Gadgetell | Tech News, Reviews, and Interesting Things

Walt Mossberg is the personal technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal who has been a very influential reviewer of tech products for some time.  If you release a tech product and you want it to be successful, a good review from Walt Mossberg is a big step in the right direction, while a negative review can often prove to hurt the product in the long run.

So what does Walt think of Google’s new browser, Chrome?

Mossberg generally likes the browser, especially it’s simplistic design and the fact that it gives the most screen real estate to the web page of any browser out there.  However, he does point out that it has some flaws and is missing some features that the competition has.  Some simple features such as a progress bar to see how a web page is a loading and a way to manage bookmarks are missing.  Overall though, Mossberg says that the browser is a good start for Google that is sure to shake up the browser wars.  Since it’s in beta, it’s only going to get better over time. Check out his video review below…

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Hey, if thousands of people are doing it, it can’t be wrong.....right? That’s the million dollar question about one of the newest music sites on the Web. Songza advertises itself as a “music search engine and Internet jukebox”. Ummm, ok.  Or, one might also say they are a site you can go to in order to search out music and be able to listen to and download it for free. I’m just sayin’.

With 28 million songs instantly playable on the site, 10 month old Songza is luring in the music-seeking crowd pretty nicely.  And they make their songs playable in a rather creative way. When you go on their site and enter the song or band title of your choosing, Songza will search the huge inventory of music videos on YouTube looking for it.  Then, it streams the audio of the song, while hiding the video in an unseen margin of the browser. Pretty dang tricky, but.....is it actually legal?

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So, we’ve all been seeing the hoopla the past few days surrounding Google’s Chrome browser. First it was how exciting! Google has a new browser! Then that excitement lessened somewhat as time went on. It went from performance benchmarks being less than stellar to the fact that it was discovered that their snazzy new browser was susceptible to a carpet-bombing vulnerability that could expose Windows to malicious hacker attacks.  And now, we’re taking note of Google’s fine print in their end-user license agreement. To put it lightly, it does not look friendly in the least to the user.

Taken from their agreement terms:

“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.”

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With Google’s new nifty browser Chrome getting all the press, they’ve quietly put out Picasa 3.  Picasa is Google’s photo sharing service and it just got a whole lot of attention with some very exciting upgrades.  And like most of Google’s products, its free and striving to be as simple as possible.

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With all of the excitement yesterday coming from the new Google Chrome browser its important to remember that we already have some good browsers on the market, namely Firefox.

With progress being made on version 3, Mozilla has announced that the latest beta (Beta 1) for Firefox 3.1 will be delayed by a few weeks. According to the developers website, the code freeze was pushed back from September 9 to September 30. Mike Shaver, the interim head of engineering for Mozilla stated that “the delay was necessary so developers would be able to incorporate feedback on the earlier alpha editions.”

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Microsoft is still trying it’s hardest to compete with Google and Yahoo! for your internet searching.  It’s still trying to buy companies to do so, though it succeeded in the acquisition this time.  To help with search results, Microsoft has bought Greenfield Online, the company responsible for ciao.com.  Ciao.com is a European price comparison search engine, that is apparently quite popular.

This combined with the Microsoft Live money giving program could make for a great combination for Microsoft if they can leverage it well enough.  It should be able to actually provide links to buy products in search results now, rather than mainly links to the the manufacturers page for the product.  Sounds like a decent idea, almost like Google Shopping, but in the same page as normal search results if they implement it that way.  Now if only Microsoft can convince people to actually look at that page, that’d be quite a feat.

Read [Reuters]

Bill Gates promised frequent updates way back when they were doing the final testing of IE7. Yet somehow, it’s been almost two years before they finally released the beta mode of Internet Explorer 8 just today. Some will hurrah, some will cringe, some won’t care one way or the other. But...it’s out...and along with actually seeming to be an improvement over the previous version...it’s pretty clear that the folks at Microsoft are also using their latest browser as a clever little way to try to take over some Google ground.

I admit, I’m a diehard Firefox user. And when I checked out IE8 beta, I immediately recognized the same thing others seem to be seeing. The Smart Address Bar is very similar to the Awesome Bar in Firefox 3. When you start to type in the address bar, it tries to guess where you want to go, based on where you’ve been before. Although I have to give it to Microsoft, their Smart Bar seems to do the job even a little better. It shows history items, autocomplete suggestions, and your saved Favorites all in lists that you can collapse or expand with just a click. Also, you can delete an address from the Smart Bar with just a click as well, which is really handy for any addresses you may have in there that were typed incorrectly or if you have bookmarks you just don’t use anymore. 

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Mozilla Labs announced yesterday the release of the Initial Prototype of the latest project meant to connect the web with language - Ubiquity.  From a quote on their blog, the folks over at Mozilla Labs hope to “find new user interfaces that could make it possible for everyone to do common Web tasks more quickly and easily.”

Ok. So, what the heck does that mean? An example of what they are saying their program would be useful for could be this. You just snagged some concert tickets from a radio contest to a show happening tonight. Coolness. Only you haven’t been to this venue before, and neither has the friend that you’re emailing and inviting. Not so cool. Heck...you haven’t even heard of the band. Do you even know if you want to go? Is there anywhere to eat on the way? Now, normally, you’d have to be searching out the address on some mapping site, looking up the band for some info on them, copying all of this into an email (including either links or the map itself as well). Lots of typing, clicking, searching, copying, pasting, right? Well, this is some of what Ubiquity hopes to get rid of.

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In private beta testing mode since January, the England-based ProofHQ has just opened it’s program up to the the public. What makes it so appealing to so many is the obvious allowance for collaboration. ProofHQ makes this simple with the use of several formats on the web. Blogs, social media applications...users are able to comment and give feedback on a project that can be seen by anyone working on it by using embeddable objects.

There is no cost for this new personal version, unless you want to upgrade to a more advanced package that offers more storage.  The free package only allows for five proofs a months (50 megabytes of storage), and the upgrades run anywhere from $29 to $99 a month. However, you can get a feel for it to see what you think by taking advantage of their 14 day free trial offer. It is both PC and Mac compatible. 

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Amazon just announced the acquisition of the start-up book sharing company Shelfari. They are on a roll with literary-related purchases, as just earlier this month, they bought AbeBooks, an online seller of rare and used works.  Now, what makes this Shelfari purchase a tad more interesting is the fact that one of their main competitors is LibraryThing.  And AbeBooks just happens to own 40% of LibraryThing.  Keeping it in the family Amazon.

LibraryThing however, is not seeming to have that much respect for the Shelfari site. Just yesterday they wrote on their site that Shelfari is a “clone” and that it is “..somewhat less intellectual, less featureful”, among other zingers. And there they are practically cousins. 

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