The browser wars have been heating up lately with the recent releases of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. As a long-time Phoenix Firebird Firefox user, and recent convert to Opera Mini (which is excellent btw) on my Treo, I thought I’d run these two through their paces to see what they are made of. The hits and misses after the jump.

Opera 9.5

Opera 9.5 actually came out about a week or so before Firefox 3 so it was the one I tried out first. Opera takes a kind of “kitchen sink” approach, and is arguably the most feature packed browser out there. For the most part this approach works really well. Most browsers couldn’t duplicate the functionality of Opera, and it would take dozens of extensions (which often don’t work when new versions of Firefox come out) to try to pull off the same effect in Firefox.

Here are some of the notable features built-in to Opera:

• Built-in browser sync (even to Opera Mini on my Treo!, try that with Weave)
• An excellent download manager
• Built-in ad content-blocker
• Session management
• Wand (auto-form filler on steroids)
• Web development tool
• A unique trash can approach for recently closed tabs
• A novel speed dial start page

The best, and most notable, “feature” of Opera is its speed however. It really is incredibly fast. It starts almost instantly; actually everything happens pretty much instantly. It is easily the fastest full service (i.e. not K-melon) browser I’ve ever used. Opera also has a pretty good security track record and is even more obscure than Firefox (smaller target for hackers).

While I really appreciate that I don’t have to basically roll my own browser (I’m looking at you and your extensions Firefox), Opera may suffer from a few too many features. Does a modern web browser really need an IRC or email client? Both clients are just average implementations, and the really odd part is how they show up as tabs in the browser right next to web pages. That said, you don’t have to use or enable them if you don’t want to.

The biggest problem I have is with the rendering in Opera 9.5. While most (>95%) of the sites I visited rendered fine, quite a few blogs and Netflix didn’t look right. Even though most of the blogs probably suffer from poor HTML coding and lack of compliance to web standards, it is still something that was a bother. Firefox has always rendered quirky sites well.

Firefox 3

Now onto the reigning “alternative” browser champ, Firefox; here is the quick take on its latest installment. The good: all of the features of Firefox 2. The bad: not really anything new since Firefox 2. The speed has improved a bit and it hasn’t crashed on me yet (should that really be a feature?), but I really have to ask myself what else Mozilla has been doing during the almost two years between Firefox 2 and 3.

Here are the only features I’ve found notable in Firefox 3:

• Scales/zooms images using a higher quality bilinear (or maybe bicubic, see image to the right) method instead of using a low quality “nearest neighbor” approach (finally someone did it!)
• Download manager back-end has really been improved (resume actually works now), it is too bad they ruined the front-end UI for it however

There really aren’t many other new features but most of them fall under the “different, but not necessarily better” category for me. Yeah, yeah, the bookmarks use a database now, but I’m still trying to figure out how that benefits me or why I should care, the “AwesomeBar” is a bit short on awesomeness, and the one-click bookmarking is only easier if you never organize your bookmarks.

The Verdict

The verdict? I’m still using Firefox. The page rendering problems and something about the Opera UI just doesn’t suit me well. Other than that though it is clearly the better browser; I will definitely be following its development. I am probably just too used to Firefox really; especially the keyboard shortcuts for tabs. If I was already an Opera user I could not think of a single reason why I would switch to Firefox though. If you aren’t happy with your current browser you should definitely check Opera out.

…one more thing about Firefox

Back in the day one of my favorite web browsers didn’t really improve much for a long time, remember it? It was Netscape 4 and they weren’t even the underdog. If Mozilla wants to maintain their momentum they need to bring their A-game, there is some stiff competition these days (Opera, IE, Safari) who are all actually innovating.

I am going on record that, unless Mozilla changes the direction they are heading, Internet Explorer will push Firefox back to single digit market share within three years. I’m sure a lot of people will flame me that Microsoft could never pull that off, but try telling that to Netscape. Each incarnation of Firefox since at least version 1.5 has not been a significant improvement on the previous version. Yeah, they claim all sorts of new features, but really, what is going on with Firefox 3?

Sure it is supposed to use lower memory, but the user interface is seriously going downhill. They seem so insanely focused on the underlying technologies (which isn’t necessarily bad) that they don’t spend any time on the UI. Look at the new download manager; functionally it actually works a lot better, but I’ll be damned if my parents (or any other average user) would ever figure out how to use the new features it has.

Then there are the areas where they have changed the underlying system dramatically (database driven history and bookmarks) that really don’t work any better than the old way. I ran FF3 Beta 3 for about a month, honestly the new bookmarking/history features adds about 5% benefit (it does the search in the location bar instead of in the history sidebar) but at a cost that every extension written for bookmarks or the history don’t work. That is a major deal breaker for me. Maybe Firefox 3.5 will actually expose more useful functionality for this feature, but it isn’t that great right now.

My real problem is the direction that Mozilla is taking Firefox. Their handling of adding features and juggling extensions is a joke. They consistently seem scared of adding a new feature that would be genuinely useful to the average user. I have seen this first hand on Bugzilla with a feature request for save to PDF support. Firefox 3 has the built-in underlying technology (through Cairo) to save web pages to PDF, but they don’t want to add it as a feature. They just say that it should be delivered through an extension (which exists). The code is all there except for a user interface to expose the functionality to the user!

Every user has to go out and find the extensions though. Why can’t Firefox have official/recommended extensions (maybe weather, gmail, etc) that can optionally be installed with Firefox? Or why aren’t there different versions of Firefox? Just think, they could make a Firefox Developer Edition that would come with many common web developer extensions like Firebug, Web Developer, or HTML Validator.

The biggest problem with extensions is that they never work from version to version. Firefox is a terrible platform in this regard. It is ridiculous that by far most extensions won’t support FF3 it before it launches. But the Mozilla folks seem to believe that that doesn’t matter. Why is it that extensions constantly have to be redone for new versions of Firefox? Hell, even Firefox 1.0 extensions didn’t work on 1.5 but “add-ons” for Internet Explorer 6 still work on version 8!

This finally gets me to Internet Explorer 8 Beta 1. The bottom line? I kind of like it. They are actually going in a direction that I’m interested in with features like Webslices and Activities. Basically, Webslices allow you to subscribe to a portion of web page; similar to how you sign up for an RSS feed. It fits a very different usage scenario than RSS feeds though. A Webslice could be a eBay auction you are following, the status of a friend on a social network, or the latest news headlines. Here is a link to Microsoft’s page and a video on Webslices.

Internet Explorer Activities allow you to select text (anchors can be embedded in the page too) and get context sensitive options. The most obvious example is selecting an address to get a map. The cool part is that the activity can show information (like a map) without leaving the page (see image below). Any website can create activities for IE8 as well; it isn’t locked down to just Microsoft services.

The best thing about Activities and Webslices? They just come built-in to IE8. They aren’t some “great” extension that only one in twenty users of a browser with 15% market share have. So with Firefox the feature will be so uncommon (3% of web users) that no web developer can really target it. Within a year of IE8 coming out it will have more than 50% of the market. Consequently, websites will actually implement Activities and Webslices.

Another illustration of where IE8 is going is that it includes a Firebug-esque development tool built-in. The Mozilla people need to come to grips with the fact that a huge amount of the “value” of Firefox to users is found in the extensions. They try to position Firefox as an extensible base platform with a rich ecosystem of add-ons, but the add-ons break between every single version. That is, if the average user has even found or realized that they can add those add-ons.

Bottom line: I haven’t switched to Internet Explorer yet, but if Microsoft and Mozilla keep the trajectories they are on I can’t rule it out in the future.

*Disclaimer: I have been using a Mozilla browser as my primary browser for six years. First Mozilla (aka Seamonkey) v0.95, and then Firefox when it was known as Phoenix 0.6. I have been exposed to some of the development activities on Mozilla’s Bugzilla too. So I don’t want to hear that I’m just some Microsoft fanboy.

That was me before I started using VoIP (voice over IP) at home about two years ago. It is easy and inexpensive to setup, will work with your existing telephones, and I’m only paying about $8.50/month for service now. Here’s how:

VoIP gets talked about a lot these days, but it is usually: some service from your internet provider (Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, etc) that is only marginally less expensive than the phone company, really complex to setup (Asterisk), or it doesn’t work with your existing equipment (Skype). What I am recommending doesn’t fall into any of those categories. I am using a SIP-based service called Gizmoproject (Skype’s main competitor) with a hardware SIP ATA (analog telephone adapter).

SIP is the same technology that Vonage uses (they just lock their hardware down to their service). It is a standardized way of doing VoIP (unlike Skype’s proprietary setup); think FTP but for voice. As it is a standard, many different companies offer SIP-based services and products that are interoperable with each other. To get started you need two things, a service provider, and a hardware ATA.

As I just mentioned, I am using Gizmoproject as my SIP service provider, but you could use others if you wanted. They have “Call In” numbers with unlimited inbound minutes that cost $12 for 3 months, or $35 for 12 months. The price for calling out depends on the location you are calling, and the prices fluxuate a little bit. Currently, calling any number in the U.S. costs $0.019/minute. International calls are quite inexpensive as well, see this link for the full list. “Call Out” credits are purchased in $10 or $20 increments.

I should note that you don’t have to have a “Call In” number to make calls, and you don’t have to have “Call Out” credits to receive calls. They are independent of each other.

One of the great things about Gizmoproject is that SIP-to-SIP calls are always free. I set my parents up with this because of that. And because it is all going over the Internet it is a free call whether they live in Luxemborg or Los Angeles. Calls to toll-free numbers (800, 888, etc) are free too. They also came out with a new feature called Backdoor Dialing that allows Gizmo users to call about 11% (currently, but the number is growing) of U.S. phone numbers for free.

Another feature I use somewhat regularly is their call forwarding feature. If you are waiting for a call on your landline but want to run some errands you can just forward all of your calls to your cellphone. I know this can be done with most traditional phone services, but with Gizmo it doesn’t cost an arm-and-a-leg per minute; you only pay your normal per minute outbound call rate.

The hardware SIP ATA I have is a Grandstream Handytone. You can get one that even supports having two seperate lines for about $50 online. My house isn’t hooked up to any POTS (plain-old-telephone-service) service so the SIP adapter just plugs into my household wiring. If you still have a traditional land line service, you can plug a phone straight into the ATA. If you want the ATA to run to all of your phone outlets in your house, just disconnect the phone line coming into you house from the phone company (usually located in the phone box on the side of your house) before you plug the ATA into one of your phone jacks. Now all of your existing phones will be connected to your VoIP service.

You will have to put in a few settings (username, password, etc) into your ATA, but it is pretty easy. Here is a link to Gizmo’s knowledge base entry on setting up a hardware ATA. You can also put in what area code you want the ATA to think you are in. It will add the area code prefix (Grandstream calls it “Home PNA”) you choose to any 7-digit number you call. If you don’t see it in the ATA settings, make sure your ATA isn’t using really old firmware.

Once you have that setup, you are ready to go. When you pick up the phone you will hear a dial-tone just like you did before. You will make calls just like you did before. You will just be saving a lot of money. Last year it only cost me $102 total ($8.50 per month) for this setup! We mostly use it for long calls (my wife talking to her mom) or when we get low on rollover minutes.

There are a few downsides I should point out. Most SIP services won’t transfer your current home number, so if you want to keep that you are pretty limited. Vonage will transfer your number however, and the SIP ATA I have recommended will work with Vonage. There isn’t any 911 service either, but I can always call 911 with my cellphone so that isn’t an issue for me. Gizmo does include free caller ID, but unfortunately it will only show you the number (similar to cellphones) not the caller’s name. Lastly you can’t use a fax machine, at least with Gizmoproject. There are SIP-based Fax over IP services that use the same ATA but they aren’t quite as cheap as Gizmo. They are still probably cheaper than your traditional phone service, however.

The Good

Lean: Overall Firefox seems so much leaner this time around. Even after hours of browsing with dozens of tabs open Firefox 3 is using about one-third less RAM than I typically see Firefox 2 use. The RAM savings didn’t come at the sacrifice of performance though, everything is notably quicker. Going back to previous pages, opening new ones, even the auto-completion when I typed in a URL seemed quicker. Even Google Maps seemed more responsive.

Features: While there is an entire list of changes in Firefox 3, Mozilla has added a notable one. The history and bookmarks have been combined into one database driven section called Places. Don’t be worried that the the UI has changed too much, on the surface most users won’t really notice the difference; it is more of a back end thing. They did add a new “Places” folder on the bookmark toolbar which can show recently viewed pages, tags, or starred pages. In addition, there is a completely revamped bookmarks organizer that will allow you to search your current bookmarks or history as well.

Some of the changes are much more subtle. The search box has been changed so that you can now resize it to any arbitrary size you want. When you scroll through tabs when there are more than can fit on the screen, they have added some animation to make it more clear what is happening.

If you zoom in or out on a webpage (ctrl-plus or ctrl-minus) you will notice that the whole page zooms now instead of just the text. While it is a nice feature in practice, the images look horrible when scaled up. I am still waiting for a browser that will do a smooth (read: bicubic/bilinear, not nearest neighbor) resize of a scale image. If the images looked good, this could be a major feature for those with old eyes that would just like everything to be bigger on the high DPI screens being sold today. It should be noted that version 3 also remembers your page-zoom settings on a site-by-site basis now too.

The Bad

Extensions: It can be summed up in one word, Extensions. While the extensibility of Firefox is a major feature (I probably like my set of extensions more than I like Firefox really), they are a huge problem when it comes to upgrades. Out of the eleven extensions I use, only one works with Firefox 3. That means, no weather, Gmail, Google Toolbar or Bookmark Sync, Image Zoom, Firebug, etc. Now I know some of these will probably be compatible by the time version three dot zero is released, but I’ll bet most of them still won’t. And until 95% of them work, I won’t be upgrading to Firefox 3.

The Verdict: Firefox 3 is a solid, but progressive upgrade. I won’t be adopting it though until at least six months after its release. I don’t know what the technical solution is for the Extensions, but Mozilla needs to figure out something with this. It is unacceptable that one of the biggest features of their product is incompatible from version to version. It happened when 1.5 came out, 2.0, and now 3.0. This is an area where Microsoft has typically excelled.

* Disclaimer: If you plan on checking out Firefox 3 for yourself, make sure you backup your Firefox user profile first.

Start with a TV and maybe a DVD player. Slowly add a game console, then a DVR, maybe some surround sound, another game console, etc. Then one day your wife will start complaining commenting that she doesn’t know how to watch a DVD or can’t switch it back to the TV. I had four remotes, and I was thinking of adding another one. I knew that wouldn’t go over well; not that I liked having to manage a pile of remotes either. Fortunately there is a better way…

The example above is exactly the scenario that has happened to me over the last five years. We started out with just a TV. (You know, one of those crappy small ones you start out with. ) Then we added a DVD player, bought a better TV, got an Xbox 1 (supplanted the DVD player), HD DVR, Surround Sound Receiver, and then Xbox 360 came out.

To watch TV, it took two remotes (fortunately my surround sound remote managed the TV ok or it would have been three) for the surround sound receiver remote and the DVR. I would have to turn on the TV, switch to the HD input, then turn on the receiver, and switch that to the DVR, and then I’d have to pick up the DVR remote to change the show; 6 button presses just to get it on. Volume was handled on the receiver remote, so even once it was all on I still needed to have both near me.

The icing on the cake in this whole setup was getting Windows Vista Ultimate on my desktop computer so that I was now using my 360 as a Media Center Extender as well (a review on that will come in a few weeks). Even though the Xbox 360 has wireless controllers, I really wanted to get a remote to control it properly. Initially I thought about getting the official Microsoft-brand Xbox 360 Remote which is fairly inexpensive, but five remotes was just too much. This led me to my latest “can’t live without it” gadget, a Logitech Harmony Universal Remote.

The Solution to Remote-Creep

For those not familiar with Harmony, it was a company that Logitech purchased a few years back and is now Logitech’s brand of high-end programmable universal remotes. What makes Harmony so unique among other universal remotes is that you set it up via a program on your computer and sync the changes to the remote via USB. There are two consequences of this design. It is far easier to setup than other programmable universal remotes. It is also relatively future proof, as the remote can download codes to new devices that come out after the remote was produced.

The remote I purchased is the Harmony Advanced Universal Remote for Xbox 360. The list price for the remote is $100, but you can usually find it for about $80 online. Although it is marketed as an Xbox 360 remote, it is basically exactly the same as the Harmony 880 but has added X, Y, A, and B buttons which is useful. The other Harmony remotes could still control the Xbox 360, though.

The Industrial Design

Harmony’s remotes are known for their high-quality industrial design. The remote’s weight is well balanced and is notably slimmer than most remote controls. It is very comfortable in my hand, and my only aesthetic complaint is that it doesn’t have any sort of bump/notch between the volume and channel up/down buttons. I don’t actually have trouble accidentally hitting the wrong button, but it just feels like I should look down sometimes to make sure I’m hitting the right button. It is easily light-years beyond any other remote in my “arsenal” though.

Setting up the Devices

As mentioned earlier, you use the Logitech Harmony Remote Software to setup the remote. This setup is broken down primarily into two parts: devices and activities. I have five devices: DVR, TV, receiver, Xbox 1 (primarily running the awesome Xbox Media Center software BTW), and an Xbox 360. Entering in all of these devices was deceptively simple, select what category the devices falls under, who makes it, and what the model number is, and click next. Honestly, that is basically it. You can customize some stuff, and if somehow it doesn’t have the device in the Harmony database (pretty unlikely), you can manually add it using the remote’s ability to “learn” commands from another remote.

Setting up Activities

The second part of the setup is determining what activities you actually want to configure your devices for. I decided on five activities for my setup: TV, DVD / Music (using Xbox 1), Xbox 360, Media Center, and Laptop. When I select DVD / Music on the remote, it automatically turns on the devices needed for that activity and changes the affected inputs.

The Harmony remote is even smart enough to remember what is already on or off. So if I switch from TV to Xbox 360, it just turns on the Xbox 360 and switches the inputs, but if I switch back to the TV it will turn off the Xbox and change inputs. I even have mine set so that it never turns the DVR off, even though it is only used for the TV. The options are really limitless.

In fact you’ll notice that I have separate activities for Xbox 360 and Media Center, even though both use all of the same devices. The difference between them is that the Xbox 360 can be powered up into the “dashboard” for gaming or straight into the Media Center interface. Hint for you Xbox 360 Media Center Extender users out there, add an additional duplicate device for the Xbox 360 as a Media Center Extender and set the power on button for it to “Media Center”. Then when you turn on that device in your activities it will go straight to MCE.

Once your activities are setup you sync the changes onto the remote via an included USB cable, and you are ready to go. My wife couldn’t believe it was really as easy as pushing the “TV” button to turn everything on and set it up right. Or that she could switch to DVD with just a push of a button. Since it remembers what is on, if you push the power button on the remote it will automatically turn off everything that is on too.

Bonus Feature

Now as if all of the automated goodness wasn’t enough, I stumbled upon a new feature for my DVR; a 30-second commercial skip button. My standard DVR remote does not have this button, but the Harmony remote lists it as a function and the box supports it. As all commercials are in 30-second increments, this makes skipping commercials even quicker.

The Bad

Unfortunately, not everything is perfect with the Harmony (although I can find weak spots in almost anything). The only real problem with the Harmony remote is that it is still quite technical to set it up. While the software could certainly be much worse, it is no where near being easy enough for my wife to setup this remote, and she is the type of person who will benefit from it the most. Everything is “wizard” driven and some dialogs particularly aren’t very intuitive (see image to the right).

If you are a pretty tech savvy person though, you should be able to set it up. It took me probably 60-90 minutes to really get it set how I wanted it at first, but I’m still making tweaks here and there a week later.

The good news is that the support options look like they are great. I didn’t use them, but it looked like Logitech hosts an active forum just for Harmony, and they even have their own telephone tech support with a number that is easy to find on their website.

Conclusion

Ultimately, even with the moderately complex setup, it is a really great gadget. I’m hooked and will never not have a remote like this ever again. It is kind of like a DVR, where once you use it you’ll wonder how you survived without it before.

The great thing about this product is that it feels so consumer focused the whole time. From the special blister-pack plastic packaging that is perforated for easy opening without a machete, to the fact that it comes loaded with batteries AND an extra replacement set too. This is definitely a product where you get what you pay for, and it is good. 8.5/10.

For those not familiar with Watch Now, I’ll fill you in. Watch Now is included free with every Netflix membership. Every member gets one hour per dollar of their membership every month to watch instant streamed video. With a decent internet connection the video quality is nearly as good as a DVD; but maybe more importantly, it’s better than CinemaNow or Vongo. It runs inside your browser (only Internet Explorer still…..) as a plug-in, and I have never run into any sort of DRM issues like I have at other online video sites. That said, as all of the video is streamed, you have to have an active internet connection to watch; you can’t download anything to keep.

With my school schedule this past year I have been on the lowest tier Netflix plan: $5/month. That gets me two discs per month one-at-a-time plus five hours of online viewing. Until recently, five hours of online viewing was more than I did in any month, but then I discovered Heroes. Which if you haven’t seen yet, you owe it to yourself to check it out. It may be better than 24 for me.

I actually watched the first episode on my Xbox 360 because of a promotion where I could download the first episode of the first season for free. Then I found out that Netflix had the whole first season AND every episode that had aired in the second season so far. Typically the video available online on Netflix is content that came from a DVD (often slightly older films). Heroes episodes come out on Wednesdays mornings, a little more than 24 hours after they air on NBC.

Initially (first day or two) my wife and I just watched our five hours that comes in our monthly plan; we got hooked though. When we started watching Heroes there had been 28 episodes, and now we wanted to watch them all. At Apple’s iTunes or Amazon’s Unbox, each episode would have cost us $2, or $56 total to own lease the video. With episodes only being 43 minutes though, it only costs $0.72/episode on Netflix. So we just upgraded our plan by $12, and got caught up to the current episode in about a week (yeah, we didn’t do much else that week).

In addition to getting all those episodes, I am also in the three discs at a time unlimited plan for this month as well; I have gotten nine DVD rentals. This is what is great about Netflix, you can change your plan at any time with no contract of any sort. If you increase your plan you can choose to pro-rate it for the remainder of your cycle or you can have it start at the beginning of the next cycle. Downgrades go into effect at the beginning of the next cycle. So I upgraded, and then downgraded my account just for this one month.

So this is just another way that Netflix is delivering the most entertainment for the dollar out there. If you haven’t tried it yet, I highly recommend it.

Out of interest for full disclosure, we do occasionally run an ad for Netflix, but it is a service that we all believe in here. Actually, quite a few of us here are Netflix and Mozy (another TechConsumer sponsor) customers, myself included.

That said, they introduced a new feature that I think is really cool. When you are watching a video in Joost you can click on a button (see screenshot below) that will copy a link to the video into the clipboard. You can then paste the link in an e-mail/blog/IM. When someone clicks on it, it will take them to Joost.com where the video can be launched into the Joost player. They have added a lot of content, and I decided that I would share some of my favorites here. Especially don’t miss the video of David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton.

They have also added widgets. That’s right….widgets. I don’t know how I feel about this one. There is a widget for RSS feeds, to post video to a blog, and they even have a GoogleTalk/XMPP/Jabber instant message client widget. One of the more interesting widgets is a channel chat widget. You can chat with anyone else watching the same show that has the widget open too. I don’t think I need my RSS being delivered along with my video, but it might be interesting if you are watching on a home-theatre PC.

With more than 15,000 shows on tap and the service open for everyone, Joost is the spot for free video over the internet. Even with the bugs I’ve encountered, I would recommend that everyone check out what Joost is offering.

Joost Videos:
David Letterman interviewing Paris Hilton
Oscar the grouch makes Craig Ferguson an honorary citizen of Sesame Street
Transformers (old skool animated series)
G.I. Joe

Something has surprised me more than the twists and turns of the plot though, and that is Bungie’s Halo 3 website. It is a whole new level of game and interweb integration. Dare I say it, it is almost a social network.

The Old

Halo 2 already had quite a bit of interesting integration into the web. You could check your all-time stats, look at where each of your deaths took place, and even check out where the person was standing who killed you. But that was pretty much where it stopped.

The New

Stats: Halo 3 ups the ante on the stats, offering far more comprehensive stats. I especially like that they have added emphasis to the kill to death ratio for those players who make you lose the game by 3 kills when they get 25 kills, 35 deaths, and still feel they had a good game. You can look at your stats for each map, for each game type, and for each weapon you use even. So far my weapon of choice (in one multiplayer game) is the Heavy Machine Gun (turret).

Forge: There are two new modes in Halo 3 that are quite unique: Forge and Theater. The Forge allows you to customize all of the multi-player maps. Weapons, spawn points, vehicles, teleports, and more can all be altered. It will be incredibly interesting to see what the Halo community comes up with in the Forge.

Theater: The Theater lets you watch recent games from anywhere in the game, Forge, Multiplayer, or even Campaign; and when I say recent, that is a relative term. The Theater will keep the most recent “25 films, or about 400MB worth, whichever comes first.” My 360 still has every minute of my entire campaign. You can also save films to your library if you don’t want them deleted. Obviously you probably wouldn’t want to relive an entire campaign (unless that is your thing) so the Theater is about more than just replaying games. You can make brief clips or take screenshots (the picture above is actually one of mine, click on it for full screen) of any of your video.

Sharing is Caring: What good would all these custom maps and screenshots of major pwnage be without a way to share them with the world? That’s where the Halo 3 file sharing comes into play. It isn’t the illegal P2P type of file sharing most people associate with that name. It is the place you can put up any content, maps, videos, screenshots, gametypes, etc, you create in Halo 3 for anyone to download. Friends can find content through the game, but you can even download stuff via your web browser onto your Xbox 360. Just find the content you want on the site, click download, and next time you play the game… Violá, it downloads it.

The Social Network: As you may have noticed above, I was initially going to say it was almost a social network, but looking into it further I realized it is really a full-blown social network…for a game. Think about it, you have your profile, a message center, a friends list, a people finder (to find other friends on Halo 3), a forum, and even groups (formerly Clans). That sounded like a social network to me, but it was when I saw what clans had become that it pushed me over the top.

Groups: Clans (now called groups) have moved far beyond just a bunch of people to game with. Each group now has its own homepage (see below), forum, articles and FAQ sections, news, announcements, links, and of course an RSS feed. This is going to build a whole new level of community in many groups, particularly competitive ones. It will be really interesting to see if Bungie expands the feature list to allow group file share. I can envision groups just for machinima with episodes on their homepage.

Finding new groups has been expanded too. It used to be that if you played with someone on Xbox Live and had a good time, you might ask them for an invite into their clan, or maybe you had some friends at school that had a clan. Now you can search for groups based on location, the founder, or even just the name of the clan. I have already found one in my zip code and one dedicated to my university.

The Finale: So needless to say, I’m feeling pretty good about the return on my gaming dollar for Halo 3. I think Bungie has created something that will be mimicked by a lot of other studios, and that it has the potential to revolutionize the community aspect of gaming. If you have an Xbox, you owe it to yourself to get this game. With the solid campaign and multi-player, along with innovative features like the Forge and Theater, I’m giving this game a 10/10. Ask anyone who knows me, I don’t give out tens easily; I can nitpick with the best of ’em.

In addition to the comments below, if you are on Xbox Live, drop me a message or game invite. My gamertag is peskyNOSPAMpescado. Just take the nospam out. Don’t ask about the name, it is a long story.

More Screenshots (courtesy of me, click for full screen):

*Those are real in-game graphics.

Vongo is a download video service owned by Starz Entertainment that can best be described as a video subscription service similar to Netflix meets CinemaNow. For $9.99/month you get all the movies you can download from their current selection of movies. While the selection of movies (2,500 titles) isn’t as large as Amazon’s Unbox, there are more current mainstream movies (The Queen, Stranger than Fiction, Bridge to Terabithia, etc) than can be found on Netflix’s “Watch Instantly” service.

As with most of the services available, you have to download a special application to find and download the Windows Media DRM’d movies. The movies are in standard DVD resolution (720×480) but are compressed down to about 1GB. Picture quality was generally lower than a DVD, but higher than what I have experienced with the on-demand movies available from my cable company. I should note that there was a noticeable jitter on scenes that pan side to side a lot. With my eye for compression artifacts, I usually notice things like that, but even my wife noticed and complained about it. Overall I would say the picture quality was acceptable, but still lower than the Xbox Live Marketplace.

Vongo’s application can run as a standalone application, or within Windows Media Center. After trying both interfaces, I strongly prefer the normal GUI and not the Media Center version. The only saving grace about the Media Center interface is that it mostly works on Media Center Extenders such as the Xbox 360. The programs will queue up your movies and download them one at a time, and even though I have a 10MBit/sec internet connection most downloads were around 1.5MBit/sec and took about an hour. If you plan on watching the movie on your computer, you can start playing it after just a minute. You have to wait until the download completes to watch it on another device like the Xbox 360 though.

Up to this point everything sounds good, but unfortunately it wasn’t that easy. The download manager seemed to crash quite often. It could only download 2-3 movies before it would crash. You have no idea how annoying it is to be half-way into a movie only to have it stop all of the sudden.

I also encountered quite a few odd problems with it not taking care of the DRM properly. In fact, I had to use a trick I learned getting CinemaNow to work on Vongo too. One movie even stopped playing half-way through because it lost its authorization to play mid-movie. Go figure.

Last but not least, you can’t actually play movies on an Xbox 360 through the Media Center interface. If you try to, it will just basically crash the Media Center interface. You can only do it through the normal video playblack that is built-in to the 360. It is nice that you don’t have to have Media Center to play the videos however.

Even with all of the technical snafus, I still kind of liked the service. I am planning on canceling after my free trial runs out, but I might try it again later (unlike CinemaNow). The problem for Vongo is that the software is just too buggy. The average user is not going to be able to get it to work, and others who maybe could get it to work won’t want to deal with the hassle. If you are curious about it, I would recommend trying out the 14-day free trial they have going on right now. You have nothing to lose but possibly some of your time.

For another movie rental option, see our coverage on using Amazon Unbox and Tivo together.