Google lance un nouveau navigateur

Google a annoncé hier le lancement d’un nouveau navigateur, Chrome. Ce lancement est prévu aujourd’hui mais nul ne semble savoir où télécharger Chrome. Donc, je n’ai pas encore essayé ce navigateur. L’image ci-dessous vous donne une idée du “look & feel” de ce nouveau navigateur.

Si l’on s’en tient à cette image, Chrome supporte les tabulations tout comme Firefox et Internet Explorer. Toutefois, on nous dit que sa gestion des processus est différente de celle de Firefox en ce sens qu’à chaque tabulation est dédiée un processus.

L’entrée de Google dans le marché des navigateurs est un choix stratégique dont la cible principale est Microsoft. La compétition entre ces deux géants s’intensifie. Toutefois, à moyen terme, il se peut que ce soit Firefox qui soit la première victime de Chrome.

En effet, on peut s’attendre à ce que ce soit les utilisateurs avancés qui adoptent le nouveau navigateur, eux qui forme la majorité des utilisateurs de Firefox. Ceci dit, c’est une version beta de Chrome qui nous est proposée. Il faut forcément s’attendre à des bugs. N’oublions pas non plus que l’introduction récente de Firefox 3.0 a été un franc succès, avec plus de 8 millions de téléchargement. Il faut aussi dire que Firefox bénéficie de l’appui de nombreux programmeurs. Ceux-ci ajoutent de la valeur à ce navigateur avec leurs add-ons.

On peut se demander pourquoi Google engage cette attaque frontale contre Microsoft. Je ne suis pas dans le secret des dieux mais au fond Google n’avait pas vraiment le choix. Avec plus de 80% du marché des navigateurs, Microsoft pourrait déployer des technologies qui affecte la publicité en ligne qui reste la source principale des revenus de Google.

Tout aussi important sinon plus est la tentative de Google de pénétrer le marché de la bureautique. Pour cela, il lui faut une plate-forme dédiée. A mon avis, c’est ce rôle qui est réservé à Chrome. Car, il faut bien le dire, Google s’est créé une (petite) place dans le marché de la bureautique. Il lui faut absolument consolider sa position. Sa croissance future en  dépend.

Il est important de noter que Chrome est un logiciel libre (open source). Cette option stratégique permet à Google de capitaliser sur la créativité d’autres programmeurs et bien sûr leur travail. Il est pratiquement certain, compte tenu de la taille et de la place de Google que nombreux sont ceux de ces programmeurs qui vont supporter Chrome.

Une question que je me pose est la suivante: que va faire Yahoo! ? A mon avis, si ils ne réagissent pas, leur position vis-à-vis de Google sera encore plus fragile.

GMail Massive Outage

A couple of days ago, GMail suffered a massive outage. I was not affected or to be more precise, I checked my GMail account when the service was up and running again. However, the main reason is simply that my GMail account is in fact dormant. My active webmail account is Yahoo! When I read the news of this latest outage of GMail, I remembered that Facebook went down a couple of months ago. The lesson from this is simple: we should not take our personal infrastracture for granted! Things can go wrong for each and everyone of those services that we use on a daily basis.

What then can you do? First, I think it’s a good idea to have more than one webmail account. In case of trouble, you can switch to the running service. Hopefully, these kind of outage won’t happen to all your services at once. Other risks exists: privacy of your data, spam, viruses, you name it.

Now, how do you choose the best combination for you? It all depends of what you do online. My first webmail account was Hotmail, long before Microsoft bought this company. I had to terminate this account because of excessive spamming. I have no regret. I then moved on to Yahoo! Mail. Then came GMail with an offering of 2 gigabytes. I liked that but was troubled by the fact that the service is in permanent Beta. Also, I was not that enthusiastic about the “thread” concept of GMail. In the mean time, Yahoo! introduced a new version that delivered a richer experience. For me, there was no reason to switch.

Another Look at Firefox Add-ons: Part II

Today, we will have a look at Stumble!. I find this add-on interesting because it enhances the way I surf the web. Now, let me explain. The web, per definition, has what I can call a “linear” architecture. By that, I mean that from a link, you can go to another link. In other words, to reach link2 which is located inside link1, you’ll need to come to link1 first. Well, with Stumble!, you move from a random link to another random link. And, believe me, you can come across some very exciting stuff!

Now, you can define your areas of interests, for example sports, gardening and philosophy. And Stumble! (www.sumbleupon.com) will only display pages related  to those categories. For me, the two ‘I like it!’ icons of Stumble! are quite useful: with them, you simply tell Stumble! that you like or dislike the page you stumbled upon. From then on, Stumble! will look for similar pages for you on the web.

If you really want to discover your web, this add-on is a must.

We will end our series on Firefox add-ons here. My conclusion is simply that add-ons can add value to the browser. You simply have to pick the good ones, which is not that easy.

Another Look at Firefox Add-ons: Part I

Firefox 3.0 is out: they were more than 8 millions downloads on the release day, probably a Guinness world record! Congrats to all the folks at Mozilla!! So, let me take this opportunity to introduce PicLens (www.piclens.com) by Cooliris , a Firefox add-on that enhance your view of photos or videos. They boast an immersive view on your pictures. Well, I have to agree the view is indeed immersive. Here is an impression of what you’ll get.

Bloukrans Bridge, SA

When I tested PicLens, I was really impressed. So I installed it. I have to say that I’ve been disappointed by other firefox add-ons before, but this time it was different. Installation is easy. I particularly like the fact that you can launch PicLens from the toolbar.

PicLens supports most popular feeds includin YouTube, Facebook (see example above),  Flickr, Google, Yahoo and more.

From time to time, PicLens will open a tab in another Firefox session when i close the current photo or video. My workaround to this is to close PicLens windows by clicking on the upper right end of the window.

Online Office Tools: something for you?

When you think about it, online office tools can be very helpful to many of us. For example, frequent travelers, people who take office work home, etc.

Last week, I visited zoho.com and found that their proposal has real potential. If you sign in to the web site, you can use a set of online office tools, including Zoho Writer (word processing) and Zoho Sheet (a spreadsheet tool).

I am interested in this site because I use some of my documents on different locations. Up to now, my solution was to send those documents to my web e-mail address and download them where I need them. With Zoho Writer, it would have been much easier to access the document from anywhere: I would simply have to log into my Zoho.com account.

Zoho Writer provides you with a set of standard word processor features. You have close to 20 fonts available. You can save your document on their server, import a Microsoft Word document without problems or work offline on a limited number of documents.

This being said, I am concerned by the following points when it comes to working online. First, how secure are my documents when I save them on a third party server? Second, what about performance, particularly that of Zoho Sheet? I doubt that this application can process a large sheet as a normal spreadsheet application will do. That being said, Zoho office tools are worth a try.

Well, I Prefer Firefox

Some weeks ago, I started using Firefox 3.0 which is still in beta.  After a while, i asked myself why exactly do I prefer this browser. I’ve been using it almost since Mozilla released the first version. Initially, I adopted Firefox because I liked Netscape of the early days, say begin of the 90’s. Of all the browsers I’ve used, Firefox is by far the easier to use.

Tabs are one of the features of Firefox I like most. They are very clear and easy to use when I compare them to Internet Explorer, for example. Now, most of the time, I have one Firefox window open with different tabs per activity. For example, I may have one blogging window, one database development window, one news window and so on. In the news window, I may have two tabs for cameroonian news sites, one tab for bbcworld.com, one for reuters.com, one for lemonde.com, one for bloomberg.com and one for techcrunch.com. This enables me to quickly and easily move from one news site to the other. It’s also very helpful when I need to compare news from two different sources.

The possibility to zoom in and out is also very useful. In version 3.0 (i repeat, still in beta), zooming in works for text and images, including videos. In version 2.0, it works only for text. For those of you who wear glasses, zooming in in text is certainly very helpful. But, being able to zoom in with videos is what I like most. It simply enrich the experience so much. This is how I watch the music videos that I like on Youtube. Now, this feature sometimes does not work and I have had to report a couple of bugs to Mozilla about it. Still I really like it and hope in the release version it will work properly and almost all the time.

Another interesting feature of Firefox is that your sessions can be restored after a crash. Now, when you have five Firefox windows opened each with six or more tabs, you certainly don’t want to restart all of them after a crash. You may even have forgotten the web page of a specific tab when the crash occured. So, this feature is quite handy.

Note however that some sites do not work with Firefox. In which case, I switch to Internet Explorer. With Firefox controlling some 15% of the browser market, organizations should develop their online applications with W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) standards. This will ensure that their sites work properly on all browsers.

Now, I am aware of Firefox add-ons and have tried a couple of them. I wasn’t quite impressed. That’s why i simply use the standard browser.

So, ask yourself why you’re using your preferred browser. If you’re not already a Firefox fan, try it and share your experience with us.

Sommes-nous plus avancés avec Facebook en Français?

A la demande d’utilisateurs francophones, Facebook a été traduit en Français. Cependant, certains Facebookers sont contre cette initiativive. Ils émettent plusieurs raisons pour leur opposition. Ils pensent que Facebook perd de son charme à partir du moment où ce réseau social n’est pas en Anglais. Ils appréciaient le fait de communiquer en Anglais et apparemment, cette expérience leur permet d’améliorer leur maîtrise de cette langue. Et ce, de manière ludique.

Les partisans de la traduction, quant à eux, s’étaient mobilisés à cause de leur frustration de ne pouvoir utiliser toute les possibilités de facebook comme il convient, notamment ses applications. Tout simplement parce qu’ils ne comprennent pas la langue. Et je comprends parfaitement cette frustration. Imaginez que vous deviez vous plonger dans un dictionnaire chaque fois qu’une application vous interroge sur telle ou telle chose ou bien même que vous deviez cliquer au hasard, sans rien comprendre de ce qu’on vous demande. Il y a de quoi abandonner facebook…

Mais à y regarder de plus près, il se pourrait que ladite traduction en Français ne résolve pas (complètement) les frustrations que j’évoque ci-dessus. D’abord parce que la traduction concerne (et ne peut concerner) que l’interface de facebook. Or les utilisateurs francophones dans leur ensemble peuvent se retrouver dans cet interface puisque ce sont eux qui, par leur groupe de discussion, ont incité facebook à la traduire. Cela veut dire qu’ils pouvaient jusqu’à un certain point utiliser facebook en Anglais.

Il convient de discuter plus amplement ce qui ne peut être traduit. Il y a d’abord le contenu de facebook, qui selon moi est la plus grande valeur de ce réseau. En quoi consiste ce contenu? Tout simplement en toutes les discussions, messages, photos, vidéos que les utilisateurs contribuent à Facebook. La masse de cette contribution est en Anglais. De manière marginale, il y a du contenu dans la plupart des autres langues que vous pouvez imaginer: chinois, japonais, xhosa, français, etc. Toutefois, dans l’ensemble, la proportion que ces langues occupent par rapport à à l’anglais est infime. A l’exception des photos, il est impossible de traduire ce contenu en Anglais. Et même pour les photos, les commentaires qui les accompagnent apportent souvent un éclairage nouveau au cliché et ces derniers sont la plupart du temps aussi en Anglais. Je signale par ailleurs le contenu interactif: il est impossible de le traduire et ça n’aurait tout simplement pas de sens. Comment voulez-vous traduire une discussion en temps réel que deux individus ont, l’un à Trinidad et Tobago et l’autre en Australie?

Il y a ensuite les applications. Celles-ci ne peuvent simplement pas être traduites parce que facebook n’en est pas propriétaire. Elles sont écrites par des tiers, souvent de petites entreprises ou bien même des individus isolés. La responsabilité éventuelle de leur traduction n’incombe donc pas à facebook. Ce qu’il faudrait éventuellement, ce sont des entreprises qui veuillent servir le marché des francophones et développer ou traduire des applications existantes. Cette dernière option est du domaine du possible. Les utilisateurs doivent prendre leur mal en patience.

Enfin, de nombreux messages circulent selon lesquels la traduction de facebook est pleine  d’erreurs. Je ne peux moi-même juger car j’utilise facebook en anglais. Mais cette assertion me semble tout à fait plausible.

En conclusion, nous pouvons retenir que la traduction de facebook en Français ne va pas forcément enrichir l’expérience des utilisateurs frustrés. En fait, il semble que le besoin d’un réseau social à contenu essentiellement français se fasse sentir. Et si le contenu est en Français, les applications seront majoritairement aussi en Français. A ma connaissance, un tel réseau social n’existe pas à ce jour.

Windows Vista? No, Thanks. Maybe later…

We recently bought some computers and were faced with the decision whether we should accept the machines with the pre-installed Windows Vista on it or ask the supplier to pre-install Windows XP for us instead. We quickly came to the conclusion that XP was the best option for us.

The main reasons why we postponed including Vista in our portfolio were as follows. First of all, with Vista Service Pack 1 (SP1) being released this year, we felt the operating still lacked stability. This could negatively impact the quality of our service. I was concerned with connectivity issues (for example, will all new PCs connect to our printers, in other words, are all the drivers we use already compatible? What about scanners? ). In addition, we used third party software including freeware to connect to our servers, as email client (e.g. Foxmail) or desktop productivity tools ( Open Office). Will the installation process of  these applications be possible without unnecessary hurdles?

Besides the risks outlined above, I was bothered by another aspect of the question. First of all, I want technology to improve the performance of our users. Next, I believe by enriching their experience, users are not only more creative but also more productive. To achieve these goals, budget considerations play a role. Is a new operating and in this case a new version of Windows needed? My answer is no. I think it is certainly more important to improve for example the speed of our internet connexion (which by the way is satisfactory at 512K ADSL) or introduce online productivity tools to some of our users who travel frequently. I would also take steps to make the internet connexion more reliable (we had a two weeks disruption of service last year). For all this, I don’t need Vista.

I would also like to mention a last point concerning training. Despite Windows Vista being another Windows flavour, the computer literacy of our users is a concern when it comes to deployment. I think some of our advanced users will within a couple of days find their way within the new system. Unfortunately, most of them will be coming back to us every minute if they don’t have proper training. In addition to this, I don’t think it is a wise policy in a small company like ours to operate with more than one OS. Therefore, adopting Vista should mean migrating all the PCs, which we won’t do because the system is not yet stable.

So, if not this year, next year? I can’t say. Because Microsoft is pushing PC makers, I am confident we will face this same question next year. Will Vista SP2 be out then? Not sure, after all, next year is over 6 months.

About me

My name is Christian Essombe Kuoh. I am a software engineer based in Douala (Cameroon). In this blog, I reflect on high tech as an experience. You may expect items covering social networks, tools, platforms, applications, systems and much more.

Quelques mots sur l’auteur

Je m’appelle Christian Essombè Kuoh. Je suis informaticien et actuellement basé à Douala (Cameroun). Dans ce blog, je partage avec vous mes réflexions sur les nouvelles technologies appréhendées comme une expérience vécue. J’aborderai les réseaux sociaux, les applications, les systèmes d’exploitations et beaucoup d’autre chose.