“A pair of new patent filings from Apple include suggestions for improving the browsing experience offered through its Safari Web browser, such as a adaptive media support and a visual history tree that more accurately shows users where they’ve been and how they got there,” Sam Oliver reports for AppleInsider.
“Both filings are relatively fresh, having been filed in January and April of this year, respectively, and each are credited to known members of the Cupertino-based company’s Mac OS technology and QuickTime teams,” Oliver reports.
“Of particular interest is the filing for improved navigation history display, which suggests that a user’s browser history be presented in the form of a visual tree diagram tied to a timeline, rather than as a linear list of previously accessed pages that otherwise lacks structure,” Oliver reports.
“In the second filing, Apple looks to solve the problem where Mac users are sometimes prevented from viewing digital media — primarily videos — on the Web because Safari lacks the means required for display of that media in its preferred format… As a solution, the company proposes that Safari examine metadata included with the media item to determine whether the content can be displayed in an alternative format supported natively by the browser, or through plug-ins that could retrieved and installed on the spot,” Oliver reports.
More details and patent app illustrations in the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Readers “Brawndo Drinker” and “MacVicta” for the heads up.]
oh shiny! I want a history tree! When can I get it?
Seriously, unless you are mcsame and your browser history is under 3 pages for all time, you have to see the advantage in this….
“shows users where they’ve been and how they got there”
Quick! Send the U.S. Congress a copy!
“adaptive media support”
A euphemism for fetish porn?
OK, this is off topic but did anyone noticed that first generation iPhone’s triangulation has improved in 2.1?
It actually works now pretty accurately.
Is it just me because my area was flooded with WiFi hotspots or is it something that was fixed by AT&T;/Apple
Apple…please add a Javascript blocker and an image blocker like Firefox.
@ Rob–
Actually, 2.1 made mine worse. Before the update, Loopt put my location exactly where it should be. Afterward, it’s off by about three miles.
So, I think it is just you. Sorry.
‘So, I think it is just you. Sorry.’
Did you ever think it might be ‘just you’? Huh?
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hummm… a sort of ‘TimeMachine’ file history for web pages – that’d be nice
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Barrack Hussein Obama needs a history tree to keep track of all the donations he has received from Fannie and Freddie.
I want to use plugins. Like adblock plus. And fix it so it ain’t a memory hog.
Squirlfish Extreme (SFX) just came out in the webkit nightlies and it is FAST. About 3x as fast as the rescent FF3 nightlies and 20X as fast as IE8Beta on the Sunspider benchmark. I would like to see safari or webkit implement a DNS prefetching system like google’s chrome. I just love browser competition. The browser is slowly replacing the OS as the most important platform.
As far as the patent regarding web history, they should integrate it with the isight camera so you can have a picture of what you were wearing when you visited a certain page.
@ Shent
Take it somewhere else, drooling troll pig.
Way to go, Shent! Jolly good!
Ditto to you, Victor.
wow shent! that is funny!
don’t be mean Modbus, shent inspires research…. and then you learn things like:
“McCain should look first to his campaign staffers as the cause of that debacle. One of them was Fannie Mae’s head of lobbying, and spread tens of millions of dollars around Washington in the form of lobbying contracts. A number of McCain staffers were on the receiving end of those contracts, collecting hundreds of thousands of dollars each from the lenders to rep their interests. And McCain’s campaign manager served as president of a lobbying association that fought to protect Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae from the sort of regulation that McCain is now proposing.”
yeah that “bad black muslim” candidate is the problem! don’t pick on the established candidate!
“Aquiles Suarez, listed as an economic adviser to the McCain campaign in a July 2007 McCain press release, was formerly the director of government and industry relations for Fannie Mae. The Senate Lobbying Database says Suarez oversaw the lending giant’s $47,510,000 lobbying campaign from 2003 to 2006.”
but McSame isn’t in their pockets! no it is the guy who took a donation from them, along with millions of other donations. not the guy who is only run by them….
“And other current McCain campaign staffers were the lobbyists receiving shares of that money. According to the Senate Lobbying Database, the lobbying firm of Charlie Black, one of McCain’s top aides, made at least $820,000 working for Freddie Mac from 1999 to 2004. The McCain campaign’s vice-chair Wayne Berman and its congressional liaison John Green made $1.14 million working on behalf of Fannie Mae for lobbying firm Ogilvy Government Relations. Green made an additional $180,000 from Freddie Mac. Arther B. Culvahouse Jr., the VP vetter who helped John McCain select Sarah Palin, earned $80,000 from Fannie Mae in 2003 and 2004, while working for lobbying and law firm O’Melveny & Myers LLP. In addition, Politico reports that at least 20 McCain fundraisers have lobbied for Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, pocketing at least $12.3 million over the last nine years.”
yeah, lets compare donations.
but i don’t expect a republican to actually have a grip on “facts” or anything like that…
“At a campaign rally Wednesday morning in Fairfax, Virginia, John McCain said that the heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac ought to give back the millions of dollars they’ve earned. What about the lobbyists who helped Fannie and Freddie game the system? Maybe McCain can ask them — at the next campaign strategy meeting.”
STFU.
@Bartsimpsonhead
Seen the History flow screen available when you install SafariStand? It’s pretty much what you’ve just asked for…
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It is easy to identify the historical turning point that marked the beginning of the end.
Back in 2005, Fannie and Freddie were, after years of dominating Washington, on the ropes. They were enmeshed in accounting scandals that led to turnover at the top. At one telling moment in late 2004, captured in an article by my American Enterprise Institute colleague Peter Wallison, the Securities and Exchange Comiission’s chief accountant told disgraced Fannie Mae chief Franklin Raines that Fannie’s position on the relevant accounting issue was not even “on the page” of allowable interpretations.
Then legislative momentum emerged for an attempt to create a “world-class regulator” that would oversee the pair more like banks, imposing strict requirements on their ability to take excessive risks. Politicians who previously had associated themselves proudly with the two accounting miscreants were less eager to be associated with them. The time was ripe.
Greenspan’s Warning
The clear gravity of the situation pushed the legislation forward. Some might say the current mess couldn’t be foreseen, yet in 2005 Alan Greenspan told Congress how urgent it was for it to act in the clearest possible terms: If Fannie and Freddie “continue to grow, continue to have the low capital that they have, continue to engage in the dynamic hedging of their portfolios, which they need to do for interest rate risk aversion, they potentially create ever-growing potential systemic risk down the road,” he said. “We are placing the total financial system of the future at a substantial risk.”
What happened next was extraordinary. For the first time in history, a serious Fannie and Freddie reform bill was passed by the Senate Banking Committee. The bill gave a regulator power to crack down, and would have required the companies to eliminate their investments in risky assets.
Different World
If that bill had become law, then the world today would be different. In 2005, 2006 and 2007, a blizzard of terrible mortgage paper fluttered out of the Fannie and Freddie clouds, burying many of our oldest and most venerable institutions. Without their checkbooks keeping the market liquid and buying up excess supply, the market would likely have not existed.
But the bill didn’t become law, for a simple reason: Democrats opposed it on a party-line vote in the committee, signaling that this would be a partisan issue. Republicans, tied in knots by the tight Democratic opposition, couldn’t even get the Senate to vote on the matter.
That such a reckless political stand could have been taken by the Democrats was obscene even then. Wallison wrote at the time: “It is a classic case of socializing the risk while privatizing the profit. The Democrats and the few Republicans who oppose portfolio limitations could not possibly do so if their constituents understood what they were doing.”
Mounds of Materials
Now that the collapse has occurred, the roadblock built by Senate Democrats in 2005 is unforgivable. Many who opposed the bill doubtlessly did so for honorable reasons. Fannie and Freddie provided mounds of materials defending their practices. Perhaps some found their propaganda convincing.
But we now know that many of the senators who protected Fannie and Freddie, including Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton and Christopher Dodd, have received mind-boggling levels of financial support from them over the years.
Throughout his political career, Obama has gotten more than $125,000 in campaign contributions from employees and political action committees of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, second only to Dodd, the Senate Banking Committee chairman, who received more than $165,000.
Clinton, the 12th-ranked recipient of Fannie and Freddie PAC and employee contributions, has received more than $75,000 from the two enterprises and their employees. The private profit found its way back to the senators who killed the fix.
There has been a lot of talk about who is to blame for this crisis. A look back at the story of 2005 makes the answer pretty clear.
Oh, and there is one little footnote to the story that’s worth keeping in mind while Democrats point fingers between now and Nov. 4: Senator John McCain was one of the three cosponsors of S.190, the bill that would have averted this mess.
Shen = Scum
Thanks @ Shen. I loved that. Keep up the good work.
Thank you Shen. Having tried hard to make sense of the mess from over the pond here, where things are little better, your analysis- unexpected though it was in a Mac forum- has been of great assistance.
I assume you were talking about @Shen’s post. Shen made no sense whatsoever.
“Shen = Scum”
Yep, another nonworking bum waiting for Obama to give them a FREE handout…
Yo, I am all for political debate, but there are plenty of forums on other websites to do that—I forgot what this article was about…
Well I can’t wait for safari 4 to come out. Been looking forward to it since I knew it was coming. I’ve been noticing some script handling slowdowns in Safari compared with FF3 on a lot of the sites I go to. And actually I have noticed Firefox to use more memory than Safari most of the time.
And please keep out the Political crap this is not the forum for it. We hear enough Political stuff from everywhere else it doesn’t need to be here, too.