If you ever share a computer with a friend or family member, you’ve probably experienced the challenge of remembering who is logged in to accounts on Google or other services. User’s of Google’s excellent Chrome browser will be happy to hear that now in the works is a simple feature that will allow multiple browser windows to run different Google Profiles with a simple click of a button.

The feature is not yet available but was spotted in developer documentation and first reported on by the watchdog blog Google Operating System. While this might seem like a simple matter of convenience, it also represents the convergence of a number of other trends in online computing.

Above, a mock-up of how the Mac version of Chrome might display which account is running in a particular window. New browser windows will use the same account that the last active window was using, and all browser extensions will be common across all windows regardless of account.

Incidentally, speaking from one ad-supported company to another, it’s hard not to notice that there’s Ad Block Plus running in the mock-up screenshot of this browser. Thanks, Google.

What it All Means

Computing in the cloud. The browser as a key to identity. Personalization of the computing experience. Those are the kinds of things we see here and in many other developments on the web, to put this news in context.

It would be great to see different browser window identities entirely partitioned off from each other, with different sets of cookies, so that you could run different accounts on Twitter, Facebook and other services at the same time too.

Consider this in conjunction with Chrome’s plan to experiment with predictive background tab preloading for “wicked fast navigation” and I think you’ll agree – the world of the browser looks to be very different in the future.

What’s Google’s economic incentive to develop features like this? The nicer it is to browse, the more you’ll do it, and the more you browse – the more ads you’ll see. That’s not the whole story, but it is the part that pays the bills.

View full post on Web Technology Blog, Development and Social Media

Today you can go download the beta of IE9 and from what I’ve seen it looks like it’s pretty damn impressive. We also released a version of Flash Player, codenamed “Square” which not only has support for IE9, but includes a bunch of code collaboration that we did with Microsoft to create a really streamlined experience. The Flash Player Team Blog has a bunch of info:

As part of our collaboration with Microsoft’s Internet Explorer team over the past few months, Flash Player “Square” has been enhanced to directly support the hardware-accelerated graphics capabilities in the newest version of IE. Flash Player “Square” leverages the new GPU support available with Internet Explorer 9 Beta to deliver a faster and more responsive user experience with Flash-based content. In our internal testing, we’ve seen significant improvements in Flash Player graphics performance – exceeding 35% in Internet Explorer 9 Beta compared to Flash Player running in previous versions of IE. While the performance improvements will vary based on the type of content and how it’s created, bitmap-heavy content for Flash Player will experience the greatest benefit. Flash-enabled content that’s embedded as transparent (wmode=”transparent”) will also run more efficiently given the benefits of offloading the HTML and Flash content compositing to the GPU. Try it out by downloading the Internet Explorer 9 Beta and the Flash Player “Square” preview. We’d appreciate your feedback and observations on performance.

So right off the bat with IE9 you get hardware support for Flash. We’ve also (finally) got native 64-bit binaries for Mac, Linux, and Windows. It’s been a long time coming, but we hope you get a chance to test these versions out and give us feedback.

We’re only a couple of months from MAX, and this gives you a taste of some of the things we’ve been working on. Between the work on HTML5 with Dreamweaver and Illustrator and the work the Flash Platform teams have been doing, it’s going to be an incredible year for RIAs and for Adobe designers/developers.

View full post on Digital Backcountry – Ryan Stewart’s Flash Platform Blog

Theres an email going round asking Facebook users to reset their password. The email is a fake and contains a virus, do not open or follow any of its instructions.

Facebook is reportedly in the process of letting its users know, but be sure to let anyone you know be aware of the email.

The message says the following:

The message appears to come from Facebook Support with help@facebook.com as the email address.

If you use a web based email client, you shouldnt be too concerned with the viral part of this but if you download your email, its worth virus checking your computer to be safe. The attachment contains a password stealer that can potentially access any username and password combination used on the computer, not just the login credentials for Facebook reports CNet.

More details to come.

Via All Facebook

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