Sunday, December 27th, 2009 at 5:07 pm
Here’s an early New Year’s present for all fans of the Firefox browser – their mobile software, which has been in development for more than a year, is on the verge of being released. A lot of the talk in the world of browsers recently has been about Google and their Chrome offering, and so it is interesting to see Mozilla try to wrestle the momentum back from the internet giant.
It’s been a crazy few weeks in the browser world, with the introduction of Google Chrome browser extensions, and the fanfare surrounding them. Mozilla has taken a back seat to Google in the race to become the de-facto #2 in the race (behind Microsoft’s Internet Explorer), and so they’re trying to get back in the fight through the mobile product.
What can we expect from the Firefox mobile browser?
Mozilla want its users to have as close an experience to the desktop product as possible, and so they are trying to incorporate as many different options and settings as they can. This includes tabbed browsing (which up to this point has been sorely lacking in a vast number of mobile browsers, including RIM’s Blackberry software).
What will be similar about the mobile browser?
The tabs for the browser will be found on the left hand side of the screen, with easy access to a number of open pages. There has also been a promise from the Firefox development team that this will be fast software, and not a memory hog like some mobile addons and widgets can tend to be.
Look out for the Firefox mobile browser before the year is finished! That means within five days at the latest. Stay tuned for more browser news from RockNLoad in the future, including talk about the Google Chrome browser and its current war with Internet Explorer!
Tuesday, December 22nd, 2009 at 9:48 am
A recent survey by an analytics company has revealed that Twitter, one of the leading stars in mobile website accesibility and technology may not be as entrenched in the mobile web as we might expect. When asked about which brands they want to see on their mobile phones, respondents to this research placed the microblogging service as low as 16th, behind Weather.Com and even the dying dinosaur Myspace.
But what implications will this have for Twitter as a company and as an online brand? Is this good or bad news for the Web 2.0 superstar?
Twitter’s mobile brand not as big as previously thought
This means two things for Twitter. The first is that they clearly have a long way to go if they are to get the right amount of mobile market penetration that a service like this needs to compete with the likes of Facebook and Google. This last year has seen Twitter embroiled in a number of controversies, including their site being hacked embarrassingly on a number of occasions and sensitive user data potentially stolen from their servers.
The second thing for Twitter to take from this data, on a more positive note, is that the predicted demise of their service due to Facebook’s increase in its mobile service is short sighted. Since they are not dominating the mobile world (as once suspected), they have nothing to fear from an unrelated increase in Facebook’s mobile activities. They should be more worried, perhaps, that Facebook will be able to take the ground and the initiative which they themselves may want to occupy first.
Either way, this year promises to be an interesting one in social networking, with the established brands trying to win the hearts and minds of users moving into the the new decade, and new pretenders on the horizon. The web has never looked so interesting!