Slashdot Mirror
Axis, Yahoo's New Browser
markjhood2003 writes "Fresh on the heels of Slashdot's discussion of the lack of browser choice on mobile devices comes the announcement of Yahoo's new web browser Axis. According to VentureBeat, the browser runs on iPad and iPhone as a separate standalone browser and as an extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari, with support for Android and Windows Phone coming soon. It actually appears to bring some innovation to mobile search, displaying results and queries on the same page for more productive navigation between the two."
http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/yahoo-axis-chrome-extension-leaks-private-certificate-file
I heard you like browsers, heres a browser that runs in a browser.
Pimp it!
Nik Cubrilovic discovered that a private certificate file was left in the chrome extension source files:
http://nikcub.appspot.com/posts/yahoo-axis-chrome-extension-leaks-private-certificate-file
Will this new browser only be available in Germany, Italy, Japan, Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, and Finland?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
I'm super excited that this relevant and forward thinking company is releasing a browser that will make me forget about using any other browser.
- Me from 1996
http://support.google.com/mail/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=6594
Click the button in the upper-right to detach the "Compose Mail" dialog into a new window, then click "Compose Mail" again and voila, you will be composing two messages simultaneously.
Labels are strictly more powerful than folders especially now that gmail has nested labels: http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2011/06/superstars-and-nested-labels-now.html.
Spend at least 5 seconds googling, or, umm, yahooing, before complaining.
Gmail aliases are unlimited. Not just 500. If you are more paranoid than average you can use a second address set to auto-forward as the base. That makes it take about as much setup as Yahoo's version.
Gmail has keyboard shortcuts.
Yahoo!'s storage space isn't unlimited, they just don't tell you the cap.
You can detach the "compose mail" dialog to a separate window. You can make as many windows as you wish (or until you window manager/browser crashes.)
If you only use one label per message then labels are identical to folders. Otherwise they have a strict superset of folder functionality (a message can have >1 label, but can only be in 1 folder.)
What, exactly, does Yahoo! have that Gmail doesn't have? Other! Than! Excessive! Punctuation!
Not a sentence!
As covered in the article about mobile browser choice yesterday, just by virtue of being on the Apple Store this cannot be a real browser in any significant meaning of the word. So saying it's a "separate standalone browser" is just a flagrant lie. At best it's a shell around the existing WebKit/Safari browser on those devices.
Given that it's also listed as an "extension for Chrome, Firefox, and Safari", what is this really? Yet another privacy-invasion toolbar? :(
What's worse is that Yahoo have accidentally included their private signing key inside the Chrome extension, meaning anyone can now sign Chrome extensions as Yahoo....
This feature is worthless as a spam decoy strategy, as anyone can use it to find your real address. I would be amazed if spammers don't already strip off the "+whatever" from gmail addresses,
[...]
I wonder why Google hasn't stepped up to supply actual disposable email addresses yet
oh, but they do have that but it's a bit hidden and it's only available via Apps for hosted domains. (even free apps has it).
The way to set this up is to host your domain (or at least the mail receiving functions of it) with Google Apps and then you can set up the email service to accept wildcard emails, *@your-domain-hosted-on-google-apps_dot_anything.
Now whenever you give out an address just invent one on the spot @your domain and it will be valid. I do this and i got into the habit of throwing a date stamp and the name of whoever it is for into the email address itself so that if i start receiving spam for that address i know who leaked it and when they were assigned that address. Such an address usually looks like: mail-for-my-name-from-slashdot-org-20120524@example.com
And since my domain is set up at Gmail with a wildcard catch-all address, that will be routed to my actual mailbox (only if it passes Gmail spam filtering tests).
root@127.0.0.1