Way of the Retainer

As Banjo Paterson would put it, there is movement at the browser station. Unless you’ve fallen off the internet in the last couple of weeks, you’ve no doubt heard that Google has released their own browser – Google Chrome. It’s based on the same original codebase as Firefox 3 and Flock (which we’ll get back to) which puts it in interesting company.

I’ve only tinkered with Chrome a little bit, but it’s targeted at being as non-intrusive and lightweight as possible. The idea is that it gets the hell out of your way, which is an admirable goal. There’s only two menus in the browser. Two. It seems to have some great support for debugging web development, as well. I’m looking forward to giving it a decent trial by fire when I start doing some fairly heavy-weight web development using the Zend framework – lots of Javascript doing sexy stuff like this, which will really put it through its paces.

I’ve only just upgraded to Firefox 3, personally. I held off for a while due to potential issues with the Delicious plugin I use. Not having Delicious was a deal-breaker, as that’s where I keep most, if not all of my bookmarks now when I can manage it. Turns out that Firefox 3’s Delicious support is fantastic! But, Flock is more what I wanted to talk about, after having tinkered with it a bit.

Since my migration south, I’ve been more and more reliant on using the web to keep in touch with friends. I’ve plugged in to Flickr, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, 43 Things, LinkedIn, Delicious, Plaxo Pulse, and Bebo. (the last two of which I’m still not really using to their full effect) All of these are great ways to keep up with friends and know what’s happening in their world (and let them know what’s happening in yours)

BUT. (like Sir Mixalot, I like big buts)

All of this can also create a lot of work to keep up with. It’s sort of the reverse of the Inbox Zero / RSS problem. Not so much having to work through a queue put in front of you, but having to find where the new information is. And for my money, Flock is fantastic at neatly summarising and pointing you at updated information. Distilling your social network updates into some simple visual cues.

It integrates with Flickr, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, and adds two new concepts – the People Sidebar – a vertical pane to the left of the browser, and the the media bar – a strip at the top of the browser.

Contacts are sorted in order of last update by default, and a summary is shown based on the site. For Facebook, this means their current status, and whether they’ve made profile changes recently. For Twitter, this means their last Tweet. For Facebook, Flickr and YouTube, a media icon is also highlighted () if they’ve uploaded media (photos or video) recently.

This is where the media bar comes in. Its purpose is to show thumbnails of new media – images or videos that have been uploaded. So if a friend uploads new photos to Facebook, I’ll see the media icon highlight for that friend. Clicking their media icon shows me a strip of thumbnails of their new photos in the media bar.

Simple, huh?

The media bar can also be customised to save favourite media streams you can look at – essentially, smart, repeatable searches based on the functionality of different sites: what’s popular on YouTube / Flickr, photos of you on Facebook, or certain tag searches on Flickr. Powerful, easy, repeatable. There’s still a lot of Flock’s functionality I haven’t tinkered with yet. The ability to blog starting with a photo/video looks neat, but it’s not how I do the majority of my posting.

So, there are some interesting choices out there when it comes to browsers at the moment.

Want a lean, stripped-back browser, with good developer support and very economic memory usage? Go with Google Chrome.

Want a flexible, pluggable browser with great developer support via plugins like Firebug? Go with Firefox 3.

Want to make social networking a lot easier? Go with Flock.

That’s my view on the whole browser thing right now. What browser do you recommend, and what’s the killer must-have feature that means you wouldn’t shift from it?

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One of the pieces of feedback I’ve consistently received in the nicest possible terms, is that what I write here is often inaccessible. (Jules Winnfield would not approve of anything less than clear communication) Now, admittedly some of the topics I talk about are so dense with technical context we could happily orbit a spoonful of their weighty matter.

With other areas however, I’m trying to reach a point where what I’m saying is easily accessible – conveyed not only clearly, but enriched through the transmission. Because I believe there are a  lot of interesting things to say about technology. A lot of them more questions than answers.

So there are two very distinct schools of thought here, that are wont to complete viciously at yearly sports carnivals, and possibly for the affection of that girl.. In order to keep them separate, I’m going to enrich my tagging scheme a little. I’m incorporating the following tags going forward, for each post to classify a target audience:

Gobbledygook – these posts are likely inaccessible due to an alphabet soup of acryonyms and required domain knowledge. But we will TRY to break through the arcane nature of the subject. We will try!

Plain English – these posts are, as much as possible, clear and plain English talking about something straightforward and accessible in the realm of technology. It may still sound like Klingon, but the intent is clarity.

Meta – it’s blogging, about a blog. These posts are where I entertain the delusion of an audience, and stand before them, tweaking knobs and dials.

Here’s to clarity, moving forward!

(also, thank you to those of you who have provided feedback along these lines – really! Otherwise I wouldn’t know that the problem exists…)

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