Kido’z Browser Launches

Watch out Firefox, stand back Google Chrome. There’s a new browser in town.

Meet Kido’z, the new Internet browser designed especially for kids.

In all seriousness though, Kido’z is a fantastic idea offering safe and easy browsing for kids and direct access to the best kid’s websites.

Kido’z has been developed by KIDOZ Ltd - an Israeli startup - and built using Adobe AIR (which in turn uses the WebKit engine also shared by Safari and Chrome). The site uses a simple two arrow navigation system to allow kids with no previous experience of using a computer to be able to navigate the selected websites.

Kido’z sounds like a fantastic idea for those parents who are both concerned about what their child can view whilst on the Internet, but wish for their child to gain confidence in using a computer. Let’s hope it picks up with the under 8’s.

Google have released a “SEO Starter’s Guide” PDF document designed to help web developers understand how to improve their website’s ranking in Google.

“[The guide] covers around a dozen common areas that webmasters might consider optimizing. We felt that these areas (like improving title and description meta tags, URL structure, site navigation, content creation, anchor text, and more) would apply to webmasters of all experience levels and sites of all sizes and types. Throughout the guide, we also worked in many illustrations, pitfalls to avoid, and links to other resources that help expand our explanation of the topics.”

The PDF can be downloaded here. And here’s the original article from Google.

Yahoo! have relaunched recent acquisition IndexTools as Yahoo! Web Analytics. Currently in a private beta, Yahoo! Web Analytics tools look set to give Google a run for it’s money with real time updates, raw data formats and eventually with the release of Yahoo! Open Strategy an API that will allow developers to access data.

Yahoo! Web Analytics is an enterprise site analytics tool that provides real-time insight into visitor behavior on your website. With powerful and flexible tools and dashboards, Yahoo! Web Analytics helps online marketers and website designers enhance the visitor experience, increase sales and reduce marketing costs.

It will be interesting to see what Google do next to respond and stop customers leaving their services.

File this under rumour for the moment but Blogoscoped have just revealed that apparently Google are to release their own web browser, called Google Chrome.

http://blogoscoped.com/archive/2008-09-01-n47.html

There’s a comic-style presentation here with cartoons of the Google Engineers:

http://blogoscoped.com/google-chrome/

Hopefully there will be some more clarification and confirmation on Chrome in the next few days…

Keep an eye on http://www.google.com/chrome

While some companies already offer amazing and fast loading video quality at a price, for the regular user YouTube’s video quality is average at best. This is set to change, however, with the arrival of new higher quality video formats at YouTube.

There are two new formats being introduced, known as format 6 and format 18. Eventually there will be a link to switch between the formats on the YouTube video page as there are for a restricted number of files already, but currently you will need to suffix your (newer) videos’ query string with either &fmt=6 or &fmt=18. The difference in video settings is as follows:

Unfortunately, there is currently no easy way to embed these new video formats into a web page. But rest assured, as soon as there is, we’ll let you know!

Microsoft have released the first Beta of their next generation browser, Internet Explorer 8, available to download here. At a presentation at the MIX08 conference in Las Vegas, after demoing Internet Explorer 8 Microsoft surprised it’s audience by announcing that the first beta was going to be available to download straight away.

According to Microsoft, some of the key goals for Internet Explorer include complete, full CSS 2.1 support; improved scripting performance; support for HTML 5; built-in developer tools for scripting, CSS and layout debugging; “activities” and “web slices”, which are designed so that user’s can quickly see updates to their frequently checked web sites.

Give it a try here!

You may remember back in January we wrote about Internet Explorer 8 featuring version targetting, and how we would need to use a meta tag to identify content built for Internet Explorer 8.

Today, after much feedback from the community on the matter, Microsoft have gone back on that decision and are instead opting for a more standards focussed solution.

Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles. Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting web content in the most standards compliant way possible is a better thing to do.

We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action. While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue. As stated above, we think it’s the better choice.

You can read more about this reversal of decision on the Internet Explorer blog.

Mozilla have announced that Firefox 3 Beta 3 is now officially available for download

The new version of the browser seems pretty stable, although there are a few minor issues remaining; the toolbar icons still look like they need some tidying up, and most of your extensions will be no longer compatible (for the mean time). Ars Technica has a review of the new features together with some screenshots.

Opera may not have a very large market share when it comes to browser usage on computers, but on mobile phones Opera is considered THE browser to use.

Opera have released a video of their new Opera mobile browser - version 9.5.

Opera Mobile has always been quicker than standard mobile phone browsers due to where in the page loading process it formats the page for display. But this new video really shows off the power of the new version, and it’s passed the ACID2 test. Woo!

View the press release [PDF]

As you have probably heard, on Friday Microsoft placed a bid to takeover Yahoo! for $44.6 billion.

Yahoo! is the second most popular Internet search engine after Google - but there are some considerable differences in search hits between the two. Yahoo! has been struggling for some time, with falling advertising revenues and dwindling share prices, and the dominance of Google as the search engine of choice for many which has really put a strain on Yahoo!’s operations.

Microsoft claim that Google are dominating the market and a takeover of Yahoo! would encourage healthier competition. “Today this market is increasingly dominated by one player. Together, Microsoft and Yahoo! can offer a competitive choice while better fulfilling the needs of customers and partners,” said the press statement from Microsoft.

Google, on the other hand, have expressed their concern about such a takeover bid. “Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets” says David Drummond, Senior Vice President, on their blog.
Microsoft’s plan could potentially backfire as Yahoo! now begin to quickly seek out other ways to stay independent and could potentially push it closer towards rival Google.

One thing’s for sure - the future of Yahoo! is about to take a turn in some kind of new direction. I personally just hope it’s neither Microsoft or Google that end up holding the reigns.