We're big fans of most Android apps that can help us get the skinny on nearby restaurants and bars, Yelp included. We weren't overly impressed with Yelp's initial attempt for Android, however, but the last two updates have brought it closer in line with Yelp's other mobile apps.

A small but significant update on Wednesday fills in two missing holes in Yelp's features roundup. First, you can now bookmark a business from the phone to view later. Thankfully, you can remove bookmarks as well. Second, opinionated Yelpers can draft a review of a business from Android for later publishing on Yelp.com.

We've never liked this unpublished review mumbo jumbo, but Yelp steadily withholds reviews publishing from all its mobile apps. Publishing a short tip on Yelp for iPhone is as close as you can get in the mobile sphere, a provision that does Android users no good. If Yelp continues to insist on publishing full-length reviews only from Yelp.com, we're hoping it will at least bring quick-tip publishing to its other mobile platforms as well.

Yelp did mention that mobile check-ins--the social networking activity of letting others know where you are--should arrive in the next Android iteration.

Originally posted at Android Atlas

For eager beavers who want a taste of Firefox to come, Mozilla issued a second preview release Wednesday of the browser.

The software is based on version 1.9.3 of the Gecko browser engine that underlies Firefox. The current Firefox 3.6, and an update called Lorentz, are based on 1.9.2.

The headline feature of the new preview release is the same for Lorentz, though: out-of-process plug-ins, which means that Adobe Systems Flash Player and the like run in a separate memory compartment to protect the browser overall when they crash. Mozilla hopes people will see how well it works on an OOPP testing page.

However, according to a mailing list posting by Benjamin Smedberg, who's working on the OOPP feature, it only works on Linux and Windows systems at present. "MacOS presents some unique challenges: the traditional drawing and interaction model for plug-ins is very difficult to do across processes. We are working on Mac support for multi-process plug-ins, and hope to have a preview of this work available soon," Smedberg said in an OOPP blog post.

The new alpha release also should cool off some hot spots that consume a lot of labor when laying out Web pages, Smedberg said, thereby improving performance.

Mozilla detailed the 1.9.3 preview release features in a blog post, too.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Article corrected 3/3/2010 at 12:00 PT (SuperPages.com supports its own version of Yellow Pages) and updated stability issues at 2:00 pm PT.

The field of iPhone search apps is already crowded with Yelp, Urbanspoon, and Zagat for dining; Flixster's Movies app for showtimes; YellowPages for people; and Google Mobile App for just about everything else. Now here comes Poynt, a new free iPhone search app that mashes together elements of them all.

At its core, Poynt is an aggregator of third-party services encased in an attractive wrapper. SuperPages.com powers the business listings; CinemaSource feeds you entertainment info and facilitates ticket purchases via MovieTickets.com. Poynt taps SuperPages, CitySearch, and OpenTable to find you food, and Google Maps handles all mapping and directions on its native app. With the exception of Google Maps, which kicks you out, Poynt keeps you in its environment with an in-app browser.

Poynt's feature set is strong overall, with buttons for visiting the Web site where available, calling, mapping, searching nearby, streaming movie trailers, and viewing augmented reality if you have an iPhone 3GS. Instead of tapping to place a call, Poynt employs a calling gesture. As with voice search in Google Mobile app, lifting the phone to your ear triggers the action.

We do have minor complaints. Although Poynt lassos three services to bring dining reservations and reviews, it lacks Yelp's complete features, like viewing photos and flagging if restaurants are currently open. Other niggles: The navigation carousel on the splash screen is more stylish than seeing four static icons but is also less efficient.

Poynt's text fields dedicated to numbers should call up the iPhone's numerical keyboard, not the virtual text keyboard. Voice search is an absent feature for those who don't feel silly speaking search terms aloud in public.

The handy call gesture got us into trouble--or rather, the hardware did. With call gestures on, tapping, touching, or otherwise engaging the sensor (near the speaker) can trigger a call. We got caught in an incessant dialing loop while trying to take screenshots. If you're setting off unwanted calls too often, disabling call gestures in the iPhone Settings or minding your hands should keep you out of trouble.

Poynt's publisher, Multiplied Media, has created a credible iPhone version of Poynt for BlackBerry that at least has a shot of breaking into the iPhone's ranks of high-rated search apps. Poynt is available in the US and Canada.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

It took Mozilla more than five years of concerted effort and a lucrative partnership with Google to dent Internet Explorer's dominance. But maybe it doesn't have to be so hard.

Courtesy of an antitrust case against Microsoft in the European Union, several small-fry browsers are getting a helping hand that could boost their efforts to attain relevance. At least as long as Europeans notice a particular scroll bar.

"The ballot represents an enormous opportunity for Maxthon," said Ron White, a spokesman for one of those relatively obscure browsers that will be brought to the attention of Europeans. "Even though the choice screen does its best to hide Maxthon and six other lesser-known browsers, it's still a safe bet that the ballot will bring Maxthon to the attention of hundreds of thousands of computer users who would otherwise never hear of it."

Through Microsoft's 2009 settlement of the EU antitrust case, the company will present a "ballot" screen with a choice of browsers to Windows users in the European Union--about 100 million of them, by the European Commission's estimate.

"We plan to begin a phased roll-out of the update across Europe the week of March 1," said Dave Heiner, Microsoft's deputy general counsel, in a recent blog post, and a Microsoft representative confirmed that the company has indeed begun issuing the browser choice update across European Union nations.

The European Commission welcomed the move: "This should ensure competition on the merits and allow consumers to benefit from technical developments and innovation both on the Web browser market and on related markets, such as Web-based applications."

Browser choice in action
Here's how it works. After a Windows Update change Microsoft has begun issuing, the choices appear to people with Internet Explorer set as the default browser. The choice screen shows the five most widely used browsers, in random order: IE, Firefox, Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera. Next to the icons are links to install them or to get more information.

But tucked at the bottom of the EU browser options list is a scrollbar that reveals seven other browsers. Don't be surprised if you haven't heard of them, much less installed them.

They are GreenBrowser, K-Meleon, FlashPeak's SlimBrowser, Maxthon International's Maxthon, Avant Force's Avant, Fenrir's Sleipnir, and Flock.

The only two to surface on NetApplications' monitoring of global Web browser use are Maxthon, with 1.2 percent share of browser usage in February, and Flock, with 0.06 percent.

Neither of these projects is entirely original, either: Flock is based on the same Gecko technology underlying Firefox, and Maxthon uses IE's Trident browser engine now (a second engine, the WebKit project used in Safari and Chrome, is being added to the next version of Maxthon).

It's hard to get a browser project off the ground, with or without a helping hand. In the last 15 years, browsers have moved from being curiosities that nerdish types use to see what's on the Internet to an essential part of the computing experience often used for hours a day.

Instead of being a mere window to the Web, browsers now are a foundation for applications. And the more powerful players in the market are moving fast--adding new features, concentrating on better performance, and trying to close security holes as fast as possible.

New attention
The second-tier players believe the EU browser choice will give them a leg up, though.

"Considering that going into this balloting, Maxthon has a market share of 1.21 percent, even a 1 percent shift would be a big difference," said Maxthon's White. "It's obvious who the two leaders are. The chart also shows that there's really not much difference among the four other browsers. It wouldn't take an awful lot for Maxthon to overtake Opera, Safari, or even the vaunted Chrome."

Maxthon, which claims second place after IE in China, now has a specific ambition from the European change. "What I'd like to see in the next six months is enough people select Maxthon that we can take Opera's place among the first five browsers on the ballot," White said.

Sleipnir, a browser from a company in Japan called Fenrir, has already seen a difference from the browser-choice screen.

"New downloads are increasing from this list," said spokesman Yasuhiro Miki. "We are very happy for this opportunity [for] users to gain more chances for browser choice," and as a result of the of the browser-choice screen, "we are thinking to cover finally all languages in Europe."

Flock, too, is happy with its new opportunity.

"Flock's existing market share has been generated almost entirely by organic word of mouth. It is likely that increasing users' awareness of choice in the browser market will increase the sampling of browsers," said Chief Executive Shawn Hardin.

The scrollbar worry
But he's among those worried about the browser choice page design.

"While we are very supportive of the EU's effort to give users more choice and open up competition, we believe that Microsoft's implementation of the final choice screen is flawed and could substantially undercut the EU's original intent and intended benefits," Hardin said. "If no changes to the choice screen design are made quickly, we estimate 58 percent of the browsers chosen (7 of 12) will only be discovered and considered for installation by a very small minority of users who receive the choice screen on their PC."

K-Meleon, which also uses Mozilla's Gecko engine but combines it with a native Windows interface, is experiencing a 30 percent increase in downloads. "There are quite some visits from browserchoice.eu," said a K-Meleon forum moderator called Guenter who's active in the project.

But Alex Tarantul, who also works on the K-Meleon project, shares Flock's concern about the horizontal scrollbar. He sees a vicious cycle: people mostly won't use the scrollbar, so lesser browsers won't be installed, so the browser choice screen will drop them on the assumption that there's little interest.

And Yannis Kargas, who writes extensions for K-Meleon, believes K-Meleon may actually be doing better than statistics indicate. "Unlike what most believe, K-Meleon is not a browser with very limited user base. Certainly, it has less users than the common or mainstream browsers but it isn't by any means an unknown or forgotten browser without real users," Kargas said.

At root of the problem, Kargas said, is browser identification text called the user-agent string. Because many Web sites check this string and reject browsers they don't support, many using browsers that are off the beaten track "spoof" this string to gain admittance. And some sites don't read the string correctly, for example believing any Gecko-based browser is Firefox.

"Unfortunately, many non-savvy users will not know that they simply need to change the user agent when encountering those Web sites, and they think the browser is flawed and eventually decide to use one of those 'popular' browsers because they are 'supported' or recommended on those Web sites," Kargas said, even though the browser actually is compatible.

FlashPeak also is unhappy with the scrollbar situation.

"We are tracking the number of downloads but so far, the numbers are fairly disappointing (a few hundred downloads per day for us). I was expecting a couple of thousands per day. But it's better than nothing," said company representative Stephen Cheng.

Several of these companies lack the resources of major browsers. Efforts to contact GreenBrowser and Avant representatives were unsuccessful.

But even for those of the lesser-used browsers that are well organized, the fight for relevance will be tough. For example, Opera, which already has a significant following in Europe, is is launching a publicity campaign based on the browser choice situation.

The EU will give a new opportunity for the curious to try new browsers. But even for the curious, brand familiarity matters. And when it comes to branding, Microsoft, Apple, Google, Firefox, and even scrappy Opera have a big lead.

Update 5:53 a.m. PST with comment from FlashPeak.

Originally posted at Deep Tech