Webmonkey » Michael Calore

Google Shows Off Chrome OS, Along With a Store to Fill it Up

Michael Calore — Wed, 08 Dec 2010 00:32:27 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Google unveiled a beta version of its Chrome OS Tuesday morning.

The company showed off the operating system, which has been in development for over a year, during a press event here. Also making an appearance at Tuesday’s event was the Chrome Web Store, which we expected to see launch today. If you’re using the Chrome browser, you can visit the store and start installing apps now.

Chrome OS, which doesn’t go into general release until next year, relies entirely on web-based applications for basic productivity tasks like mail, document editing, photo sharing, social networking and reading news. Its inner workings are based on Google’s own Chrome browser.

To get around the connectivity problem inherent to web-based apps, Google says every Chrome OS laptop will ship with both wi-fi and cellular connections. The company has partnered with Verizon — when you buy a Chrome OS laptop, you get 100MB of free data per month for two years. There are no long-term contracts. If you want to upgrade, you only pay for what you need. Chrome OS users can buy a day pass from Verizon, or choose from a few long-term plans starting at $10 per month.

Acer and Samsung Chrome OS laptops will go on sale in mid-2011, with more OEMs to follow, the company says.

In the meantime, Google is launching a pilot program to get hardware running Chrome OS into developers’ hands. Early adopters can sign up to get a black, unbranded Chrome OS notebook, codenamed “Cr-48.”

Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai held one up during the event — it’s a full-sized laptop with a 12.1″ screen, an Intel Atom processor, a world-mode 3G radio, a flash memory drive, and it has a built-in “jailbreaking” mode so you can hack it. Google is also giving away a few of the pilot laptops to its Facebook fans.

From what we’ve seen so far, Chrome OS is extremely fast (the demo we saw was running on the Cr-48 laptop) and, provided you already have a Google account, it literally takes under a minute to get up and running.

Pichai, who has been using ChromeOS for six months, continuously gushed about its speed, which was evident during the demos.

“By building an experience based totally on the web, we’ve made all of the user experiences instant,” he said.

When you launch Chrome OS for the first time, you log in with your Google account and immediately see a grid view of pre-installed web apps like Gmail, Google Reader, a text editor and apps from The New York Times and other partners. All of the apps shortcuts live inside a browser window, so if you want to start surfing, you just type into the URL bar. Chrome OS also has built-in controls for syncing, so any user can log into any Chrome OS laptop and get the desktop and the same experience they’re used to.

From the home screen, you go to the Web Store and install single-serving apps that are enhanced versions of those already available on the web. The download-and-install option gives you a few more niceties, like the ability to answer e-mail, work on your docs and play games when you don’t have a web connection.

The Web Store launched Tuesday in the U.S. with around 500 applications. Other countries and regions will follow soon, Google says.

These installable web apps square well with the cloud-based direction we’re currently heading. Whether you’re reading a book, writing e-mails, or sharing documents, cloud-based apps allow you to stay synced across your phone and all of your computers.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt showed up at Tuesday’s event to drive home his belief the time is right to release Chrome OS.

“We finally have a viable third choice for an operating system on the desktop,” he said.

“We’re now able to build web applications that are at the scale and power of desktop applications,” he said, citing the speed an security innovations made by Firefox, as well as new technologies like HTML5, as the advancements that paved the way to a web-based operating system.

In a round of demos, Amazon showed off two apps — a web app version of its Kindle reader, and a product browser called Windowshop. We saw apps from Sports Illustrated and The New York Times. They both looked like a rich news readers, with enhanced navigation heavy on HTML5 and JavaScript, all the recent headlines, photos and videos loaded dynamically. Curiously, there were no ads on display in the apps.

Many of the apps are free or available under a freemium model. Some of them, like games, cost $2 or $3 each. You buy apps from the Chrome Web Store using Google Checkout, so you need to have a Google account to buy apps.

Google has also partnered with Citrix for easy installation of enterprise apps with secure, company-only sharing features. The Citrix platform will launch during the first half of 2011, the company says.

We’ve seen hints of the Chrome OS and Web Store launch in recent weeks. In Novemeber, rumors that OEMs were prepping laptops loaded with Chrome OS surfaced. Just last week, Google debuted Chrome 8, the first version of its web browser with the built-in ability to plug into the Chrome Web Store. TechCrunch uncovered an e-mail from Google telling developers to get ready for the Web Store launch. In the wee hours of Tuesday morning, the company unceremoniously posted a page for getting started with its Google Cloud Print service that lets you print a page from a laptop or mobile to any printer hooked up to a Windows PC with internet access.

Google admits there is still much work to be done on Chrome OS, and the bug tracking page shows numerous stability problems and hardware shortcomings.

“We’ve made amazing progress but we still have a lot of work to do,” Pichia said.

If you want to try it out today, you can join Google’s developer program and install Chrome OS on a wide range of hardware. But as Google VP of engineering Linus Upson said Tuesday, the process is still rather hairy for non-geeks.

“The question is, how comfortable are you compiling from source,” he joked.

See also:

Chrome Gets New ‘Crankshaft’ Engine, Syncing, WebGL Support

Michael Calore — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 20:58:04 +0000

SAN FRANCISCO, California — Google has rolled out some enhancements to its Chrome web browser, adding a new JavaScript engine, more hardware acceleration, and finalizing its system that keeps all of your copies of Chrome in sync.

The enhancements were debuted as part of a press event for Chrome OS and the Chrome Web Store here Tuesday.

The new JavaScript component is called Crankshaft, and it’s built on top of the open source V8 JavaScript engine that currently powers Chrome.

Google VP of product management Sundar Pichai says the boost makes Chrome 50 times as fast as web browsers were just two years ago when Chrome launched.

“Something that took a minute to happen in JavaScript two years ago can now happen in under a second,” he said.

We haven’t been able to verify Google’s speed claims yet (we’re still at the press event) but you can test out Crankshaft now. It’s available in the bleeding-edge Canary build of Chrome right now.

The syncing feature, which Google has had kicking around in developer and beta releases for months, offers “the same Chrome experience everywhere,” Pichai says. It syncs your bookmarks, preferences, auto-fill information and themes across all copies of Chrome, and you sync up your browsers by logging in to your Google Account. You can choose which datatypes you want to sync and which you don’t.

Also on display were the new WebGL features, which offload the most processor-intensive tasks for graphics and page rendering to the machine’s GPU. The demo featured the familiar “look at how fast the fish swim around the fish tank” method of showing off hardware acceleration, but Google added a nice touch by introducing sharks with lasers coming out of their eyes. The laser beams even refracted when they passed through the glass of the tank.

Google says Chrome 9 beta will have WebGL enabled.

Pichai also showed off some of Chrome’s other recent enhancements, like sandboxing for plug-ins.

He also said Chrome now boasts 120 million users worldwide.

See also:

Xmarks Lives: LastPass Buys Downtrodden Bookmark Syncing Service

Michael Calore — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 19:48:38 +0000

Just when we all thought we’d never see it again, the cross-browser bookmark syncing service Xmarks has received a life-saving injection.

The company has been acquired by LastPass, maker of a cross-browser password manager and form filler add-on. The deal was announced Thursday, and terms were not disclosed.

Xmarks will live on as a freemium service. The initial cross-browser syncing tool you’re already familiar with will be free, but users will be encouraged to upgrade to a paid subscription to unlock more advanced features. It’s the same model employed by LastPass for its own Premium version of its (otherwise free) password-syncing service.

Xmarks Premium will be offered for $1 per month ($12 per year) and it comes with some new features like apps for the iPhone and Android phones, and technical support. You will also be able to bundle the premium offerings from LastPass and Xmarks together for $20 per year.

There’s already an iPhone app for Xmarks, and the company just recently released an Android app, too. Xmarks says anyone currently using the iPhone app can continue to use it without upgrading to the premium service, but they will have to buy in to the $12 per year plan to get future upgrades.

It looked like curtains for Xmarks in September, when the company announced it would shut down its service in early 2011.

Apparently, there’s no money in a free bookmark syncing service, and the company was facing new competition from the cloud-based syncing systems being built into Firefox and Chrome. Even though Xmarks one-ups those built-in single-browser services by syncing bookmarks across all your browsers, it couldn’t stay afloat.

The service has some 4.5 million users, and there was an outcry when Xmarks announced the shutdown. Later, the company asked its fans if they would be willing to pay a subscription fee to keep Xmarks alive. Over 30,000 of them pledged to do so, and that was enough to attract the attention of LastPass.

The two companies will continue to operate under independent brands, though they may merge everything later.

So, it turns out this dark story of cloud computing had a silver lining after all.

See also:

Chrome Browser to Start Sandboxing Flash Player

Michael Calore — Wed, 01 Dec 2010 23:47:41 +0000

The latest developer channel release of the Chrome browser now supports sandboxing for Adobe’s Flash Player on Windows 7, Vista and XP.

This feature should provide extra protection against malicious browser exploits through the Flash Player. The dev channel releases of Chrome on Windows already support sandboxing for HTML rendering and JavaScript execution, two of the most common paths people can use to run malicious code on an unsuspecting user’s machine. Sandboxing keeps these sensitive parts of the browser more secure while still allowing web pages and apps to access the other, less-sensitive parts of the browser.

Windows users on the dev channel should see the update arrive automatically. We should note that the sandbox does have some bugs and may break other parts of the browser — this is a developer release, after all. Once the kinks are ironed out, all of these sandboxing features will begin making their way into proper stable Chrome releases.

Google’s Chromium team has been working with Adobe to build better Flash controls into Chrome, and to utilize Chrome’s sandboxing technology for the plug-in. Google says Wednesday’s update makes Chrome the only browser on XP that sandboxes Flash. For more about sandboxing and how Chrome is implementing it, read the overview post on the Chromium blog from October. Also, Wednesday’s release comes less than a month after Chrome introduced click-to-play controls for Flash and other plug-ins.

Adobe’s Flash Player is the most widely-used browser plug-in on the web, and it’s the dominant choice for video playback and games online. Even so, the technology gets beat up for performance issues and its security shortcomings, and it’s still falling out of favor among standards enthusiasts who are pushing HTML5 as the better solution for displaying multimedia in the browser.

Adobe also released a new beta version of the Flash Player on Wednesday that improves some of its performance issues.

See also:

Beautiful Websites: Google’s Book of 20 Things

Michael Calore — Thu, 18 Nov 2010 19:33:24 +0000

If you’re looking for a nerdy book to give that budding programmer in your family this holiday season, Google has you covered.

Best of all, it’s free (you cheapskate) and it’s written entirely in HTML5 (you nerd).

The book is called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web. According to the forward, it’s “a short guide for anyone who’s curious about the basics of browsers and the web.”

It covers the structure of the web, then offers primers in HTML, JavaScript and Ajax, then offers a glimpse at what’s next in the world of browsers and web apps. There are also discussions about privacy, security, open source software, and design.

The book was written and built by the Google Chrome team, so the bulk of the technical stuff highlights features in Google’s browser. Under the hood, there’s some cool tech going on. There are fancy CSS type treatments and animations throughout. They’ve also recreated the familiar page-flipping animation as you thumb through the book, which frankly smells like the 1990s but adds a rather quaint touch here.

It’s a solid demonstration of how HTML5 can be used to present content in a compelling, “featurey” way. Plus, it’s not just for kids — I learned something new flipping through it, though I’m not saying what. I have a reputation to uphold.

See also:

New IE9 Preview Arrives, Now With More JavaScript Power

Michael Calore — Wed, 17 Nov 2010 17:01:29 +0000

Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

Microsoft pushed out another preview release of Internet Explorer 9 Wednesday. This is not a new beta release — we’re still months away from the official release of Internet Explorer 9 — but we’re definitely approaching the finish line.

Wednesday’s release, dubbed Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview 7 (whew) includes a big performance boost with a newly revamped JavaScript engine inside of it.

The last preview release of IE9, which only arrived a few weeks ago, saw increased support for web standards. But Microsoft made it clear to us during a phone briefing that Wednesday’s release is all about speed and performance.

To that point, PP7 contains an updated version of the Chakra JavaScript engine. This new engine for IE9 was first introduced at Microsoft’s PDC developer event in November 2009. During the last year, the company has been improving Chakra to the point where it’s now scoring over 300 percent higher on the WebKit SunSpider benchmark than it was at launch.

Microsoft’s Ryan Gavin from the IE team says the new release scores 234.6 ms on SunSpider’s JavaScript execution performance test. Read more about the testing stuff on the IE Blog.

While some browsers are certainly faster than others, the major browser vendors continue to tweak their internal workings and make small improvements to speed. JavaScript performance is particularly important, since modern web applications like Gmail, Facebook and Twitter rely heavily on scripted actions. A faster browser means a snappier web app. Just last week, Mozilla released a new beta of Firefox 4 that included revamped code for its JägerMonkey and TraceMonkey JavaScript engines.

You can download this early version of the next IE browser directly from Microsoft. It’s available for PCs running Windows 7 and Vista. Also, this platform preview can be installed alongside IE9 Beta or IE8 with no problems.

Once you grab it, head over to the company’s demo playground and put the new browser through the paces. Be sure to report your results in the comments.

The whole “beta” versus “preview” thing is totally confusing, we know. But it wouldn’t be a Microsoft release if the versioning convention didn’t make your head spin.

Microsoft debuted the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 in September. But Wednesday’s release is not a second beta, it’s the seventh platform preview. Beta releases are considered to be almost totally stable and are intended for a more general audience. Platform previews are on the bleeding edge, and may contain code that isn’t as thoroughly tested. So, this release is primarily aimed at developers.

IE9 Beta is doing spectacularly well, however — Microsoft says its beta release has been downloaded 13 million times since its release two months ago. It has also been receiving kudos for its expanded support of web standards like HTML5, CSS 3 and WOFF.

The next IE9 beta will arrive some time in the near future. After that, the browser will move to the release candidate stage.

Microsoft’s Gavin says the IE9 pre-releases “continue to be quality-driven” with no specific public roadmap.

“The rapid adoption and the feedback we’ve gotten from developers have put us on a very good path to a release candidate,” he says.

Though Microsoft wouldn’t comment on it, our best guess puts IE9′s final release sometime during the spring of 2011.

See also:

20 Years Ago, The Web’s Founders Ask for Funding

Michael Calore — Fri, 12 Nov 2010 18:54:17 +0000

Robert Cailliau's original logo

Ever wonder who the first web developers were?

Twenty years ago today, when Vanilla Ice’s “Ice Ice Baby” was at the top of the charts, two engineers at CERN’s data handling division wrote the proposal to fund the research project that would give birth to the web.

The proposal, submitted by Tim Berners-Lee and Robert Cailliau on November 12, 1990, laid out what they wanted to build and the resources they’d require. The team wanted to start by building a browser and a server. They estimated development would take six months, and that it would require “four software engineers and a programmer.” There are also some serious hardware requirements totaling tens of thousands of dollars (or is it Swiss francs?), but about a third of the requested funding was dedicated to software user licenses.

Here’s the overview:

The attached document describes in more detail a Hypertext project. HyperText is a way to link and access information of various kinds as a web of nodes in which the user can browse at will. It provides a single user-interface to large classes of information (reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line help). We propose a simple scheme incorporating servers already available at CERN.

The project has two phases: firstly we make use of existing software and hardware as well as implementing simple browsers for the user’s workstations, based on an analysis of the requirements for information access needs by experiments. Secondly, we extend the application area by also allowing the users to add new material.

Phase one should take 3 months with the full manpower complement, phase two a further 3 months, but this phase is more open-ended, and a review of needs and wishes will be incorporated into it.

The manpower required is 4 software engineers and a programmer, (one of which could be a Fellow). Each person works on a specific part (eg. specific platform support).

Each person will require a state-of-the-art workstation , but there must be one of each of the supported types. These will cost from 10 to 20k each, totaling 50k. In addition, we would like to use commercially available software as much as possible, and foresee an expense of 30k during development for one-user licences [sic], visits to existing installations and consultancy.

We will assume that the project can rely on some computing support at no cost: development file space on existing development systems, installation and system manager support for daemon software.

It’s an extension of Berners-Lee’s original document, written a year earlier, outlining the architecture of a “HyperText” information system.

Looking back now, we can clearly see how the original plan has come to fruition.

From the abstract: “Potentially, HyperText provides a single user-interface to many large classes of stored information such as reports, notes, data-bases, computer documentation and on-line systems help.”

A single user interface to pull data stored in remote databases — from search engines to Facebook to eBay, this is what we see today. Also, the idea of enabling self-publishing was baked in from the start, a philosophy that has fully matured with tools like blogs, wikis, RSS and social sharing platforms.

Two of the things we love about the web the most weren’t part of the original plan — “sound and video” and other “fancy multimedia facilities” weren’t on the table, nor were full-blown applications that run in browser and allowed users to engage in non-public activities.

As far as we’ve come in twenty years, some of the original problems the WWW project was supposed to fix still exist today.

As Berners-Lee and Cailliau wrote in 1990, “The current incompatibilities of the platforms and tools make it impossible to access existing information through a common interface, leading to waste of time, frustration and obsolete answers to simple data lookup.”

Anyone who works with government data can tell you this is still very much the case. Stacks of data, all of it freely available and certainly vital to the growth of a publicly serviceable web, are stashed inside ancient enterprise-scale systems where it’s inaccessible to simple tools.

These are the problems the Gov 2.0 movement is still trying to solve, with initiatives like increased government transparency, campaign finance transparency, health care reform, and a reboot of our air traffic control system.

See also:

New Beta Release Gives Firefox a Shot of Jäger

Michael Calore — Thu, 11 Nov 2010 00:15:00 +0000

A new beta version of the next Firefox browser has arrived.

Mozilla released Firefox 4 Beta 7 on Wednesday. Unlike the last couple beta releases which mostly just tidied things up, this release is a substantial step forward. Most notably, it includes a new JavaScript engine called JägerMonkey that give the browser a performance boost on script-heavy sites.

It has better support for web graphics and fonts, and it has been deemed complete enough for add-on developers to begin porting over their creations from older versions of Firefox.

If you’re a beta tester already, you’ll see an automatic update today or Thursday. If you’d like to download beta 7 for Windows, Mac or Linux, you can do so from Mozilla’s beta site.

Wednesday’s release comes on the heels of the recent announcement that Firefox 4 won’t be ready until early 2011. Mozilla’s release dates have always been somewhat loose, but the last update was over a month and a half ago, and we were originally expecting the browser to arrive some time between October or January. Now, it looks like Firefox 4′s release date could stretch out as far as the second quarter of next year. It’s a blow to fans of the open source browser, especially since Firefox is seeing increased competition from Chrome, which shifted to an accelerated release schedule earlier this year, and from Internet Explorer 9, which entered a public beta phase in September.

The silver lining here is that it’s looking like Firefox 4 will be much different than 3.6, the current version, and that the update will be worth the wait. Also, the beta releases have been remarkably stable, and, with very few exceptions, are capable enough for every day use.

For the full list of what’s new, check out the release notes. Here’s what has us the most excited.

The enhancement sure to make the biggest splash is Firefox’s new JägerMonkey just-in-time JavaScript compiler. Complicated, JavaScript-heavy sites like Facebook and web apps like Gmail will be more nimble, and you should see a big speed increase on games and demos that previously only impressed those running Chrome or Safari. JägerMonkey is new code that works in tandem with the same TraceMonkey JavaScript code that powered previous versions of Firefox (love the naming convention, by the way) and you can read more about the change on Mozilla engineer David Mandelin’s blog.

The new Firefox release has expanded support for 3D graphics in the browser using WebGL and some more hardware acceleration (if you have the right hardware).

Something else to look forward to in this beta is more support for the OpenType, a font format that allows for richer, more “book like” typography on the web. For years, magazine designers have been moaning in their Rob Roys about the limitations of type on the web. And while super-pretty print-quality type treatments on web pages are still a ways off, OpenType is one of those technologies that’s getting us a whole lot closer. OpenType supports some really fancy stuff, like ligatures and swashes. If you’re not a type nerd, this post from John Dagget will give you a good overview of why OpenType is blowing minds and breaking hearts. Or, just visit this page and play around with the text — click on a word and start typing.

Firefox 4 beta 7 also has an Add-on API that’s stable and reliable, so Mozilla has given add-on developers the green light to start updating their add-ons to work in Firefox 4. If you were waiting to join the public beta program because of that one add-on you can’t live without, you’ll want to keep your eyes open, because now is the time the serious add-on update work begins.

Finally, Mozilla engineer Josh Aas tells us about some crazy voodoo going on in the Mac OS X version of Firefox using the operating system’s native tools.

This post was updated to correct a technical point explaining how JägerMonkey and TraceMonkey work together.

See also:

First Look at RockMelt, a Browser Built For Facebook Freaks

Michael Calore — Sun, 07 Nov 2010 17:01:13 +0000

The rumor mill has been buzzing for months about the imminent arrival of a new “Facebook browser” called RockMelt.

Well, it really does exist, and it’s here. RockMelt is being released as a limited public beta Sunday. Anyone can sign up to test it out, but the release will be throttled so as not to overload the cloud-based components of the app. RockMelt will be doling out download links as quickly as it can manage on a first-come, first-served basis.

The two founders, CEO Eric Vishria and CTO Tim Howes, demonstrated RockMelt to Wired a few days before Sunday’s launch.

It’s based on Chromium, so it inherits Google Chrome’s speed, looks, and basic functionality on both Mac and Windows.

And while its Facebook integration runs deep, RockMelt is not exactly a Facebook browser. It’s a social web browser, allowing you to post links, videos and status updates to both Facebook and Twitter (that’s it for now, but more services will be added later). There are also built-in clients for consuming your Facebook feed and managing multiple Twitter feeds, a chat client, and lightweight RSS reader. It does use your Facebook account to personalize the experience, but its reach is broader than just Facebook.

We’ve seen browsers custom-built for the social web before, most notably Flock, which launched as a MySpaced-up version of Firefox. Mozilla experimented with Ubiquity, an in-browser tool for posting to different social sites and interacting with web services. There are a number of add-ons that can embed social networking dashboards into the browser for you. These tools have grown in popularity as we’ve struggled to manage the ever-increasing flow of links, media and bits shared by our online friends.

So, the idea isn’t original. And RockMelt doesn’t sport a complete re-invention of the browser interface, either. But it is very streamlined, and there are some key elements that people who live and breathe the social web will find intriguing.

First of all, you log in to RockMelt before you use it. You authorize the browser to connect to your Facebook account, and the browser is instantly customized for your social circle, showing your friends and your favorite sites in slim sidebars — or “edges,” to use the RockMelt parlance.

The edge on the left has your picture at the top, and the friends you interact with the most appear in a list below you. To send a new tweet or to update your Facebook status, you click on your picture. To send your friend a message or start a new chat with them, click on their photo. You can also share things by grabbing an image or video on the web page and dragging it on top of your friend’s icon.

The edge on the right has small icons for each of the services RockMelt tracks for you (only Facebook and Twitter for now) as well as spaces to add RSS feeds from your favorite sites.

The “edges” aren’t intrusive — they are less than 50 pixels wide each — but they do add extra visual heft.

“You can’t forget you’re a browser, and you can’t get in people’s way,” says RockMelt CEO Eric Vishra. “We designed these edges to be very thin, to be there when you want, and to blend in when you don’t.” You can also dismiss them with hot keys.

Clicking on one of the icons in the right edge — either Twitter, Facebook or a website icon — brings up a little pane that shows recent posts and activities from that source. Following the “keep things out of the way” philosophy, these panels can pop out from the browser to float freely if you want.

All of your user data is stored in the cloud by RockMelt (on Amazon servers) and synced when you log in, so no matter whose copy of RockMelt you’re using, you see your own custom version of the browser. Others are moving in this direction, too — Chrome connects to your Google account and Firefox has an agnostic Account Manager. But RockMelt’s Facebook integration is central to the experience.

RockMelt is polling Facebook, Twitter and your favorite sites periodically to check for updates (There’s no Firehose or PubSubHubbub magic yet, the founders tell us). But the feeds are real-timey enough. Updates show up in under a minute, often less. The updates are collected by the cloud service and pushed down to the browser.

There’s also a big “Share” button at the top of the browser. Clicking this button opens up an all-purpose sharing window, so you can tweet a link, post something to your Facebook wall or send the link as a message to a friend. Not a huge innovation, as we’ve seen something similar in Flock, but it’s nice.

Lastly, when you use the web search box in the browser, you get another floating window pane that shows the top ten search results. You can click (or navigate with keys) through this list, and the results flip by in the main browser window. RockMelt starts pre-fetching and rendering each one of those ten search results as soon as they show up (with Flash blocked). When you click through the list, you’re seeing real web pages, not snapshots, and you don’t have to wait for the individual pages to load. It’s wicked fast, like flipping through a stack of cards. It sounds bandwidth hoggish, but the browser calculates how much pre-fetching your connection can handle and adjusts accordingly.

Those are the big features. But let’s consider for a moment the elephant in the room: RockMelt is very, very Facebooky. It uses Facebook to sign you in, the in-browser chat experience is built on Facebook Chat, and when you share something via a message, you’re sending them a Facebook mail.

The founders say there are investigating other login experiences, like Twitter sign-in or OpenID logins using Google, Yahoo or AOL accounts.

“We’re going to remain agnostic and pick the services that the most people want to use,” Vishra says, but the team decided to “go deep” on Facebook simply because of the site’s size and volume.

Although it’s disappointing to see that the browser doesn’t play as well on the open web as it does on Facebook’s web, the tight focus makes sense for a young browser trying to gain a foothold in the mass market: Go drop your line where the fish are biting.

The downside being, of course, that if you’re not a Facebook person, RockMelt isn’t as interesting. I could see it being useful for Twitter power users who have a Facebook account, even if they don’t use Facebook heavily. But if that’s your angle, RockMelt’s chat and messaging features, which are based entirely on Facebook, are nothing more than food coloring.

See also:

Microsoft Drops a New IE9 Preview, Boosts CSS Support

Michael Calore — Thu, 28 Oct 2010 21:43:35 +0000

Internet Explorer 9 Beta on the Windows 7 desktop

We’re still months away from the official release of Internet Explorer 9 — it’s likely due some time during the first half of 2011 — but Microsoft continues to roll new features and additional web standards support into its next-gen browser.

The company put out a sixth pre-release “platform preview” of IE9 Thursday. It includes support for CSS3′s 2D transforms. There are also improvements to hardware acceleration, font rendering, and the browser’s JavaScript engine. You can read about these enhancements in depth on the official IE Blog.

Microsoft released the first beta of Internet Explorer 9 in September. But this new release is not a second beta, it’s the sixth platform preview. A bit confusing, sure. But beta releases are considered to be almost totally stable and are intended for a more general audience. Platform previews are on the bleeding edge, and may contain code that isn’t as thoroughly tested. So, this release is primarily aimed at developers.

IE9 Beta is doing spectacularly well, however — Microsoft says its beta release has been downloaded ten million times since its release six weeks ago. It has also been receiving kudos for its expanded support of web standards like HTML5, CSS 3 and WOFF.

Here’s a video showing off the new stuff in IE9 platform preview 6:

If you watch the video and read the post on the IE Blog, you’ll notice a lot of emphasis on “full hardware acceleration” in IE9, and how other browsers like Chrome and Firefox can’t perform as well as IE9 because they only offer “partial” hardware acceleration. In fact, all browsers have access to the same Windows APIs that enable off-loading work to the PC’s graphics processor when needed to speed up 2D and 3D animation rendering. This has been an issue of some debate over the past two months, with Microsoft and Mozilla going toe-to-toe over the issue.

If you want to test the new IE9 platform preview 6, it’s available for Windows 7 and Vista only. Microsoft also released some new tests at the ietestdrive site — run all your browsers through them.

See also: