news aggregator

[Cross-posted from the Google Drive Blog]
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TIMWE, a multinational company that operates in the mobile marketing, mobile entertainment and mobile money areas, and Opera Commerce, a fully-owned subsidiary of Opera Software, today announced an agreement that enables easy and safe mobile payments for users of TIMWE services and the Opera Mini mobile browser in more than 75 countries worldwide. Read more

This past March, some of the most creative web developers out there showed us what they could do for the mobile Web in the March Dev Derby contest. After looking through the entries, our our three expert judges–Craig Cook, Franck Lecollinet, and Guillaume Lecollinet–decided on three winners and two runners-up.

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The popular SunSpider JavaScript benchmark suite was originally released by the WebKit team over five years ago, in December 2007. It was engineered to be a balance of real JavaScript code from the web, and to serve as a blueprint for the sorts of language-level operations that the WebKit JavaScript engine should, but was as yet unable to, optimize. Read more

So what’s a Beer and Tell?

A Beer and Tell is an event web developers at Mozilla hold every third Friday of the month. We share emotional and uplifting stories about projects we’re hacking on to the group. Usually open source projects. Likely with a reasonable license. Today your Beer and Tell post is written by Edna Piranha of Noodle Industries fame.

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This is episode 11, out of a total 12, in the A Node.JS Holiday Season series from Mozilla’s Identity team. It’s the last part about localization, hopefully making you feel all ready to handle that now!

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The Promise of Web Payments

The first and second articles in this series outlined how PaySwarm is designed to transmit and receive funds with the same ease as sending and receiving an email. Read more

The number of Indians using mobile devices to get online is growing at a steady pace, and the availability of affordable smartphones is an important factor fueling this growth. This special State of the Android Mobile Web report takes a closer look into the mobile browsing behavior of these smartphone users in India. Read more

In a web world rapidly turning mobile, it's even more important to make sure websites are prepared for the influx of mobile devices. In this State of the Mobile Web report, Opera Software takes a look at what makes or breaks a good mobile website. With more than 249 million users of Opera's mobile browser products in March, the people at Opera Software know a thing or two about mobile browsing. Read more

Opera Software today announced that the Opera Devices Software Development Kit (SDK) has been deployed on some of the 2013 Samsung Blu-ray players, offering superior online video support for YouTube, BBC iPlayer and more. The new Opera-powered Samsung Blu-ray players provide viewers with the ultimate home entertainment experience by not only allowing viewers to watch their favorite Blu-ray Discs and DVDs, but also to enjoy various streaming video services with ease. Read more

This year’s WebKit Contributors Meeting is almost there: it starts next Thursday. The Contributors meeting is a great opportunity for contributors to discuss the future of WebKit.

If you are attending, don’t forget to prepare demos if you have anything cool to show, and update the wiki with suggestions for the Talks/Hackathons.

New exposed behaviors

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My good friend Nico Williams reckons that HTTP is the new TCP, and TCP the new IP. If this is the case, then perhaps the rest of this article isn’t worth reading. However, not every application – particularly in the slower-moving corporate world – is going to move to the web overnight, and even though off-line web-based applications continue to improve, some of us still prefer our thick-client mail readers, amongst other things. Further, remote logon protocols such as SSH, and file sharing protocols such as CIFS and NFS, don’t always have direct web equivalents.

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On April 12-13, Microsoft hosted a record-setting Test the Web Forward event to advance the Web by creating interoperability tests. Dozens of volunteers from Adobe, AT&T, Blackberry, Mozilla, and many other local companies joined us at our Seattle offices to learn about Web standards testing, how to write CSS and HTML tests, as well as the tools available for test suite management. Attendees from around the country - and even Canada – contributed to create a record-breaking 514 overall new tests.

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If you use a Chromebook, you’ve already been enjoying the ability to open Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files directly in your browser. Starting today, we’re excited to bring this same functionality to Chrome on Windows and Mac.
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Time for another look at the latest developments with Firefox. This is part of our Bleeding Edge and Firefox Development Highlights series, and most examples only work in Firefox Nightly (and could be subject to change).

HiDPI support

We’re happy to say that ico/icns with multiple images are now supported: the highest resolution icon is now used on HiDPI/Retina displays.

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Video captioning on the Web is about to get significantly better, putting in place another critical building block for enabling professional-quality online video delivery and playback. Read more

The Promise of Web Payments

The first article in this series on PaySwarm outlined how the technology is designed to transmit and receive funds with the same ease as sending and receiving an email. It went on to explain how taking the tools that have been traditionally only available to banks, Wall Street, and large corporations and making them available to everyone can reshape financial systems in a very positive way. Read more

Registration is now open for the W3C Workshop on Referencing and Applying WCAG 2.0 in Different Contexts on 23 May 2013 in Brussels, Belgium. This Workshop will explore approaches for using Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) 2.0 and its supporting resources in different policy settings and contexts. It is open to policy-makers, users, developers, accessibility experts, researchers, and others interested in adopting, referencing, and applying WCAG 2.0. Registration is open until 7 May 2013, or until spaces are filled. (2013-04-24) Read more

Mozilla, Geeksphone and Telefonica have been working together to create a Firefox OS developer preview phone, and we’re excited to say they will go on sale April 23rd. Read more

It’s been a smooth week in WebKit land. Improvements to build times and executable sizes are still coming in, as the codebase continues to recover from the departure of the Chromium port.

New features:

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