, when they announced a new service called Meebome. Basically this allows me to embed a live chat service in any webpage I want. I quickly put one here in my blog and I might add it to a few other places. With this service in place, I can be logged into Meebo and automatically see if/when someone visits FML! Noone has initiated a chat with me yet but it is really interesting to see in real time the number of people who visit the site.
  • Bloglines: Like coComment, this service, too, just keeps improving. The latest improvement allows users to use the letter ‘o’ to open up the original blog post when viewing it in Bloglines. The lack of this feature (which has been present in Google Reader from day one) has been the only major gripe I’ve had with the service ’til now.
  • Google Maps: I have always liked this service and again, it just keeps getting better! The latest improvements include the ability for me to use the service from my cell phone. Very, very nice. I’ve tried it out and it works very well. The only problem is that as one would expect, it takes up a lot of bytes and I will have to watch this carefully because of service limitations in terms of the size of data transfers with my cell phone service. Another improvement in the service is that I can now store favorite locations.
  • Comcast Digital Voice: This VOIP service from our cable TV and Internet provider is something we’ve thought about in the past but didn’t try because we didn’t think we needed a dedicated home telephone. We thought we could just rely on our cell phone service instead. After trying this for a few weeks, though, we concluded that it would be good to have a regular telephone service. We chose Comcast Digital Voice because it seemed to meet our needs quite well and we get a discount because we are already have other Comcast services. We’ve only had it in place for a few days but it seems to work great!

Blogged with Flock

COinS anyone?

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I’ve been following the development of a new technology called COinS with a lot of interest. Lorcan Dempsey wrote about it last week on his blog and used that post to announce the availability of COinS functionality in Open WorldCat. Great news! If you use the Firefox web browser and have installed the OpenURL Referrer extension, you should see your local OpenURL site’s logo or text appear next to citation information in this post, thanks to COinS. This is highly useful stuff. To go even further, if you use WordPress as your blogging software, you can use a COinS plugin for WordPress developed by Peter Binkley that helps to create the COinS information. Or create your COinS information using a freely available COinS generator.

Flock: some first impressions [Updated]

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I was excited to get an invitation late last week to download a preview (developer’s) release of the Flock web browser. (If you want an invitation so as to be able to download it, drop me an email at s t o b e r g [ a t ] o b e r g s . n e t.) Built on the same codebase as Mozilla Firefox, Flock differentiates itself by attempting to make all of the social web functionality (tagging, blogging, the so-called Web 2.0 sort of stuff etc.) more seamlessly integrated into the interface. I’ve been using Flock for about three days as my primary web browser at work. Here are some initial impressions:

  • It looks, acts, and functions much like Firefox, although with a little bit more appealing icons and interface tweaks. No surprise there, I guess. The user experience is very similar to Firefox with several tweaks (extensions, themes) added in.
  • There are some bugs in it (e.g. the inability to highlight text for copy/paste when using the keyboard, some AJAX hiccups when reading or composing Gmail messages) but it is remarkably stable so far.
  • One of the features that most stands out from Firefox is the Shelf feature. I used it a bit today and will try to use it some more over time, but so far, I am not sure how/whether I will make extensive use of it.
  • I like the built-in blogging functionality very much. It is very easy to post to my WordPress-powered blog from within the browser, much easier than using an extension in Firefox. In fact, I composed this posting using this tool.
  • I also like the easy way that I can enter Technorati tags when composing a blog entry, as well.
  • The ability to quickly integrate photos from Flickr is a nice touch.
  • I would like to see more of the same extensions that I am used to using in Firefox made available for Flock.

Overall, I am positively impressed with this new, highly touted web browser. However, it [did not] elicit as much of a whiz-bang, gee-that-is-totally-awesome kind of experience for me as I had thought. I’ll keep using it and seeing how it develops and improves over time.

Google Scholar and OpenURL

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Google Scholar recently began what it describes as a “small pilot project” with a number of libraries, to link Google Scholar search results through their OpenURL services. See Google Scholar Preferences for a complete list of current libraries participating in the project.

It took me only a few minutes to achieve much the same thing for my institution, thanks to the work of Peter Binkley at the University of Alberta and the folks at Openly Informatics. Students and faculty at Taylor who use the Firefox web browser (and in my opinion, more of them should be using Firefox) can add in an extension that will make Google Scholar results link directly through the “Get It! @ Taylor” OpenURL service that I set up.

Answers.com

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This ResourceShelf announcement about the availability, for free, of a service called Answers.com, is worth noting. I am embarrassed to say that I had never heard of GuruNet (Answers.com’s predecessor). I’ve used this service a little bit and think it is good enough to advertise more widely for users of my library. I’ve also downloaded and installed the 1-Click Answers.com software and like it. With this you can point to any word or phrase in your web browser, do an Alt-Click, and this will query Answer.com for you. Great stuff.

Long live Mozilla

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OK, yes, I confess, I’m a Mac fanatic. I’m also a Mozilla lover. If at all possible, I refuse to use Internet Explorer on my WinXP PC at work. Instead, I use Mozilla Firefox, which gets my vote for the best web browser (or at least, one of the best) currently out there. The latest version even offers integrated RSS functionality. See this posting from Lockergnome’s RSS & Atom Tips to read more.

[Earlier today, Matt reminded me that he had recently posted something to his blog along the same lines as what I've written here. But his is a much more articulate critique of IE and defense of Firefox.]

Safari 1.2

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Just proved the usefulness of RSS once again…having heard via MacCentral that today, Apple released a new version of the Safari web browser. Unfortunately the one thing that remains the one problematic site for which I’d like to use Safari, OCLC’s Connexion service, still won’t work in spite of the improvements in this new version. Oh well.