All Mac Users Get Unlimited Access to New York Times Free

While most my news consumption comes through RSS (Google Reader), Twitter or on my phone (using my6sense of course), the New York Times home page is one site I still visit directly, and with some regularity. With their recent move to limit free access to the site to 20 articles a month, I haven't given it much thought - until yesterday, I saw I started to get little warnings that I had 2 articles remaining of my free 20, then 1, and then they were all gone. But as others have pointed out, there are so many holes in the Times' paywall, it seems to be an impotent approach, a limping attempt to squeeze much-needed revenue into the flagging old media giant. One of the biggest holes in the paywall is that of Safari - the Apple Web browser that ships on every Mac, and is available for Windows as well.

Without having to resort to any browser shenanigans, all Mac users have to do to read any of the New York Times' articles after the 20 articles are consumed is hit the "Reader" button in the location bar. While the New York Times begs you to pay up to read the full story, Apple extracts the text and repaginates it for you in a clean way - the entire article, whether you've paid or not.

The NY Times Warns I'm Almost Out of Articles

What Happens Once You've Read 20 Items

The battle between publishers and news applications has been a push-pull tug of war between innovation and traditional media ownership. One has seen clashes with Flipboard and Pulse as two of the most recent examples, with Pulse even getting sued by the New York Times right after their mobile reader app launched on iPad last year. But technology always seems to win. For every half-baked scheme to force readers to pay for content they expect is free, technology finds a way around it, whether intentional or otherwise.

Clicking "Reader" In Safari Brings Every NY Times Story in Full

Considering Apple's extensive market weight, and Cupertino's highlighting of the New York Times in Steve Jobs keynotes, commercials and other features, I don't see the Times screaming at Jobs to get this particular circumnavigation fixed. It's just another thing it looks like the Times people didn't think about when they tried to force their most loyal (and even occasional) readers like me to pony up.

If you're a Mac user who has switched to Firefox or Chrome, this is one place where Safari has a leg up, so if you hit your limit on the NYT, just open up a second browser.

Feedly's RSS Start Page Makes It to Safari After Two Years

A week away from the service's second birthday, Feedly, the advanced RSS and news reader, displayed in a magazine-like format, finally made its way to my browser of choice, Safari. Having long required Firefox, and later supporting Google Chrome, through a browser extension, Apple's release of Safari 5, with support for browser extensions has brought Feedly to me.

As I've mentioned several times, RSS, and Google Reader specifically, is my go to starting point for news discovery. As Google Reader and Google Buzz have grown in parallel, and in many ways merged, I am turning to Google's RSS-powered engines to bring me the best news from the Web and from my friends' recommendations, where we can engage in discussion around the news or simply say we "like" something.

Most Popular Items in Feedly on Safari

My Feedly Digest On Safari

Feedly, one of the closest-working partners to Google Reader, and a strong user of their API, has innovated alongside the service's developments, adding in each of the new social elements as they debut. But for the most part, I just watched, because I am reticent to ditch Safari, which has all my customization, bookmarks, and history - plus synchronization to iPhone and iPad.

Buzz on Feedly on Safari

With Apple rolling out Safari as part of their fleet of announcements at WWDC this week, Edwin Khodabakchian and his team took a couple days to spin up a Safari extension which provides the full Feedly experience - finally - in Apple's browser. While I am still not a huge fan of browser extensions, I am absolutely willing to sacrifice my ideals for such a long-anticipated, high quality, news discovery experience.

Installing the Safari 5 extension is simple. Just download it - linked from the official Building Feedly blog, double click to install, and you're good to go.

Are Early Adopters Leading Move from Firefox to Chrome?

With the first month of 2010 in the books, Web statistics tracker Net Applications made headlines showing Google Chrome's browser market share exceeding five percent usage, taking tenths of a percentage point away from the top two most popular browsers on the Web, Microsoft Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox. But in our little niche, Internet Explorer has never had that huge a market share in terms of visitors to my site. Most of my peers utilize Firefox or Chrome, or if they are Macheads like myself, they trend toward Safari. After crunching the numbers, looking at my Google Analytics data from the last 13 months, to get solid year over year data for the month just completed, the trend is clear: cutting edge Web users are trading in their Firefox browsers and trying Google Chrome.

Over the last year-plus, the top four Web browsers to louisgray.com have been unchanged: Firefox, IE, Safari and Chrome. Yet in four of the last six months, Safari visitors have outpaced Explorer visits. Meanwhile, in October of 2009, Chrome visits passed up IE users, and by December, Chrome visitors had passed up Safari visitors, good enough for the second-highest browser share overall. This ranking repeated in January.

As Chrome Share Has Increased, Firefox Is Fading

(Source: Google Analytics for LouisGray.com)

Just how rapidly has Chrome taken market share in terms of visits to the blog? In January of 2009, Chrome represented 6.53% of all visitors, a mark that held mostly steady through March of 2009. In the month just concluded, Chrome represented 17.46% of all visitors, an increase of 267%, nearly tripling.

At the same time, Firefox use dropped from nearly 51% of all visits to just over 41% of all visits, after peaking in March of last year with almost 55% of all visitors. The 10% of visitors who stopped using Firefox almost exclusively switched to Chrome, for IE visits declined only slightly from 20% to 16.5% of all visits, while Safari has held rather steady, at about 17% of all visits both in January 2009 and January 2010.

At the risk of making mountains out from small sample sizes, the trendlines cover almost a million pageviews over 13 months, and in each of the 3-month blocks following January of 2009, you could see a steady increase in Chrome visitors, from 6% in Spring of 2009, to 8% in the Summer, 10% by Fall and more than 14% by Winter. If the trend lines hold, I would not be surprised to see Chrome eclipse 20% of visits here by summer, and see Firefox fall to 35%, with continued declines in Internet Explorer visits that keep it below 15%. Pivot tables in Google Analytics also show that most of my Internet Explorer visits are from Google searches and other non-direct visits. Most referred visits from social networks, like FriendFeed, Twitter and Facebook, prefer Firefox, Safari and Chrome.

Framed: Should Microsoft, and Would Apple... Fight Back vs. Google?

Wednesday's announcement from Google that they were releasing a Web browser plugin called Chrome Frame for Internet Explorer gave IE users many of the same core elements they would receive by surfing with the native Chrome browser - namely support for HTML 5, and massively improved JavaScript performance. Google's goal has largely been seen as setting the stage for Google Wave, working to get Web surfers off older, outdated browsers, like Internet Explorer 6, and providing them a richer experience. But this process, as noble as it may be, has me wondering if its competition, Microsoft, won't be finding a way to shut it down. After all, I am pretty sure Apple would if given the same choice.

Many across the tech Web are lauding the move as easier for Web consumers to perform than a rip and replace strategy to ditch IE and turn to Chrome, despite its clear benefits. After all, it's said users are comfortable with plugins like Adobe Flash, and Chrome Frame would just be a simple plugin. But isn't this a lot more like what Palm did in faking us all out by pretending its Pre mobile phone was really an iPod, in order to gain access to iTunes?

While Google didn't make any noise about looking to similarly decapitate Safari, and put Chrome in Apple's browser, there are definitely times when I find my preferred browser lagging behind the most-popular surfing options. Even Google's Toolbar, which includes the new SideWiki we discussed on Wednesday, does not have a native version for Safari, but maybe, if Google found a way to push Chrome in Safari, it would.

Matt Mastracci, co-founder of DotSpots and a sharp Web developer, reminded me this evening that Safari "isn't built to be extensible", making Toolbar integration or Chrome Framing a real challenge, but even if they could somehow pull it off, I don't see Steve Jobs and Cupertino sitting idly by. No doubt the next system update, or Safari point release, would knock it out of the sky, the same way they have updated iTunes in the past to stop jailbreaking of iPhones, or the way Microsoft posts Windows Updates to stop malicious code from hitting their user base.

Microsoft is already whining and saying that running Chrome Frame as a plug-in increases the potential for bad code and malicious scripts to hit customers. (See: Microsoft: Google Chrome Frame Makes IE Less Secure) It is not my tendency to jump on Redmond's side, and I certainly don't believe their scare tactics, but they have to be hotly debating their next move. It would not surprise me if the opportunity to disable Chrome Frame was being thought about as part of the next "Critical" Windows Service Pack update, executing a high-stakes game of cat and mouse between Microsoft and Google, and potentially the Justice Department - who didn't ever get its wish of splitting Microsoft up after its monopoly games with Netscape.

Apple's recent ploys to knock Palm Pre out of iTunes, and its controversial blockage of Google Voice make it clear they have every intent to control their users operating system and iPhone experience. In fact, as they have not really been taken to task in the way Microsoft has for anti-competitiveness, I would see Cupertino more likely to be proactive in trying to fight Google here. The only question is, will they ever get the chance to do battle?

Safari 4's Introduction A Clear Salvo In the New Chrome Wars

In today's Web-centric computing world, there is practically no more important software than that of the Web browser. While an argument could be made that one's e-mail is equally as important, the move to Web-hosted mail services, like GMail and Apple's Mobile Me means that the Web browser itself is where most of today's work gets done. The move from the operating system being the center of our world, and the prism by which we see everything, to that of the Web browser, was central to Netscape's annihilation by Microsoft, and has now practically come true, even as Navigator's time has now come and gone.

Almost 14 years after Netscape as a company went public, a new wave of browser wars is upon us. And while, yes, Internet Explorer, the standard on practically all Windows-based PCs, is still the market share leader, the innovation is not being perceived as coming from Redmond. Instead, it's products like Firefox, Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari which are pushing the envelope and working to enhance our browsing experience. Unfortunately for Microsoft, it's gotten to the point that even if they made a better product with all the possible bells and whistles, nobody outside of Dare Obasanjo would give them credit.

Yesterday, as practically every tech blog on the planet mentioned, Apple introduced a new 4.0 beta version of the Safari browser, including speed enhancements, and most notably, a Top Sites feature that mimics Chrome's most visited sites page. And while other usability enhancements were made, including to the toolbar, expanded browser history and further integration with Google's search bar, it was this addition of "Top Sites" that has everyone thinking about how Apple is taking on Google's Chrome even before the company comes out with its much-awaited official Mac version.


My Top Sites - After Editing Out All Work-Related Sites
And this is exactly the dialog that has long-been needed in the browser space but was lacking when IE finally reached the summit atop Netscape's corpse. Opera and OmniWeb and iCab all had their handful of users, but never gained the kind of mindshare and deployments possible from Firefox, Safari and Chrome. Now, it could be said that Microsoft is being hit from all sides after years of letting Explorer stagnate. (I first called it the Chrome Wars on FriendFeed yesterday)

Being hard wired both as an Apple fanboy and an early adopter, I downloaded Safari 4 beta as soon as I knew it was available. After finally updating the laptop with the latest security updates, we were good to go - and honestly, there will be no turning back. For whatever reason, over the last few weeks, I have had the worst time keeping Safari up and running. Every new tab welcomed a new opportunity to stall and require a force quit. But Safari 4, after a full day's aggressive use, hasn't fallen on its sword even once. And considering I spend practically all my waking hours in front of a browser, that's a good thing.

For me, it's the stability and the speed, and the support for standards, that will make using Safari on a daily basis a success. The Top Sites feature is interesting, a cute way to have 12 pages on hand to click through at all times, but it's not exactly going to save me a ton of time. With RSS, keyboard shortcuts and autocomplete, it's not like I was taking tons of time to enter URLs and go site to site. So yes, we like the new features, but we like it even more that it doesn't crash and will support new Web services that may be using bleeding-edge code.

And while I assume you already know, Safari is more than just a Web browser for Macs. It's also available for Windows, and forms the core browsing experience on the iPhone and iPod Touch. You can get the new Safari 4 beta here: http://www.apple.com/safari/download/.

Is Requiring a Firefox Plugin Akin to Designing for IE Only?

Internet Explorer doesn't have a monopoly on the browser market like it did nearly a decade ago, as Microsoft systematically suffocated Netscape - speeded by the company's own failings. Today, IE reportedly has just under 70 percent market share, with Firefox owning just over 20 percent and others, including Safari, Google Chrome and Opera, making up the remaining 10 percent. (See: Wikipedia for a stat table)

At Internet Explorer's peak, it claimed more than 90 percent share, as recently as 2004. As it became the de facto standard, it was common for Web designers to optimize their pages for IE, or even require users to run IE to access the site. While the practice is less common these days, there are still a select number of Web applications that push users toward IE, or as many Mac and Linux users find themselves told, to use Windows.

As the Internet mob has repeatedly spoken, designing for IE is wrong. The browser has never quite nailed Web standards the way other browsers do, and to force users to have a certain configuration to get to something that should have universal access flies in the face of one of the major tenets of the Web - that data will be presented in the same way to all current browsers on any platform. But even as this has been agreed to, some cutting-edge applications are pushing Firefox extensions or Greasemonkey scripts to simply work. And unfortunately, even if doing so means the development team can leverage the browser in new, innovative, ways, it dramatically limits their market share, and keeps people who might like the applications, but prefer another browser, out.

As an Apple Safari user, I know there are some places where the browser falls short. For whatever reason, it isn't supported by toolbars, including StumbleUpon or the Google Toolbar. I can begrudgingly accept that developers aren't going to make work-arounds for such small market share, but the practice of purposefully designing solely for Firefox and requiring people to download an extension seems counter-intuitive, if the goal is to have wide adoption. So while I understand that Firefox users are vocal and love their browser's extensibility, the entire practice has me shying away from new services like Clikball, and rarely using Feedly, even if I think they're cool.

But there's no outrage and frustration when developers demand Firefox extensions the way you see the same tumult when a site demands you use IE. It could be because the practice is more rare, or because the Firefox community likes being catered to. But I believe it's time to move away from demanding plugins and extensions to our browsers. There are enough tools out there, and enough tricks you can do with code to make the Web do some great things. If you can build it without making me download yet another program, or switch browsers, it'd be much appreciated.

RSS Has Practically Eliminated My Need for Browser Bookmarks

People use Web browser bookmarks in vastly different ways. All of us have no doubt encountered people who bookmark just about everything, and don't organize them into folders, leaving the poor user to scroll through page after page to find the bookmark they are trying to find. Others don't bookmark anything and rely on Google to find the desired page, through the search engine. On the opposite spectrum, others have tidy folders, while a small percentage of them are so focused as to have their bookmarks sorted alphabetically in nested folders.

That last example would be me. Not only do I have all of my bookmarks sorted in folders, but each of the folders is alphabetically ordered in my Bookmarks toolbar in Safari. Many of the folders have subfolders, and believe it or not, the bookmarks are alphabetized in each of those folders. If only I were this organized everywhere else!


My Safari Bookmark List Just Got a Lot Smaller...
Best of all, these bookmarks are synchronized to my iPhone, meaning I have them with me on the go, practically anywhere.

But these days, it really doesn't matter how organized I am, because I so rarely encounter my bookmarks - and many have not been clicked in a very long time. In fact, this afternoon, I went and cleaned up my bookmarks for the first time in a while, going on a deletion spree.

Why the change? Because practically all the important sites I used to visit on a regular basis have transitioned to my Google Reader, thanks to RSS. There's no need to have TechCrunch and Scobleizer bookmarked. There's no need to check in on MacRumors and AppleInsider every day. Instead, they come to me. Even the dozens of saved search strings I had for work to scour Google and all the industry trade rags are no longer necessary because each of those can spit off an RSS feed into my reader.

At this point, practically the only bookmarks I need are the portals, such as iGoogle and My Yahoo!, which are themselves RSS-powered, sites where my own action is required to make them useful, from retail sites like Amazon.com, or transactional sites, such as Wells Fargo and eTrade, and the occasional sports-related site that has instant scores, like ESPN.com or Yahoo! Sports.

The old ways of visiting each site one by one, or even to open every bookmark in a folder at once, as Safari lets you do, are no longer necessary. With the inclusion of auto-complete features in practically every browser, the rapid growth of RSS and precision of Google search, browser bookmarks are an archaic breed. There even may come a time when I go back into my bookmarks and start removing entire folders.

What about you? You've likely got a start page. It's no secret mine is FriendFeed, as it has been all year. I am also a regular visitor to Google Reader and Twitter to round out my news gathering, but what next? Are there still sites that are so necessary to visit frequently that they warrant bookmarking?

CodeWeavers Brings Chrome Experience to Mac OS X, Linux

While the Google Chrome browser team is hard at work making the browser run natively on non-Windows operating systems, the team at CodeWeavers has already delivered a port of Chromium, the open source browser project spun off from Google's efforts on Chrome, utilizing the WebKit engine, for both Mac OS X and Linux. Now, Mac and Linux aficionados can get the Chrome experience without having to boot up their emulation environments - giving them the same start page, top tab behavior and integrated "omnibar".

If you are a Mac or Linux user, you can find the CodeWeavers' CrossOver Chromium for Mac OS X, Ubuntu, Debian, Red Hat, Mandriva and Suse on the product's Web site here.

As with the Chrome install itself, it's a fairly light production. You just have to download the installation file, add the program to your applications folder, and open it like any other browser. The expanded file itself takes just over 130 megabytes of space, but loads very quickly and has no issues running alongside Safari.


Chromium, on Mac OS X, Tracks My Frequently-Visited Sites
The CrossOver Chromium is clearly a port, and not a native Mac OS X app, as the drop-down menus, shortcuts and fonts smack of a typical Windows application. But if you're dying to use Chrome instead of Safari or FireFox, you get all the functionality of Chrome today.


The Chromium Omnibar Suggests Sites Based on My Entry
In my quick testing of the port, it accurately tracked my most-visited sites, it automatically filled the "omnibar" with search results and suggested URLs, and retained the ability to make new tabs along the top, as well as tear them away to make their own windows - all features lauded in the initial Chrome release.

You can get the browser here: http://www.codeweavers.com/services/ports/chromium/.

Google Grinds Out Gears for Safari

I'm still waiting for the day when every Web site and Web application behaves the same, intended, way on every Web browser and operating system. But despite it being more than 15 years since the launch of NCSA Mosaic, and 13 years since the introduction of Java, we're still not there. As a result, just like application developers often have to make the choice to code for Macintosh or Windows, we're seeing Web utilities make their way to Internet Explorer and Firefox before they get to Safari, despite the Mac's recent growth trajectory. Today, one of the laggards, Google Gears, released tools for the Safari browser, 16 months after debuting for other browsers.

At the time of Gears' launch in May of 2007, I frustratingly dismissed it as "Another Utility That Won't Work With Safari". Considering I've managed to go more than a year without Gears on Safari, to be honest, I almost forgot why I would want it in the first place. There's something about being a Mac/Safari user that makes us more hard-headed than the average Web consumer, and I'd already pretty much reached the point where I didn't remember what I could possibly be missing out on.

But with that said, today's announcement on the Google Mac Blog enables us to gain the full functionality of Gears-enabled sites, like Zoho, WordPress and Google Docs offline, in what's our preferred browser.


Google Reader: My First Google Gears/Safari-enabled App
With Google Gears installed, the first thing I've noticed is the new ability to take Google Reader offline. So, in the rare event that I'll be out of range of the Internet, but didn't get a chance to clear my Google Reader list first, I can take my favorite feeds with me. (See: Google Reader: Offline Reading)

Today's announcement also holds a hidden wrinkle - that the tool should be easily customized for any browser using WebKit. Without saying so, that certainly means Gears' integration in the Chrome browser is behind getting those of us using Safari will get some trickle-down help.

The New World of Browser Choices is All About the Hooks

In a perfect technology world, every Web site and every Web application would perform the same way across all Web browsers, operating systems and mobile devices. But we're not in a perfect world, and Web surfers' experiences are being increasingly determined by browser-specific plug-ins, third party applications and tie-ins with the host operating system. The result makes it less likely that one Web browser user can make a switch, after having invested in one specific application to get a tailored user experience.

Today's big news/rumor is that Google is preparing their own Web browser, called Chrome, which is based on WebKit, the same foundation underlying Apple's Safari browser. While the news hasn't been confirmed by Google outright, all indications make it appear to be true.

(Update: Google has now made it official)

There Are A Lot of Questions About Chrome

With news of Chrome, Web enthusiasts are already asking questions - will it support the GreaseMonkey scripts designed for FireFox? Will it be released for Mac OS X on the same day it's released for Linux and Windows? And, as it's so early, at least the latter question can't be answered. But assuming they are using WebKit, it's unlikely GreaseMonkey scripts could be used out of the box.

Today's Web Browsing Experience Comes Down To:

1. Speed
2. Reliability
3. Compatibility
4. Data Portability
5. Extensibility

It is no longer enough to load the fastest. The time when you could put Internet Explorer and Netscape or Safari and Firefox side by side and show me how quickly they loaded HTML pages or performed JavaScript renders is gone. People just expect the browsers to work. And if they crash even once a day, users are unhappy. So Speed and Reliability are assumed.

Compatibility, for the most part, is a small issue at this point. It's a rare site that says "Please Use Internet Explorer" or "Your Operating System is Not Yet Supported", although that does happen. That's why initial response to Internet Explorer 8, beta 2, was so tepid, as it really did fail the basic expectations. (See Steven Hodson's critique)

That leaves what I see as the most important points going forward: Data portability and extensibility, and the biggest trojan horse I see going forward to impact the browser marketplace is the iPhone.

If Google Announces Chrome, Does Apple Put it In the iTunes App Store?

Apple made a custom, light-weight, version of Safari for the iPhone, which makes their Web browser the default browsing experience for what's the world's most talked-about cell phone. Using Safari on the iPhone makes it more likely that you will use Safari on your Mac or your PC because it can synchronize your bookmarks, and unify your browsing experience. Changing bookmarks on your desktop means they are changed on the iPhone.

Today, there are no alternative Web browsers for the iPhone. No Firefox, no Opera, and definitely, no Internet Explorer. While Google and Apple appear to be friends, and Google makes applications for the iTunes Application Store, and therefore, the iPhone, can you see Apple opening up the option for users to browse in Chrome instead? And even if they did, the likelihood of Chrome's behavior being mirrored to the desktop, via iTunes, is slim.

Apple playing the role of gatekeeper to the iTunes Store will be a bigger deal as the iPhone increases in market share.

Could Mozilla/Firefox Apps Be Re-written for WebKit?

There are scads of great GreaseMonkey scripts designed for some of the social networks I use, including FriendFeed. In addition, the Google Reader overlay, Feedly, only works in Firefox, so as long as I stay in Safari, I don't use the product at all. To date, Safari has badly trailed Firefox and IE in terms of getting add-ons, like browser toolbars and plug-ins, but if Google were to enter the market with another WebKit-based browser, that could shake things up.

So What About the Hooks?

As a Mac user and a MobileMe customer, my e-mail, Web browser bookmarks, and address book are synchronized across my devices, both laptop and iPhone, and the data is available online from any computer, in the cloud. Because of these hooks, I'm not a good candidate to move away from Safari any time soon, and I'm more tied into Apple's infrastructure of E-mail, Address Book, and iCal than ever before.

For others, it's Google who has the hooks. From their Google Calendar to GMail and Picasa, they've trusted Google with their personal data. For these folks, Google will undoubtedly tailor Chrome to their interests, and it would be hard for competitors like Apple and Microsoft to make the interoperability any better. But this, of course, leaves out the iPhone scenario, which leads us to Android, Google's approach to make a next-generation phone operating system, distributed through multiple handset partners.

Now, instead of seeing that a browser is faster, or more pretty, or has more features, it's more important that we can move our data around between devices and that the applications don't hiccup. We may not have seen it at first, but as the major browser vendors start to tie in to the applications you use every day, they're getting more of a hook into you as a customer, and reducing your potential to use an alternative product. Even before we see Google's Chrome in action, I know it will take being lighter, faster, and as reliable, to start, plus featuring the type of hooks that Safari does today, on the iPhone, to make me consider it anything more than a hobby and as a primary browser alternative.

We've come a long way since Microsoft embedded Internet Explorer in the Windows operating system and was deemed a monopolist, but that won't stop the big players from playing favorites with their own applications and giving you reasons to stick around.