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Firefox 3.6 needs more, better features to compete against Chrome 3

Publié: août 10, 2009, 11:34pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Download Mozilla Firefox 3.6 Alpha 1 code-name "Namoroka" for Windows from Fileforum now.
Last April, Mozilla gave the first public indication of the feature set it was planning for the version of Firefox that could be released in the fall of this year. Among them were the following: a thumbnail preview mode for tab switching using Ctrl+Tab; an integrated, if limited, version of the Ubiquity command line tool; live theme changes without reboots; a new and more fully loaded "New Tab" feature; a complete status window that answers to the URL about:me; and integration of the desktop Web application platform Prism.
But in releasing the first public edition of the Firefox 3.6 alpha, code-named "Namoroka," general testers will find none of these features -- at least, not yet. Only in the private nightly builds may some testers begin to see features including Ctrl+Tab preview, but now it's believed that integrated Prism and other features will not make it into the final release.
According to Mozilla's official schedule, whatever front end enhancements the organization will end up making to this particular release, will have to be ready for Beta 1 sometime next month. Meanwhile, testers will have to deal with a 3.6 platform that's slightly faster than Firefox 3.5.2 in some respects, but noticeably slower in others, most likely due to developers' error control code as indicated by Betanews performance tests.
What Firefox aficionados say they love most about the browser compared to Google Chrome -- currently its biggest competition as an alternative to Microsoft Internet Explorer 8 -- is its rich feature set and customizability. Chrome, by contrast, is fairly bare-bones, although its bare chassis can now claim to be nearly twice as fast as Firefox 3.5.2 on Windows XP SP3, the fastest (though arguably the least secure) of Microsoft's three modern operating systems. Although Chrome has demonstrated some fancy windowing functionality, probably as a show of Google's prowess in producing something more resembling an operating system; and last week it adopted something that could be laughably described as "themes", Google's developers are finding buckets full of performance for Dev channel editions on an almost daily basis.
Since Betanews' tests just last Friday, Chrome 3 has clinched nearly one point of performance, and on our Windows XP SP3 physical test platform is now flirting with 20 times the performance of IE7 on Vista, now at a record 19.90 on our XP index. This while Mozilla's public release of Namoroka Alpha 1, on our Windows 7 RTM index slips almost one full point over Mozilla's final Namoroka release candidate, due mainly to visibly slower scores in the general math departments. The latest private daily build of Firefox 3.5.3 "Shiretoko," however, gained back some ground to pull just ahead of the stable 3.5.2.
An updated word about our Windows Web browser test suite
If a full feature set is the factor that distinguishes Firefox over Chrome, then Mozilla will need to pack as many features from that April wish list as it can cram into Firefox 3.6 Beta 1 and Beta 2 next month.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Facebook buys FriendFeed

Publié: août 10, 2009, 10:07pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Popular social networking site Facebook has bought FriendFeed.com, and will be taking its entire staff aboard, the companies announced this afternoon.
"Since I first tried FriendFeed, I've admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information," said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO.
While the small 12-person team will become Facebook employees and the four founders (all ex-Google employees) will assume executive positions at the social network, where FriendFeed users will go is not as clear cut."
"FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being," The FriendFeed blog today says. "We're still figuring out our longer-term plans for the product with the Facebook team."
Facebook already uses a number of FriendFeed's popular features, but one of the main advantages of FriendFeed is that its feeds show up in real time, where Facebook's status updates must be refreshed.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
GM's big eBay yard sale starts Tuesday

Publié: août 10, 2009, 9:47pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Today, bankrupt-but-bailed-out automobile company General Motors announced it will be attempting to sell cars on eBay in a move to reach out to new customers and possibly reclaim some market share.
Beginning tomorrow, approximately 225 California Chevrolet, Buick, Pontiac, and GMC dealerships will put some 20,000 cars up on a new dedicated portal (gm.ebay.com) with "buy it now" prices which are negotiable.
The slogan: "Our Best Cars, Your Best Offer."
GM's choice to use eBay to help re-vitalize the American car business is just too perfect. The former mother of all online auction sites has turned into e-commerce's equivalent of the dirt mall after a slow decline that has spanned more than five years.
No longer the premier site for trading rare and treasured goods, eBay is now a place where you can buy on the cheap. CEO John Donahoe said earlier this year that the site was beginning to concentrate more on "secondary market" goods, (i.e., liquidation and overstock merchandise) as PayPal becomes the main revenue driver for the company and Skype gets spun off.
Mark LaNeve, GM vice president of US sales, said today, "Together with eBay Motors, GM and our dealers are reinventing the car-buying experience for our California customers...As the dealer showroom expands from the parking lot to the laptop, this makes it easier for a customer to browse available new-car inventory, make an offer, buy it now, or send a message asking for more information from a dealer -- all at the customer's convenience."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Nortel CEO steps down in massive restructuring

Publié: août 10, 2009, 7:07pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Nortel CEO Mike Zafirovski is stepping down from his position today as the nearly bankrupt Canadian telecommunications company continues its liquidation and reconstruction.
After losing almost $7 billion in two years, Nortel filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy in January of this year.
"Mike came to Nortel to transform this company," said Chairman of Nortel's Board of Directors, Harry Pearce. "He made great progress on many fronts including addressing significant accounting and related legal issues; improving the quality of Nortel products and the company's cost structure. His ambitious vision helped shift the economic center of the company from legacy to growth investments. It was unfortunate the transformation was derailed by a deteriorating economic climate and the company's legacy cost structure. The operating improvements and strategic investments made during his tenure significantly contributed to the fact that Nortel's businesses are so attractive to potential buyers today."
At the end of July, New Jersey-based Avaya Inc. agreed to purchase Nortel's Enterprise Soultions unit for around $475 million, and Swedish wireless communications company Ericsson entered into an agreement to acquire parts of Nortel's Carrier Networks division related to CDMA and LTE technology in North America.
At an emergency House of Commons Industry meeting on Friday, Research in Motion's co-CEO Mike Lazardis said Nortel's LTE assets should not be turned over to a foreign company.
"Nortel's intellectual property and workforce devoted to next-generation wireless research, known as LTE, is nothing short of a national treasure that Canada must not lose," Lazardis said to the committee.
Lazardis argued that the deal should be subject to government review even though it was below the limit that would require a government oversight. Transactions worth more than $312 million require a review, but Ericsson is buying Nortel's properties for only $149 million. It is unlikely that a review of the transaction will take place.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Breakthrough in Intel/Nvidia licensing standoff for i7, i5 CPUs

Publié: août 10, 2009, 5:50pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In a statement this morning that included a blessing from an Intel vice president, GPU maker Nvidia announced it has been licensed by Intel, along with other leading motherboard manufacturers, to produce its GPU-stacking SLI technology for motherboards that include Intel's Lynnfield generation Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs using Nehalem microarchitecture, with Intel's P55 Express chipset.
It's great news for system builders who had been concerned about whether a recent legal standoff between Nvidia and Intel would render it impossible (or at least, unsanctioned) for them to build performance gaming systems with the latest Intel 45 nm CPUs, plus multiple Nvidia GPUs. Simply being blockaded from doing so at the legal level would be perceived as a watershed moment for rival ATI, which wouldn't be good news for Intel either since ATI is now wholly owned by arch-rival AMD.
The Lynnfield platform is important because it integrates quad-core with Intel's hyperthreading technology. Introduced years ago as a stopgap while it developed an inexpensive true-dual-core to compete with AMD, hyperthreading is now perceived as a powerful weapon in Intel's arsenal, giving a four-core processor the threading capacity (if not yet the horsepower) of an eight-core system. But Intel also threw power-saving technology into the mix, in a move that combats AMD's Phenom II strategy, which some say sacrifices power conservation for higher performance.
Not that all high-performance system builders really place power conservation high on their features list. But they can get it along with high performance, and now without sacrificing the capabilities of SLI, Intel can stay competitive on the high end even when it doesn't have the cheapest up-front prices. Getting Intel's blessing to include its SLI technology on Asus, EVGA, Gigabyte, and MSI motherboards is a big step towards full redemption for Nvidia.
Last February, in a licensing skirmish that nearly all parties involved say was overblown by the enthusiast media (though which enthusiasts themselves have said is quite important), Nvidia intimated that it was already licensed to include SLI technology with motherboards using Intel chipsets including P55 Express. Intel went so far as to request a court injunction to preclude Nvidia from making such statements until an actual licensing agreement was worked out.
What today's statement from Nvidia does not yet say is whether Nvidia is now licensed to produce its own chipsets to compete with P55 Express, that would also enable GPUs using SLI to be used on different motherboards with Lynnfield processors. The absence of such information implies that such a license has yet to be obtained, though Betanews has sought clarification from Intel on that subject.
1:36 pm EDT August 10, 2009 &middot As Intel spokesperson Chuck Mulloy confirmed to Betanews this afternoon, this morning's Nvidia license does not extend to the right to produce competitive chipsets for Intel CPUs. "Two unrelated issues," said Mulloy.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Tr.im: You can't make money shortening URLs

Publié: août 10, 2009, 5:23pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

There's an old business saying: If you want to make money in a gold rush, don't prospect, sell shovels. This is the same sort of idea that happened with Twitter and URL shorteners.
URL shortening services are the shovels of the Twitter gold rush, except nobody's making any money selling them.
Because Twitter limits its posts to 140 characters, URL shorteners such as bit.ly and TinyURL are a necessary tool for link sharing and re-tweeting, activities which are now major methods of news circulation. Tr.im was another link shortening service, maintained by The Nambu Network, which received nearly one million unique visits a month.
Unfortunately, though their "shovels" were being used, there was no way for Nambu to make any money, and the site has begun its shutdown process.
On its home page, a message reads:
"Statistics can no longer be considered reliable, or reliably available going forward. However, all tr.im links will continue to redirect, and will do so until at least December 31, 2009. Your tweets with tr.im URLs in them will not be affected. We regret that it came to this, but all of our efforts to avoid it failed. No business we approached wanted to purchase tr.im for even a minor amount."
Since Bit.ly has become the default URL shortener on Twitter, Tr.im simply cannot afford to hang around.
"There is no way for us to monetize URL shortening -- users won't pay for it -- and we just can't justify further development since Twitter has all but annointed bit.ly the market winner," the site's farewell message says. "There is simply no point for us to continue operating tr.im, and pay for its upkeep."
Bit.ly has reportedly offered to host the millions of Tr.im URLs so they do not disappear on January first when the service officially closes down, but there is no word on whether this will take place yet.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Microsoft exits the ad agency business with Razorfish sale

Publié: août 10, 2009, 4:43pm CEST par Scott M. Fulton, III

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Microsoft's sale of Razorfish, which for only two years served as its creative advertising division, to French ad giant Publicis Groupe is not so much the indication of a new trend, but of an old trend that is being suspended for now, perhaps for some very old-fashioned reasons.
In the present-day Internet business model, the principal generator of revenue is advertising. Unless a Web site or publisher is in the music delivery business, or happens to be one of the world's few paid search providers, there's few other alternatives for a steady source of income. But as with nearly all media these days, publishers are contending with whether they actually need to invest in the creative side of the process -- why not let someone else create the content, or better yet, let's see if someone will volunteer to do it for free.
When Microsoft purchased advertising resources firm aQuantive three years ago for a tremendous $6 billion, it was working to put itself on a par with Google, which was just acquiring DoubleClick and looking to make itself an online advertising behemoth in all respects, including creatively. The arrival of the software king in the advertising realm was heralded as a signal of the arrival of logic into the advertising process, and a reversal of the dynamics of all of online advertising.
Specifically, creative talent such as Brian Fling of Seattle's creative ad design firm Blue, proclaimed the traditional advertising agency "dead." His reasoning seemed sound (and may yet be sound at some future date): Since the Web compels users to "pull" information based on the criteria they're interested in, ad firms whose business models are built around "push" -- inserting unrequested content in the middle of streams -- are becoming less relevant, he said.
"Take news for example, a few years ago we got our news pushed to us through the method of a morning newspaper at our front door, or the local news broadcast at 11 pm," Fling wrote just after the aQuantive buy. "The time and medium of delivery was defined, we needed to adjust our lives in order to receive it. Today how we gather information is far different. We pull it from various sources when we need it or when it is convenient to our schedules, our expectation is information will always be available on-demand. The pull model is becoming an increasing pervasive method of gathering information, only to store and retrieve it later using the method or medium of our choice."
The modern ad firm would be one, Fling reasoned, that best applies itself to a more segmented model of information delivery, from sources that fit smaller niches and deliver precise information to more precise targets. But history might have informed him that Microsoft has rarely been the first to ride the crest of a major trend.
As the recession hit, creative resources were the first to be devalued; and as a result, Razorfish -- at one time the creative heart of aQuantive -- was considered less and less crucial to Microsoft's plans in online services, especially in the midst of the Yahoo takeover attempt. With Microsoft trimming down its resources, it made the decision to keep the analytics and technical side of its ad operation, while selling Razorfish (one of whose principal clients is, not surprisingly, Microsoft) for about $530 million -- about one-ninth of what Microsoft originally paid.
Razorfish joins an international network that is nothing short of a colossus, and one of what the advertising world calls the "Big Four." Saatchi & Saatchi and Leo Burnett Worldwide are also part of that school of fish in which Razorfish now swims. The ad agency as we have known it for some time remains alive and well.
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009
Armistice Day for the format war: Toshiba signs on with Blu-ray

Publié: août 10, 2009, 2:46pm CEST par Tim Conneally

By Tim Conneally, Betanews

Toshiba this morning announced that it has applied for membership in the Blu-ray Disc Association (BDA), the body in charge of standardizing and evangelizing the high definition disc format, and that it intends to launch Blu-ray notebooks and standalone players this year.
"In light of recent growth in digital devices supporting the Blu-ray format, combined with market demand from consumers and retailers alike, Toshiba has decided to join the BDA," read the company's statement this morning.
Today's announcement confirms last month's report in Japanese daily Yomiuri Shimbun in which an anonymous insider said that the former champion of HD DVD had plans to release its own Blu-ray players by the end of 2009.
Like a shy schoolboy, Toshiba is acting as though it's just now considering its Blu-ray product plans for 2009; but of course, there's not much of 2009 left. "Toshiba aims to introduce digital products that support the Blu-ray format, including BD players and notebook PCs integrating BD drives, in the course of this year," reads this morning's statement. "Details of the products, including the timing of regional launches, are now under consideration."
Copyright Betanews, Inc. 2009