To enable E-mail notifications, login into Google Wave. Move your mouse over Inbox (on the left). Click on the Arrow (pointing downwards) and select Notifications.

Google Wave: E-mail Notification Feature

You can opt to get notified about new and updated Waves immediately (as it happens), hourly or weekly. The notifications are sent to the E-mail address associated with your Google Wave. This will be the GMail or Google Apps (in my case) E-mail address at which you got the Google Wave invite.

I tested it with “immediately” option and found that Google Wave sends an E-mail when

• A new Wave is created and you are added as a participant
• A new Blip (message) is created in a Wave in which you are a participant
• When an existing Blip is updated in the Wave in which you are participating

Google Wave will not send a notification when:

• It has already sent you notification for a new or updated Wave. It will not send any further notification for any update in that particular Wave, till you log into Google Wave and click on the new or updated Wave.

A new Wave E-mail Notification sent by Google Wave

Issues/Bugs:

• The notifications are sent even when you are using Google Wave – logged into it and seeing the Waves. Why a notification when I can see a new Wave(s) being created and updated in front of me ? So what if I choose to click on them after sometime. Ideally the notifications should be sent after I have closed the Google Wave window on my Web Browser. I said “closed” and not logged out because logging out of Google Wave may mean to log out from other Google apps too.
• The “Immediately” notification is not so immediate. Few notifications were delayed by as long as 14 minutes! Though at times I have received the notification within a minute. This does not fit well with a real time app like Google Wave. Immediate notifications must be “immediate”, as it happens and within seconds.
• The notification settings link in the E-mail (notification) just opens Google Wave and does not show the Window or popup to change the settings. Note that this bug is a known issue as per the Google Wave blog.

Good to have in the next version:

1. There should be a provision to send notifications to any E-mail address and not only to the associated Gmail or Google Apps E-mail address.
2. The notification settings, besides being system wide and applicable to all Waves, should be present for individual Waves too. The notification settings for individual Waves should override the system wide settings. This way one can subscribe to notifications only for the Wave in which he/she is interested.
3. If point 2 is implemented, there should be an exclusive option to get notified about New Waves created by others – where you are added as a participant.

I was wanting this feature so much that last year I wrote a Robot for my own use (with a hard coded E-mail address) to send me notifications for updates in Waves. I add this Robot to the Waves of my interest. I even wrote an article in PCQuest magazine about this Robot. For those who are interested in the code, refer to this link at the PCQuest forums to download the article with the code intact. If Google Wave could bring the Notification settings to individual Waves, I would no longer need to use my Robot.

I own an Android Dev Phone 1 (a.k.a. ADP1). It was just today that Microsoft Tag Reader app for Android was announced. The Tag Reader app allows to scan, extract and store information in Microsoft Tags using the phone’s camera.

I wasted no time in firing up Android Market on my ADP1 and searched for “microsoft”. And voila Microsoft Tag Reader showed up on the top, in the list of apps. Installed it. Alternatively, one can browse to the URL  http://gettag.mobi using the Android’s web browser. This will automatically launch the Android Markert app, prompting to install Microsoft Tag Reader.

To see the app in action, you will need to have a Microsoft Tag handy. One of the quickest way is to create your own at http://www.microsoft.com/tag/. The different types of information that one can store in a Tag are URL, Free Text, vCard and Dialer. The Microsoft Tag Reader is well integrated with Android and invokes the appropriate actions for each of these types like - launching the web browser with the URL, displaying the text, storing the vCard into Android’s Contacts and launching the Dialer with the number.

Pros

• Instant and fast scanning
• Integrated with Android apps like Web browser, Contacts and Dialer

Whilst there are some cons too

Cons

• VCard: Does not store IM Address in Contact’s Chat addresses.
• VCard: This seems to be a bug. In case of commas (,) in the address or any other fields, the Tag Reader prefixes a backslash (\) to each comma. For example: an address like “124-A, New Delhi” is stored as “124-A\, New Delhi” in the Android’s Contacts 
• The app displays the text for Free Text but does not allow to copy (for copy-n-paste) – a good to have feature.

Cons aside (its likely that these will be fixed in the next version), the noteworthy point is Micrsoft Tag Reader is the first ever Android app from Microsoft!

A blog post using Google Wave for content and comments

This became possible, recently, with the introduction of the read-only access feature. I created a blog post with a Wave talking about the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) about Google Wave and a blank (to start with) Wave for comments. Click here to see this blog post. This was achieved as follows:

• Logged into Google Wave and created a new Wave about Frequently Asked Questions about Google Wave, as showed in the screenshot.
  

  A Wave about frequently asked questions about Google Wave

• Added the Public participant to this Wave. This can be done as follows:
  • Click on the + button on the bottom right pane titled Contacts to add a new contact
  • For Address type in public@a.gwave.com
  • Add this new contact by clicking on the Submit button.
  • Next add this contact to the Wave, which you want to make public. For this click on the + button on the top of the Wave.
  • On the Add Participants pop-up, search/browse, and click to add the contact named Public.
  • You will see a notification on the top of the Wave saying “You gave everyone access”.
• I gave Read-Only access to the Public contact/participant. Refer to this blog post on how to assign read-only access.
• Next I created another Wave, for comments, with just one blip or message which says: Wave your comments about the FAQs on Google Wave.
• Added the Public contact to this Wave but did not setup read-only access this time. That means, anyone (with a Google Wave account) can add/edit/delete blips/messages on this Wave. That’s what commenting is all about, right?
• To embed Google Waves in this blog post, I installed and activated the Wavr plugin for WordPress. You can download this plugin from here
• With Wavr plugin you can embed any Google Wave in a blog post using the following syntax:[ wave id = "<Google-Wave-ID> ]
  Please note that, unlike shown above, there should be no space between the opening/left square bracket and the text “wave id”.
• To find out the Wave ID of a Google Wave, Click on the Wave. Copy the URL (shown in your web browser) from googlewave.com upto the . (dot) or upto the end. Exclude the dot. Replace %252B with+ (plus). For example, in my case, the Wave IDs for the content and comments Waves are googlewave.com!w+3413MFFlD and googlewave.com!w+53bOqvqzB
• Next I created a new blog post in WordPress and embedded the Waves as follows:
  [ wave id = "googlewave.com!w+3413MFFlD" ]
  [ wave id = "googlewave.com!w+53bOqvqzB" ]
• You can change the default colors of the embedded Waves from the WordPress admin panel – Settings>Wavr. I changed the default background color and default color to #FFFFFF (white) and #000000 (black) respectively. I also set the height to 700px. Note that , you can set these options on a per Wave basis too. You can find more about it, at the Wavr’s download page.
• Last, since I wanted to encourage comments via the Google Wave only, I disabled comments to the blog post. This can be done while writing or editing the post. Click on the Discussions panel (at the bottom of the editor) and untick “Allow Comments”.

The output of the above efforts can be seen here. Be ready to catch me, in real time, when and while I update the FAQ wave. Though it is more likely that I may catch you while you are writing a comment and could reply instantaneously. After all I pledged to keep Google Wave always open in my web browser.

Amongst using regular expressions and DOM (Document Object Model) parsing, I used XPath too. XPath works great for well-formed Web pages. A HTML Web page is called well-formed when all the opening tags have corresponding closing tags and the tags are nested properly (refer to this link for more). A well-formed HTML page is also called an XHTML page.

XPath is a query language to access content on a well formed page – XHTML or XML. All the content in a Web page lie within HTML elements or tag pairs. The following is needed to extract out the content, of interest, using XPath from a Web page:

1. A well-formed Web page
2. An XPath expression for the HTML element of interest
3. XPath query using the expression

An XPath expression looks as cryptic as  .//*[@id='home_featured']/div. Here is where Firefox web browser with a plugin called FireXPath comes to help (as explained below). The second and third requirements are met by PHP (in my case) which is used for automated Web scrapping using the XPath expression.

Click and build XPath expressions
Building the cryptic XPath expression is easy and intuitive with Firefox and a couple of its plugins – namely Firebug and FireXPath. Install Firebug from here, followed by FireXPath from here and restart Firefox. As of this writing, I’m using the following versions of Firefox and the plugins:

• Firefox 3.5.6
• Firbug 1.4.5
• FireXPath 0.9.1

After, the Firefox restart, browse to the Web page of your interest. Next:

• Launch Firebug by clicking on the bug like icon on the right corner of the status bar.
• Click on the tab named XPath (in FireBug)
• Click on the arrow (blue arrow) and move your mouse over the content, of interest, on the web page
• Once the required chunk is highlighted (with a blue border), note down the XPath expression in the textfield.

For example, the screenshot below, shows the XPath expression (.//*[@id='home_featured']/div  ) for the “Featured Post” chunk, on the home page, of this blog:

With FireXPath, point your mouse on the chunk/element of interest, to build an XPath expression

A few examples of XPath expressions:

• .//*[@id='latest_post']/span[1] : The posted and modified dates of the latest post on this blog – http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com
• .//*[@id='top-stories']/div[1]/h2/a : The headline of the top story on Google News – http://news.google.com
• .//*[@id='mp-tfa']/p[1] : Contents of featured article on Wikipedia – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Main_Page

Automated scarping using PHP
With the XPath expression in hand, a PHP script as follows, can extract out the required content from the Web page:

<?php

class WebScrap
	{
	private $url;
	private $xpath;

	public function WebScrap($url,$xpath)
		{
		$this->url = $url;
		$this->xpath = $xpath;
		}

	public function GetScrap()
		{
		// use Tidy to try to make the page well formed
		$page = $this->TidyIt($this->url);

		// create a document out of the well formed content
		$domDocument=new DOMDocument();
		$domDocument->loadHTML($page);

		// create an XPath object out of the document and query it for the supplied xpath
		$domXPath = new DOMXPath($domDocument);
		$domNodeList = $domXPath->query($this->xpath);

		// Get the content (HTML) out of the NodeList returned by the DOMXPath::query
		$content = $this->GetHTMLFromNodeList($domNodeList);

		return $content;
		}

	private function TidyIt($url)
		{
		$tidy = new tidy();
		$tidy->parseFile($url);
		$tidy->cleanRepair();
		return $tidy;
		}

	private function GetHTMLFromNodeList($domNodeList)
		{
		$domDocument = new DOMDocument();

		$node = $domNodeList->item(0);   

		foreach($node->childNodes as $childNode)
			$domDocument->appendChild($domDocument->importNode($childNode, true));

		return $domDocument->saveHTML();
		}

	}

?>

Note that, the function/method called GetScrap( ) of the WebScrap PHP class first calls the TidyIt( ) method. This function uses the Tidy library to fix (if required) the HTML for well-formedness. The PHP class for Tidy is used to fetch the web page via the given URL and repair it. Henceforth the DomXPath object is used to query the well-formed Web page content for the XPath expression.

To use the above code, you will need to install PHP modules for XML and Tidy. On a RedHat/CentOS/Fedora Linux machine, these modules can be installed using the following command:

yum install php-xml php-tidy

Save the above code in a file named class.WebScrap.php (say). Subsequently, the WebScrap class can be used as:

<?php

include("class.WebScrap.php");
$scrap = new WebScrap("http://news.google.com",".//*[@id='top-stories']/div[1]/h2/a");
print($scrap->GetScrap());

?>

The code should be self explanatory for a seasoned PHP programmer. If not, shoot your questions via comments to this post. For repeated and automated Web scarping, a scheduler like Cron can be used to execute the above PHP script at regular intervals and fetch the latest content.

The Leftovers
The code above is readable, crisp and focusses on the subject. For this reason, it has deliberate exclusions.  In a real world application, you should:

• Use Curl library in PHP  or external tools like Wget to fetch the URL. Then pass on the fetched content to Tidy. Hint: use the  parseString( ) of Tidy instead of parseFile( )
• Handle errors in case of errors in Tidy and XPath.
• Fallback to other means (say regular expressions) in case of errors in Tidy or XPath querying

Note that XPath may not always give you the structured content that you desire. For example, using the expression .//*[@id='latest_post']/span[1] (for posted and modified dates of the latest post on this blog) will result into something as follows:

<strong>Posted on:</strong>
January 8, 2010
<span class="dot">⋅</span>
<strong>Last modified:</strong>
January 8, 2010 @ 4:49 pm

So there are tags and text (like “Posted on:” and “Last modified:”) to be stripped out, to get the posted date (January 8, 2010) and the modified date (January 8, 2010 @ 4:49 pm). For this, you may still have to use regular expressions and/or string manipulation functions like split( ).

It all seemed to have gone smoothly and the new server has been up and running. But one not-so-fine day, the client started complaining that some HTML pages are not displaying properly. These were showing question marks (?) and some other weird characters. I figured out that these HTML pages were generated using Microsoft Word and had those special characters (closing quotes, double hyphens etc.). I discussed with the client that this could be a web browser problem because it is not able to use the correct character set.But the client insisted that such pages used to display properly earlier, before the upgrade.  This meant I have missed redoing some configuration. The obvious suspect was at Apache web server side. After all it is Apache which is serving these web pages to the browser. Hence, if the culprit is not the web browser then it better be the web server. After parsing through the Apache’s configuration file I spotted a comment against a directive (or configuration option) called AddDefaultCharset which said:

# Specify a default charset for all content served; this enables
# interpretation of all content as UTF-8 by default.  To use the
# default browser choice (ISO-8859-1), or to allow the META tags
# in HTML content to override this choice, comment out this
# directive:

I followed it and commented out the directive and voila it worked!

To sum up, if HTML files served by an Apache web server  are not displaying special characters properly in a web browser (IE, Firefox etc.), the solution is:

• Open the Apache’s configuration file named httpd.conf (found in the directory /etc/httpd/conf for RedHat based Linux distributions) in a text editor
• Comment out, by prefixing a hash (#), the line which says “AddDefaultCharset UTF-8″ such that it looks as follows:
  # AddDefaultCharset UTF-8
  
• Save the file and reload/restart Apache server. For RedHat based distributions you can do this via “service httpd reload”

Fennec Alpha 1 is available only for Nokia N810 tablets running Maemo. But I own a Windows Mobile. Fortunately, Fennec is downloadable for Windows, Linux and Mac desktops – for users (like me) to see its glimpse, test it and give feedback.

I downloaded the Linux version from here. Extracted the archive (tar -jxvf fennec-1.0a1.en-US.linux-i686.tar.bz2). This produced a directory named fennec.  Changed to this directory and launched Fennec by issuing ./fennec.

Fennec - The first launch

With the aim not being a full fledged review of Fennec (since it is in alpha), following are a few noteworthy features:

Awesome bar: Like Firefox 3, Fennec shows the earlier visited sites as you start typing in a URL. It shows the URL and title of the sites. This allows you to quickly jump to the URL without much typing:

Awesome Bar

Optimizes Website’s dimension: Seems Fennec tries its best to horizontally fit a web page to the viewable area. A website can be scrolled vertically by dragging the mouse from bottom to top.  Following is how my Blog looks in Fennec:

Shekhar Govindarajan's Blog in Fennec

Tab browsing: As hinted on the first launch screen, drag the mouse, to the right, on the Fennec window and you will see the tabs panel. It shows the preview of all the currently open tabs as shown below:

Tabbed browsing in Fennec

You can launch a new tab by clicking on the + button or remove a launched tab by clicking on the – button on the tab preview. Fennec automatically launches a separate tab for links which open in a new Window.

Back, forward and favourite buttons: Dragging the mouse towards the left reveals the typical web browser button for Back, Previous and Bookmark/Favourites.

Drag the mouse to the left to see the typical web browsing buttons

Configuration/Preferences: Clicking on the wheel button (at the bottom), shown in the above screenshot, reveals the browser’s configuration or preferences option. But I was not able to select or change any option. Either I’m doing something wrong or it is the Alpha factor.

The preferences window

Remember password: Fennec showcases the same non-intrusive remember password prompt – as in Firefox 3 and Google Chrome. The remember password prompt is displayed on the top without stopping the subsequent (to the login) page from opening:

Remember password prompt

I browsed through GMail (non mobile version) using Fennec and found it to working fine. This means Fennec will be supporting JavaScript and AJAX intensive sites.

Miscellaneous:

• Fennec claims to support plugins and addons with several plugins like that for Java, Quicktime and DivX listed. But even after enabling them I could not see Java applets or Quicktime videos.
• It seems to remember the data filled in form fields too and displays a small popup above the fields to assist in prefilling
• Flash based websites did not work. There were no Flash plugins listed
• While not a Fennec’s issue, Websites (like mine) are not detecting Fennec as a mobile browser. The user agent string emitted by Fennec (while running on a Linux desktop) is as follows:
  

Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.9.1b2pre) Gecko/20081015 Fennec/1.0a1

Note that Fennec is not the first mobile browser from Mozilla. Earlier Mozilla had released a web browser called Minimo. Minimo is now found in the Mozilla archives. This means Fennec is the way forward. I had used Minimo on my earlier mobile which was a Windows Pocket PC (running Windows Mobile 2003). Minimo also supports tab browsing.

Fennec is said to use the Firefox’s design principles and the Gecko engine and hence I’m calling it the Firefox for mobiles. I’m not sure if Fennec and Firefox share the same code base.

Last but not the least, I played with Fennec on a Linux laptop with a mouse, keyword and a large screen. How well it works with a phone’s input and output devices can be told by someone who owns a Nokia tablet. It will also be interesting to see how the future versions of Fennec behave on smaller screens of mobile phones and PDAs.

Waiting eagerly for the WIndows Mobile version of Fennec …

With Wine ( a Windows emulator for Linux), one can run Chrome on Linux. Several HOWTOs started floating around which required upgrading or downloading/installing specific version of Wine. While I was about to get carried away by one of these, CrossOver Chromium made its debut yesterday.

The download page offers Crossover Chromium for various flavors of Linux which includes Ubuntu, SuSe, RedHat and Mandriva.

I’m running Fedora 9 on my laptop. Since Fedora is based on RedHat (actually vice versa), I opted to download the CrossOver Chromuim for RedHat from here. It was an RPM (Linux installer) which installed like a charm.

On Fedora’s Gnome desktop, a menu item (Application>CrossOver Chromium>Chromium) got created. Clicking on it launched Google Chrome! Though it took some time (about 10 seconds) to launch.

Chrome running on Linux desktop (Fedora 9)

Note:

• With desktop effects enabled, I was not able to maximize the Chrome window. Disabling the desktop effects (System>Preferences>Look and Feel>Desktop Effects) worked.
• It did not render my blog well. The top portion was screwed up. Chrome on Windows renders my blog well. Even while browsing Yahoo.com, it did not show the advertisement on the top and the Yahoo logo was cut off form the top. Bottom line: some very peculiar issue in rendering.
• Create application shortcut (Control the current page (icon)>Create application shortcuts) did not work – i.e. it did not create a shortcut on the GNOME desktop.

Crossover clearly states that Crossover Chromium is a proof of concept. Hence use it for a light weighted test drive of Chrome on Linux.

Many of us cut out articles from the newspapers if we find them interesting. Think of Web Slices to be cuttings from Web sites. But with a difference. If these cuttings (web content) are updated on the respective web sites, you will be notified, as well as your cuttings will be updated. Technically, you “subscribe to a Web Slice”, instead of saying cutting it off which may offend the webmasters

The latest post on my Blog is Web Slice enabled (or say, it is a Web Slice). In fact, it is Web Slice enabled since some time. Perhaps, some of you (who are using IE 8 ) would have noticed it.

Other web sites which are Web Slice enabled are digg.com, ebay.com, facebook.com, msn.com etc.

How to subscribe to a Web Slice

To slice out the latest post or to subscribe to the latest post on my blog:

• Download and install IE 8 from http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/default.aspx
• Once installed, browse to my blog at http://www.shekhargovindarajan.com.
• Wait for the site to load up completely.
• Once loaded you will notice, the “Subscribe to Web Slices” icon (the second icon, after the home icon on the top right) turns green as shown in the screenshot below:

A green icon indicates Web Slice(s) on the page

• Clicking on the green icon, will show you a dialog box which prompts you to add the Web Slice. Clicking the Add button, on the dialog, will place a bookmark on the Favorites bar.
• Alternatively, if you move your mouse over the latest post, you will see a green border around the latest post, and a green icon on the left, as shown below:

Move the mouse over the latest post to subscribe to the Web Slice

• By clicking on the green icon you can subscribe to the Web Slice.
• Clicking on this bookmark will show you the preview of the Web Slice (the content of my latest blog post), as shown in the screenshot below:

Web Slice Preview

• Clicking on the arrow (->) icon on the preview window will take you to the full blog post.

How does it work ?

If I write a new blog post which, upon publish, becomes my latest post, the Web Slice bookmark on your IE will turn bold. By default, the Web Slice is checked for any updates once in a day. Upon an update, the Web Slice bookmark can turn bold or even play a sound.

Right click on the Web Slice bookmark. Click on “Bold on Update”. This will make the bookmark bold, upon an update.

To play and sound, right click on the bookmark and select Properties. Click on the Settings button under “Update Schedule”. Check the box labeled “Play a sound when a monitored feed or Web Slice is updated.

Notice the numerous other options in the Properties window. Note that you can setup when to check the Web Slice for updates – which is by default set to 1 day.

How to enable Web Slice on your site

Refer to the URL http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc848871(VS.85).aspx. Read the section titled “Creating Web Slices”.

The rules are:

1. The Web Slice Block: You should have a HTML tag (like a <DIV>) enclosing the content that you want to Web Slice enable. This <DIV> tag must have the CSS class name set to “hslice” and must have an id. If you view source (the HTML source) of this blog, you will notice: <div id=“latest_post” class=“hslice”> Note that this <div> has the class set to hslice and id set to latest_post. The id must be unique. That is, no other element or tag on the page must have the same id. If you search for latest_post in the source, you will not find any other element with the same id.
2. The Web Slice Title: The title of the Web Slice or the content should be enclosed within a tag with the classname as entry-title. On my blog, I have given this class name to the anchor (<a>) tag which encloses the title of the latest blog post.
   
3. The Web Slice Body/Content: The content should be enclosed within a tag whose classname is entry-content. Earlier the content of the latest post was enclosed within a paragraph tag (<p>). But giving the <p> tag, the class name as entry-title did not show the preview of the Web Slice (as shown in one of the screenshots above). Changing the <p> tag to a <span> tag showed the preview. Note that on my blog, the content of the latest post is either the full content (in some cases) or a part of the full content. In the latter case, clicking on continue reading shows you the full content. In the latter case, the Web Slice will be marked as updated only when I update the part of the content which shows in the latest post.
   

To summarize, following is the markup structure of my latest blog post which is Web Slice enabled:

<div id=”latest_post” class=”hslice”>
—
—
<a class=”entry-title”  href=”…”> the post title </a>
—
—
<span class=”entry-content”>
the post content
</span>
—
—
</div>

Issues with Web Slices

Though Web Slices seem to be easy to implement, I thought of the following issues with them:

1. For an existing site it may not be always straight forward to implement Web Slices if there are issues like <p> not working (as explained in point 3 in the above section). I would like to have no structure change to use Web Slices.
2. If you go through the link http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc848871(VS.85).aspx, you will notice a line which says “The Web Slice preview window will not always display content the exact same way it appears on a Web page; some of the formatting is stripped away”. I could not find the documentation on what formatting is stripped away. I can see that, the Web Slice preview magically removes the continue reading, comments and category links (which are at the bottom of the latest post). And it magically redirects to the full post, when clicking on the -> (arrow) on the preview button. How come, it is detecting the first link as a useful link and discarding other links. I like magic but would like to read the documented logic behind it.
3. Web Slice only works with IE 8, officially (read “Web Slices with Firefox” below). Perhaps, RSS still remains the cross browser standard which works well to notify about updates.

Web Slices with Firefox

With Firefox 3 and a plugin called Webchunks, you can use Web Slices in Firefox! It is very similar to using it in IE. First install the plugin from the following link http://disruptive-innovations.com/zoo/webchunks/webchunks-0.30.xpi. This is the direct link to the plugin. So launch it in Firefox 3.Once installed, it will ask for a Firefox restart. After restart, if you navigate back to my blog (or any other Web Slice enabled) site, you can subscribe to the Web Slices in a very similar way as shown in the screenshots below:

Clicking on the blue icon (on the left) will allow you to subscribe to a Web Slice (if any) on the page

You can also subscribe to a Web Slice by moving the mouse over the content, as in IE 8

The Web Slice preview in Firefox 3

To sum up, I do like the visual slicing out (e.g. by moving the mouse over on the latest post) of content from the web pages. It is like I’m indeed cutting and taking off something from the website

Update:

“And it magically redirects to the full post, when clicking on the -> (arrow) on the preview button. How come, it is detecting the first link as a useful link and discarding other links. I like magic but would like to read the documented logic behind it.”

Found the logic behind this one. It follows the link (<a>) which has rel=”bookmark”. My latest blog post has two links (the title link and the continue reading link) whose rel=”bookmark”. Both of them point to the full post. So Web Slices is picking up one of them, either the first one or the last one.

1. Easy installation
2. Sleek top menu bars give more real estate to the web pages
3. Shows thumbnails of most visited pages as the default page
4. Less configuration options
5. Robust Incognito window (porn mode)

Cons (so far)

1. Not available for Linux
2. No built-in RSS reader
3. Limited configuration options
4. MS Silverlight based applications do not work
5. Cannot leverage the plethora of Firefox plugins

After lots of news and attention since yesterday, Google’s very own web browser called Chrome is finally available for download now, but only for Windows.

To start with, since I’m on Linux (Fedora 9), the download page http://www.google.com/chrome, did not show me a download link but instead prompted me to subscribe (with my E-mail) to get alerted when Chrome is available for Linux.

I subscribed to the alert and then quickly launched Win XP SP2 in VirtualBox (a VMWare or Virtual PC like virtual machine) from my Fedora 9 laptop. Went to the download page and, this time, was greeted by a download link for WinXP/Vista. Downloaded the installer (about 400KB in size). The installer when run, in turn, downloaded the browser (took about 3-4 minutes on a 2Mbps link). Following is the first look of Chrome when it got launched (automatically) after the installation:

The first launch

I should have been in the first or in one the first batches of people to download (started downloading @ 00:55 hrs IST) and run Chrome. I was regularly hitting the site when suddenly the Chrome’s page (earlier was a 404 message page) showed up Writing this line from within Chrome . Will explore and write more about this new kid in town. So do visit back! Okay, Im continuing to write about it now:

Quick Notes

• Installation, no questions asked: During Chrome’s installation, no questions were asked on where to install, what to install, what to import and what not to. The only prompt I got was when Chrome could not import Firefox’s bookmarks because Firefox was open. It imported Internet Explorer 6′s and Firefox 3′s bookmarks.
• No “default browser” nagging: Thankfully (very thankfully indeed) Chrome does not nag to make it a default browser, not even once. If you indeed want to make it the default, you can click on the “Customize and control Google Chrome” icon on the top right and then click on Options. There you will find a button to make it the default.
• Tabs are Windows:Chrome, as a norm these days, has tabbed browsing. But what is interesting is the location bar, back, forward buttons, bookmarks, tools/options menu and everything else is below (or inside the tab), as oppose to being above or outside the tab. The latter is what we see in IE and Firefox. This gave the impression that the tabs are like independent but “placed together” windows. It is a kinda  MDI (Multiple Document Interface  application.
• Non intrusive “remember password” prompt: To continue writing this post from Chrome, I logged into my Blog and Chrome displayed the remember password prompt on the top without stopping the loading of the blog admin page (the page after login). That is, it did not pop-up a box saying “do you want to remember the password or not” and did not wait for me to say yes or no to continue loading the admin page. This feature is already showcased by and present in Firefox 3.
• A Beta with an uninstaller: It was glad to see the beta with an uninstaller. Sometimes beta applications do not ship with an uninstaller but Chrome does. Though I’m in no mood to execute the uninstaller
• Installation Location and size: No, Chrome does not install in Program Files. It installs in C:\Documents and Settings\<user>\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome, where <user> is the Windows login name of the user who is installing the application. This means that Chrome installed by one user will not be available to any other user of that system. I think this is rather a thought of location for a beta application. Perhaps the final version will install in Program FIles(by Administrator) and be available to all users. The installation size (basically the size of the folder) was about 46MB! I’m assuming that it did not install files elsewhere.
• Placement in quick launch menu: This is an interesting one. Chrome’s shortcut was placed on the quick launch bar – the first icon from the Start Menu. As far as I remember new shortcuts are placed towards the end of the quick launch menu (unless you move it) . Hmm has Google done some trick here ? As said above, I installed Chrome on WinXP SP2
• Built-in Spell Check: Chrome has built-in spell checker, just like Firefox. The spell checker underlines (in red) any misspellings in the typed in text in textareas (rectangular text boxes) on any webpage.
• NO RSS ???: Chrome could not detect RSS feeds in websites. Forget that, it could not even display RSS feeds in a formatted way like IE 7 or Firefox 3. It just throws the entire, unformatted text between the RSS tags. There should be a good enough reason for this. I can only think of its beta status.

So after writing this much (as above) I went to sleep (@ 05:00 hrs IST) so that I can browse with Chrome on a fresh new day.

Started my day at around 11:00 IST and started browsing through Chrome while in bed. Now sitting at my office and what I saw and seeing, is what I’m writing:

Chrome’s default page

The default page, when Chome is launched or a new tab/window is opened, is now changed to look as follows:

Default page after some browsing

That is, the default page changed to show me the most visited sites using Chrome. Visiting my favouite website is just one click away! Makes all the sense. One may tend to visit his favourite/most visted site when he launches the browser.

But the issue is, if I want to avoid one or more of my “most visited” site from showing up, I can’t. The only option is to delete the entire browsing history. Take this scenario as an example. I’m amy be giving a presentation, I launch Chrome and everyone sees a porn site as one of my most visited sites on the projector’s screen . I would like to delete just the porn site from the most visited list. While there is a way to avoid the recording of  browsing history (which I will write about a little later), but on a day to day basis one may forget to use it.

Coming back, so the default page is the recently visited sites. But there is an option in the “Customize and control Google Chrome” menu (lets call it the Tools menu hereafter), to enter the URL and make a webpage as default. You can find this at Tools>Options>Basics (tab)>Home Page>Open this page. This webpage then shows up when you launch or re-launch Chrome. But when you open a new tab or window, Chrome still shows the most visited sites. But if you check the checkbox which says “Show home button on the toolbar”. This shows a Home button (like in Firefox). Clicking on this button will open the default page that you have set.

Next as a developer, I thought occured to me. What about all those links on websites which say “make this site your default page”. Will they work ? Went to in.yahoo.com which has the link (on top left) to “Make Yahoo! India your homepage”. Clicking on this link showed!:

When I clicked to make Yahoo my home page

Instructions for Firefox!. It asked me to drag the link to the home button – but the Chrome’s Home button did not accept a drop of a link. This brings us to two questions:

1. Is a JavaScript function or some other method required for Chrome to make a website the default page ?
2. Why is Yahoo detecting Chrome as Firefox ?

Answering the first question, I feel it is not required. It makes sense that your most visited pages compose your default page.This means the websites should detect out Chrome and hide such links to set the default page.

And Yahoo is detecting Chrome as Firefox because Chrome identifies itself (via the useragent string) as a Mozilla browser. Following is the useragent string for Chrome:

“Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US) AppleWebKit/525.13 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/0.2.149.27 Safari/525.13″

Plugins

Installation of Flash plugin is easy and does not require a manual downloading. Once installed, for the first time, the page which demanded Flash plugin automatically refreshes to show the Flash objects or movies

Trying to browse some Silverlight apps at www.silverlight.net prompted to download and install the SilverLight plugin. The plugin installation refused to install at the first go saying that the browser or the operating system (Win XP in my case) may be incompatible. Manually clicking on, to download the Windows version, installed SilverLight 2.0 Beta 2. Henceforth, upon trying to browse SilverLight applications, showed some glimpse of the SilverLight 1.0 and 2.0 applications which were very slow and unresponsive. To summarize MS SilverLight does not seem to work with Chrome. But there should have been a clear alert by Chrome stating the same, rather than users expecting for something to happen, after seeing a glimpse of something happening and waiting for it to happen (forever).

Also just, indeed just, tried my luck by trying to install a Firefox addon (namely Sage-Too) but didn’t work. No complains though, after all Chrome is not based on the Gecko engine (which Firefox uses). Chrome uses WebKit

For Java applets, if you have installed Java Runtime Environment on Windows, Chrome shows the applets.

Porn mode a.k.a. Incognito

Like IE 8′s (Internet Explorer 8)  in-private browsing (also popular as Porn mode), Chrome features Incognito window. It can be launched from the “Control the current page”>New incognito window menu (the icon before the Tools icon).

The Incognito WIndow

It launches a distinct window with an detective wearing goggles icon on the top right – giving you a go ahead to do something goofy. As you can read in the Incognito window, this window will delete any cookies or browsing history. It still stores cookies while you are browsing. So this means it will not hamper a continuous browsing session if Cookies play a role (if any) in it. That is: your browsing experience will be as usual as before. But features like “remember me” against login boxes on websites will be useless because ‘remember me” typically remembers your login and password via Cookies. But these Cookies are destroyed when you close the Incognito window.

Since Chrome claimed that the Cookies etc. gets destroyed when the Incognito window is closed, I tried to trick it as follows. I launched the Incognito window and browsed to a site with login and remember me. Checked “remember me” and then logged in. So at this point, the Cookie would have got stored on the hard disk. Next instead of closing the Incognito window, I just closed my virtual machine, simulating an abnormal shutdown. When I booted in back, and went to the login site in the Incognito window, it did not fill up the username and password. So i could not trick the Incognito window . Chrome must be performaing a clean up on start up too.

The interesting bit is, in the Incognito window, the URLs get auto completed with the URLs you have typed in the non-Incognito window. But if you have used, for example, the remember me on a Website, the password is still not remembered in the Incognito window. So it is kinda, while the Incognito window can pick up the browsing history from the normal window, it does not pick up the Cookies. Is this an unconscious miss out or a deliberate distinction ?

–Will continue to write more, watch out!—-

1. Using the Web browser in your mobile device, goto the URL http://www.google.com/gwt/n
2. In the text box, key in the URL of the website, that you want to visit.
3. Optionally, check the box “No Images” if you do not want to see/download images on the website.
4. Click on Go.
5. And you would see, a rather clean, only vertically scrolling, website.
6. Henceforth, you would like to make http://www.google.com/gwt/n the default page of your mobile’s Web browser.
   

Note:

1. Once you visit a site using the above method, and further, click on links on the site, the resulting pages will also be mobile optimized. (technically: all links in the site are rewritten to redirect through this URL i.e. http://www.google.com/gwt/n)
2. The images are actually stripped off (and not simply hidden), if you select “No Images”.
3. The mobile optimized markup has all whitespaces and newlines removed. This means a much smaller page and hence faster download on your mobile.

Webmasters may provide a link on their Website(s) to the mobile friendly version. For example: for www.foo.com the link will be: http://www.google.com/gwt/n?u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.foo.com

Screenshots: