This is all great news but there are still some technologies that have got to change in 2012 and they need to do this very quickly or else the technology we use will move so far ahead of them that innovation itself will begin to suffer.  Those technologies are all concerned with the Internet itself or with Internet communications.

Let’s start with the ADSL or DSL broadband lines coming into our homes and offices.  Unless you’re lucky enough to live in a country such as Sweden which already enjoys 50Mb/sec lines or faster you’ll be lucky to get a stable connection on a tenth of that.  Indeed the old 2 miles from the telephone exchange line is wearing thin with many but telecoms companies and governments simply aren’t doing enough to rectify the problem.  Here in the UK we think that people who live in countryside villages and who still have to use dial up or get a 512k/sec broadband line have a bad deal.  In some countries where the distances are far further such as the USA, Canada and Australia the problems are 100 times worse.

It’s a similar story with mobile networks.  The USA was late to the 3G game but has forged ahead with 4G connections.  Many other countries however are still several years away from moving to 4G, but which time it’ll be time to move onto something else in all probability.  The mobile networks also need to sort out the mess that is unlimited data plans and manage their networks in such a way as to allow people to use mobile broadband properly.  The pricing for mobile broadband also has to drop by at least 50% next year.  There’s already more than enough money to be made and many people, especially those in isolated areas would love to move away from an ADSL line and onto a SIM contract.  At the moment though it’s still far too expensive to do this.

Many people think that a universal wireless solution like a full roll-out of 4G or WiMax will solve the problem and make traditional broadband lines obsolete.  Telecommunications companies need to protect their bottom lines however and, as such, a lot of innovation is being stifled for reasons of profit and share prices.

When we actually are able to get online though using our sexy new devices we find that the web is still looking as old and outdated as it was in 2003.  Back then we didn’t have the preponderance of smartphones, tablets and touch-screen PCs that we do now.  Even next year’s iMacs are rumoured to be multi-touch but almost none of the world’s largest websites have moved to a touch-friendly design yet.  I did this with my own website last month and firmly believe it’s absolutely essential.  Some companies are making a move in this direction with the BBC launching a part-touch-friendly website recently but the new YouTube redesign is traditional menus and mouse control only.

It’s one thing having new interfaces and new form factors that enable us to use the web in new and exciting ways, and new operating systems that are designed primarily around touch.  If we can’t get good, quick and stable connections to the web though, or properly and effectively use the websites we visit when we get there all this technology is going to waste.  Here’s hoping that 2012 brings us much more than just a move to IPv6 and some 4G radio spectrum auctions.  What technologies do you think really need to change in 2012 and do you agree with me here?  Why not tell us in the comments.

One of the main culprits are images and other media contents. Images are not just screenshots on websites but also logos, buttons and advertisements. These items are usually larger than the pure code of the site, and one way to speed up things is to disable images in the browser.

In Firefox, you can either disable or enable images. There is no option to display images on some websites and block them on others. Sorry I have to correct myself: You can disable images and configure a whitelist in the browser’s options. This is however a tedious process and it is not possible to load only some of the images on a site.

That’s in stark contrast to the Opera web browser where it is possible to configure those settings individually.

ImgLikeOpera is a Firefox extension that adds Opera’s image loading capabilities to the Firefox web browser. The extension comes with four pre-configured general profiles and options to assign profiles to individual websites. That way you could still load images on a site while images would not be loaded on others.

Only cached images are loaded by default after the extension has been installed. It places an icon in the status bar of the Firefox browser that works as a switch between the various image loading settings and as a link to the extension’s options.

A click on the icon iterates through the available image loading modes (left-click next in line, right-click previous). The selected mode is then set for that particular domain name.

You can switch from loading cached images only to one of the other available image loading presets, for instance to load no images at all or to load all images. Images can be loaded selectively by hovering the mouse cursor over an image, holding down Ctrl and a left-click.

Filters can be configured to handle specific images automatically without user interaction. Filters support both simple and regular expression.

A simple filter would be to block all .gif images from being loaded, or to allow all images from a specific domain or from a specific directory of a domain.

Additional options include blocking Flash contents, delaying the loading of images by a certain amount of time and integrating the functionality with Tab Mix Plus’s session management.

Hotkeys are provided to switch between image loading states. This is done with Alt-M and Alt-M).

ImgLikeOpera is a handy extension for Firefox users who work on a slow or unreliable Internet connection The extension is only available for Firefox 4 or later.

One major problem is the reliability of those speed tests on the Internet. Some show lower speeds even if the Internet connection is able to handle faster speeds. This can be due to server capacities at the speed test host, the location of the servers in the world or general routing problems that affect the measured speed.

Speed.io is the first broadband speed test on the Internet that measured the speed of an Internet connection correctly. Every other speed test was usually missing a few thousand Kbits. The service measures the download and upload speed, the maximum number of connections and the response time of the Internet connection.

The download speed test result was 14806 Kbit and the result of the upload speed test was 990 Kbit which comes close to the maximum capacities of the 16 Mbit / 1 Mbit advertised speed of the Internet provider.

The developers of Speed.io claim to utilize 50.000 servers world wide for their speed tests which seems an awful lot but would be an incredible infrastructure if this was the case. Still, it does not really matter if they have 1 or 50K servers as long as the speed tests are accurate.