Axis, Yahoo's New Browser 194
markjhood2003 writes "Fresh on the heels of Slashdot's discussion of the lack of browser choice on mobile devices comes the announcement of Yahoo's new web browser Axis. According to VentureBeat, the browser runs on iPad and iPhone as a separate standalone browser and as an extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, with support for Android and Windows Phone coming soon. It actually appears to bring some innovation to mobile search, displaying results and queries on the same page for more productive navigation between the two."
That is cool, but... (Score:4, Insightful)
That search result display is actually really cool. I'd love to see that in other browsers (including desktop browsers). The problem is Yahoo's track record is poor when it comes to updating their products. For instance, Yahoo Mail is embarrassingly behind other web mail services. If Yahoo treats this like they treat their other products, I can't help wondering if it will just become another obsolete Yahoo thing.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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You and your GF should try iGoogle, and its widgets. I am willing to bet that you/she will like it better than the Yahoo portal. Yahoo sports is a good one, I dont think there is a replacement in Google, but you still can add a widget from your favourite sports website to iGoogle and be done with it.
I agree about the yahoo interface, I am pretty much torn in between Yahoo and Gmail interfaces.
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iGoogle is similar to Yahoo Portal, it lets you view your email (gmail only), news, weather. In additon to these, it also allows you to add widgets from other websites. I used to have a widget from my local news website, and one from my favourite sport news website. This as far as I know, cannot be done in Yahoo Portal. Google+ (Google's social network) is optional, you need not signup for it. Otherwise, I think privacy implications are the same. I agree with not rocking the boat, but if you are actively lo
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I already replied to the other post; iGoogle is not limited to service offered by Google, while Yahoo Portal is, and gmail's spam detection is way better. These are the reason I prefer Gmail and iGoogle, while I still occasionally use Yahoo. If these do no matter to you, you should continue to use Yahoo, if not switch to Gmail.
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- pop3 access is for paying customers only ("free" pop3 servers are only accessible through ip assigned to mobile networks)
- if you use their "forward" option to forward your mail to another address, then you can't use pop3 anymore (true story)
- No Imap option *even for paying customers*
- Unlike Gmail, Yahoo doesn't warn you if somebody logs in to your webmail from an unusual ip, they also don't offer anything like a list of recent login ip.
- And w
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Did you ever think that maybe, just maybe...yahoo mail users LIKE the current UI?
Nope. After having asked all of my relatives who use Yahoo! they don't mind the current UI, and if anything are just afraid of change.
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Google has been doing predictive search and result display for a while now. There's nothing new in this, just keeping up with the competition.
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The problem is Yahoo's track record is poor when it comes to updating their products.
Nonsense, I'm sure whoever happens to be Yahoo's CEO this week will provide the leadership and vision to keep this on track.
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The problem is Yahoo's track record is poor when it comes to updating their products.
IMO, Yahoo's problem is bloat. Our work computers are getting pretty long in the tooth, more than three tabs open with Yahoo News bogs the poor old thing down badly. I've never seen a well designed Yahoo product (that said, I prefer their email to Gmail. Gmail locked out my mcgrew@gmail.com account because there was a typo when I signed up, they took it away when I tried to change passwords).
As to updating products, I think
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someone didn't take her meds today
I got an error (Score:3)
When I clicked on the yellow "Get it now! DESKTOP" icon at the upper right hand site, yahoo sent me to a null pointer
http://axis.yahoo.com/null [yahoo.com]
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I fucked up !! (Score:4, Funny)
Help, I fucked up !!
I installed that "yahoo browser" while browsing on Chrome
Now I got a butt ugly shitty thing floating at the lower left hand corner on my screen !!
How do I get rid of that "yahoo browser" ???
HELP !!!
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Click the wrench icon on your toolbar, navigate through the Tools sub-menu and select "Extensions." You can disable or delete Chrome add-ons from there.
Thanks ! (Score:3)
Yeah, that butt ugly thing is gone !
Thanks !!
ADOBE CALLED AND THEY ARE PISSED! (Score:2)
They want back the letter "A" that Yahoo! took from their yard.
It's pretty easily identified: no legs and a little off center.
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Look. We all have our days...
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Really? And you have actual evidence that this person is receiving monetary compensation, as opposed to simply... oh, I don't know... being a rabid fanboy much like yourself?
You don't? Oh, how surprising.
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Shut the fuck up you piece of shit troll. Aren't you still licking your wounds from slashing your wrists over the google oracle verdict today?
Who is Google Oracle?
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The last oracle I spoke to said: "For a good time engrave `Elbereth'."
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The last oracle I spoke to said: "For a good time engrave `Elbereth'."
She lied. You wouldn't get laid by the sluttiest succubus on earth if you did that.
Re:That is cool, but... (Score:5, Informative)
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594 [google.com]
Click the button in the upper-right to detach the "Compose Mail" dialog into a new window, then click "Compose Mail" again and voila, you will be composing two messages simultaneously.
Labels are strictly more powerful than folders especially now that gmail has nested labels: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/06/superstars-and-nested-labels-now.html [blogspot.com].
Spend at least 5 seconds googling, or, umm, yahooing, before complaining.
Re:That is cool, but... (Score:4)
Labels are strictly more powerful than folders especially now that gmail has nested labels: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/06/superstars-and-nested-labels-now.html [blogspot.com].
Spend at least 5 seconds googling, or, umm, yahooing, before complaining.
Those "smart tags" make gmail a pain to use over IMAP, since you have lots of autogenerated folders, and deleting an email won't delete it, and moving it sometimes copies, sometimes moves. It's really a pain if you use any client which is not their own.
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Works just fine for me. Seamonkey (therefore thunderbird) handles labels via IMAP just fine.
Re:That is cool, but... (Score:5, Informative)
Gmail has keyboard shortcuts.
Yahoo!'s storage space isn't unlimited, they just don't tell you the cap.
You can detach the "compose mail" dialog to a separate window. You can make as many windows as you wish (or until you window manager/browser crashes.)
If you only use one label per message then labels are identical to folders. Otherwise they have a strict superset of folder functionality (a message can have >1 label, but can only be in 1 folder.)
What, exactly, does Yahoo! have that Gmail doesn't have? Other! Than! Excessive! Punctuation!
Re:That is cool, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
What, exactly, does Yahoo! have that Gmail doesn't have? Other! Than! Excessive! Punctuation!
well, there's one thing: yahoo mail has stupid and obnoxious graphical ads, sometimes with flash&sound and sometimes the ads expand to fill the page if you accidentally mouse over them (happened to me a month ago when i was installing a new computer and i didn't had time to install AdBlock Plus. ABP was the first thing i installed after that).
Gmail only has text ads and those are not even remotely as annoying as the crap that yahoo shows.
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well, there's one thing: yahoo mail has stupid and obnoxious graphical ads,
There are ads on the Internet?
i didn't had time to install AdBlock Plus.
Oh, I see.
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I applaud the appropriateness (and truthiness) of your signature.
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gmail's spam filtering is pretty damn awesome for me, as well.
Very few false negatives, and only a handful of false positives (but when I look at it objectively, I'd imagine the majority of users would consider such newsletters as spam).
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You can detach the "compose mail" dialog to a separate window. You can make as many windows as you wish (or until you window manager/browser crashes.)
And if I want all my mail tabs in one window/tab, not every mail in a new tab? And labels are still displayed in the main inbox, while Yahoo folders take the message out of the root folder, so in the inbox, I only see unsorted messages. Granted, those total some 400 for me, but my point still stands, since other folders run into the 10,000s. All those messages in Gmail would make browsing almost impossible, unless I used the search box, which could strip context (one of my friends has an email provider who
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But hey, use what you like, just don't make stuff up to justify it
Hey, I listed completely, totally subjective points (IMHO). Maybe I didn't tag them as "In my opinion", but they are. Like I said, I like Gmail too, for its strong integration mainly, but I use Yahoo because I find it better for me.
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If you need more than 500 email addresses you are doing something illegal.
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If you are more paranoid than average you can use a second address set to auto-forward as the base.
Most people are not going to be familiar with the system enough to know what you mean by this. Google's FAQ will help: [google.com]
Gmail doesn't offer traditional aliases, but you can receive messages sent to your.username+any.alias@gmail.com. For example, messages sent to jane.doe+notes@gmail.com are delivered to jane.doe@gmail.com.
Obviously any spammer can figure out that your real address is jane.doe@gmail.com with such a system. Your solution, to chain the alias account to a secondary real account to a primary real account does hide the primary address, but exposes the secondary address, which is just as bad. You can't close that down, or all your aliases stop working.
I haven't used Yahoo!'s system, so I can't s
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I still use Yahoo email too, though its not my primary one. The only place I find yahoo lacking is in spam detection. I have seen legitimate mail classified as spam and spam making it to the inbox. This has never happened with Gmail (in the last one year, I cannot recollect this happening even once). I understand your preference for the Yahoo Interface and its unlimited Storage. Everything else, though, is available in Gmail. Gmail does support keyboard shortcuts (this might be part of the "Gmail labs" feat
Re:That is cool, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can create unlimited spam decoys in Gmail too, just use "youremailid+arandomstring@gmail.com"
This feature is worthless as a spam decoy strategy, as anyone can use it to find your real address. I would be amazed if spammers don't already strip off the "+whatever" from gmail addresses, and those that don't would certainly start if any appreciable number of people used it. It's got its uses, but spam prevention isn't among them.
I wonder why Google hasn't stepped up to supply actual disposable email addresses yet. It doesn't seem like a difficult feature to add, and would have a lot of value to their users.
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Not to mention a lot of sites "helpfully" say that your +whatever address is invalid.
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Re:That is cool, but... (Score:5, Informative)
They should. The RFC says so.
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The problem is the SMTP daemon, in this case, it's perfectly valid. Whoever wrote the daemon, didn't read the RFC.
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Re:That is cool, but... (Score:5, Informative)
This feature is worthless as a spam decoy strategy, as anyone can use it to find your real address. I would be amazed if spammers don't already strip off the "+whatever" from gmail addresses,
[...]
I wonder why Google hasn't stepped up to supply actual disposable email addresses yet
oh, but they do have that but it's a bit hidden and it's only available via Apps for hosted domains. (even free apps has it).
The way to set this up is to host your domain (or at least the mail receiving functions of it) with Google Apps and then you can set up the email service to accept wildcard emails, *@your-domain-hosted-on-google-apps_dot_anything.
Now whenever you give out an address just invent one on the spot @your domain and it will be valid. I do this and i got into the habit of throwing a date stamp and the name of whoever it is for into the email address itself so that if i start receiving spam for that address i know who leaked it and when they were assigned that address. Such an address usually looks like: mail-for-my-name-from-slashdot-org-20120524@example.com
And since my domain is set up at Gmail with a wildcard catch-all address, that will be routed to my actual mailbox (only if it passes Gmail spam filtering tests).
Re:That is cool, but... (Score:4, Informative)
I do that, but it is limited in its usefulness because there is not a simple way of then killing off one of those addresses that you have made up on the spot. Eventually if spam to all these made up addresses becomes a problem, you have to turn off the catch-all address to stop the spam coming through. Which then means you have to actually set up another account or group in Google Apps each time you want an extra address, which is a lot less quick and easy.
point taken but i don't usually give such an address to any site. I use mailinator.com / bugmenot.com for random junk like reading nytimes.com or stuff like that.
The Gmail wildcard is useful for sites you want to receive stuff from but these sites are not trusted/appreciated enough to give them a proper email address. Also, in order not to fill up my main email account, i have a separate, dedicated account@my domain and that one is the target of the wildcard, not my main account.
To access that quickly, I set up account access delegation rights between the wildcard-reception account and my main account.
If one of the made-up addresses starts receiving spam i can always set a filter to delete that email as soon as it arrives (usually i just filter it with a label for sending to spamcop) and (usually) the owner of the site it was initially intended for will get a spam & abuse complaint sent on all contact email addresses i can find (via whois and their site)
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I do that, but it is limited in its usefulness because there is not a simple way of then killing off one of those addresses that you have made up on the spot.
You will no longer see any more of the emails from that disposable made-up email address. Enjoy!
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Hmmm. This is a new spam decoy method I wasn't familiar with; Appears Google has numerous ways of doing it. You can also insert periods anywhere into the front of your address. Not quite the same thing, but that will give you a number of extra addresses (depending on the length of your username) that spammers probably won't be smart enough to notice.
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Zoho blows everything Yahoo has done out of the water. Never heard of it? It's business oriented - and has NO ADS embedded in its presentation. It's IMAP access from the word go - and you can map your DNS to it with an MX and TXT record - so you get AJAX web-mail with integrated calendar and business tools, without looking like lovebags00027.
Yahoo blew their Zimbra acquisition. "Social Integration" destroyed the experience for me - as it did for Hottmail. GMail? Don't start me on that!
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Huh... (Score:3, Funny)
So Yahoo! is still making stuff, that's good to see. You can't fault them for trying to stay relevant.
Unfortunately I tried to download it and got redirected to... I'm not kidding... /null
Can we get a collective, "doh!"
Re:Huh... (Score:5, Interesting)
What's worse is that Yahoo have accidentally included their private signing key inside the Chrome extension, meaning anyone can now sign Chrome extensions as Yahoo....
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I assume Google will revoke the key any second now?
What's it for? (Score:3, Funny)
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Axis search is searching for the "cool" kids; it shows you all the search results other people want to see (they call it "trending").
Ofcourse the concept of trending search topics is completely safe from spammers, scammers and other marketeers.
The Chrome Extension Leaks Yahoo Private Certifice (Score:5, Informative)
http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/yahoo-axis-chrome-extension-leaks-private-certificate-file
Yo dog (Score:5, Funny)
Pimp it!
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Bitches love browsers.
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Yo dog, i heard you like browsers, so we gonna put a browser inside your browser so you can browse while you browse.
FTFY
Private Certificate File in Chrome Extension (Score:5, Informative)
Nik Cubrilovic discovered that a private certificate file was left in the chrome extension source files:
http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/yahoo-axis-chrome-extension-leaks-private-certificate-file
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Fucking amateurs. Seriously?
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There is no such as a "private certificate". Certificates are inherently meant to be public. A certificate establishes identity. What was leaked is a private key.
The Axis? (Score:5, Funny)
Release Code Names (Score:3, Funny)
(I didn't realise Finland was an Axis power; I thought it's fame in The War was due to being the only country simultaneously at war with both Ivan and Gerry.)
Axis powers (Score:2)
Finland was not actually part of Axis - at least not fully. They fought with German against Russia, and they received quite significant help from German though.
"Co-belligerents
Various countries fought side by side with the Axis powers for a common cause. These countries were not signatories of the Tripartite Pact and thus not formal members of the Axis."
Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Axis_powers [wikipedia.org]
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It's fame is for being the only country that was assigned as a "client country" in Molotov-Ribbentrop that didn't get annexed in spite of two of some of the biggest military campaigns of the world war 2, including the single biggest concentration of artillery per kilometer of frontline.
And then, there's of course this: https://secure.flickr.com/photos/suzymushu/3009425719/ [flickr.com]
(Not my flickr, just the first hit on images.google.com for "finland be afraid").
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_War [wikipedia.org]
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That was 70 years ago, these days the enemy is "The Axis of Evil" (North Korea, Iran, Syria)
Although Mitt thinks that the biggest enemy is "the Soviet Union" - I guess he was asleep in 1989)
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Only if you advance from the east. Else it's a slap in the face.
oh I get it (Score:4, Funny)
Anyone else excited? (Score:5, Funny)
I'm super excited that this relevant and forward thinking company is releasing a browser that will make me forget about using any other browser.
- Me from 1996
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Pretty much sums it up for me too.
I herd you like mudkips so we put... wrong meme! (Score:2)
Except to use this browser you apparently have to run it as a plugin inside another browser.
Some guy called "Eck Zibit" or something just called. He was saying something about "yo' dog"... do you know anything about this?
Screw the beach ball (Score:2)
Axis will make your *entire* browser spin around waiting for 50 seconds.
How is this a browser? (Score:3)
The video on Yahoo's site talks all about all kinds of search features which all sound perfectly interesting as features of a search site.
But how exactly is it a browser? Or, I suppose, why? Everything it says it does could be done in a site accessible from any browser. Did they just decide to package the site in a stand-alone application because... someone doesn't understand the difference between a site you view in a browser (albeit a site you use to find other sites), and the browser itself which accesses and renders those sites?
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Not entirely sure why either, but it actually is pretty cool on my iPhone. It's missing a couple things, though, such as tap top to zoom to the top of the page, and I'm not sure I can live without Reader. Other than that, it's a very nice way to search on a phone, and I'm surprised to be saying that.
On the desktop, though, it's bundled as an awkward browser extension that seemed to vanish as soon as I closed the Safari tab, and the Chrome extension has a big security issue (probably all versions of the ex
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Did they just decide to package the site in a stand-alone application because... someone doesn't understand the difference between a site you view in a browser (albeit a site you use to find other sites), and the browser itself which accesses and renders those sites?
There *is* a reason they are launching on iOS.
This can't be a browser due the Apple Store (Score:5, Insightful)
As covered in the article about mobile browser choice yesterday, just by virtue of being on the Apple Store this cannot be a real browser in any significant meaning of the word. So saying it's a "separate standalone browser" is just a flagrant lie. At best it's a shell around the existing WebKit/Safari browser on those devices.
Given that it's also listed as an "extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari", what is this really? Yet another privacy-invasion toolbar? :(
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The fact it uses the WebKit rendering engine doesn't mean it's not a browser, or that it's just a shell around Safari. And aren't all browsers just shells around a rendering engine? Loads of different browsers use WebKit. The main reason Google won't release Chrome for iOS is that they can't use V8, their JavaScript engine. Most of their WebKit customisations are available in Apple's implementation too. so, yes, it is a separate standalone browser. Install the app and see for yourself.
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"BLABLABALBABLABALBALBALBABLABLBALBALBALBALBALBALBA"
it's a shell around iOS safari. even icecat is more of a real separate browser.
Re:This can't be a browser due the Apple Store (Score:5, Insightful)
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Thank you, I had to wade through a massive shitstorm of people hyping and bitching about Yahoo Mail to find the one comment I was interested in. I'm glad it's here, 80% of the way down the page.
Read the source Luke (Score:2, Insightful)
because its just a toolbar re-modelled,
its primary purpose seems to be setting a GUID, a yahoo cookie and tracking everything you do with a web bug beacon, and it injects external scripts on every page
reading the source reveals their true intents and its not an extension to help you
basically its good old spyware
Yahoo eh? (Score:5, Funny)
Can't wait to see Altavista's entry into the mobile browser market.
yahoo? (Score:2)
Who was that again?
Thumbnail Results Are Useless (Score:2)
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I actually tried it (for all of 2 minutes). First, it does show the page title overlaid on the bottom of each thumbnail, which makes them far less annoying than I expected them to be. Second, they do potentially convey "hey, this page looks like ass, I'm not even gonna bother".
What did annoy me right quick:
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Do mobile browsers suck? (Score:3)
I didn't know that. I do share the concerns about the amazing shittiness of the dominant mobile OSes, causing mobile browsers to stagnate. But even when (yeah, it's "when" not "if") that happens, I thought at least it won't be as bad as what happened a decade ago. Back in the day, I would have agreed with the (then) contemporary version of the above statement: Everyone knew MSIE6 and NN4 absolutely suck (even by the standards of the time), and all the good browsers were niche or off the beaten path. But in 2012 I really don't agree that the most popular mobile browsers suck. Mobile Safari and Android Browser both seem pretty good to me.
(In fact I'd say the web browsers are the only thing that makes those two platforms be tolerable at all. They're otherwise garbage and the fact that you can so easily web-browse on them is what saves them. But that's another topic.. not that I'm averse to topic-drift, as you'll soon see.)
No? What don't you like about the current mobile browsers? They sure seem pretty up-to-date on standards and rendering capabilites, if nothing else. (Nobody would have said that about MSIE6 or NN4.)
BTW, totally different topic. The Axis demo movie thing, the presenter's voice was doing something funny. When they were just showing screenshots, I heard a woman's voice. Then they occasionally shift back to the dude and it's a man's voice. But it's the same voice. Without the face, it's a woman. Anyone else hear this, or is it just me?
Not a new idea at all (Score:2)
Splitting out the results by topic is not a new idea at all.
Many years ago while consulting at Yahoo! we already played around with a search engine that broke its results by topic (back then we used the 'Explorer' search text to show its potential). Somehow this never caught on.
I cannot remember the name of that particular search engine we used back then (these were the days of Altavista, a new start up called Google and Microsoft was still using Yahoo). A little research on the webs brought me to this: htt [yippy.com]
Linux (Score:2)
"Download Axis Desktop Now!"
click
"Yahoo! Axis does not run on your Operating System. Have an iPhone or iPad? Check out the Yahoo! Axis apps!"
Fail (not as if I really wanted it, anyway)
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Perhaps not long, but it shouldn't last long in court unless they can show likely customer confusion between a browser and motorcycle accessories. The stylised "A" is not registered against any category like computer software. http://tess2.uspto.gov/bin/showfield?f=doc&state=4007:e52vk0.2.1 [uspto.gov]
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Funny, they have suppressed search results for "yahoo axis chrome". Query "yahoo axis key" returns articles about the leak, but you have to know what you're looking for.