Photo by Pinar Ozger, pinarozger.com

“Some businesses literally threw me out of the meeting five minutes in when they realized I asked them to move their emails outside of their firewall,” remembered Google’s  Rajen Sheth at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference in San Francisco Thursday. Sheth is known as the father of Google Apps, and he told his audience Thursday that establishing these apps what a bit of an uphill battle.

Even Google’s executives initially didn’t believe in the idea, and it took months to finally get the approval for one single engineer. Seven years later, Chrome Google Apps have evolved into a huge success story with four million business customers.

However, Sheth already has his next battle picked: He is now Group Product Manager of Chrome for Business at Google, and in this role is trying to sell Chromebooks to enterprise customers. “I feel like it’s a déjà-vu,” he said when asking about the challenges around establishing the device in the enterprise world. Some people already get it, he said, others aren’t quite there yet.

Google officially introduced the Chromebook at its Google I/O conference in May, and is charging enterprises $28 per month and device. Sheth said that Google wants to do to the desktop with Chromebooks what it did with Apps for enterprise IT. The upside for webworkers and companies alike is that the individual device matters much less than before. “We want to get to a point where any device is your device,” he said, adding that he doesn’t even carry a computer anymore. “I know when I log into my Chromebook at home its the same as my Chromebook at work,” he explained.

So how can Google win this battle and repeat the success of Google Apps? Sheth said that the product is continuously getting better, and also implied that there could be products other than laptops and the workstations currently available. “We are building it as a generic operating system,” he said, explaining that it would be up to the CE partners to come up with compelling form factors.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

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Syncpad Webnotes is actually an add-on for yet another Chrome extension, Syncpad for Simplenote; if you want to install Syncpad Webnotes you must first first install Syncpad (which is a full-featured plain text client for Simplenote). Once you’ve installed both extensions and set up Syncpad with your Simplenote account credentials, you can add sticky notes to any web page by clicking Webnotes’ icon next to the address bar; notes ca be repositioned on the page by dragging and dropping. Sticky notes are automatically synchronized to your Simplenote account and so will also appear other machines that you’ve installed Webnotes on. You can also access these notes in other Simplenote clients; Webnotes just adds a specially-formatted line to the each note to identify that it is a Webnotes sticky note and tell it where to position the note on the page. As a simple way to add contextual notes to a web page, Syncpad Webnotes works really well.

Syncpad Webnotes requires a free Simplenote account.

(via Addictive Tips)

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That’s an impressive result for Google’s WebKit-based browser, which was only released in December 2008. One of the reasons Chrome originally gained so much traction, apart from its novelty, was its clean design, blisteringly fast V8 JavaScript engine and support for newer web standards, which, when Chrome was released, meant it ran complex web applications, like Gmail and Google Docs, much faster than the crop of browsers that existed at the time. Its release forced the other browsers vendors to catch up, even Microsoft, sparking a new round of browser wars. This resulted in an across-the-board improvement of browsers that’s not only good news for users, it’s good for Google, too, as the company wants to make using its web apps feel as close to a desktop experience as possible.

Note: Browser market share statistics should always be viewed with a healthy slice of skepticism, as they can be skewed depending on where the data is collected from. StatCounter Global Stats are based on aggregate data collected on a sample exceeding 15 billion page views per month (4 billion from the U.S.) from the StatCounter network of more than three million websites, but it should be pointed out that Net Applications, for example, reports Chrome’s marketshare at 12.5 percent in May.

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Once installed, the extension adds a new “Snooze” button to the Gmail interface, as shown above. Hit the button, and a drop-down menu appears, enabling you to choose a snooze period from five minutes to four hours, or to be reminded about the email on a specific day or at a specific time:

When the snooze period is up, the extension will then play an alert sound and pop up a desktop notification, reminding you about the email and (optionally) marking the email as unread. In the notification, there are handy links to open the email or to snooze it again:

It’s a simple idea and it’s implemented well. However, it only works on Chrome, so if, like me, you also tend to read your emails on mobile devices it may prove less useful. I’d love to see this as a Labs feature in Gmail itself and have it available on multiple platforms. Note that despite its name, Snooze Your Email for Gmail also apparently works for Yahoo Mail, although I haven’t tried it.

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The new View Later functionality is baked into the browser UI. As you can see in the screenshot above, the “View Later” button — a clock icon — sits next to the familiar bookmarking star in the address bar. Clicking that button adds the current page to the user’s View Later list, which can be accessed from the right-hand strip on the browser. The items are displayed as a searchable chronological list; each item is displayed with an excerpt and thumbnail image for easier scanning. From the demo I’ve seen, it’s a very slick implementation:

Unfortunately, the View Later tool currently doesn’t sync with other popular “read later” tools like Instapaper or Read It Later, nor does it have mobile access, which may limit its usefulness. One of the reasons I like Instapaper is its ability to save articles while browsing on my Mac to catch up with later on my iPhone. However, as the data is stored in your Facebook account, View Later will sync between RockMelt installations on different machines, and Vishria says mobile access could come in a future version.

The browser also gets a redesigned Twitter app. It now makes use of Twitter’s Real-Time API for near-instantaneous updates, and also has a redesigned UI which makes it much easier to access @ mentions and direct messages (DMs) via new tabs. The new interface looks very reminiscent of Tweetie/Twitter for Mac; Vishria describes the changes to the UI as making the app “more Twitter-y”

RockMelt’s integrated Facebook chat has also been improved, with a new unobtrusive chat bar along the bottom of the browser window, which allows users to hold multiple chat conversations simultaneously. Chat windows can be “torn off” from the chat bar and placed onto the desktop, making the browser into a much more capable chat client.

The browser has been updated under the hood, too: It’s now based on the same version of Chromium as Chrome 10, which should make for a snappier experience.

The new beta will start to roll out to users April 1.

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To check out how IE9 compares to its competitors, I installed it (which, unlike other browsers, required me to restart my machine) and ran it through a few different benchmarking tools.

Acid3

Acid3 is a benchmark which checks how well a  browser follows selected web standards. The browser is marked out of 100.

UPDATE: Replaced figure

Microsoft has made an effort to improve the standards support in IE in this release, and as you can see, IE9 scores a creditable 95 (much better than IE8 which scored a paltry 21), but it still can’t match Opera and Chrome’s perfect scores.

The HTML5 Test

Acid3 doesn’t test for HTML5, as it’s a newer web standard, so I also ran the browsers through The HTML5 Test, which provides an indication of how well they support the upcoming HTML5 standard and its related specifications.

UPDATE: Replaced figure

HTML5 support is important, because as more browsers are able to handle its advanced features, developers will be able to build much more powerful apps (see Why HTML5 Web Apps Are Going to Rock Your World). As you can see, although Microsoft has made a bit of fuss about IE9 supporting newer standards like HTML5 (even providing some online demos to show off the browser’s HTML5 chops), it’s actually lagging behind its competitors here, although none of them scores perfectly. However, I’d take this benchmark with a pinch of salt, as the standard isn’t finalized yet.

Kraken

Kraken is Mozilla’s JavaScript benchmark, primarily based on the SunSpider suite. It tests how well a browser handles JavaScript and is supposed to simulate a number of different “real world” scenarios.

UPDATE: Replaced figure

JavaScript performance is vital, because we’re all increasingly reliant on JavScript-heavy web apps. The Kraken score above is a the time in milliseconds it takes for the browser to complete the test runs; a lower score is better. Note that JavaScript benchmarks should be regarded with a healthy degree of skepticism; it’s incredibly hard to create a realistic benchmark that accurately indicates how fast a browser will be in day-to-day use, so these tests can only give an indication of how fast a browser might be. That said, once again, IE is lagging behind the best here: It took twice as long to complete the tests as Chrome, and nearly three times as long as Firefox (although it’s much better than the beta of IE9, which scored around 50,000 ms).

Overall

IE9 is a great improvement over previous incarnations; it has caught up to the pack and now doesn’t lag so very far behind the other  browsers available. In particular, Microsoft should be applauded for its efforts to support web standards in this release. However, unless you really want some of its novel features, like the ability to pin websites to the taskbar, or your choice is restricted by your employer to Microsoft’s browser, I still can’t recommend it over Firefox, Chrome and Opera.

Internet Explorer 9 can be downloaded from microsoft.com; it requires Vista or Windows 7.

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Today, the company announced an extension for Firefox that brings its intelligent data about your contacts to your Gmail account, , and it plans to roll out an extension for Chrome very soon. Gist already has a web app, iPhone app, Android app, a plug-in for Outlook and Lotus Notes and a gadget for Google Apps.

With Gist for Firefox, you get a pervasive widget in Gmail that brings up information about all the individuals mentioned in the “To:” or “Cc:” fields of an opened email. You can choose to view their various social media feeds, their profile, stats that include data on your level of interactions with that person, and notes that you can make about the person at any time.

Gist is constantly measuring the importance of the people you’re interacting with at any given time, based on the frequency of emails between you, mentions in your calendar, and how else you are connected with them such as on LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, or their listings in your CRM program such as Salesforce or SugarCRM.

Let’s face it: networking is hard. Remembering details about the many people with whom you network is even harder. Having information about the people with whom you are interacting for business is invaluable. Gist is like having a personal assistant whispering key information about someone as they are walking up to you or call you or email — just in case you’ve forgotten a few details. It is also like having that same personal assistant inform you of any important news about that person, or provide you with details of something interesting they said in the social mediasphere, so you can dash off a quick note to them. With Gist, wherever you go, or wherever you are, you can tap into the professional and social profiles of people with whom you want to network.

I think we’re going to see several other savvy companies slowly taking over their market sector by creating a ubiquity of functionality like Gist. See my recent piece on WatchDox’s iPhone app as another example. These companies realize we don’t want to be locked into one platform for accessing useful tools; they understand the value of being pervasive and always at our fingertips.

To take advantage of Gist for Firefox, you must first sign up for a free Gist account then download the Firefox browser extension. You can also read my previous article on the company Gist Adds Public Business Profiles for more about Gist features.

How do you keep up with your contacts?

image by stock xchng user salingpusa

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I’m sure that you, as a web professional, know that it’s important to use a VPN or to encrypt your connection by using https:// whenever you can. But this might be a good time to remind colleagues and friends. And there are several ways of forcing secure connections.

With Firefox, you can use:

• HTTPS-Anywhere, an add-on that comes pre-configured with rules for over two dozen popular sites, including Facebook and Twitter. You can add your own rules, but you’ll need to edit an XML file.
• Force-TLS, an add-on that has a much simpler way of adding sites to connect with securely, but it doesn’t come with any pre-configured sites.

As far as I can tell, these two add-ons coexist gracefully, so you may want to have your less web-savvy colleagues install both. That way, HTTPS-Anywhere can take care of the popular sites, and others can be added to Force-TLS (using Tools-> ForceTLS Configuration).

With Chrome, you can use the KB SSL Enforcer or Force-SSL add-ons. There doesn’t seem to be an equivalent add-on for Safari yet.

For mobile devices, you’ll want to use a VPN. There are a number of VPN apps available for iOS and Android.

How do you keep your web browsing secure?

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The extension blocks all traffic from third-party sites to Facebook servers, which keeps Facebook from gathering any data about your browsing activity on those sites, but (unlike some other Facebook Connect blocking tools) it doesn’t stop you using Facebook itself.

Facebook Disconnect can be downloaded from the Google Chrome Extensions repository. The developer (Googler Brian Kennish) says he plans on adding an omnibox icon to indicate when blocking is occurring, and that, as the extension was built in just one day, there may still be some bugs in it, although I’ve yet to find any (and the commenters on the extension’s home page all seem pretty happy, too). Note that the extension can break third-party apps on Faceboook itself.

(Via Download Squad)

Photo courtesy Flickr user rpongsaj.

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Unfortunately, however, the official TinEye Chrome extension doesn’t do the one thing that would be really useful: add TinEye to the context (right-click) menu. That’s a little odd, because the Firefox add-on does support the context menu, and it’s a much-requested feature in the comments on the official Chrome extension’s page. Fortunately, there’s now a third-party Chrome extension that does just that.

For example, say I’ve found an image of Rembrandt’s “The Night Watch,” and I’d like to find a higher-resolution version. With the new extension, I can now (as in the screenshot above) just right-click on the image and hit the “Search similar!” menu option. A new tab opens with my TinEye search results; in this case there are a couple of versions that are over 3,000 pixels wide, and several over 1,00o pixels wide:

If you’re a blogger, designer or anyone who frequently works with images, the third-party TinEye reverse search extension is worth downloading.

Found a useful third-party extension? Share it in the comments.

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(Via Download Squad)