Business Tech

Google is on the verge of launching a Web site to showcase its extensions to customize what its browser can do.

The company's latest developer preview edition, Chrome 4.0.249.0, promotes the feature on its opening screen and its new-tab page. "New! Google Chrome now has extensions and bookmark sync," the page reads, offering a link to a site that's not public yet, https://chrome.google.com/extensions. (Bookmark sync is already available.)

Extensions and support for Mac OS X and Linux are the headline features of Chrome 4.0. It's available as a beta for Windows, with Mac OS X and Linux beta availability expected in early December. According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta is planned for December 8 release and the stable release of Chrome 4.0 is due January 12.

A number of third-party galleries for Chrome extensions already are available, but programmers for the project have said on mailing lists that a Google site is planned. Earlier this year, Google shipped a version of Chrome that pointed to a collection of visual themes before the Chrome themes gallery was actually live to the public.

Extensions are a key asset of one Chrome competitor, Mozilla's Firefox; extensions permit people to customize the browser and add new features without burdening the overall project. Firefox is getting a new extensions framework, Jetpack, starting with version 3.7 due in the first half of 2010, and Mozilla has just launched its own Jetpack gallery.

As you may remember, in Microsoft's most recent round of layoffs, the company laid off Director of Business Development Don Dodge. Dodge is very respected in the start-up community and tirelessly defended Microsoft's technologies at conferences and to developers during his time at the company. When he was let go, many people were shocked by the move and were watching intently to see who would pick him up. On Monday, Dodge announced on his blog that he will be joining Google in a similar capacity to his role at Microsoft.

Now, Dodge will focus on evangelizing Google's technologies and platforms, instead of Microsoft's, to the developer community. Dodge said that within 90 minutes of the news of his layoff becoming public, Vic Gundotra, Google's VP of engineering (who also came from Microsoft), contacted him about this job opportunity with the company. On his blog, Dodge claims that he has already switched over to Gmail, Google Apps, and Chrome from their Microsoft counterparts.

It's great to see that Dodge landed on his feet so quickly after being ousted from his position at Microsoft and he will likely be a great asset to Google in dealing with the developer community.

In a bit of a Thanksgiving appetizer, many companies were beefing up their structures by--as one of my colleagues put it--gobbling up other companies.

The biggest deal was announced by Hewlett-Packard, which plans to acquire 3Com, maker of network switching and routing products. The deal is valued at $2.7 billion, or $7.90 per share. HP says the purchase is intended to boost its networking business, particularly in China, where most of 3Com's business is focused.

The 3Com deal is the most recent in a string of enterprise-related acquisitions HP has made in the past year, including most recently file serving software maker Ibrix. HP wants to be a leader in providing customers with an integrated stack of computing technology ranging from servers and storage at the foundation all the way up to services.

Other deals

EA picks up Playfish for social gaming push

Electronic Arts makes some serious waves in the social gaming by acquiring Playfish for $275 million in cash and $25 million in equity.
•  A new set of rules for social games

Google to acquire AdMob for $750 million

Mobile advertising is AdMob's specialty, and the deal gives Google a technology inroad into a fast-growing segment of online advertising.
•  With AdMob, Google seeks mobile-ad advantage

Logitech buys video-conferencing firm LifeSize

Acquisition puts the maker of Webcams and other peripherals into the video-conferencing market.

More headlines

Intel to pay AMD $1.25 billion in antitrust settlement

AMD drops its litigation while Intel agrees to "abide by" a long list of prohibitions. And renewed patent cross-license agreement frees AMD to spin off chip manufacturing.
•  What Intel just bought for $1.25 billion: Less risk
•  AMD-Intel deal: No big change for consumers
•  AMD: Our claims about Intel have been 'ratified'

Windows 7 use continues to climb

It now makes up 4 percent of Web-accessing computers, a mark that took Windows Vista nearly seven months to reach.
•  Microsoft pulls Windows 7 download tool
•  Microsoft probing Windows 7 zero-day hole

Microsoft bans 1 million Xbox Live players

Players who were caught modifying their consoles to play pirated games have been booted from the popular service.
•  Craigslist brimming with banned, 'modded' Xboxes

Google hopes to remake programming with Go

A Unix co-creator is among those behind a language Google hopes will speed computers and programming. Today, Go becomes open-source software.
•  Google hopes Go will give a browser boost

Research: Twitter has yet to grow into valuation

Company is worth significantly less than $1 billion, one company surmises. That's in part because the effectiveness of its possible business plan is still up in the air.
•  Judge bans Twitter from court
•  Twitter issues mulligan on new 'retweet' feature
•  Mint makes Twitter an investor hub

Microsoft denies Windows 7 is based on Mac OS

Following comments from a U.K. Microsoft executive that Windows 7 was designed to create "a Mac Look," a company blog post distances itself from his words.
•  Microsoft exec: Mac OS inspired Windows 7

Verizon tests sending RIAA copyright notices

The No. 2 phone company, known for its reluctance to intervene in antipiracy cases, has struck an agreement to forward copyright notices on behalf of the music industry.
•  Even in media mecca, plenty are willing to pirate
•  Former RIAA chief tries to save Qtrax image

Expert says Adobe Flash policy is risky

Adobe Flash Player allows arbitrary content to access applications without permission, says researcher at Foreground Security.

As alternative energy grows, NIMBY turns green

With more renewable energy projects trying to come online, the country grapples with the balance between local land use and a national push for clean energy.
•  Students pitch green businesses for greenbacks

Also of note
•  Bill Gates' home tour on charity auction block
•  U.S. Army orders bridges made of recycled plastic
•  Facebook status update saves man from jail

SINGAPORE--In a year, most enterprises will have the choice to "get rid" of Microsoft Office if they so choose, suggests Dave Girouard, president of Google's enterprise division.

Girouard said in an interview here with ZDNet Asia that he expects Google's online suite of applications, Google Docs, to reach a "point of capability" next year that it will serve the "vast majority's needs."

He acknowledged that Docs is currently "much less mature" than Google Mail or Calendar. "We know it. We wouldn't ask people to get rid of Microsoft Office and use Google Docs because it is not mature yet," he said.

But this is expected to change in about a year, after the company's introduces another "30 to 50" updates.

Read more of "Google: Firms can 'get rid' of Office in a year" at ZDNet Asia.

Google, ever eager to renovate the computing industry for the benefit of the Web and its own business, is working to link two nascent but potentially significant projects, its experimental Go programming language and its Chrome Web browser.

Specifically, the company is building a foundation to let programs written in Go run directly within a Web browser endowed with Google's Native Client software. Native Client is designed to let browser-based programs run faster than is possible with today's widely used JavaScript; though it's still in its early stages, it's built into Chrome and available as a plug-in for other browsers.

A little poking around the Go source code reveals a reference to NaCl, the abbreviated name for Native Client. And Native Client is indeed on the Go agenda, said Rob Pike, one of the five core members of the Go team, in a Wednesday interview.

"We have an embryonic implementation of the NaCl support for Go using 8g," a compiler that produces code for x86 chips such as Intel's Core line, Pike said. "It's restricted by a couple of details of NaCl's implementation, but we hope to see changes to NaCl one day that will make Go a full-fledged language in that environment."

The Native Client compiler--the tool that converts what people write into software a computer can run--is specially modified to screen out a variety of software instructions that could expose a computer to an attack from a Native Client module downloaded off the Web. And the Native Client software itself checks such modules before they run. The result, if the security approach stands up to security scrutiny, is browser-based software that runs close to the speed of ordinary software that runs natively on a PC.

Native Client has been maturing, the most recent stage being inclusion of NaCl within Google's Chrome browser, though disabled by default for now. Google is using Chrome as a vehicle to distribute other Web technology, too, including Gears, which can let people use Gmail while offline, and WebGL, which gives hardware acceleration to 3D graphics in the browser.

Go is only experimental at this stage, but Google hopes to use it to produce some of the software running on its vast array of servers. Google's scale makes even academic projects potentially commercially relevant, which is enviable to many companies who've tried to get projects off the ground.

Indeed, an episode earlier in the Go team's history is illustrative. Pike, Unix co-inventor Ken Thompson, and Russ Cox all worked on the Plan 9 operating system project that, like Unix, began at Bell Labs. (Yes, Plan 9 is named after Ed Wood's famously bad movie, "Plan 9 from Outer Space.")

Unlike Unix, Plan 9 didn't have much commercial success, although Vita Nuova does sell a version called Inferno. Getting a mainstream operating system off the ground is hard: you must convince programmers, software companies, and hardware makers to embrace it; you must convince people to use it in the real world; and you must keep pace with the evolution of entrenched operating systems.

A bit of Plan 9 lives on inside the Go project, with various Plan 9 tidbits appearing in the Go source code. Pike, though, says there's not much.

"The 6g/8g/5g compilers are almost completely new but are tied to the open-source Plan 9 compiler suite's C compilers and linker," Pike said. "That's really about it except for the obvious historical connection for some of the protagonists: Ken, Russ, and myself."

Programming languages face similar challenges as operating systems in getting off the ground: A lot of interdependent elements in the ecosystem must all be built simultaneously. It's what's known in the trade as the chicken-and-egg problem: you can't make a chicken without an egg or vice versa.

But Google makes things different for Go. It's devoting real resources to the project and believes it could be useful on its own servers to run software such as the Gmail service Web browsers tap into. It's got the chicken and the egg under its own roof.

And with the money Google could save by increasing the performance or efficiency of its servers even just a fraction of a percent, it has abundant financial incentive to make things work.

Marrying Go to browsers is just another aspect of the same issue.

Assuming Go and Native Client mature enough to be useful, Google can't mandate that Web developers embrace them; indeed, they generally haven't embraced Gears even though it can help with some Web site matters. But again, Google has a browser and some awfully big Web sites it can use to get the ball rolling.

Google plans to release a Mac beta of Chrome in early December, judging by some chatter on a mailing list for the browser.

Chrome 4.0 is available today as a beta version for Windows but only as a rougher developer-preview version on Linux and Mac OS X. The standout feature of the new version is customization through extensions, a technology that long has been a core asset of another open-source browser, Firefox.

Google has been moving to a new extensions presentation technology called Browser Actions that let people interact with extensions through a small button toward the upper right of the browser window. "We've noticed that many of you have updated your extensions to take advantage of the new UI. We'd like to encourage the rest of you to do so as well," said Nick Baum, a Google Chrome product manager, in a mailing list posting.

But here's the hitch: Browser Actions only work on Windows and Linux right now. That means those building extensions will leave Mac Chrome users behind for a time. But in telling those developers they won't have long to wait, Baum mentioned the deadline for the beta version.

"The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December," he said.

And Google is on the case for adding Browser Actions to the Mac version of Chrome.

"We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that," Baum said. "If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"

Google software luminaries such as Unix co-creator Ken Thompson believe that they can help boost both computing power and programmers' abilities with an experimental programming language project called Go.

And on Tuesday, they're taking the veil of secrecy off Go, releasing what they've built so far and inviting others to join the newly open-source project.

The computing industry is in constant tension between making a fresh start and evolving the current technology. The limits of today's hardware designs and programming technology led the Go team to take the former approach.

"We found some of those problems to be frustrating and decided that the only way to address them was linguistically," said Rob Pike, a principal software engineer working on Go. "We're systems software people ourselves. We wanted a language to make our lives better."

So far, Google's Go project consists of the programming language, compilers to convert what programmers write into software that computers can run, and a runtime package that endows Go programs with a number of built-in features. It's most similar to C and C++, but, Pike said, it employs modern features and has enough versatility that it could even be used within Web browsers.

Go's assets
There's a huge step between creating a new programming language and building into a major force in the industry. Sun Microsystems, which succeeded with Java, has had less success with a would-be Fortran successor called Fortress.

But Go has some assets most languages don't.

First, the project is at Google, which has a powerful incentive to make something useful in order to get more out of its hundreds of thousands of servers and its countless in-house programmers. An experiment at Google could have more commercial relevance than many other company's actual products, and Go is already graduated from a 20 percent time project to one with formal support.

"We don't intend it to be experimental forever," Pike said. "We really want to build stuff for real with this."

Second, there's the Go team's pedigree. Among them:

• Thompson, the winner of the 1983 Turing Award and 1998 National Medal of Technology, who, along with Dennis Ritchie, was an original creator of Unix. Thompson also came up with the B programming language that led to the widely used C from Ritchie.

• Pike, a principal software engineer who was a member of Bell Labs' Unix team and a later operating-system project called Plan 9. He's worked with Thompson for years and with him created the widely used UTF-8 character-encoding scheme.

• Robert Griesemer, who helped write Java's HotSpot compiler and V8, the Chrome browser's JavaScript engine; Russ Cox, a Plan 9 developer; and Ian Taylor, who has worked on improving the widely used open-source GCC compiler.

The name Go itself stems from the challenging board game, a reference to Google itself and, of course, the idea of going somewhere, Pike said.

What's Go for?
Google has high hopes for Go.

It's designed to address some issues in getting software to take advantage of multicore processors that can perform multiple tasks in parallel. It has an approach to ease some of the pains of object-oriented programming. It has modern language features such as "garbage collection," which helps programmers deal with mundane but important memory management issues. And it's designed to be fast--nearly as fast as programs written in C or C++--and enable fast creation of programs in the first place.

"It seems it's getting much harder to build software than it used to be," even though computers are vastly faster than in the past, Pike said. "The process of software development doesn't feel any better than it did a generation ago. We deliberately tried to make a language that focused in part on rapid development, that compiles really efficiently, and that expresses dependencies efficiently and precisely so the compilation process can be controlled well. I find it much more productive to work in."

When it comes to the speed programs at which programs run, "Our target was to get as close as we could to C or C++," Pike said. They're reasonably close--programs run about 20 percent to 30 percent slower right now, he said.

The Go Web site itself is built with Go, but Google has broader ambitions. The software is designed to build server software--Google's Gmail is one example of what it's suited for. Google thinks that it could be good for other cases, including running software in a Web browser, a task JavaScript handles today.

"It's at least an order of magnitude better than JavaScript," Pike said. Note that Google built its own browser, Chrome, in part to speed JavaScript and Web performance, and that Google already is incorporating its technology such as Native Client and Gears.

Another nice Web-related feature in Go: tasks can be shared by servers and client devices such as PCs or mobile phones that use those services. That makes a service more easily adapted to different amounts of processing power for those clients, Pike said.

Making the most of multicore
Go also is designed to tackle one of today's big challenges, multicore processors. Programs often work sequentially, moving through a task one step at a time, but multicore processors are better at handling many tasks in parallel.

Go is no magic bullet for the problem, but Pike is optimistic that it will help. "We think we have support sufficient to take a crack at it," he said.

Specifically, Go uses a technology dating back to the 1960s called CSP, or communicating sequential processes, that handles interactions among a set of cooperating programs, Pike said. The technology made an appearance in programming languages such as Occom and Erlang, but it generally hasn't been applied in systems programming.

"We don't believe we've solved the multicore-programming problem," Pike said. "But we think we've built an environment in which a certain class of problems can take advantage of the multicore architecture."

The design also can apply, to some extent, to spreading tasks among multiple servers connected over a network, he added.

Lending a hand
The Go team is looking for help. One big area is in improving the runtime library from which Go programs can draw.

Such libraries speed up programming by providing many tools and functions so programmers don't have to create those ingredients on their own, and Go's library includes many elements crucial to Go's design. Go's libraries supply resources for handling concurrency, garbage collection, and other "low-level gunk you don't want to expose to programmers," Pike said.

The Go team also is looking for compiler help. Thompson has written some compiler support for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 processors, and for ARM processors, and Taylor has written a Go front end for the GCC compiler.

ARM processors are dominant in the mobile-phone market that Google is trying to spur into greater activity with the Android operating system, and Go software will be able to run on mobile phones, he said. "We're looking at interesting applications on things like Android phones. We're not sure where that's going to lead, but it's too intriguing to let it go," Pike said.

Google has released many products as open-source software over the years, in part to give something back to the pool from which it's drawn and in part because it stands to gain from the collective-development philosophy. Go fits with those motives.

"We did this to help Google first, but we decided (that) we need to open-source it," Pike said. "It's interesting, but it needs help from the community."

For all Google's ambitions for Go, the company doesn't expect it to erase today's technology.

"I don't think we'll replace anything," Pike said. "We're just putting another player into the arena."

It looks as though Microsoft may have a winner in Windows 7, at least in comparison to Vista.

The software giant saw relatively strong early adoption of Windows 7 in the 10 days since its official launch. According to Net Applications, more than 3 percent of PCs accessing the Web in the past two days have been doing so using the new operating system. Usage of the operating system has been growing strong in recent days, though Windows 7 already accounted for 2 percent of global Web traffic in the days ahead of its formal launch.

Judging by its initial sales, Windows 7 is certainly proving more popular than Vista. Microsoft sold 234 percent more boxed editions of Windows 7 than it did Vista in the initial releases of both products, according to research released by NPD Group.

In actual dollars, Windows 7 has also been more successful than Vista. However, early discounts on pre-sales copies and a lack of a promotional boost behind Windows 7 Ultimate led to revenues only 82 percent greater than those of Vista.
•  Windows 7 upgrade version: The dos and don'ts
•  FAQ: Buying the right Windows 7 upgrade
•  Microsoft Windows 7 vs. Apple Snow Leopard

More headlines

New York antitrust suit accuses Intel of bribery

Intel used payments to keep computer makers from selling systems with AMD chips, according to New York's attorney general. It's a new front in an old Intel war.
•  N.Y. lawsuit details Intel's 'largesse' toward Dell

T-Mobile experiencing widespread outage

The cellular carrier acknowledges problems affecting both its voice and data networks.
•  T-Mobile users still reeling from outage
•  T-Mobile says software error behind outage

AT&T vs. Verizon: There's a lawyer for that

AT&T is suing Verizon Wireless over its "There's a Map for That" ad campaign, stating that it misleads consumers about AT&T's network coverage.

Corporate bank accounts targeted in online fraud

Small and medium-size businesses, governments, and school districts are targets of online bank fraud involving malicious e-mails, key loggers, and money mules, FBI says.
•  Phishing, worms spike this year, say Microsoft and McAfee
•  New Trojan encrypts files but leaves no ransom note
•  Hacker breaks into jailbroken iPhones, asks for $7

Barnes & Noble hit with suit over Nook

A Cupertino, Calif.-based start-up claims the bookseller misappropriated its trade secrets in its design of a similar e-reader.
•  Spring Design seeks injunction barring Nook sales

Microsoft gives the MSN butterfly a makeover

It's given a new look to both its home page and the MSN butterfly logo. The main page now has just half as many links, with more videos and photos.
•  Microsoft to fix holes in Windows, Office

Mozilla: Firefox 3.6 won't be late

The first beta of Firefox 3.6 may have crossed the finish line weeks late, but Mozilla says the final version should still be done this year.
•  Firefox gets a quick fix
•  Firefox gains Windows 7 features

Lack of global climate deal won't crush green tech

No matter what happens in Copenhagen next month, green-tech companies say industry and national governments will drive investment in the near term, an analysis shows.
•  Waste Management squeezes fuel from landfills
•  LA changing its glow for more efficiency
•  PetroAlgae signs deal with Indian Oil

Mac game: Art project or malware?

Is the Lose/Lose game a legitimate art project, or should it be flagged as malware because it deletes files?

Virtual goods: Duping the masses?

When is ad not an ad? When it's an offer for something other than what you think you are signing up for.
•  After onstage spat, Offerpal replaces CEO
•  Offerpal Media mess gets stickier

Beatles copyright case down a legal rabbit hole

BlueBeat is streaming Beatles recordings for free and selling them for 25 cents apiece, claiming that they aren't the original recordings and therefore aren't copyright-protected.
•  Beatles catalog comes to USB
•  No Doubt says 'no' to Band Hero depiction

Also of note
•  An unofficial way to 'dislike' things on Facebook
•  Best Buy to launch branded movie download service
•  Wi-Fi-free iPhone officially lands in China

With a project called Closure Tools, Google plans on Thursday to start helping developers who aspire to match the company's proficiency in creating Web sites and Web applications.

Google is a strong proponent of using JavaScript to write Web-based programs, part of its Web-centric ethos. Indeed, the company has pushed the language to its limits with services such as Gmail and Google Docs, and it developed its Chrome browser in part to enable JavaScript programs to run faster.

But writing, debugging, and optimizing heavy-duty JavaScript can be difficult--in part because a given JavaScript program sometimes works differently on different browsers. Google's open-source Closure Tools project is an attempt to help with some of these challenges.

The first in the suite of tools is the Closure Compiler, a software package designed to boil down a JavaScript program so it's smaller and runs faster. For example, a function named DisplayAddress() could be replaced with just a().

Along with the compiler come some extra tools that run in the Firefox browser. One, Closure Inspector, is an extension for Firefox's Firebug add-on designed to help programmers understand and debug the rewritten JavaScript--linking a() back to DisplayAddress(), for example. Another add-on for the Google Page Speed extension lets programmers see how much the compiler helped.

Google also plans to make the compiler available as a Web application hosted on its Google App Engine service.

The second element is called the Closure Library, a collection of prebuilt JavaScript code that lets programmers handle relatively sophisticated technology--arrays and string manipulation, for example.

Last are Closure Templates, more prewritten code to ease creation of JavaScript and HTML user interfaces.

In an earlier era, programming tools were expensive packages bought by a select few, but open-source software, new marketing strategies, and new business methods have made that approach the exception rather than the rule these days. Now programming tools are often a means to another end--encouraging programmers to produce the software that will make Windows or the Palm Pre useful and therefore popular, for example.

In Google's case, the objective is often to make the Web more popular because it sees more activity on the Web as corresponding directly with more activity on its revenue-generating search site. Among the high-profile projects to this end are Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android, all subsidized by Google's powerful search-advertising business.

One interesting contrast to Closure is another Google project called Google Web Toolkit. It's designed to accomplish some of the same goals as Closure, including paving over browser incompatibilities and producing high-performance JavaScript. But with GWT, coders write programs in Java that gets translated into JavaScript.

So one last question: why the name?

Google's reply: "Being a functional language, the concept of a function closure is fundamental to the JavaScript language."