emoko is a web browser just like FireFox or Internet Explorer, with one big difference - emoko is built using video game technology.
The browser apparently renders pages in a “3D world,” and users’ avatars in that 3D world can interact (via text and voice chat, or drawing on the page) with one another, as long as they are visiting the same web page. The version at the time of writing is version 0.9.6225, and it is the second major update according to the browser’s website.
The following video demonstrates emoko’s vision of how the browser works:
Now that we’ve seen the video, I have to admit that I’ve actually installed and played around with emoko a bit. Unfortunately, my experience wasn’t anything like what you see in the video. The browser felt more like a Java app to me than it did a video game. Even on my fairly powerful computer, things felt a bit slow and jittery. If it’s possible to tilt web pages, create avatars and find other users in emoko, I couldn’t figure out how to do it. The best I could do is get a feel for the interface, which in itself is a bit different than what is offered up in the video:
Don’t let me be the judge, though. If you’re into trying new things, give emoko a spin yourself and definitely let me know if you have a different experience than I did. Regardless, it’s good to see people thinking outside of the box with web browser development. This one may just be a little too far out of the box for my liking.
I originally covered Wyzo back in September of 2007 when it was still an alpha release. Believe it or not, Wyzo has now grown up and is known as Wyzo 3. It is billed as “The Media Browser,” and “will accelerate your web downloads, let you download torrents with a single click, discover media in your browser and much more.”
Rather than review the browser again, now that it’s matured quite a bit, I’ll do one better and share this YouTube video with you, which does a good job of showing off the UI, some of the important features, etc.:
If you’re interested in keeping tabs on what the Wyzo folks are up to, you can follow them on Twitter: @wyzo. I’ve also added them to @Browsersphere’s list of web browsers.
At first it was under consideration, and then the decision was made to version the Shiretoko release of Firefox, formally versioned as 3.1, as version 3.5.
The Cost of Internet Explorer attempts to track all the “wasted time and effort” on the part of web developers trying to make websites compatible with IE.
Armenia, a country with around three million people, saw its Opera Mini usage grow by 2800% last year. See this and other interesting statistics in the State of the Mobile Web report (via Choose Opera).
“Yahoo! is expected to begin distributing Opera Mini via Yahoo! Mobile and also as a standalone download from Yahoo!’s mobile Web sites in the near future.”
There was a lot to cover this time around, and there’s much more I haven’t yet covered. Hopefully that means we’ll see the 13th installment of “Around the Browsersphere” sooner than November.
I was really quite fond of the concepts behind Latitude, but as all the members of the team have no free time to spend on it, we have to be frank after months of inactivity and call it quits.
Fortunately (or rather, unfortunately), it seems not all concepts shown in the mocked up screenshots of Latitude will go lost with the demise of the project. Apple has patented (yes, legally patented) a few of the ideas that we have discussed online. These patent filings appeared in late 2008 on websites like Macrumors, and as a team, we were quite surprised to see them. For us, it won’t matter, but I hope it won’t stifle innovation in the browser marketplace. I do hope to make an announcement in January that will relate to this, and I hope it will also help in a future where I hope to see more well-designed and useful browsers. So long, Latitude, we barely knew ye.
Google grants outsider Chrome-coding privileges – Given the requirements of becoming a Chrome “insider,” I’m not surprised to read that only one outsider has been granted permissions thus far.
Exclusive: First look at Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 RC1 – RC1, “which is believed to be the first feature-complete version of the browser, will lack in compatibility with web standards and will not match the JavaScript performance of all other major browsers.”
Since my last installment of Around the Browsersphere was posted back toward the beginning of May, there’s simply way too much going on to get all caught up without breaking things up a bit. Therefore, this eleventh edition will focus solely on the “minor players,” or the web browsers not named Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera or Safari.
Someone thinks that the folks who are triaging Konqueror bugs are contributing to more bugs being fixed than opened in KDE recently.
Karpion is a Konqueror add-on that “utili[z]es the Open Phishing Database to provide the user with information and tools that help protect against phishing.”
Web Worker Daily points to the Off By One Browser, which has “a footprint of about a megabyte.” I think I may have mentioned it here before because I recognize the website, but it doesn’t hurt to drop its name here again.
I’m hoping to catch up on the major players soon, so stay tuned.
Last time around, I didn’t get any feedback on the format of these “Around the Browsersphere” posts, so I’ll give a slightly more organized approach a try and we’ll see how it goes.
Camino
Camino 1.6, which features a customizable toolbar search field, software update capabilities, a scrolling tab bar, etc., was released on the 17th.
Firefox
Fuzzbot is a Firefox extention that is “useful for detecting embedded semantic information in web pages and performing actions on that semantic data” (via Microformats).
sKatterBrainZ claims that “there’s nothing in Safari that is truly innovative or unique to the world of web browsing.”
Somewhat contradictory to that, Ian Hixie, the author of the Acid3 test, seems pretty impressed with how quickly the Safari/WebKit team has responded to the issues uncovered by Acid3 (I’ve covered this here as well).
Opera’s Charles McCathieNevile, Mozilla’s Brendan Eich and Microsoft’s Chris Wilson will square off at SXSW tomorrow in a panel called “Browser Wars: Deja Vu All Over Again?”
Auto Web Browser “will consult the search engines from a user defined list, download the pages to your computer, filter and analyze them and then it will automatically surf further, downloading other potentially interesting pages using the links from the meaningful part of the relevant documents.”
Amazingly enough, there’s a lot more to post about, but that should hold you over for a little bit. I’m interested in hearing if Browsersphere visitors are more interested in somewhat random links like this or if it would be preferable to have the links broken down by the web browser to which they correspond. If you have any thoughts on that, please leave a comment.
Though, it looks like the Flock folks