Second Beta Release of Firefox 4 Arrives

The second beta release of the next version of Firefox is now available.

Download Firefox 4 Beta 2 from Mozilla and test it out. Windows, Mac OS X and Linux builds are available in multiple languages. We were originally expecting it to arrive last Friday, but the release was delayed a few days for quality assurance testing.

Keep in mind, this is a pre-release version of the browser, and it may not be entirely stable. But it should be stable enough for daily use, and it will give you a heads up on all the new goodies coming in Firefox 4 when it’s officially released this fall.

Tuesday’s release has a number of new features, including support for CSS 3 transitions, better handling of retained layers on pages and a new feature in the add-ons manager that confirms when an add-on has been installed. There are also the requisite performance boosts and stability improvements, so if you’re running beta 1, definitely consider upgrading.

The feature sure to generate the most chatter is something new for Mac OS X users: a new tabs-on-top interface. Windows users got the tabs-on-top look as the default interface in Beta 1 earlier this month. With beta 2, the change arrives on Macs. The new beta also enables App Tabs, a similar concept that lets you miniaturize the tabs for common web apps — e-mail, your calendar, or other apps you use multiple times a day — and store them in the tab bar for quick access.

Firefox 4 Beta 2, with the tabs on top on the Mac. The setting can be toggled in the browser's View menu

The move to tabs-on-top is a growing trend among browser vendors. It was popularized by Google Chrome, which has shipped with top-tabs as the default since its birth two years ago. Reaction has been mixed — Opera now puts the tabs on top, and Safari tried the same thing in a beta release thing before abandoning it. And there are some within the Firefox user community who fear Mozilla is making the switch just to chase the latest design fad.

Mozilla’s lead user experience designer Alex Faaborg defends the decision, saying it has nothing to do with fashion. By putting the tabs on top, he says, Firefox 4 will be better equipped to run web applications that sit in their own tab.

These UI tweaks turn the tab bar into something much closer to a dock or a task bar — a fitting change, since the browser is becoming something much closer to a GUI for an operating system. Of course, if you don’t like your tabs up top, you can always choose the old look in the browser’s View menu.

The final browser is expected in October or November, and you can read our preview of Firefox 4 on Webmonkey.

This article originally appeared on Webmonkey.com, Wired’s site for all things web development, browsers, and web apps. For more from Webmonkey, follow the links at the end of the article.

Illustration at the top courtesy of Mozilla.

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Report: Mobile Geo-Marketing Not Where It’s At, Yet

Marketers should avoid advertising on Foursquare and other location-based social networks because not enough people use them, according to a Forrester Research report. Only four out of every 100 online adults have ever used a social service that tracks their locations — and only 1 percent use such a service more than one time per week, according to Forrester.

Location-targeted advertising on mobile devices holds lots of promise for marketers, because they will be able to send ads to people, based on where they are and where they’ve been, along with other methods already in use. However, the market for location-based apps and services is still far too immature to support a robust advertising industry, claims Forrester, except for brands that want to run small tests of how to target male users.

“The market is quite nascent, with only a reads few million consumers using geo-location apps monthly,” an excerpt from the $500 study. “Marketers need to know what audiences can be reached with these services, which companies — if any — are ready for prime time, and whether LBSNs [location-based social networks] align with business objectives. Forrester recommends that bold, male-targeted marketers start testing, but that most marketers should wait until they can get a bigger bang for their buck, when adoption rates increase and established players emerge from the fray.”

Wired.com obtained a copy of the report, which also concludes that the few people who are using Brightkite, Dopplr, Foursquare, Gowalla, Loopt, Scvngr, StickyBits, Whrrl and other location-based social networks tend to influence their friends and family, making them good advertising targets. They tend to be young males with college degrees living in households that pull in an average of $105,000 per year, and are more likely than the typical online American to check their cellphones from a store for product information before making a big purchase — a big factor for marketers looking to sway buying decisions at brick-and-mortar stores.

Another key finding: Facebook and Twitter “are both in prime position to combine their mastery of social networking with mobile location.” Twitter appears to be in better shape in this regard, having launched TwitterPlaces in June, which lets people tag their tweets with their locations (and lets others view tweets associated with a given place by searching for that tag).

Facebook, on the other hand, appears to have blown it, for now anyway. The site’s recent privacy imbroglio, which became front-page news on mainstream publications due to the way it was handling (or mishandling) sensitive personal data, was timed horribly, according to the study, because users will only divulge their locations to services they feel will maintain high privacy standards.

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Reddit Versus Digg: A Rivalry by the Numbers

As with the famously feuding Sharks and the Jets, the rivalry between Digg and Reddit is more about how much the two social news voting communities are alike than different.

But for those interested in the differences, here’s a great infographic of a two-week study of the sites, which confirms Redditors’ suspicions that Diggers borrow from Reddit more than vice versa.

Some other stats of note:

  • More than half of the popular Reddit links go to pics hosted on Imgur, a photo-sharing site created by a Redditor, while Digg’s top destination is YouTube.
  • Reddit is also highly self-referential, with over a quarter of the top links pointing to Reddit.com. Reddit users can create self-referential posts to ask questions of the community like “What’s your favorite little seen movie?” Reddit also features the Ask Me Anything, or AMA, section, where users use throwaway accounts to talk about their jobs or life — a fascinating, if not always credible, section of the site.
  • Digg’s top traffic is more focused on traditional news sites, with leanings towards The Huffington Post and British sites like the UK Guardian. Wired.com stories also fare well on Digg, but don’t make Reddit’s graph at all. That’s interesting, in no small part, because Reddit and Wired.com are both owned by Condé Nast.

The chart was created by Rate Rush, a personal finance startup.

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App Turns Google Into Music Locker Before Google Has The Chance

The Cloud Music app downloads music from folders in my Google Docs account and stores them on the iPhone for local playback.

Reports continue to trickle out about Google’s music service, set to launch later this year. But a tiny upstart beat has already the tech behemoth to the punch, in a sense, by building a roll-your-own music service accessible from any Apple iOS device onto the Google Docs infrastructure.

Cloud Music, a $2 app for the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad, allows users to play back MP3s files stored in a free Google Docs account. One simply uploads songs and albums albums to Google Docs, either organized by folder or individually. Then, the app connects to Google Docs and sends your music to you over your cellular or WiFi connection, just like Google’s official music service will do — whenever it launches.

Granted, Cloud Music isn’t perfect — it can’t play anything until it downloads to the app’s local memory cache (no streaming), for instance. On the upside, that means you can play your music even without a good connection — and without affecting your limited AT&T data plan, which is the bane of all cloud-based media services.

A free Google account comes with 1GB of storage for documents, which is enough for about about 24 albums. If you want to exceed that, you can pony up $5 per year for 20GB of storage (more for more), potentially allowing all of your music collection to be stored on Google Docs and accessed through Cloud Music.

This app (via Music Ally) works pretty well, considering that it costs a one-time payment of $2, and its integration with Google Docs is a clever kluge.

The Cloud Music app sees all your Google Docs — select the music folder to download its songs to the iPhone (phone numbers associated with recordings have been intentionally obscured).

When Google unveils its actual music service, we expect it to offer a similar ability to play back one’s own music collection, due to the company’s acquisition of Simplify Media, which made software specifically for that. But in addition, Google reportedly plans to negotiate licenses with labels and publishers to offer users a monthly music subscription along the lines of MOG or Rhapsody.

Google’s Android vice president Andy Rubin has been talking to Harry Fox Agency, which represents music publishers about clearing those rights, according to the New York Post, which sees the talks as “a sure sign that talks with the labels have gone smoothly enough for Google to move to the next level.”

In addition, the Post says, Google Music will link up with the company’s popular search engine in some way.

Meanwhile, Google’s music attorney Elizabeth Moody echoed what we’ve heard about the future of on-demand music services in a recent Billboard interview: that the industry will no longer license free, ad-supported music services. That means Google Music, unlike Cloud Music, will charge a monthly fee. (Video services that include music, such as YouTube, are tolerated by the labels because they command higher ad rates than do audio-only services.)

The Post’s sources expect Google Music to launch in November or December. For now, if you want to build your own Google music service, try Cloud Music (iTunes link).

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Ask.com Returns to Answering Questions, Web 2.0 Style

For Ask.com, what is old is new again.

Starting Tuesday, the search site that refuses to die is re-reinventing itself as a question-answering service. This time Ask.com is adding a Web 2.0 twist on its origins as a site that promised to understand what you were asking and provide the one right answer.

Ask.com rose to dizzying heights in the original dot-com boom when it was known as Ask Jeeves. Its stock rose to more than $300 a share a few months after its 1999 IPO, before quickly plummeting in the inevitable crash to less than a dollar — risking being delisted from NASDAQ. Seeing the rise of Google, the company ditched its editor-powered results for a smart alogrithm and introduced a bevy of innovations later copied by its bigger rivals, including Google.

With those innovations, Ask.com rebounded a bit, retaining a distant fourth place in search. That isn’t a bad place to be — given the company still ranks in the top 10 of internet properties, above eBay and Amazon in terms of monthly visitors.

But now question-centric services are hot again, including the long-running Yahoo Answers, the hot new start-up Q&A site Quora, the Google-purchased Aardvark, the test-message-focused Cha Cha and Facebook’s rumored social network–based question-answering service.

In short, Ask.com realized that fortune had miraculously returned the company to the catbird seat.

The company’s formerly unavoidable commercials — featuring an animated version of P.G. Wodehouse’s famous valet Jeeves — turned out to be so enduringly persuasive, that despite the company’s retirement of the mascot years ago, people still think of Ask.com as the place online to get questions answered.

Oddly, that held despite the fact that the hundreds of young liberal arts graduates the site originally relied on to build an answer database had long since been laid off.

“When you ask people what site to use for asking questions, we are No. 1,” Ask.com President Doug Leeds said in a phone interview. “We have had more questions in one day than Quora has in its lifetime.”

The revamped Ask.com now uses algorithms to answer questions, returning an answer as the top result, without requiring a click-through. Traditional style search results are also returned beneath the “answer.”

And now, as a backstop, the site is offering a way to ask a question of a community of volunteer Ask users who answer questions in minutes — which are fed back to the searcher through e-mail and mobile apps. Ask.com volunteers are only sent questions relevant to subjects they say they are interested in, and answers are added to the index of known answers, so that volunteers aren’t asked to repeat their answers again. Continue Reading “Ask.com Returns to Answering Questions, Web 2.0 Style” »

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iPad Owners Are ‘Selfish Elites.’ Critics Are ‘Independent Geeks.’ Discuss.

Bill Klein models a photo of Steve Jobs on his new iPad at the Apple's Fifth Avenue store on launch day, April 3. Klein, visiting from Boise, ID, and says this is only the second time he's waited in line to purchase a new release--the first being book seven in the Harry Potter series. Klein "didn't expect it to be as awesome as it is." Bryan Derballa/Wired.com

It’s not exactly official, but should also surprise no one: According to a new study the psychological profile of iPad owners can be summed up as “selfish elites” while have-not critics are “independent geeks.”

Chart courtesy of MyType

Of course the “haves” would probably call the “have nots” “cheap wannabes” to which the “have nots” would retort: “FANBOI!!”

Which is why we should stick to the science.

Consumer research firm MyType conducted the study, in which opinions of 20,000 people were analyzed between March and May. The firm’s conclusion was that iPad owners tend to be wealthy, sophisticated, highly educated and disproportionately interested in business and finance, while they scored terribly in the areas of altruism and kindness. In other words, “selfish elites.”

They are six times more likely to be “wealthy, well-educated, power-hungry, over-achieving, sophisticated, unkind and non-altruistic 30-50 year olds,” MyType’s Tim Koelkebeck told Wired.com.

96 percent those most likely to criticize the iPad, on the other hand, don’t even own one, although as geeks, they were slightly more likely to do so than the average population — and far more likely to have an opinion about the device one way or the other (updated). This group tends to be “self-directed young people who look down on conformity and are interested in videogames, computers, electronics, science and the internet,” said Koelkebeck.

One might expect people with an interest in videogames, computers, electronics, science and the internet to be interested in a device that lets you play videogames, functions like a computer, is made of electronics, relies on science and connects to the internet, which suggests there would be a high convert rate if the “have nots” just went to an Apple Store for the afternoon.

Why does the iPad apparently appeal to self-centered workaholics who value “power and achievement” and tend not to be kind or to help others (iPad owners in the Wired.com ranks notwithstanding)? MyType speculates that one factor could be the device’s high price tag, and because screen-bound workaholics are likely to want another screen with which to stay engaged. The urge to include another screen in one’s life correlates strongly to seeing value in connecting to information in a new way, which is basically a nice way of saying what a lot of people were saying when the iPad was released: What do you need one for, really?

As to the critics-who-are-a-test-drive-away-from-being-fans, the study found that “bashing the iPad is, in a way, an identity statement for independent geeks,” wrote Koelkebeck.

“As a mainstream, closed-platform device whose major claim to fame is ease of use and sex appeal, the iPad is everything that they are not.”

Ouch. For the record: Koelkebeck said it, not we.

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Early Birds Will Dig Chrome Canary

People who like to run pre-release versions of browsers in order to access the latest features have a new choice: Google Chrome Canary.

Canary has all the bleeding-edge features found in the developer and beta releases of Google Chrome. But unlike the other channel releases, Chrome Canary allows you to run the pre-release browser without overwriting other installations of Chrome on the same system. So, you can now run a regular version of Chrome and a pre-release, auto-updating version of Chrome on the same computer at the same time.

You can download Chrome Canary today, but it is a Windows-only release for now. We expect Google to follow with canaries for other operating systems soon.

Early adopters — mostly curious geeks and developers working with the latest web standards — prefer to run beta versions of browsers. Beta testing allows them to gain intimate first-hand knowledge of the new capabilities that will be found in the next versions of each browser. But beta versions and regular versions of the same browsers both access the same file resources on your computer, a restriction that prevents you from running two different versions side-by-side. Try launching a Firefox 4 beta while Firefox 3.x is open. You’ll see an error: “Only one copy of Firefox can be open at a time.”

On the fence about running an unstable pre-release browser? Canary can help you take the plunge safely.

Chrome Canary side-steps this issue. As Google engineer Huan Ren explains on the Chromium-dev list, “the installer will install Google Chrome canary build to a separate directory with different default user profile, short cuts, and icons, i.e. everything should be separate from existing Google Chrome installation.”

With this release, there are now four versions of Chrome available. The others are “dev,” the least stable build intended for developers, “beta,” which is more stable than dev but not fully baked, and the regular Chrome release, the rigorously-tested version that’s the default option for the public.

On the same developer’s e-mail list, Google’s Mark Larson says Canary will be the most bleeding-edge of all Chrome builds. It will auto-update more frequently than any of the other versions available to developers.

This article originally appeared on Webmonkey.com, Wired’s site for all things web development, browsers, and web apps. For more from Webmonkey, follow the links at the end of the article.
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The Power Of Social Media, Part 2

It’s no easy feat to engineer a viral video, and even harder when that video is an advertisement. But when it happens, the payoff can be huge.

Sales of Old Spice body wash more than doubled earlier this summer, coinciding with the rise in popularity of its social-media-friendly online ad campaign in which be-toweled former NFL wide receiver Isaiah Mustafa answered specific viewers’ questions in a series of hastily produced videos appearing in near real time.

During the four weeks ending June 13, market research firm SymphonyIRI (cited by Ad Age) found that sales of the product were 106 percent higher than during the same period last year.

The videos attracted questions from Ashton Kutcher and other web-friendly celebrities and scored more than 15 million views. “The man your man could smell like” is a model for other brands learning how to advertise effectively in an increasingly saturated marketplace.

Rather than releasing ads online, Procter and Gamble’s ad firm created a two-way experience that allowed select audience members to influence the content of the ad campaign. It became part of the conversation on Twitter and Facebook (because that’s how people submitted their questions), and included lots of quirky elements and props to amuse web viewers, such as that fish that kept falling into Mustafa’s hands from out of nowhere.

The tagline on the YouTube video that started it all (above) features the same sort of transparent irreverence that plays so well elsewhere on the web: “We’re not saying this body wash will make your man smell into a romantic millionaire jet fighter pilot, but we are insinuating it.” Everyone is in on the joke, and as a result, Procter and Gamble’s body wash, which had suffered over the last year, reversed those losses in just four weeks.

Social media was likely a huge factor in that increase, but a coupon program may also have played a part. While Old Spice enjoyed the biggest gain in market share of any body wash over the four weeks ending June 13, according to the study, two of its competitors also had big sales increases: Gillette and Nivea. As AdAge points out, those brands, along with Old Spice, launched major coupon programs during that time frame, so it’s hard to say for sure how much of the increase was due to the commercials, and how much was due to the coupons.

But one thing is clear: These videos have been watched millions of times, and attracted immeasurable attention on social networks, including tweets and Facebook status updates from civilians and celebrities who normally don’t send out ads in their feeds. That level of success will be hard to duplicate, but you can bet that countless other brands are already trying.

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The Energy Department Has A New Commitment to Solar (And A New Blog)

The Department of Energy launched a new blog last week, the aptly named (yet uninspiring) Energy Blog. Among other announcements and musings (OK, really more statements than deep thoughts) is a call to develop three Energy Innovation Hubs, one of which will drive research to turn sunlight into fuels.

This is not the first time the Obama Administration has shelled out for sunlight fuels. Last October, ARPA-E, the advanced projects research group at the Department of Energy, gave out $23.7 million in grants to startups and universities experimenting in the relatively new field of direct solar fuels. The current award will give out up to $122 million over the next five years to one Hub for developing this one technology.

The Energy Innovation Hubs will be modeled after the Manhattan Project, the AT&T Bell Laboratories and on the three $25 million-per-year DOE Bioenergy Research Centers. The other two Hubs will research energy efficiency in buildings systems and modeling and simulation for nuclear reactors.

For the sunlight fuels, there are already various universities that are working on direct solar fuels, including the University of Minnesota, MIT, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Penn State. BioCee and the University of Minnesota wants to take sunlight, carbon dioxide and two organisms (cyanobacteria for sunlight capture and shewanella for metabolic transformation) to produce a liquid hydrocarbon, while MIT-spinoff Sun Catayltix uses sunlight to spilt water to produce hydrogen.

The DOE is hoping that these Hubs will be able to lay the groundwork with critical research to the point where the technology can be handed off to the private sector.

Among the other chatter from Scott Blake Harris, DOE blogger and General Counsel for the Department of Energy, is a call for public written comments on how to meet smart grid goals. The blog has a link to check out what’s already been gathered and also to submit additional feedback via email by August 9, 2010 to help shape a report due out this fall about modernizing the grid.

The Energy Blog feels a lot like the DOE News page, although you don’t find a lot of calls to tweet the DOE on the news page. The information, like updates on the Global Energy Efficiency Challenge (super-efficient appliances, energy efficiency for large commercial buildings, smart grid action, getting 20 million EVs on the road by 2020 — all lofty ideals with vague roadmaps and funding), is presented in the nearly same format as it would be in other sections of the DOE website.

Also, as this is not Twitter, and certainly not Gawker, there is not likely to be any real additional breaking information, insider views or gaffes that come across this blog. Not unless you count the fact that their RSS feed tab was broken today.

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IPad Gets The University Treatment This Fall

The iPad is about to have its academic chops put to the test this fall in a number of programs around the country. Colleges and universities are looking to adopt the iPad as a collaborative tool, a standardized mobile device to integrate into curriculums, and, in some cases, even a cost-saving device.

Oklahoma State University plans to begin a pilot iPad program this fall, with students in certain courses offered by the School of Media and Strategic Communications and the Spears School of Business receiving iPads to use with those courses. The program will be used to determine how effective iPads can be as tools to enhance learning as well as how such mobile devices can be integrated into the workplace.

“This limited pilot will be focused on fields of study where we believe we can best determine the higher education value of the iPad,” Bill Handy, visiting assistant professor in OSU’s School of Media and Strategic Communications, told Macsimum News. “We will evaluate the academic enhancement to the courses, how the iPad and its specific apps and web-based tools can be integrated in this capacity, and perhaps most importantly, how the integration of these mobile tools can expand the tactical abilities of students as they enter the workforce.”

Though an iPad starts at $499 and can cost as much as $829 for the top-end model, there is potential for cost savings, as well. The university has already identified one class where the textbook in ePub format costs $100 less than the dead-tree version. With a typical class load of five courses, it could be possible to completely offset the cost of a device like an iPad in textbook savings alone. (At least, this is true if you’re comparing the iPad against a stack of brand new textbooks; the savings may disappear if used books are brought into the comparison.)

The Illinois Institute of Technology has even more ambitious plans to integrate iPads into academics. A technology initiative will give all incoming freshman undergraduates—about 550 students—an iPad to use as a technological enhancement to the curriculum. Because all freshman are required to take several introductory courses, such as “Introduction to the Professions,” software, e-texts, and other resources will be uniform for those courses.

With a typical class load of five courses, it could be possible to completely offset the cost of a device like an iPad in textbook savings alone

“We can ensure everyone has the same hardware and software, and it makes it easier to integrate into the curriculum,” Evan Venie, associate director of media relations for IIT, told Ars. “But we also want to open it up to other faculty that want to integrate iPad support into their courses—most of the faculty are very interested in leveraging the potential the iPad offers in the academic environment.”

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