Hashemian Blog Web Tools, Financial Markets, Technology Saturday, November 17, 2007 Adobe Flash Cookies, Local Storage  Call me paranoid, but I always like to be clear on what a site is doing on my computer while I have it up on my browser. I don't think I'm that paranoid (okay, maybe a little,) but I think users are entitled to know if a site is storing and reading data to and from their computers. That's an exact description of what browser cookies are used for, but tonight I learned about a new kind of cookie I had been abashedly unaware of. I for one, don't appreciate being followed around while I surf the Net, so I delight in cleaning or modifying my cookies often and throwing off the trackers. But tonight I was stumped by an often visited music site that remembered me steadfastly, even when I deleted my cookies and visited the sites on different browsers. What was going on here? Was the site using my IP address to identify me? I doubted it. IP address tracking is so inexact these days that it's generally only used for geo-location, and even that yields questionable results. After some persistent searching, I finally found the elusive answer, and it was a Flash cookie. I had never known that Flash player could store data on users' computers, so I delved a bit deeper. I found out that they are similar to, but work completely independently from browser cookies. On my Windows XP machine, Flash cookies (known as local storage in Macromedia's jargon) are stored under the "\Documents and Settings\[account]\Application Data\Macromedia\Flash Player\#SharedObjects\" folder. By default each site is allowed to store and access up to 100KB in the cookies and users are oblivious to this activity the whole time. Way to go Adobe. I don't remember every seeing anything about these cookies when I was installing the Flash player. No doubt it was buried in some privacy legalese. The good news is that once discovered, these cookies can be deleted using Adobe's Website, or by just simply zapping them in the folder mentioned above. Adobe's site also allows users to disable Flash cookies altogether. The caveat is that just like browser cookies, many sites rely on these cookies and probably will not function correctly without them. For me, the happy medium was to configure Flash to alert me every time a site wants to store a Flash cookie on my PC. You can do the same by going to Global Storage Settings panel on Adobe's Flash site and alter your settings to match the figure below. Maybe you can't stop sites from storing and retrieving data from your computer, but at least you know who's tracking you using this type of cookie. flash cookies,flash local storage,adobe,macromedia,flash,cookies,browser cookies,browsers,flash player Labels: browsers, flash, web <Adobe Flash Cookies, Local Storage> // posted by rh 1 comments Wednesday, June 13, 2007 Apple Safari on Windows  I'm a man of habits. That trait also extends to my browser of choice and, like many, I use Internet Explorer (IE) to surf the Web. Years ago, when the Internet was still new to the general public, it took me some time to actually start using a browser alongside my favorite text-based programs to browse the Web, read Usenet, or check email. That was the NCSA Mosaic times. Then I took my time to switch to Netscape. And I was yet again behind the curve when Microsoft joined the fray and introduced IE. For now I'm still an IE user, and true to form, I have refused to upgrade to version 7. Not that all the bad publicity has helped anyways. I did try Opera once and saw no need for it after fiddling with it for a few days. I do use Firefox occasionally now. Not because I like it any better than IE for general browsing, but mostly to test Web pages. Firefox does have a leg up on IE in one area, the add-ons. Unlike IE, Firefox has done a superb job in designing and integrating the add-ons. They are much more straightforward to program and there's a bevy of available add-ons on the Web to choose from. Greasemonkey is one of my favorites, for example. One browser I wished I could have was Apple's safari. That is the browser of choice for most Apple junkies, but until now it was out of the Windows' realm - Until now. Apple finally released a version (public beta 3) and, true to their claims, it is faster than either IE or Firefox. The speed was even evident during the installation process. It has a relatively small installation file and the setup process was fast. Safari for Windows is a no-frills browser. It's lightweight and doesn't have a lot of bells and whistles. It does have an Apple-ish look, but after browsing to several sites I could confirm that their claim of being speedy is for real. I didn't clock its rendering speed, but it did feel faster than its other two popular counterparts. The configuration is a bit clunky and bears some resemblance to Firefox (must be the Mozilla heritage) and the fonts are a bit rough, but it performs magnificently. I was impressed. Having Safari available on Windows is also a boon to site designers who need to check their pages for browser compatibility. One of the pages I tested was the JavaScript Countdown page on this site. There were some complaints of Safari incompatibility from some of the users. I was prepared to see a broken counter, but to my surprise the page loaded just fine, counter and all. That left me wondering whether there were differences between the Windows and Apple versions. Since I don't have access to an Apple, I am going to tentatively declare that the countdown utility is Safari compatible. Safari won't unseat IE for me as the browser of choice for general browsing, but if you are in the market for a lightweight and speedy browser, this could be the one. But even if not, it's a valuable tool for Web designers toiling on Windows to achieve maximum browser compatibility for their pages. If you want to download the browser, here's the link: Safari for Windows. safari,apple,apple safari,ie,internet explorer,firefox,mosaic Labels: browsers, web <Apple Safari on Windows> // posted by rh 0 comments Tuesday, December 26, 2006 HTML Forms, Part 1  My first experience with the World Wide Web about 13 years ago was in school using NCSA Mosaic running on Sun SPARCstation hosts. Mosaic was the original graphical Web browser from which all modern Web browsers today can claim their common ancestry. It was a giant leap from text-based applications such as Usenet readers that were much more common back in those days. Soon after Tim Berners-Lee invented HTTP, a bunch of developers from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign got together and Mosaic was developed. The resulting work was eventually licensed to Netscape and Microsoft. The Netscape and Internet Explorer browsers were born out of that licensing and the rest is history. While today's browsers are much more versatile and dynamic, they are essentially the same utilities at their core as the original Mosaic was. The user initiates a request to a Web server, and a response is returned and displayed on the browser. Initially the interaction with the Web servers were one-sided and static in nature. A page was requested and data consisting of text, images, and hyperlinks were returned to the browser. Tags were used to position and style the elements on the browser area. But soon all that changed when web pages were armed with forms from which users would be able to send data back to the servers. Of course browsers can’t just sent any arbitrary data to the server. The type and format of that data is dictated by the browser. Data not conforming to what the server expects will be, at best, ignored. But what is the mechanism by which data is sent to a server? For that we need to study the two most common request types (a.k.a. verbs) browsers send to servers; GET and POST. We'll look at these two request types in part 2. ncsa,web browsers,www,netscape,http,web servers,html forms Labels: browsers, web, web servers <HTML Forms, Part 1> // posted by rh 0 comments

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