SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Google Inc. is releasing its own Web browser in a long-anticipated move aimed at countering the dominance of Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer and ensuring easy access to its market-leading search engine.

The Mountain View-based company took the unusual step of announcing its latest product on the Labor Day holiday after it prematurely sent out a comic book drawn up to herald the new browser’s arrival.

The free browser, called “Chrome,” is supposed to be available for downloading Tuesday in more than 100 countries for computers running on Microsoft’s Windows operating system. Google said it’s still working on versions compatible with Apple Inc.’s Mac computer and the Linux operating system.

Google’s browser is expected to hit the market a week after Microsoft’s unveiling of a test version of its latest browser update, Internet Explorer 8. The tweaks include more tools for Web surfers to cloak their online preferences, creating a shield that could make it more difficult for Google and other marketing networks to figure out which ads are most likely to appeal to which individuals.

Although Google is using a cartoonish approach to promote Chrome, the new browser underscores the gravity of Google’s rivalry with Microsoft, whose Internet Explorer is used by about 75 percent of Web surfers.

Google’s lead in the lucrative Internet search market is nearly as commanding, with its engine processing nearly two-thirds of the Web’s queries.

For the past few years, Google has been trying to take advantage of its search engine’s popularity to loosen Microsoft’s grip on how most people interact with personal computers.

The assault so far has been focused on a bundle of computer programs, including word processing and spreadsheet applications, that Google offers as an alternative to one of Microsoft’s biggest money makers, its Office suite of products.

Google has tried to make its alternatives more appealing and accessible by hosting them for free over Internet connections instead of requiring users to pay a licensing fee to install them on individual computers, as Microsoft typically does.

Meanwhile, Microsoft has tried to thwart Google by investing billions in the development of its own search engine and making an unsuccessful attempt to buy Yahoo Inc. for $47.5 billion.

The tensions between Microsoft and Google now seem likely to escalate with Google’s foray into Web browsing.

Until now, Google had been trying to undermine Internet Explorer by supporting Firefox, a Web browser developed by the open-source Mozilla Foundation. Bolstered by an advertising partnership with Google’s search engine, Firefox ranks as the second most popular browser, with a market share of more than 10 percent. Google recently extended its advertising alliance with Firefox through 2011.

Bearing the stamp of Google’s renowned brand, Chrome could be an even more formidable rival to Explorer.

Still, Google’s name is no guarantee of success. For instance, Google’s instant messaging service hasn’t made come close to catching up to the market-leading products made by Yahoo, Microsoft and Time Warner Inc.’s AOL.

In a blog post Monday, Google touted Chrome as a more sophisticated Web browser better suited for displaying the dynamic and interactive content blossoming on the Web as people migrate from television, radio and newspapers.

“The Web gets better with more options and innovation,” Sundar Pichai, Google’s vice president of product management, and Linus Upson, Google’s engineering director, wrote in the posting. “Google Chrome is another option, and we hope it contributes to making the Web even better.”

Microsoft brushed aside the threat in a statement Monday from Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer’s general manager.

“The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips … and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online,” Hachamovitch said.

Even as it has backed Firefox, Google has openly fretted about the possible ramifications of Microsoft’s huge lead in Web browsing.

Google is worried that Microsoft could abuse its power by manipulating Internet Explorer’s default settings in a way that might diminish traffic to Google’s search engine, which serves as the hub of the largest online ad network.

In 2006, Google contacted the Justice Department to raise alarms about changes to Internet Explorer that Google believed made it more difficult to install search toolbars made by Microsoft’s rivals. Although regulators decided not to intervene, Microsoft subsequently modified the way Explorer handled the selection of search toolbars.

By MICHAEL LIEDTKE

There are many ways for Extracting or fetching desired data or content from an html pages. During my work, i had to build a Miner to get news from multiple sites & update a wordpress blog with the latest news, daily.I had many choices to accomplish this task, few of them are
- Regular expressions
- PHP string functions.
- Using DOM Parsing
- Using Xpath.

First of all i used regular expressions to extract data from a static html page.Which was really a nightmare for me.As there is not proper structure of page, it was really hard to extract news from specific tags.Some of them were in Div,some were in TD & others in Li tags. After a long effort i couldn’t extract data using regular expressions.
I thought to use some html parser, some of them are available on internet.I used it to get data of my choice, even it couldn’t get desired data, becuase of complexity of structure of page.After that i tried to use PHP string functions, like str_replace,Trim etc, to replace specific tags with known id, so that parsing can get easy. But still, to get desired content, it was really a mess to get to them.

Finally i used firebug to analyze the content of the page, to see the content holders, during which, i cam to find exact XPath location of desired content holder.
XPath (XML Path Language) is a language for selecting nodes from an XML document. In addition, XPath may be used to compute values (strings, numbers, or boolean values) from the content of an XML document. but i wasn’t aware that Xpath can also be used with html pages, to parse the DOM tree of page.

finally, i got the exact path of Content holder, which had the latest news, daily updated. And i grabbed all the content from it.

I came to conclusion that in case of mining data from web, Xpath proved to be the best & most efficient.

In case of updates, we don’t need anything, but only the content holder Xpath tree structure of the content & we can get the content in single shot.Regular expression & other ways were very inefficient & time consuming.

Thanks to Farhan for sharing his valuable expertise with us on Fahd Murtaza’s Blog.

Do you wanna be social? Are you social on the web? Is your website in accordance with the “social” requirements as laid out by the web 2.0 standard. Do you want to say “yeah” but are afraid of saying it as it might be wrong as you still dont know what exactly 2.0 is. OK, let me add something (thats not new off course but clarifies a little about the social aspect of the web). The web 2.0 is about the usability factor of the web. Sites like Flickr and Google calendar are a very good example of usability. Both have social factors about them. Like on Flickr, people can comment on your photos, photos that you want to share. Also you can post photos to your blog right from your Flickr account and there are dozens of good services that can be integrated with Flickr through an API provided by Flickr. It uses AJAX for making it more usable but yeah the Social Factor like submitting your photos to public groups of similar interests make it more approachable by the users of the site.

This Flickr example is just to mention how social networking helps people to collaborate and find the things of their interests. Social networks like Orkut, Facebook, MySpace and lots more are being used by Millions of Surfers on daily basis to enjoy the Social Web.

Another popular web 2.0 application is blogging engines. Yeah you are reading this text on a blog too that is off course my personal one. What if you want to enjoy the social features of the web for your blog. You wanna be heard right? So use social bookmarking. WordPress blogging engine, which runs most of this website is a great tool for blogging, in fact for content publishing so what if you like to use social bookmarking for your blog. There are several plugins available for social bookmarking but yeah as usual I am writing about a simple and usable one.

Use

Sociable

Social bookmarking sites allow web surfers to save, catalog, and share interesting pages they find online. The Sociable plugin appends links for your readers to use those sites to the end of each of your blog’s posts, increasing your potential audience.

If you’d like to keep up with Sociable development, you can read the tagged posts on this blog (feed). Or just read all of this blog, I swear it’s so amazing you’ll be sneezing rainbows.

Download, Upgrading, Installation

Download Sociable 2.0 (released 2007-02-02)

To upgrade, first deactivate Sociable and remove the sociable directory, then follow the install instructions.

Read the rest about Sociable here.

I am with my best days of learning web development now a days! Having coffee on my cabin’s table where me and my computer live together. Ah its quite bitter , I am still not good at making cape chino! But I am still happy as I have learned new things today. I have always been looking for some great JavaScript libraries that would do some really nice tricks like animation effects and user friendly techniques with easy to code syntax and minimal lines of code to call a specfic functionality. So I got it today.

And dear readers, I was really amazed at the high profile sites who are using it for example Gucci ,Digg , Apple fluxiom , Basecamp , Shopify , Blinksale , Backpack , Feedburner , Mailroom , Ruby on Rails and many others.

Isn’t that impressive? yeah I am sure it is!

Be sure to check out the demos, too: effects engine , autocompleter , drag’n'shop , puzzle game

 I will be using it with the codignitor , the new PHP framework that I am  goin g to use for my new project thats a CMS system for teachers to help manage their content for students. It focuses on Web 2.0 with Rich dynamic features!

Just finished the wordpress theme called 6seconds

the links to respective themed wordpress blogs are

Six Seconds Press Room and their 6seconds.org Blog