We’re headed to Austin, Texas tomorrow along with the crew from Wired’s Underwire blog to attend South By Southwest Interactive . The week-long nerd fest starts Friday, and we’ll be reporting from the trenches. If you’re headed down to SXSWi, here’s what Webmonkey will be checking out. If you’re not going this year, you’ll be able to follow along from home here on the blog and everywhere else on the... 

Flash: quick or dead? A new study released Wednesday pits Flash Player’s video performance against that of native HTML5 video playback in several different web browsers. The verdict? Flash is a CPU hog in some cases, and native H.264 video is a CPU hog in some cases. That’s right — both options threw strikes and gutters. Video playback in the browser has been a central issue of discussion in the tech world of late. The forthcoming... 

If you have Google Apps running on your domain, now you can install third-party apps that fully integrate with Google’s apps. Google has debuted the Google Apps Marketplace , an online store where Google Apps users can browse different cloud-based applications and add the ones they like to their suite of online tools. The apps can share data with the standard Google apps like Gmail and Docs on whatever hosting environment you’re... 

The biggest social network on the web — that’s Facebook, by the way — is getting ready to unveil a location sharing service of its own, according to a report Tuesday. Citing unnamed sources, The New York Times’ Bits blog says there will be two components, “a service offered directly by Facebook that will allow users to share their location information with friends,” and a set of APIs other location-sharing... 

Google has announced a new geocoding web service app authors can use to better plot locations on a map. The new Google Geocoding Web Service includes some enhanced capabilities that not only make it possible for app developers to provide more accurate and granular locations in their apps, but it also lets them increase the performance of their apps through precaching. First off, the new service employs the Google Maps JavaScript API version... 

Browsing the web on one of Amazon’s Kindle e-readers is like taking a step backwards in time. It’s clunky and has only limited support for web standards and bare-bones JavaScript capabilities. But now Amazon may be looking to add browser engineers to the Kindle team, according to the job listings on the company’s website. A job posting for a browser engineer at Lab126 , the division of Amazon that develops the Kindle, indicates... 

We’re giving away a pair of passes to Google I/O today. A little over a week ago, we kicked off our contest , encouraging you to send us any HTML5 web apps or Google Chrome browser extensions you’ve built. Alternatively, we asked you to tell us how you’d describe a web app to your grandmother. We got a heap of submissions, but we worked our way through the field and picked two winners. Abraham Williams and Mike Cantelon will... 

Github user Alan Dipert has posted the source code for NCSA Mosaic 2.7 on the code-hosting website. You can download it and run it on any modern Linux installation. It seems to run on Ubuntu just fine, though PNG support is a little wonky. The good news is that the folks on Github are actively submitting patches. Mosaic was the first graphical web browser. It was born in the early ’90s, created by …  Read More →

As you may have noticed, we’ve given Webmonkey an entirely new coat of paint. The visual design has been refreshed — something we’ve been doing every couple of years since we launched in 1996 — and we honestly think the site has never looked better. It took a lot of hard work by everyone on the Wired.com technical and design teams to pull it off. As pretty as it is, there are other changes behind the scenes that we feel... 

With the latest releases of Opera, Google Chrome and Firefox continuing to push the boundaries of the web, the once-dominant Internet Explorer is looking less and less relevant every day. But we should expect Microsoft to go on the offensive at its upcoming MIX 2010 developer conference in Las Vegas, where, it has been speculated , the company will demonstrate the first beta builds of Internet Explorer 9 and possibly offer a preview release... 

The latest beta release of Google Chrome adds a slew of much needed privacy and content controls — as well as automatic page translation — to Google’s fast, but slightly feature-deficient browser. The new features — which put Chrome on par with other browsers when it comes to privacy controls — are so far only available to those using the beta channel. Google says the new privacy controls will make it to the stable... 

Opera software has released Opera 10.5 for Windows, boasting that it’s “the fastest browser on Earth.” We took the beta version for a test drive last month and found that it is indeed snappy, besting Safari 4, Firefox 3.6 and even Google’s speedy Chrome browser in our informal testing. Now that the final release is here, speed lovers have yet another browser to add to their stable. At the moment Opera 10.5 is available... 

Mozilla’s Firefox web browser was one of the first to optimize for today’s JavaScript-heavy web pages. Mozilla’s new Tracemonkey JavaScript engine — released with Firefox 3.5 — put the browser at the top of most page rendering speed tests. But lately, Google Chrome, Apple’s Safari and the coming Opera 10.5 have been beating Firefox at its own game. Mozilla is hoping to change that with some new improvements... 

In an ideal world, the web would have a built-in identity solutions — websites would automatically know who you are when you arrive. In the real world, however, almost every website has its own sign up and authentication process, endless forms enticing you to enter your name, your e-mail, pick a password… yawn, what now? It’s repetitive, boring and makes many of your users click away in …  Read More →

Google’s premiere developer event is coming up in just a couple of months, and we’ve got two passes to give away. Google I/O takes place on May 19 and 20 at Moscone Center in San Francisco. It’s the company’s largest developer event, with hundreds of sessions and demos of all the latest Google tech. Plus, there are the big keynotes like the launch of Wave , the first major public demo of Android and the HTML5 coming-out...