web

Brendan Eich is a man that is familiar with the Web as well as controversy. After all, his is both credited and at times cursed for having created Javascript, one of the most widely used and, at the same time, reviled programming languages. He also co-founded Mozilla, from which he was practically forced to leave two years ago. Now Eich is back at doing what he does best: creating browsers and stirring up the pot. Brave, as it is called, is a speedy browser that blocks ads by default. And then it replaces them with other ads.

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Last August, Google introduced a new way to communicate on the Web via your browser. It re-launched Hangouts as a dedicated website in its own right, taking advantage of the full space that the browser window offers instead of a simple popup menu or browser plugin. Less than three months later, Google is pushing what could be the biggest update to Hangouts on the web yet. As you can expect, it has improvements all around, starting with its performance all the way to the user interface.

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Google introduced Material Design last summer, and now about a year later it has introduced Material Design Lite, a web framework for bringing the design language to the Web. Google makes various promises about it, including that it “gracefully degrades in older browsers”, all the while bringing a Material Design look to a website through JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. The components library gives access to various items like badges and buttons, while customization options lend it all a personal touch.

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The Internet is running out of addresses, and adding new domain names and suffixes isn't going to help. The resource we are on the verge of eclipsing is Internet protocol, or IP addresses. When the internet was first put to use in the 1980's, engineers created IPv4, which has an upper limit of 4.3 billion different IP addresses. We've almost accounted for them all. According to the American Registry for Internet Numbers (ARIN), only 3.4 million IP addresses are still available from the 1.3 billion IP addresses allotted to North America.

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Of all the things Microsoft has been historically good at, video chat wasn’t one of them. They left Skype lingering on the vine for far too long, and are only now bringing the service up to speed. It’s coming along nicely, though, and it’s about to be available everywhere. At Build 2015, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella quickly breezed past a unique new feature for Skype; a web SDK that will see Skype built right into other apps. Rather than build a native chat client, Developers can now call on Skype.

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Twitter, which has undergone a series of updates lately, is again toying with what you see once you’re logged in. The new-look search results in Twitter don’t toy with your results, but do feed them to you in a flashy new way. When you perform a search in the Twitter web client, you might see a new layout designed to engage and entice followers. It’s not available to all users, nor is it working with all search queries just yet.

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Last week, Google updated Chrome to version 42 (beta). In that update, there was a small (possibly overlooked) feature that brings push notifications to your phone for websites than enable the feature. The update is part of Google’s Fizz initiative, which aims to bridge the wide gap between native mobile apps and web apps for mobile. That same update is creating a bit of buzz, but also confusing the matter of apps a bit, as push notifications for mobile websites are now available — just like native apps.

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You can chat with friends and family via Facebook Messenger on your phone or tablet, but to get to Messenger via the web, you have to navigate through Facebook’s website. At F8 this year, Facebook made sure we all knew Messenger would become more platform than app, so today’s announcement is really no surprise. If you head over to messenger.com, you’ll now be greeted with a standalone web version of Facebook Messenger, which exactly mimics the mobile version of the service platform.

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Those who like to read digitally have likely heard of Oyster, the monthly subscription service geared towards avid readers. At $9.99/month, getting the most out of Oyster is easy if you read one or more books monthly. If you don’t, you might have wondered why you’re subscribing — why not just buy books as needed? It’s a crossroads many have found themselves at, but you no longer have to leave Oyster if you’re not interested in subscribing. Today, Oyster is launching an eBook marketplace, where you can buy digital copies of books.

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Editing photos has come a long way since Photoshop popped up on the scene. A nearly exhaustive list of services and apps dot the photo editing landscape, many offering to do one specific thing. Some offer more flexibility, and have hence become a platform instead of an app. BeFunky is the latter. Cross-platform, BeFunky wants to be your go-to editor for photos, no matter what you want to do. Is it too much, or just enough? We find out.

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PowerPoint, once the darling of business and school presentations, is slowly but surely giving way to a host of new technologies, particularly those leveraging the power of the Web and web browsers. Even Microsoft has such a product, which it revealed October last year as Sway, which seems like an odd name for a presentation tool. But a Web-based tool is inherently something that can be accessed by more than just one person. Sadly, Sway initially wasn't that. That all changes today with Microsoft announcing collaborative features for Sway.

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Sometimes, you just need to throttle down on your data consumption when browsing. Maybe you’re tethering a computer to your smartphone and don’t want to gobble up plan data, or are on a public WiFi network. Maybe the WiFi in your hotel is slow. Whatever the case, it’s sometimes best to use as little data as possible to get the job done. To that, Google has unveiled a beta Chrome extension that will compress webpage data for you.

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