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Windows 7 gives Firefox 3, IE8 speed boosts, while Firefox 3.5 slows down

Publié: mai 12, 2009, 11:18pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
In preliminary Betanews tests Tuesday comparing the relative speeds of major Web browsers in Windows Vista- and Windows 7-based virtual machines, not only did the general performance of Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 improve by about 23%, but the latest production build of Firefox 3.0.10 appears to improve its performance by 17.5%. This despite running in a Windows 7-based virtual machine that we estimate to be 12.1% slower overall than a Vista-based VM hosted by the same environment.
These are the initial findings of Betanews' experiments in how the architecture of Windows 7 may or may not influence the performance of major Web browsers. We wanted to see whether Win7 made browsers faster or slower, and doing that meant hosting browsers in virtual environments whose relative speeds with respect to one another could be normalized.
As we discovered, Windows 7 RC Build 7100 runs perceptibly slower on a Virtual PC 2007 platform on XP SP3, than Vista SP2. This does not mean Windows 7 is a slower operating system, but rather that it behaves more slowly in this particular virtualized environment, which after all was designed for Vista. So to make our test fair, we needed to estimate just how much slower our Win7 environment was from Vista, and factor out that difference.
Up to now, we've been comparing relative browser performance in Vista using a relatively slow browser to judge against: IE7. We've used IE7 as our gauge of how much more readily other browsers blow right past it in the performance department, including IE8. But we don't want to install IE7 on Win7 -- although it's technically feasible, doing so would pollute the operating system for running Win8 and other applications. So we needed a new, slow browser that we could rely upon to stand still for us, relatively speaking.
Our first choice was Firefox 1.5, but we learned it had difficulty running in Win7 at all. We ended up using Firefox 2.0.13, not quite the final build of that series of Mozilla's browser. Our aim was to use this browser as a fair gauge of how much slower our Win7 environment was than Vista. This way, we could equalize our indexes, which are based on IE7 -- we can't run IE7 on Win7, but we can estimate how much slower IE7 would be if we could, by measuring how much slower Firefox 2.0.13 is. Though the average speed difference is 12.1% in favor of the Vista VM, for our browser benchmarks, we created differentials for each heat in the competition, to more accurately account for environmental factors between the two environments.
In the Vista VM alone, Firefox 2.0.13 puts in a performance index of 2.49, meaning it performs 249% as well as IE7 in the same environment. Compare that to Firefox 3.0.10's index score of 5.19 in recent Betanews tests in the Vista VM.
Factoring out the speed differentials, we can reliably say that IE8 gives us a performance index of 2.69 in the Win7 VM versus 2.19 in the Vista VM. Meanwhile, Firefox 3.0.10 scores a 6.10 normalized index score in the Win7 VM versus 5.19 in the Vista VM.
The news is not all good for Mozilla, however. Under the same test conditions, Firefox 3.5 Beta 4 slows down in Win7, but only by about 2.5%, scoring a 10.18 normalized index score in the Win7 VM versus 10.44 in the Vista VM. So from this angle, it appears that Windows 7 helps close the gap between Mozilla's production browser and its experimental browser. We're interested to find out whether similar discoveries await us with regard to Google Chrome, and whether Win7 will play nicely with Apple's Safari for Windows. Those results are still forthcoming.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Nokia's file sharing site gets de-prioritized

Publié: mai 12, 2009, 7:34pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
Nokia's Ovi Share has been put into stasis. Ovi Share was built from Redmond startup Twango which Nokia purchased in 2007. As a part of its online services restructuring that the company announced in late April, Ovi Share will continue to exist, but with a considerably dimmer future.
A Nokia representative was quoted by Reuters today as saying the service is just "planned to be maintained in its current state," with no further investments being put toward development as the company restructures its services department.
The social file sharing site was first incorporated into the Ovi suite of apps and services at Mobile World Congress 2008, promising that users could share photos, videos, documents, and over 100 types of files from their phone or PC. The major draw to the service over something like Flickr or Facebook is the fact that file support is so varied, and storage is unlimited.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
The Web without the browser: Mozilla's Prism enables true Web apps

Publié: mai 12, 2009, 5:58pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
Download Mozilla Prism for Windows 1.0 Beta 1 from Fileforum now.
Mozilla Labs has been devoted to building ideas into viable code that may or may not become products someday. For a year and a half, one of its tasks has been to build a framework for deploying Web-based applications straight to the desktop, while introducing though not necessarily mandating a new methodology or set of practices for sites to follow. In other words, if an application is already live in a browser like Firefox, let's take it out of the browser motif and move it to the desktop.
Since much of Mozilla is about the fine art of testing, the Prism project last week was able to officially exit its internal testing phase, and enter...a new phase of testing, this time what Mozilla calls the Beta 1.0 phase. So despite the fact that Prism 0.9 is now history, Prism 1.0 is now in public beta, with its developers openly inviting users everywhere to install existing Web apps as though they were just plain apps.
Last year, when Mozilla staff "phenomenologist" Mike Beltzner introduced us to Prism, he told Betanews, "What Prism does...is allow you, when you get to any one of these applications on the Web, to just click a button and say, 'I want to make this an application on my desktop.' You'll get an icon on your desktop, and you'll be able to interact with it through Alt-Tab like anything else, but it will actually just be this Web site. Now, there's a little way to go with Web technologies. You need offline support, you need to be able to use that application when you're connected or when you're not connected. So...we've built in support for a new HTML standard for offline applications."
Prism comes as a two-part set. Technically, you only need the Prism "runtime" (the Firefox browser with a little less fox and more fire), though in Betanews tests on a Windows XP SP3-based machine, we had difficulty getting the stand-alone Prism to enroll a Web application as a stand-alone app. We had much better luck with the Firefox plug-in, which lets you use Firefox to browse to the application you want to enroll, then from the Tools menu, select Convert Website to Application. A very simple dialog box gives you the only options you need for effectively bringing up an instance of Prism like a browser and loading your Web app as though it were its home page. When we checked Start Menu, Prism created a shortcut there, but conveniently in the Web Apps folder rather than in the usual mess of first-tier apps.
For now, we're noticing one curious problem: We can't run more than one Prism instance simultaneously. The multitasking problem will need to be solved if we intend to enter the Web application world intact.
Zoho Writer 2.0 is vastly improved over its predecessor, as we discovered last month. But one of its remaining dilemmas with the standard Firefox browser is that it reacts poorly with some plug-ins -- in many of our test systems, JavaScript won't size the user's choice of fonts correctly. Moving the Web app to Prism solves this problem, because it gets rid of all the excess baggage that surrounds every browser window (it's our fault for installing it all in Firefox in the first place, I suppose). Now, although you can start your Web app like an installed application, Windows itself doesn't see it that way yet; in our tests, it still groups the browser as a taskbar entry under Firefox, along with any other instances of Firefox you might have open. So the transition to the new metaphor isn't complete just yet, though we're delighted to see Web applications elevated even this much to the level of "real software," not by building up the Web browser but by stripping it down. By itself, Prism is merely 8 MB of code, making it an inoffensive and unobtrusive runtime platform -- as well as, in many ways, a development path for the future development of the Web itself.
Download Mozilla Prism for Linux 1.0 Beta 1 from Fileforum now.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Islamic Linux distro changes its name to avoid trademark dispute

Publié: mai 12, 2009, 4:02pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews
We all remember Windows Me. It's a moniker that has become synonymous with incomparable stability problems and generally ridiculous bugs. Did you know that until recently there was also an Ubuntu Me? The "Me" in its case stood for "Muslim Edition."
Currently, however, the Linux distribution catering to the Islamic faith has sloughed off both its association to "Me" as well as its outward association to Ubuntu, and has changed its name to Sabily, a term taken from a Qur'anic verse which translates to "my way."
The project, which takes Canonical's Ubuntu and loads it up with free software pertinent to Islam (prayer scheduling, Qur'an recitations and translations, Web filtering) had to change its name in March because Canonical found both the name of the distro and its related Web site to be inconsistent with its trademark policy.
The first version to go by the name Sabily is version 9.04, built from Jaunty Jackalope, the Ubuntu build of the same number. Its new slogan will be: This is my way; I invite unto Allah with sure knowledge, I and whosoever follows me, from the surah of Surat Yusuf, verses 108-9 of the Qur'an.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Russinovich rescues the TechEd 2009 keynote with Windows 7 AppLocker demo

Publié: mai 12, 2009, 4:01am CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews
In the absence of many dramatically new product announcements (notices about the Office 2010 technical preview and Windows Mobile 6.5 were already expected), it was Senior Vice President Bill Veghte's job for the first time to rally the troops during this morning's TechEd 2009 keynote address in Los Angeles. But perhaps not everyone has Bill Gates' knack for holding an audience captive with sweeping gerunds and participles, or Ray Ozzie's outstanding ability to conjure a metaphor as though it were a hologram hovering in space, and describe it for countless minutes without relating it to the physical universe.
What may have kept attendees affixed to their seats for the time being was the promise of Mark Russinovich, Microsoft's Technical Fellow who always dives right into a real-world demonstration in the first few minutes, and is always affable enough to be forgiven for the inevitable technical glitch. Though Russinovich's stage time today was shorter than usual, one of his highlights was a demonstration of a feature Windows 7 RC downloaders had already received but may not have known they had: a way using group policy to block specified software from running on client systems even after it's been upgraded or revised.
It's Windows 7's new AppLocker feature, which he calls "SRP [software restriction policy on steroids." Think of it as a firewall but at the kernel level: When enabled in a network environment, by default, AppLocker disables any application from running that isn't recognized as part of Windows. That, by itself, isn't something anyone would want; so using group policy or using Local Security Policy at the client level (yet another reason why the Windows client should not disable group policy management) a user or admin can program exceptions to this default rule. Those exceptions can monitor the operating system for metadata pertaining to running applications, enabling selected software to run even after it's been upgraded.
While application disablement has existed in Windows Vista, the problem it's had up to now is that whenever programs change, the rules for disablement have to change with them. Network administrators use these fairly strict rules as means of prohibiting employees from installing just any old software they find, or from downloading media that triggers the download and installation of something very much unwanted.
During Russinovich's demonstration, he launched one of his own line-of-business apps called Stock Viewer that, under the default rule, failed the execution test after a revision. He used that failure as leverage for launching a new wizard in Win7 that lets the admin quickly create a new allowance rule to mitigate future failures.
While SRP in Vista limited group policy rules to filename and file hash (a hash signature based on the unaltered binary contents of the executable file), Windows 7's new rule class, called "Publisher," lets the admin tailor the rule to account for a wide or narrow scope of metadata. In this particular figure, we used IEXPLORE.EXE (Internet Explorer 8 in Win7) as a template for entering fully qualified publisher metadata into a rule. From there, the wizard cleverly uses the slider control to dial up or down the level of control the admin needs for the rule, with down representing deeper control.
As Russinovich described, "The slider over here on the left lets you dial up or down the specificity of your rule. For example, if I trusted everything from SysInternals [his own company, acquired by Microsoft] -- which you should, obviously -- then you'd want to set this slider to here [Publisher]. But if I slide it all the way down to here [File Version], I'm creating a rule that says that only Stock Viewer is allowed to run, and only versions 1.0 or higher. So I've really controlled exactly which application from this publisher is allowed to run, but I've still made it flexible because if version 2 comes out, I don't have to go revisit this rule. It's just going to magically work."
Group policies in modern Windows can be modeled on one computer and then applied to multiple clients in a network. Alternatively, for a less Draconian approach, you can set up AppLocker to allow everything to run except those applications you specify; and there, you can use Publisher class rules to use metadata to help you craft exceptions. But that's not always helpful. For example, with the template you see in the figure above, for instance, we can set up a rule prohibiting anyone from using Internet Explorer older than version 8, by effectively enabling version 8 and higher to run; what gets prohibited are the versions you omit.
Microsoft has published a quick demonstration video of AppLocker at work, downloadable from this address.
AppLocker wasn't the only demonstration garnering enthusiasm this morning; later during his time, Mark Russinovich demonstrated the first effective use of PowerShell version 2 to generate scripts for applying group policy objects. And later he received some rousing applause for the revelation that Windows 7 can mount and even use virtual hard disk (VHD) files -- the kind usually reserved for Microsoft-brand virtual machines. This way a user can have access to a VHD's contents without invoking the actual virtual host that created it. This also enables new possibilities for VHDs' portability between devices. For example, Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 can now both be set up to boot from a VHD, regardless of where it's located -- on portable storage, maybe over a network, maybe in the cloud.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Panda lofts its antivirus protection into the cloud

Publié: mai 12, 2009, 1:18am CEST par Angela Gunn

By Angela Gunn, Betanews
Download Panda Cloud Antivirus 0.9 from Fileforum now.
If the prospect of keeping important data out in the cloud still makes you slightly uneasy, you might get positively lightheaded at the thought of keeping your anti-malware protection up there. But Panda Cloud Antivirus, which entered beta recently, did a decent job of protecting a test system from the bad stuff -- without shoveling our data into the ether, and without slowing our system down.
Panda Security's an old hand at viruses, and under its old name (Panda Software) the Spanish firm has been toiling in the anti-malware trenches since the '90s. Around the turn of the century, the company began to shift away from the once ubiquitous signature-based model and to a combination of behavioral analysis and blocking, heuristics, and hardcore auditing. Still, the malware writers have gotten much smarter in the last decade too -- and they've gotten faster at getting their wares out to the public.
The latest iteration of Panda uses a crowdsourcing-style concept it's calling "Collective Intelligence" to speed up the process of identifying new threats. The user installs a thin Panda client on the system. Panda scans executables as they attempt to run -- no data files and nothing at rest, unless you specifically run a scan -- and notes the software's behavioral patterns, file traces, and the like. It creates what the company calls a "reverse signature" for each executable -- a partial cryptographic hash, in fact -- and sends it up to the cloud to confirm that the executable is clean.
The analysis and classification happens in the cloud, thus combining behavioral data from all the users (while anonymizing that of individuals) and automatically figures out whether it's seeing some heretofore unknown piece of malware. The "reverse signature" is checked, and the executable is flagged as known-good, known-bad, or not known. Panda reps estimate that the system can nail down a new breed of infection within about six minutes of its first appearance.
Our tests found Panda to be a tidy, well-behaved application that on its initial scan presented us with evidence of a nasty little keylogger that our previous antivirus somehow didn't notice. That initial scan took hours and hours on our Vista machine (with its 2/3-full 160 GB drive and 3 GB RAM). We had to jettison our previous antivirus package, which somehow hurt our feelings less after that festering iteration of TPE Civil War IV turned up, to load Panda. Connecting via proxy server was uneventful, requiring only that we provide the IP address and port in use. (If we'd been running Internet Explorer, Panda says the software could have retrieved that information automatically.)
After loading and that initial scan, though, Panda was utterly unobtrusive, only tapping us on the shoulder when something actually turned up. The software sees viruses, worms, trojans, spyware, adware, dialers, "jokes" (which the company defines as unwanted bits of code that don't seem to have a malicious payload but could confuse your machine into thinking it's infected), and cookies. The reports it provided were easy to parse (and save) and linked back to good information pages on Panda's site.
We tried to find something Panda couldn't recognize, but it appears to have the based covered, with one serious exception (read on). The FAQ notes that the software can protect machines against the most common threats while offline, but that full Collective Intelligence requires a net-connected computer. Still, even cutting off our machine's network connection didn't keep Panda from smacking down an assortment of infected files we tried to introduce via USB drive.
When Panda finds a threat it can't neutralize outright, the problematic file is flagged as "pending," with suggestions on how best to proceed. In turn, if we'd had the good (?) fortune to pick up an infection even Panda didn't know about yet, the cloud would have (according to Panda) been able to circle back and quash the infection once Panda's analysis had conclusively identified it as such -- again, in about six minutes according to company estimates.
The program's in beta for now, and there are a few things one hopes will be added to the final package. The lack of scanning for files at rest turns out to be no great source of stress. But we did have trouble with one legit program that had malware deeply embedded; Panda saw the infection, but didn't differentiate between the malware and the legit program, making running the legit software difficult. We noticed that the neutralization process occasionally left some slop in the system, especially in the Registry; it wasn't hurting anything, but it would be best to have that stuff eliminated when the infection is detected.
More disturbingly, the program simply doesn't handle rootkits. Panda does offer a separate Anti-Rootkit package, which is also free; it behaves well running in tandem with antivirus, but we'd suggest either that the functionality be combined or that the install program for Panda make the suggestion that users download the separate Anti-Rootkit as well.
The beta period is expected to be indefinite, beta-style; after that, the company says it will continue to offer a free version. You can't beat the price (a big zero in just the right place); and the detection, footprint and scan time (once we survived that first run) were impressive. Consider making Panda your new lightweight antimalware guardian -- but don't forget to pick up a copy of Anti-Rootkit if you do.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009