Adobe Edge Preview is the company’s HTML5 animation tool, and the new version will of course come with new features. The video shows off a bit, including: symbols, clipping, support for web fonts, etc.

Users who have downloaded Adobe Edge Preview 3 before December 14 will find the product expires on December 31. An updated version, 3.1, is available, which extends the expiration date until 4 comes out in January.

First, the same experience will be nearly universal across various platforms and clients. If you’ve ever been frustrated at the version of your app being different than your friend’s, then you’ll enjoy these new versions. HTML5 will also make updating Bing apps much easier on Microsoft. Instead of worrying about different clients and languages, they can simply change the app and have it reflected across the board.

Not only will updating be simplified, but it will also enhance many features already present. Instead of relying simply on the app itself, HTML5 will allow it to gather information and conduct tasks from outside sources. The apps will also be able to utilize features on particular hardwares, including voice search and Bing Vision, which will

Stefan Weitz, senior director of Bing, said this of the upgrade, “We think it’s an interesting model to think about how to expose the things you can do with a product or service in ways that engines like Bing can consume them, so we can do a better job”

“That’s the idea, how can we begin to unlock the power of these applications so engines like Bing can use them to fulfill a request.”

Microsoft’s investment in HTML5 is a huge push towards the markup language upgrade becoming more universally accepted. If you’d like to learn more about the capabilities of HTML5, you can do so here.

The Bing homepage and its generally striking photos is possibly one of the most pleasing features of the search engine, at least for those who appreciate photography. Judging from today’s, this will only be enhanced by the new addition of video.

It shows a nice view of Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming.

The first video is US-only, but Bing will be rolling out the video homepage in other markets in the next few months. It requires an HTML5-enabled browser.

In other search engine homepage news, Google took the big blue arrow pointing to Google+ off after a two-day run (at least in the US).

Now, a day after Mercury’s birthday has passed, much like the United States’ celebration of the Labor Day holiday, the Queen Google Doodle is now viewable for visitors to the Google.com address, the default version of Google for United States users. While the delay for the United States is understandable, some were disappointed Google didn’t do a separate logo to commemorate the Labor Day celebration.

From yesterday’s initial Freddie Mercury doodle article, courtesy of WebProNews reader, Steve:

I realize that Google is under no obligation to produce ANY holiday doodles, but I still expected one for Labor Day. I was disappointed when I went to the Google site for just that purpose and there was not one to be found. Too bad they did not take the time to create one.

While Google is indeed multinational and global in its reach, it’s still an “American” company. It was founded here and their primary headquarters/campus is still in Mountain View. With that in mind, it is kind of surprising there wasn’t a Labor Day logo for American Google users.

Nevertheless, the Freddie Mercury HTML5-driven Google logo is active for Google’s American audience, and here’s what it looks like when activated:

What other doodles would you like to see Google tackle? Are you a fan of these more elaborate logos or would you prefer the standard image alteration instead of the animated video? Was Google’s decision to delay the U.S. release of the Freddie Mercury logo the correct one? Let us know what you think.

Actually, they’re never disappointing, even if they aren’t as obvious as others. With that in mind, the latest worldwide Google Doodle–more on the “worldwide” aspect in a second–celebrates one of the most famous lead singers who’s walked the planet, the incomparable Freddie Mercury of Queen. In true modern web development fashion, the latest celebratory logo is done with all of the HTML5 goodlness you’ve come to expect from Google and their new path regarding doodles.

When clicked, the logo loads an animated Queen performance of “Don’t Stop Me Now,” and it’s awesome. Because Google hasn’t yet allowed embedding of their awesome animation-rich logos, the power of YouTube will have to suffice:

As indicated, the Freddie Mercury Google Doodle can be viewed on a worldwide basis, but for obvious reasons, its not available in the United States. Mercury’s birthday is on September 5, 1946, and in 2011, that’s the same day the United States celebrates Labor Day, which falls on the first Monday of September. It’s pretty clear Google didn’t want to appear disrespectful to its United States visitors. That being said, the fact there’s not a Labor Day logo for IP addresses originating in the U.S. is little surprising.

With that in mind, you can view the Freddie Mercury logo on just about any international Google index page, but, considering the Doodle’s subject matter, a link the British Google homepage is only logical. Granted, Mercury wasn’t born in England, but he certainly made his fame there. Speaking of, here’s a tried-and-true Queen song to continue the celebration:

The company says it’s adopting an open development methodology for Edge, so it is available earlier than usual in the development process. It’s been released through Adobe Labs. Users will be able to contribute feedback, and influence the final product.

“Over the last year Adobe has delivered on several significant HTML5 milestones including contributions to jQuery, submitting code to WebKit, and enhanced HTML5 output in Creative Suite® 5.5,”said Paul Gubbay, vice president of Design and Web Engineering at Adobe. “Now, with Adobe Edge, we’re taking our HTML5 tooling to a whole new level and look forward to getting some really useful feedback from the community over the next few months, as we refine the product.”

Adobe EdgeEdge Preview 1 is finally here! Create animated content using HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript with a slick, easy to use timeline-based interface. Download it now for free on Adobe Labs. 11 hours ago · 35 likes · 6 comments

Adobe explains:

The Adobe Edge preview works natively with HTML. It enables users to add motion to existing HTML documents without hampering design integrity of CSS-based layouts, and it also enables users to easily create visually rich content from scratch, using familiar drawing tools that produce HTML elements styled with CSS3. Users can import standard Web graphics assets such as SVG, PNG, JPG and GIF files and style them using CSS3. The design stage utilizes WebKit to enable design, preview and manipulation of content with incredible fidelity. The innovative timeline feature is both familiar for creative professionals and breaks new ground in animation productivity to enable users to define and customize motion applied to HTML elements with extreme precision.

The content created with Edge is designed to work with modern browsers, including those on Android, BlackBerry PlayBook, iOS, HP webOS, as well as Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and IE9.

Edge will be updated regularly to add new functionality, Adobe says. It’s free of charge for the preview version.

From the Google blog –

The band and Pilobolus dancers are filmed through a clear floor, making increasingly complex shapes and eventually words—and messages you can write yourself.

All is Not Lost is built in HTML5 with the browser Google Chrome in mind. Different shots are rendered in different browser windows that move, re-size and re-align throughout the piece. With HTML5’s canvas technology, these videos are drawn in perfect timing with the music.

And yes, you must use Chrome to view the video.

Once you enter your custom message, the video begins. The video uses multiple browser windows to creates interesting patterns with the dancers, eventually spelling “All Is Not Lost” and finally your personal message.

When the music video is over, users have the option of replaying the entire thing or simply sharing their personal message via custom link.

Of course, OK Go is no stranger to innovative music videos. Two of their previous videos became incredibly popular on the interwebs: first, the video for Here It Goes Again (aka the treadmill video) and then for their Rube Goldberg-themed This Too Shall Pass.

This new interactive experience is nice, but it doesn’t quite live up to the incredible Chrome experiment The Wilderness Downtown in my book. That interactive film featuring the Arcade Fire song “We Used To Wait” was an unreachable kind of awesome.

What do you think? What were some of your messages? Let us know in the comments.

It lets you reuse Flash content on devices without a Flash player (ie: iPhones and iPads).

You may recall a similar tool from Adobe, called Wallaby. Here’s what Google has to say about that:

Wallaby is an installable tool that converts .fla files, whereas Swiffy is a web-based tool that converts .swf files. Wallaby focuses on reusing parts of a Flash file in HTML, and thus produces code that can be edited by the developer, whereas Swiffy generates an efficient format that is not that easily editable.

Adobe is pleased to see the Flash platform extended to devices which don’t support the Flash player. The result is that anyone creating rich or interactive ads can continue to get all the authoring benefits of Flash Pro and have the flexibility to run the ad in the Flash Player or HTML depending on what’s available on the system. Google and Adobe look forward to close collaboration around efforts like these.

Google has provided a Swiffy gallery showing side-by-side original Flash animations and their Swiffy conversion counterparts here.

To use Swiffy’s output on your own site, you can simply save the HTML file that is generated, and include it on your site using an iframe tag. You can preview the output on a mobile device as well.

Google says Swiffy currently supports a subset of SWF 8 and ActionScript 2.0, and the output works in all Webkit browsers such as Chrome and Mobile Safari.

Google says it is not sure whether or not Swiffy will be open source.

With regards to security, Chrome’s Safe Browsing technology has received some enhancements. It now warns users before they download some types of malicious files. “We’ve carefully designed this feature so that malicious content can be detected without Chrome or Google ever having to know about the URLs you visit or the files you download,” writes software engineer Adrienne Walker on Google’s Chrome Blog.

In terms of privacy, Google says Chrome now gives you more control over data that sites store on your computer, by way of Flash Player’s Local Shared Objects. Google has worked with Adobe to integrate deletion of these objects directly into Chrome.

In the graphics department, there is support for hardware-accelerated 3D CSS, catering to 3D effets on websites that implement them. That’s where the above image of the sheep comes from. You can check out the Chrome experiment with those sheep here, which displays how it looks, and how you can interact with the site.

The experiment is “Shaun the Sheep,” and lets you use controls to expand and shrink the video, rotate the scene, bring up a rotating carousel of videos, and turn on puddle reflection.

Google says Chrome has 160 million users. They should all be getting automatically updated to the latest version within the coming days. Google also reminds us of its six-week release schedule, and promises “many more improvements” to come.

While that may be, the infographic in question, provided by Periscope.com, reveals this upcoming changeover has a ways to go before Flash is rendered obsolete. First, the infographic, resized for presentation purposes. Click the image for a bigger version, which measure around 1.2 megabytes worth of file size:

Blame YouTube, I guess.

Another area of interest lies in the browser-ready section. For the Internet Explorer crowd, only IE9 supports HTML5. Firefox has had HTML5 support since version 3.6 and Google Chrome has supported the format since version 10. In the mobile device territory, support for the newer format is surprisingly high, with the exception of the Nokia and BlackBerry environments. Of course, if either company wants to keep up with the Joneses — Google and Apple, apparently — then such expect such a distinction to change in the near future.

Of course, HTML5 is still in its fledgling stage, so expect these numbers to be a little different in a few years. An area discussed by Periscope includes iPad proliferation. It seems Apple is pushing developers who want to design for the “iEnvironment” to focus on the iOS format:

If your goal is to develop content in HTML5 so that it can be viewed through both a web browser and the iPad, (to reach the largest amount of people), you might be a little disappointed. Content developed in HTML5 for the iPad has the least available features and performs the worst out of all HTML5-compatible scenarios.

Periscope concludes their post with the following heads up, “from a purely analytical point of view, the best option for developing a feature-rich dynamic data visualization right now still seems to be Flash.” Just as long as a standard-format iPad user isn’t part of your intended audience.