The Google IO conference began today, and several announcements were made this morning.

• Google has open-sourced VP8 video codec and rolled it into a projected called WebM. This change will help browsers finally standardize on an open video format to replace Flash video on the web.
• Google Wave is now available to everyone, including Google Apps users. Remember Google Wave? Our latest thinking is that it pretty much sucks. Hopefully opening it up to everyone will give them enough feedback to make it useful.
• Google Chrome Web Store is a place for marketing and obtaining standards-based web applications. Now there is a centralized location to access some cutting-edge web apps that show off the new and excited features of modern web standards.

It’s clear that Google is fully behind an open web. Google promised more announcements for tomorrow’s keynote, beginning at 8:30am PDT, which will be streamed at youtube.com/GoogleDevelopers. Tune in!

Wednesday’s post showed how a simple extension called Weave can synchronize your Firefox passwords, bookmarks and other preferences between computers. That’s all fine and good, but what happens when you are installing a fresh copy of Firefox and want to install all your favorite add-ons and plugins? Do you write down your list of favorite Firefox plugins from your old computer and install each manually on the new machine?

Last June, Mozilla launched Add-on Collections. A collection is simply a grouping of Firefox extensions that can be batch-installed. You can create your own collection or you can subscribe to a collection created by someone else. This feature makes it really easy to share your collection or quickly update your Firefox to match all the extensions advocated by someone else.

Today, in the final part of our three-part series Fixing Firefox, we’re announcing the AuctioneerTech Firefox add-on collection. We’ve put together 15 add-ons that we use regularly to make Firefox more secure and more feature rich.

User interface enhancements

• Classic Compact
  Used to reclaim Firefox screen real estate. It’s probably our favorite plugin.
• Locationbar2
  One of the best security features of Internet Explorer 8 is the way it greys-out everything in the URL except for the top level domain. Now you can bring this functionality to Firefox to make it easy to know exactly where you are.
• Tiny Menu
  A plugin also mentioned in our article about making Firefox tiny, Tiny Menu replaces the main menu with a single, nested drop-down to conserve space.
• Speed Dial
  Opera has for a long time had an amazing feature called Speed Dial which displays a grid of thumbnails for your favorite websites. This feature was copied by Chrome and Safari and now you can bring it to Firefox.

Privacy and security enhancements

• NoScript
  The king of privacy and security plugins, NoScript got its own article on AuctioneerTech nearly a year ago.
• Adblock Plus
  If you get annoyed by banner ads, this plugin is for you. It blocks content from popular ad networks and is so effective that it makes some web pages look naked.
• Flash Block
  While we can’t imagine anyone hating Adobe Flash with as much evangelical, foaming-at-the-mouth fervor as we do, we hope we’re not alone. Now you can have all Flash elements blocked and replaced by a simple graphic that, when you click it, enables the Flash element. Now you don’t have to worry about unexpected audio or video playing or, worse, Flash cookies that don’t get deleted when you clear your browsing history in your browser.
• Permit Cookies
  A very simple application that overrides the cookie storage mechanism in Firefox. To use, tell Firefox to delete cookies when you close it. Use this plugin to selectively permit cookies that won’t be deleted.

Make Firefox work better with specific sites

• Better Gmail
  Gmail is great, but Better Gmail makes using it on the web better.
• Better Greader
  Google Reader is an amazing program, but using Better Greader is the only way we’ve found to completely eliminate the buttons and navigation to make the content truly full screen. Select options from the add-on menu. You want the minimalistic skin, which lets you toggle the Google navigation header using the W key on your keyboard.

Miscellaneous

• Weave Sync
  Where have we heard about Weave before?
• Screengrab
  Taking pictures of web pages just got easier. Save the whole page or a selection that you make by drawing a box with your mouse.

Web development

• Firebug
  Firebug is the most-used and most-loved web development plugin. It allows you to interact with the code behind the web page you’re viewing. If you’re curious about how a website works, Firebug will let you hover your mouse over each element and it will automatically highlight the code that generates the element. If you do any web development whatsoever, Firebug makes you use Firefox instead of alternative browsers for your testing.
• Firecookie
  Firecookie requires Firebug and lets you see exactly what cookies your browser has accepted. It also lets you modify the cookies in real-time so you can test the security of your site and that of other sites.
• Yslow
  Another plugin that requires Firebug, Yslow is actually a Yahoo! product that analyzes the way that your page loads and offers suggestions to reduce load time to make your site faster and less server-intensive.

We hope you find the collection useful. If you like it, be sure to give it a positive review. Get the collection and rate it from here.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/collection/auctioneertech

Are we missing something? Do you know of a plugin that does a better job than one of those included in the collection? Let us know in the comments.

Yesterday, Google finally announced what many were expecting – a full-on operating system to compete directly with Microsoft Windows. What is somewhat less expected is that they are using their Chrome product instead of their Android platform as many anticipated.

The Chrome OS will be the Chrome browser on top of a Linux core. The operating system will boot to the browser and do little else. The Internet becomes the operating system.

The benefit for consumers will be a mainstream operating system that doesn’t have Microsoft Windows or Microsoft Office. The downside is that we already have Linux for that purpose. We already have a netbook remix of Ubuntu Linux that is very fast and yet robust.

Google’s Chrome browser was over-hyped and feature-poor, and it’s still slow more often than it’s fast. Chrome doesn’t have the beauty of Safari, the legacy of IE, the applications of Firefox nor the completeness of Opera. In the same way, Chrome OS won’t have the beauty of OS X, the robustness of Linux nor the install base of Windows. Google is again trying to force its way into a market space by inserting a product that is trying to compete with established players by surpassing none of them on the merits.

Smart money is that Google’s Chrome OS will be as slow and feature-poor as its browser still is, but its tough to immagine how this play from Google isn’t going to shake up the netbook and low-budget PC market.

Picture by Aaron Traffas

As I was browsing my daily news feeds this morning, I came across an article about Skyfire.

I got my Treo 700wx based on Windows Mobile 5 in November of 2006. Its coolness lasted for several months, but I started wanting for more when the iPhone and Windows Mobile 6 came out. The biggest missing pieces from my phone’s browsing experience were Javascript and Flash. Skyfire is a browser for Windows Mobile and Symbian operating systems that just rewrote the rules.

Flash support
It supports true Flash and AJAX. I just watched my Auctioneer Tech YouTube video on my Treo in the Skyfire browser.

Search
It has a single address bar at the top that functions like the bar in Chrome that allows you to enter a website or a search query. The searches are displayed in a custom-skinned results page that, by default, lists results from Google. At the top is a tab that lets you quickly switch to results from Yahoo! without re-keying your query. It also offers to add this search bar on your home page, allowing for quick searches without loading Skyfire first.

Interface
One of the biggest secrets of effective use of the Treo is leaving the stylus in the holder. Using the stylus slows you down. The problem with browsing with Internet Explorer on Windows Mobile is that using the four-way navigational selector on the Treo left you at the mercy of the tab-stops built into web pages. It was clumsy, but still better than navigating with the stylus. Skyfire gives you a mouse. Or at least a pointer that is controlled by the four-way selector. It lets you browse the web as you would on your PC, allowing zoom similar to Safari on the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Speed
What Google Chrome is to a PC, Skyfire is to a PocketPC. The speed gain is amazing. This gain is accomplished by the rendering being performed on the server side. Skyfire’s servers take the page you’re trying to view, render the content, compress it and send the rendered information to your phone. This process means that the phone is simply displaying content, not deciding based on the code how that content should be displayed on the page. The user agent reported to the web server is Firefox 2 on Windows XP, so it looks like they’re using Gecko to render. Want to be blown away by numbers? Look at the speed chart posted by MacRumors.

I’m fewer than 20 minutes into being a Skyfire user. I’m bound to eventually find something I dislike about it, but right now I can’t imagine what that something may be. If you want to turn your Windows Mobile browsing capabilities into something much closer to the iPhone – arguably better since the iPhone doesn’t support Flash – then I definitely recommend installing Skyfire. If you find something you don’t like about this browser, let me know in the comments.