Daryl › Likes

Hi guys. I've found that there's some prioritization based on several factors, including frequency of updates (that is, if you update one service a lot more often than you do another, the former shows up here quicker than the latter). You can always refresh any service manually by clicking "Share something," then clicking "Import your stuff," then clicking on your account on the right, then clicking "Refresh feed." - Mark Trapp

"Refresh feed" doesn't appear for all services. - Vezquex: God of FF

thanks for the info Mark, although this "prioritization sheme" is still too fuzzy for me (and I find it quite annoying to hit the refresh button every time. I hate everything involving manual labor when it comes to aggregators ;-) - Gaby K. Slezák

Vezquex: I think the only one it doesn't appear for is Google Talk, because it doesn't use a feed. Are there any others you've found? Gaby: right, the manual refresh is if you want it right away. With the prioritization, you have to realize it's just a feed they're pulling in most cases. Things like availability on the 3rd party's end, the freq. of the feed update on the 3rd party's end (for example, LibraryThing takes forever to update your account's feed, so it turn takes forever for Friendfeed to update) - Mark Trapp

It'd be cool if there was some sort of transparency though: notice that your feed hasn't updated in a while? If you check out your account, it could tell you when the last refresh was, and if it had any problems. - Mark Trapp

The priorization scheme is fine, just the time gaps get a little too wide sometimes. (Waited > 8hrs yesterday for my latest flickr activities to show up here, then I gave up and refreshed. A photo posted today was fetched after ~ 1hour, which is perfectly okay.) Maybe add a maximum time to the priorization, like, I don't know, 6hrs? - Andrea Sturm

Mark: if a post shows up on the 3rd party (i.g., tumblr, Flickr) it should only be a question of friendfeed pulling it. Where does the info about the priorization come from? I'm asking because I had similar experiences as Chronistin reported, and that doesn't sound like a rule we can depend on (1 hour/8 hours). Friendfeed-Support: please just tell us how it is so we can stop speculating ;-) - Gaby K. Slezák

Gaby: Friendfeed relies on one of two things to be informed about a site update: the RSS/Atom feed for your account on that service, or the service's API. Some services don't publish immediately to their API, have restrictions in place on their API, or don't publish immediately to their RSS feed. What you see on the service's web page isn't necessarily the same data Friendfeed has access to. - Mark Trapp

What about twitter? The instant you post a message on twitter, it appears on friendfeed. How do they do that? Not by polling twitter's feed every second, I guess. - Peter

Peter, that experience is not universal. For example, right now, my Twitter entries are taking a few minutes to a half hour to show up here without a manual refresh. There are a lot of factors at play in the feed updates: I think you guys are going to be hard pressed to get a simple one line answer on when you can expect to see your feed items show up automatically. - Mark Trapp

Delicious updates seem to be taking days - I need to keep making manual updates. - Daryl

Microsoft would embrace and extend, creating WebKit Expression '09, and Firefox would only use WebKit 520 for the next 3 years, complaining that Apple and Google won't slow down their development to accommodate an 18 month development cycle. - Mark Trapp

NO -- webkit is at least poorly studied for security vulnerabilities, I don't want to live with swiss-cheese-alike crap from fruity company JUST because some few entrepreneurs want to make their life easier!!! - A.T.

if only they would - Robin Barooah

Mark+++ - Rahsheen ™, Coach of FF

Extending the product is a good thing -- it's how the platform advances. As long as it's all open-source, we all win. - Paul Buchheit

It's not that everybody should like it. It's that they should all do it. - Louis Gray

Actually, that's already been discussed as part of the Gears' strategy... simply make Webkit a plugin for Firefox and IE. It's actually not *that* outlandish. - Chris Messina

Paul, the problem is WebKit is licensed under the LGPL; Microsoft could merely create a plugin to WebKit that did all of its extra features. They really wouldn't receive all that much flak about it, either. - Mark Trapp

That makes sense. It will never happen. - Khürt Williams from twhirl

@Chris - I recall that being mentioned at google code. I wonder what it would take to make a plugin for IE or firefox to use complete chrome processes as an 'accelerator' - Robin Barooah

Yeah, an IE "plugin" is the way to go. That way users don't even need to change their habits or UI, and it could potentially fall-back to IE for sites that still don't work with webkit. There's just no advantage to having different rendering engines at this point. It's high cost, low benefit. - Paul Buchheit

Didn't Netscape 9 allow users to choose which rendering engine they wanted to use? - Tony Ruscoe

@Tony: Netscape 8 did: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki... . You'll need to manually type the closing bracket, it is being excluded as part of the URL and I can't manually fix it. - nadim

for you all dearst proponents of single engine - go read "1984" book... dependence on one engine (or any subsystem, when it comes to that) for whole world is dangerous... and utterly stupid when it is done for sake of small group's convenience :-/ - A.T.

Yes, it would be just like 1984 :) - Paul Buchheit

@slipol - that would be true if we were talking about one engine developed by one company, but with an open-source project with many developers, I don't see how this could be a problem. Do you think that hundreds (maybe thousands) of developers worldwide will all collude to do something evil? Well, if so, some other people will come along and create a fork. In fact, WebKit was forked off of khtml. Let's not forget to thank the KDE folk for the good engine to begin with. - Robert Felty

Why would the two most popular browsers in the world change? - J Allen

Crazy talk! - Andrew Badera

Rob, the problem that silpol is presumably saying exists with a monoculture is that everybody is vulnerable to the same diseases. This has happened in the past where security vulnerabilities in compression and encryption libraries have made huge amounts of unrelated software vulnerable. But Paul has a good point that a dominant platform certainly makes things easier for the developer, which is why there are millions more apps for Windows than any other platform. - Gabe

You are making a big discussion out of nothing. The hypotesis that if they all use the same basis, that will have the same DOM, they will be interoperable. That has been proved wrong: all the web browsers out there already have the same working basis (Web Standards) and still they messed things up. What makes you believe that this would be different? - Marcos Marado from fftogo

Marcos, the difference is that they all started from very different places and IE and Firefox both have a lot of historical gunk. Web standards wasn't their working basis, the browser wars of the 90s was. The browsers have been converging for years now, which makes web development a lot better than it used to be, but that only emphasizes the uselessness of having multiple rendering... more... - Paul Buchheit

I agree!! - Wayne Sutton

This would definitely make life easier on the web developers - however monocultures usually result in a mediocre product. - Josh Smith

I agree - Roberto Bonini

@Paul I can only assume that you proclaim monoculture argument as nonsense only because you've never seen domino effect on large scale, with species of slightly different nature still staying... I've heard same kind of argumentation from Opera people as they were bragging on idea of "one proper engine under one proper standards" only to show them a bunch of weak points in their cardboard architecture, granted I had apropriate tools. But... Whatever. - A.T.

The monoculture argument is based entirely on analogy, which makes for nice stories, but is a very weak form of evidence. - Paul Buchheit

Paul, but if they really wanted to interoperate, i.e. If the browser wars were really over, then they would just stop the last few years nonsense and go for standards compliance. Why did Apple fork KHTML? Why does IE insist in not adapting standards? Ultimately what matters for both end users and web developers is that each browser sees the same page in the same way. It's fictitious to... more... - Marcos Marado from fftogo

Why bother with HTML, JS and others such standards then? Let's close up those shops and just standardize everything through Webkit. Which is great, unless if for whatever reason Webkit doesn't work on your device (or until the great Webkit fork). Let's standardize DOM instead, ne? :) - David Lee

Standardization is hard because there's a large amount of pages crafted specifically for quirks particular browsers. Going standard breaks them. - 9000

it sucks that it doesn't work on Windows Mobile yet.... ugh, I'm stuck in the stone age with IE6... - Harold

This conversation is so all over the place, I don't even know where to begin. All I can say is that 1985 wasn't as bad as I would have thought, seeing as it came after 1984. - Chris Messina

LOL hehehehe! - Susan Beebe

What's the point? You're still going to have to support IE6 for a decade anyway, and any new browser has to not break old apps. It's like those people who suggest that MS just replace the Windows kernel with Linux, as if all old apps will suddenly disappear, leaving the slate clean for all the glorious new apps to come. - Gabe

that's one idea i love! standardization, baby! - stefan