The feature allows companies to write JavaScript code into their emails, turning them into small live widgets with up-to-date information. The update builds off Hotmail’s Active Views platform, which allowed e-mail users to see a preview of pictures or videos in an email. Microsoft said the advance is the next logical step for e-mail, as it evolves from text and rich HTML to JavaScript.

Currently e-mail users often receive HTML ads that direct users back to websites. But the information in the ads can often be out of date by the time a readers uses it, and the task of clicking through to a web site is enough to discourage some users. But by keeping it all in the e-mail, marketers can eliminate one hurdle in engaging users. For example, an Orbitz customer can start browsing for hotel choices from an e-mail. Completing the purchase will apparently still require a visit to Orbitz.com, but much of the hunting will occur in Hotmail.

Microsoft said other partners like Netflix and LinkedIn will also join the program soon, allowing people to manage their Netflix account or accept LinkedIn invitations from their inbox.

One of the problems that has kept this from happening in the past was security concerns over JavaScript. There has been no way in the past to run JavaScript code without isolating and allowing it to be used maliciously. But Microsoft said the Active Views platform is secure and allows protects users from potential attacks. Microsoft is reportedly only allowing trusted services to use this feature and will use OAuth to connect user inboxes to third-party services. This could be a major issue if Microsoft is proven wrong on this and consumers have their e-mails and their computers compromised. That will be one of the things Microsoft will likely monitor with its pilot program.

It’s unclear how much use non-Hotmail users will get out of this advance or how many companies will be allowed to leverage this tool. For now, only Hotmail users who sign up for interactive emails from the participating companies will receive them. But if Microsoft can prove this is a secure way to bring this functionality to e-mail users without opening them up for attacks, look for other e-mail providers to go down this route.

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Since the dawn of the Internet, it’s been an article of faith that connection speeds will get faster and costs will drop. We might be seeing the end of that trend. If predictions are correct, we’ll be facing a mobile bandwidth shortage in just a couple of years.

Once upon a time, web developers knew that we had to keep graphics to a minimum, since many Internet users had slow dial-up connections. Today, we’ve become dependent on multimedia, which, in many cases, is a crutch for those who don’t have the time or just don’t want to bother to write effective site content. This is a bad idea. Sites with content that is wholly, or mostly, contained in videos are probably not reaching:

• Most of the people who use mobile devices, including iPhones. Over 50 percent of Internet shoppers are using mobile devices, most of which don’t support Flash, and have small screens that don’t display images — especially moving images — well.
• Many people with mobile connections who have data plans that cap bandwidth use. Exceeding those caps can be very expensive. You and I are probably already considered part of the “mobile workforce,” and this category is growing rapidly. One-third of all workers are anticipated to be mobile by 2013. These users will likely be on capped connections.
• People who don’t install Flash for security reasons.
• People with old browsers.
• People with visual disabilities.
• People who are behind corporate firewalls.
• People who use software or browser add-ons that block multimedia content.

If you’re a web developer, or are updating your web presence, try not to get too dependent on video, audio and other bandwidth hogs. I like a friendly multimedia experience as much as anyone. But do yourself a favor and ask these questions.

• Is this video (or audio) really necessary, or is it being included because it’s easier than actually writing a cogent description of what the site is about?
• If you must include a video, then what will people see if they can’t load the file? Will the site degrade gracefully? That is, will people see helpful alternative content?

It’s possible that faster, better and cheaper bandwidth may be on the horizon. Google seems to want that. But they are also pushing projects to increase the efficiency of the web. So living with limited bandwidth may be the next “inconvenient tech truth,” and we should plan our web projects accordingly.

How can you make your web projects more bandwidth-efficient?

Image from sxc.hu user CDWaldi

In Firefox 3, there was support for color profiles in tagged images, but it was disabled by default. Christopher Blizzard has a good post up on the support for color correction for tagged images found in Firefox 3.5. He compares images rendered by Firefox 3, Firefox 3.5 and Photoshop.

Firefox 3.5 has support for web fonts (check out this video of Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie demonstrating web fonts to Aliza), and you can find a good demonstration of how to use them and some of the new CSS features in the browser here.

One of the biggest new additions in Firefox 3.5 is the TraceMonkey JavaScript engine, which can really speed up many web applications. Here, you can find a good video demonstration of what TraceMonkey brings to the table, comparing Firefox 3.5 to Firefox 3.

There are new geolocation features built into Firefox 3.5, and you can find a good discussion of how to work with them here. Some users don’t want the geolocation features enabled for privacy reasons. If you want to disable them, Lifehacker has a good description of how to do so here.

Especially if you’re a web developer using Firefox 3.5, it’s a good idea to keep up with the posts at Mozilla Hacks on how to use the many new features. The folks posting the demos are from Mozilla, and the information runs pretty deep, so it should help you get the very best out of your new browser.

Have you switched to Firefox 3.5 RC? If so, what new features do you find yourself excited about or using most?

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I’ve been using the beta for some time now as my everyday browser. In my experience, the beta of 3.5 has been far more stable than 3.0, particularly when I have large numbers of web apps open, so I would recommend switching to 3.5 RC1 if you’re not using it already, even though it’s not the final version.

I ran the new RC1 through the Sunspider JavaScript benchmarks. It appears to be about 12 percent faster than beta 4, scoring a time of 2200 ms compared with beta 4′s 2500 ms, but as I didn’t run the tests in parallel you should take that with a large pinch of salt. While it’s not quite as snappy as Google Chrome (by far the quickest browser available, which scores 1500 ms, according to my benchmarks), this new version of Firefox is still a very fast browser. This improved performance, coupled with the ever-increasing bandwidth available to users, should give developers much more scope to create powerful web apps with desktop app-like capabilities — leading to many more useful web apps becoming available for web workers.

Have you switched to Firefox 3.5 yet?

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
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