Robert Accettura's
Fun With Wordage

TechCrunch popped the idea of creating a Web tablet based on Linux and Firefox. The idea is interesting and something I wanted to pick apart (and reassemble) a bit. It’s a novel idea and I’m very interested in watching it. Success or failure, I think important things will be learned in the industry of open source hardware. Here’s how it’s described:

The machine is as thin as possible, runs low end hardware and has a single button for powering it on and off, headphone jacks, a built in camera for video, low end speakers, and a microphone. It will have Wifi, maybe one USB port, a built in battery, half a Gigabyte of RAM, a 4-Gigabyte solid state hard drive. Data input is primarily through an iPhone-like touch screen keyboard. It runs on linux and Firefox. It would be great to have it be built entirely on open source hardware, but including Skype for VOIP and video calls may be a nice touch, too.

Overall it’s pretty sound though a few things jump out at me.

• Battery LifeThe screen for something like this looks like it will be a decent size (9-12″), meaning it will need a decent battery. Getting a slim and light enough battery with enough battery life to allow for WiFi browsing (since that’s what the device is dedicated to) could be difficult. Your going to need more than an iPhone battery. I suspect under 4hrs will never go. 6-8 for any real adoption.
• Resolution - If it doesn’t hit 1024×768 it’s going to have a tough time being popular. That’s pretty much the standard most sites are made for.
• RAM - 512MB should be enough for a product that’s just a web browser / VoIP terminal, but if it left the ability to add up to 1GB (even if no easy access door) it may do better in terms of getting adoption.
• PC Card - The major criticism of the MacBook Air was the lack of a PC Card slot for a wireless card. You know that will be a case here. This could be tricky.
• Durability - Gadgets tend to last 2-4 years. We’ll go with 2 for the sake of this discussion. The front is a giant screen. It’s shaped like a book. Many people will want to carry it ina backpack or other bag containing other items. The iPhone is somewhat unique for using glass rather than plastic. The iPhone is tough as nails. If this screen gets scratched easily, it’s going to become a crappy experience overnight. If glass isn’t an affordable option, perhaps a low cost alternative is to make a cheap and easily replaceable plastic cover. So if it gets scratched up beyond the users threshold they can order another cover and just replace it.
• Software - I agree with the slim idea, but this runs into the same issues as Apple had with the iPhone. Web Apps don’t always cut it. The ability to hit the OS should be there (at your own risk) with an easy way to restore your device to factory condition (perhaps by connecting to the desktop and running some application). I know I’d like an SSH client (openSSH will be fine). Pidgin perhaps? Skype would be cool too. Easily hackable would be a major plus. Especially considering the nature of the early adopters.
• Stand - A stand with a built in USB hub and charger would be a very good accessory (keep cost of actual tablet low). It could be designed like a monitor so when you put the tablet in place, you can have a keyboard in front of it… and use it as a terminal with mouse/keyboard. Or just use the touch screen by tilting it back. All while it charges.

The ability to adopt some or all of these ideas needs to take into account price. But these are what I think will likely gauge it’s success or failure, assuming it reaches the market. The benchmark is the iPhone, love it or hate it. Being as user friendly, flexible, and durable is important. Taking advantage of the form factor, and a reasonable price is what will set it apart.

What will we call it? The best name I can think of is the Firefox Tablet, but that will take a round of discussions with Mozilla.

With the modifications to Firefox, that’s not likely. Get ready for IceWeasel Tablet.

Now that I gave my $0.02, I’d be curious to know what others think of the idea.

Google decided to open source it’s no longer supported browser sync extension. You can find the Google Code project here. The other major extension in this category is Mozilla Weave. I’m not sure what (if any) functionality might be gained by combining efforts, though I’ve seen some suggestions around the web to that effort. Anyone dig into that source code?

Google’s on roll with open source lately.

It’s always good to read about sites that are updating to add support for Firefox. It’s about time. I’m sure BOA customers are glad to see their annoyance is finally going to get fixed.

Congrats to everyone involved. It’s now a world record. The magic number is 8,002,530.

Even after the first 24 hours, the downloads keep coming. 3.0 is one hell of a good release.

Opera is said to be sending evangelism emails to websites that have compatibility problems with their browser. What’s interesting is that they are customizing the emails with actual fixes for the problems. This is pretty clever. In theory it will improve the problems regarding compatibility and make the web more standards compliant (which is where Opera excels).

One thing I do question is if webmasters will read it, at least where it matters. Most large companies have a contact form, or an email address, but it’s often forwarded to customer support, or sometimes just into a giant bin where a handful get processed. Will the information get to the people who need it? I suspect it will for small companies who read all the email they get from the web. For large companies, I doubt it, and that’s where I think it matters the most. The bigger sites that the majority of the web visit.

Regardless, it’s interesting to see, for me in particular since I wrote reporter. I suspect the best efforts are still to encourage the industry as a whole to adopt best practice. Considering the move to go mobile, and be more flexible on the front-end, using standards is just becoming more of a requirement. I think that will ultimately end up being the winning effort. It’s already winning as newer sites are generally pretty good when it comes to standards. The old ones will take time.

With Safari 3 and Opera 9.5 out, Firefox 3 taking off, IE 8 coming soon, it’s pretty obvious that standards are the future.

Firefox was featured in a Joy of Tech comic today. I think IE and Safari are just jealous. Enjoy.

You may or may not have heard about AT&T’s Pogo Browser. It’s a “3D Visual Web Browser” (make of that what you will). TechCrunch reviewed it a little while back. It’s based on Firefox (2.0.0.14 to be exact). It has some interesting UI for bookmarking, but other than that, I’m going to have to agree with TechCrunch. I’m really not very impressed.

The impression I’m left with is simply: why wasn’t this created as an extension?

This really isn’t very accurate. I don’t know the details of the vulnerability or even if there actually is one, but I question the marketing around the Zero Day Initiatives vulnerability report. The big news seems to be “only 5 hours” after the release.

This isn’t really accurate if you think about it. It would be if Firefox 3 were a tightly controlled product that nobody could see a final version of. Reality is that the entire source code lives in CVS, there are nightly builds, and formal release candidates posted. Could someone have downloaded it after release and found a security issue? Absolutely. Is the timing a little suspicious considering everything was done out in the open? Yes.

It wouldn’t have made any waves if a vulnerability was found in a release candidate. It would have just been patched and a new candidate posted.

The advantage to the open source development process is the transparency through the entire process. The code in the release build isn’t remotely new or surprising. Many people had been running it for days prior to the actual release.

Again, it’s possible it all happened in 5 hours. But I doubt someone discovered a security hole, documented it, then it was verified and confirmed in just 5 hours. Especially considering the open nature of the development process and how easy it is to check things out in advance.

It was a ton of fun to watch, absolutely addictive. 83 terabytes of data served just for downloads over 24 hours. There’s still a ton of people to update as the auto-update functionality has yet to be triggered. You can now see the scale of what’s involved. John Lilly’s got some great statistics on what just happened.

According to Arbor Networks, yesterday’s U.S. Open played at Torrey Pines (featuring Tiger Woods and a bunch of guys pretty much nobody cares about) generated so much traffic some ISP’s thought it was a DDoS attack. There was a huge spike on TCP/1935. Ironically this was about the same time Firefox 3 was unleashed. I wonder if that had any effect. Maybe next time, rather than a “world record” it should simply be “reek havoc on your ISP”.

Something tells me that at about 10:00 PST / 1:00 EST something big will be happening.

I sure hope someone is interested .