As expected, Google I/O keynote was thrilling. Google made some major announcements regarding the future of the web. The event began at 9 a.m. PDT, that is around 7 p.m. here in Greece. The keynote started with VP of Engineering Vic Gundotra taking the stage followed by VP of Product Management Sundar Pichai. It was all about HTML5 and open standards.

First and foremost, the VP8 codec. Last summer Google acquired On2 for its video compression technology. Today, Google announced VP8 codec as part of a new project named WebM. By the way, VP8 is now open-source.

The WebM project is dedicated to developing a high-quality, open video format for the web that is freely available to everyone.

One of the most important things about this is that the WebM launch is supported by Mozilla, Opera, Google and more than forty other publishers, software and hardware vendors! Read more here.

…including Microsoft!

In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video as well as VP8 video when the user has installed a VP8 codec on Windows.

What’s Great About WebM

• Very high quality video
• Great video playback performance, even on older computers
• 100% free and open to everyone
• Supported on popular video sites like YouTube

Later on, Adobe shared some HTML5 love on the stage.

The keynote continued with the Chrome Web Store. The Chrome Web Store opens later this year.

Users will be able to discover a broad range of amazing web apps while developers will be able to reach millions of new users.

Next was Wave. Google Wave has been opened up to everyone as of today (also part of Google Apps as of today).

The keynote ended with an extensive reference to App Engine, GWT and some great things coming from Google + VMWare.

VMWare has been working with Google to bring an open-source layer for the cloud

You can watch the Google I/O 2010 Keynote online here.

I am guessing Day 2 will be all about Android. Woo hoo!

P.S. By the time I am writing this Google Buzz APIs come into play. Take a look here.

Outdated plugins are a major source of security and stability risk for web users, and some studies have put the proportion of users with older versions as high as 80%.

Just visit mozilla.com/plugincheck/ to run a plugin check for your browser.

You should also check out SecBrowsing, another powerful tool that helps you keep your browser and plugins up-to-date. If you are using Google Chrome, there is a SecBrowsing extension that alerts you if plugins are out-of-date.

Keep in mind though that this release requires Android 2.0 or above. It has been tested only on Motorola Droid and the Nexus One. And there is high probability to cause your phone to crash or make it temporarily unresponsive. You can still test Fennec on you desktop if you want to.

Weave Sync

There is an experimental version of Weave that is compatible with this build.

If you want to test Weave on your android phone, head over to mozillalabs.com/weave and click on “Experimental Version”. Read more on this on Vladimir’s blog post.

We’ve created a temporary Google Group for feedback about this pre-alpha build.

xAuth is an open platform for extending authenticated user services across the web.

Meaning that toolbar vendors, like Meebo, can now take advantage of this new open platform in order to provide a better user experience to the users. Specifically, users will be able to see social elements only from the social networks that they are actually on. This could lead to fewer HTTP requests that are usually necessary to recognize every potential online service. In addition, xAuth gives the users the option to decide which services pass data to sites through xAuth using the HTML5 methods window.postMessage and localStorage. In other words, the user has complete control of this exchange of data that takes place between the service and the site. This one strongly reminds me of a talk by Aza Raskin titled “You-Centric: The Future of Browsing” which I strongly suggest you see it. The whole idea of complete control of your data hovers around most of Mozilla’s projects like the latest Contacts.

As for the social toolbars, I personally am not very fond of, probably because I do not like the current implementation of these toolbars. Though I have used them one or two times -and they seemed quite handy- I never liked them. I don’t like the way they show up and I don’t like the way the look like.

However, xAuth seems that it grabbed my attention. I am wondering, now that developers can actually grab that information about your social networks how this could help make experiencing the web even better. I mean, why do I have to be bombarded with all these sharing/like buttons if I haven’t even joined each particular social network? And the same goes for all these commenting systems like Disqus.

Moreover, this would be very-very-very interesting for all the mobile platforms out there. Providing a faster and a better mobile experience happens to be one big fcuking reason to support xAuth.

More information on xAuth here and here.

Update: Don’t forget to watch Meebo’s CEO talk with Robert Scoble about xAuth here.

A couple of days ago, Mozilla Labs released new Weave Sync APIs and resources for developers. If you have no idea what Weave is you should check it out here. Weave aims to seamlessly bridge your desktop and mobile Firefox experiences, by syncing bookmarks, saved passwords, browsing history, and open browser tabs across your platforms. So, in short you can leave your home computer and access your, lets say, browsing history via your mobile phone.

For the time being such capabilities existed in the iPhone but only limited to the bookmark syncing via MobileMe features or via apps like Instapaper.
There is also Google Web History which merged with Google Bookmarks last summer and now has some great features like viewing your web activity, searching the full text of pages you’ve visited, getting personalized search results and more. However these features are only available if you install the latest Google Toolbar and there is no immediate access via your mobile phone.
So, Weave is here to change this. You don’t have to install any toolbar and now that there is an API out there the possibilities are numerous. Mozilla already released a number of early prototypes and sample code that have been developed alongside the Weave APIs including a web-based Weave client, an iPhone Weave client, a commandline Weave client and a WebOS Weave client.

Now that Weave API is out I would love to see a Weave client for my Android phone along with some import/export features in Weave or even better some Ubiquity commands to interact with the Weave.

By the way, does anyone know when the latest Ubiquity version will be available for Firefox 3.6?

There has been some very interesting activity at hacks.mozilla.org lately. As Christopher Blizzard said in the according blog post “One new feature that we’re including as part of Firefox 3.6 is support for web pages to access machine orientation information if it’s available. As you can see from the demo you can use it to figure out if the machine is moving and what direction it’s facing.”

Just sit back and watch. This new device API will blow your mind. :)

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