Tuna Park

I read in May that the proportion of households in the US with television sets is now in decline.  Some speculated that this was still an after-effect of the 2008 crash, but I suspect more likely is that people are substituting TV for online video services.

Personally, I don’t watch much television apart from football, (which actually means I watch rather a lot of television).  And with a new season, comes a heightened appetite for footy-ogling restricted only partially by family obligations, my family’s generous but observably finite patience, and the fact that still most games are played concurrently.

But  hope beats loud in the heart of this Fantasy League manager, and so I therefore enjoy services like the Guardian’s minute-by-minute and clock-watch, which enable me to keep abreast of all games at once.

But this season, those services are no longer auto-updating; as Jacob Steinberg explained in Saturday’s season-opening clock-watch:

3.32pm: A lot of you are asking about the absence of the auto-refresh tool. Basically we’re not allowed to use it due to the media’s disagreement with the leagues. You’ll have to press F5 instead. STOP FOOTBALL, I’m sure you’ll agree.

Got that?  No more hands-free browsing of live football scores.

While this conjures up a rather fanciful image of today’s custodians of the sport, in some bizarre echo of the game’s founding purpose, being motivated still by a concern to preserve the eyesight of the nation’s youth, you might almost forget that these are live text updates of football scores we’re talking about.

So, yes, live text updates pushed to the browser now fall under some definition of broadcasting rights.  And yes, we’re reminded yet again that a powerful and flexible browser remains a bulwark against some fairly crazy legality – in this case, the definition of what “broadcasting” a game means.  But still, Firefox users can install an extension such as Reload Every and get on with enjoying automatic text updates.

It’s 2011.  And by the time this season ends, it’s 2012.  And yet, I’m reminded of something Asa wrote back in 2005:

the user is no longer just a spectator, he’s a participant.

…and that’s true even when he’s a spectator.

p.s. not all open web doom and gloom around the Guardian’s start to the season.  I loved this css-powered kit guide.

I’m jet-lagged, having just got back from a week in California, where I was also jet-lagged.  When in the States, I tend to watch (amongst other things) Fox News on telly.   This appalled some friends that I mentioned it too, but I have my reasons.  Fox News adds piquancy to any visit.  It’s genuinely weird to me, but it’s also mainstream.  I would probably find it upsetting if I lived in the US.  But as someone who just passes through from time-to-time, it adds a keenness to the experience.  I don’t say all this to sneer: but rather, when visiting somewhere that seems so easy to relate to in so many ways, it’s perhaps more interesting to see that which you don’t understand, like say, Mr Ted Nugent’s views on US foreign policy as expressed to Governor Mike Huckabee.

On my way home, I read about Eli Pariser’s The Filter Bubble, an investigation of the notion that various Web phenomena (in particular, Google’s personalised search and the goldfish bowls of social networks) mean that we will increasingly only hear our own views reflected back at us.

It’s an interesting thought.  And one that it’s hard to latch on to a counter argument for – presumably any source I could lay my hands on is part of my own echo-chamber.   But still, I was delighted that  This Week in Google addressed the topic.  As Gina Trapani pointed out, seeking out contrary viewpoints is simply part of being a developed person: and of course, your online habits will reflect the extent to which you exhibit this behaviour.   For example, my favourite newspaper columnist is Howard Jacobson, which is not to say that I agree with him all the time, but rather, I frequently find myself instinctively disagreeing even as I am swayed by the man’s clever and humane prose.  I am probably far more closely aligned with the unreadable Johann Hari whose only mode of expression seems to be the self-righteous indignation of the politics undergraduate and whose column I would only read out of condescension.

But then, I suppose there is still rather a lot to be indignant about.  And perhaps there are few books to be sold in writing about as well diagnosed a problem as the global digital divide, but it’s that, rather than people’s natural inclination to associate with those with whom they agree, that’s more worrying.  To take a rather gloomy example: the Faces of the Fallen website places an exact figure on American service personnel killed in Afghanistan and Iraq since 2002: it’s 5,885 at time of writing.  But meanwhile, there seems to be no general consensus even to the nearest half million how many Iraqis have died since the invasion of 2003.  Estimates range from under 100,000 to over 1 million.  Obviously, there is no equivalent online epitaph to these people.

We aren’t in a filter bubble to my mind, or at least, if we are, it’s a trivial problem.  The issue is how much digital naval-gazing we’re able to do at the expense of our consideration of that part of the world that still remains predominantly analogue.  Only Ted Nugent would disagree.

After a discussion on the Mozilla marketing list, I received several requests to repost to my blog my thoughts about why I feel Firefox is still the best browser for users.  I have mixed feelings about doing this, but only because of course, of course, I am somewhat biased and secondly, this is hardly an authoritative account, both in terms of breadth and depth.

But I do profoundly believe that Firefox is the best browser for a user for a number of reasons, even in 2011 when we see some very large organisations making some very large investments in browser development.  Anyway, if you’re looking for some talking points, here’s my pitch on why I, hand-on-heart, prefer Firefox.  Thanks to Danishka for posing the question.  Mozilla.com is of course, much more authoritative on the topic.

Security & Privacy

It’s hard to speak to the security topic on IE9 given that you often tend to see problems retrospectively in closed browsers.  IE’s track record certainly doesn’t seem so stellar.   And personally, I do not find their independent research on “socially engineered malware” all that credible (nor do Opera and Google, from what I read) .

Firefox and Chrome use a lot of the same back-end for anti-malware and anti-phishing, but Mozilla has clearly offered a vision on privacy and Firefox has a very impressive selection of customisations for enhanced privacy and security today.

Chrome’s privacy approach is reliant upon customisation at the moment,  and IE’s “tracking protection lists” appear somewhat vulnerable to gaming.

Performance

This topic has partially defined the browser market for a long time: but right now, all modern browsers seem very, very fast.  They all win on some benchmark, and in the “real world”, which browser is fastest appears to depend on which website you use.  I’d argue no browser is currently outstanding in this area, although I would acknowledge that Firefox is not that fastest on the one-off activity of starting up.  It’s still very fast though…

User Interface

The user interface in Firefox 4 is “minimalist” in the same way IE9′s is, Chrome is,  etc. but what’s important to me is that we haven’t just chopped menus off and hidden them (which seems like a fair description
of what happened in IE9).  Rather, the UI is still very intuitive and contains features such as switch-to-tab, pinned tabs (which does have an equivalent in Chrome and IE) and tab groups that help the user manage
their workflow.

One obvious gap that’s often cited is the lack of a “new tab” page in Firefox: but the blank screen is intentional as the browser gets of the way of the user and doesn’t distract them in their workflow.  It’s hard to quantify the impact of that, but I’m aware of how distracting technology can be.   It possibly takes a browser without an agenda beyond that of the user to really and truly get out of the way.

Firefox 4′s interface is in fact still very customisable (Alex Limi’s blog on the Fx 4 UI is a great reference ) in a
way that IE and Chrome simply are not.

Customisation

I’d argue that Firefox still leads customisation broadly – although Chrome may quote a higher number of extensions, it’s worth bearing in mind :

• questionable levels of curation in the Chrome add-on collection, some of the add-ons I’ve used are very disappointing (e.g. they open a pop-up window for a page on an expired domain…)
•  Chrome add-ons are similar to Jet-Pack add-ons in terms of functionality supported.  Firefox offers that plus much richer, deeper customisation options
• Firefox has a very strong tradition of user-generated customisation, including the Personas gallery.

And Firefox 4 has a new add-on manager which makes customisation of Firefox also much easier and restartless add-ons.

Sync

Lastly, Firefox Sync is both more secure and more useful that the equivalent in Chrome (and there is no “native” solution for IE, as Microsoft would say).  Firefox Sync is fully encrypted on the client side and allows you to
open tabs up across instances of Firefox.  If you use more than one instance of Firefox, this is incredibly useful!

Clearly, the market is much more competitive than it was 1, 2 or 6 years ago – and clearly there are many topics (especially platform support) that I didn’t go into here.  But I feel that the quality and philosophy behind Firefox still make it the best choice for users.  And if you’re a Windows XP user (and most people on the Web are), there are much, much better options available to you than Internet Explorer.