Google, the company that made "don't be evil" its corporate motto, is shunning use of an open-source license variation that precludes use of software for evil purposes.
The matter illustrates the tensions between the sometimes free-wheeling ways of open-source programming world and the buttoned-down corporate realms where open-source software is no longer unusual. This particular issue bubbled up at Google Code, a site that hosts open-source projects from Google and others.
When he wrote JSMin, Douglas Crockford added this line to the open-source MIT License.
(Credit: Douglas Crockford)Google only permits software governed by a limited list of widely used open-source licenses to be hosted at Google Code; one that's permitted is the MIT License. Douglas Crockford picked a variation of the MIT license for his JSMin program to shrink JavaScript programs so that Web browsers can download them faster, and Ryan Grove carried that license over for his variation called JSMin-PHP rewritten in the PHP language.
JSMin-PHP had been hosted at Google Code until earlier in December, when it came to the attention of Chris DiBona, Google's open-source honcho, that the software's license had an extra requirement added to the regular MIT License:
"The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."
"As Google (and some others) interpret it, this additional requirement constitutes a vague use restriction and thus makes the license non-free. Chris [DiBona] explained that if I were to remove that line from the license and 'return to a proper open source license that we support,' then jsmin-php could stay on Google Code. Otherwise, he said, 'we can't host you,'" Grove said on his blog. "Of course, I can't change the license, because it's not my license. It's Douglas's license...All derivative works and copies of jsmin.c either include this license or are in violation of it."
Consequently, Grove moved JSMin-PHP to the GitHub collaborative programming site. "If you currently have a project on Google Code that is derived from or includes jsmin.c, you might want to consider migrating to a new host with less restrictive policies," Grove added.
How did this all come about? According to a July speech by Crockford, who works for Yahoo and describes himself as a heretic, the license was an artifact of the George Bush administration's war on "evildoers." He uses the licenses for all the projects he's created, he said.
"This was late in 2002, we'd just started the war on terror, and we were going after the evildoers with the president and the vice president, and I felt like I need to do my part," he joked. "So I added one more line to my license, which was that 'the software shall be used for good, not evil.'"
"About once a year I'll get a letter from a crank who says, 'I should have a right to use it for evil! I'm not going to use it until you change your license.' Or they'll write to me and say: 'How do I know if it's evil or not? I don't think it's evil, but someone else might think it's evil, so I'm not going to use it,'" Crockford said. His conclusion: "My license works, I'm stopping the evildoers."
He's willing to grant an exception, though, he said.
"Also about once a year, I get a letter from a lawyer, every year a different lawyer, at a company--I don't want to embarrass the company by saying their name, so I'll just say their initials: IBM--saying that they want to use something I wrote," he said. "They want to use something that I wrote in something that they wrote, and they were pretty sure they weren't going to use it for evil, but they couldn't say for sure about their customers. So could I give them a special license for that? Of course. So I wrote back... 'I give permission for IBM, its customers, partners, and minions, to use JSLint for evil.'"
These days, though, lawyers are a real force in the programming world, and I can see how the line, however jokingly it might have been added, might cause corporate indigestion. Perhaps Crockford has no intention of enforcing the license, but perhaps some contributor to a project farther down the path of derivative works might have a more humorless interpretation.
After all, there have been efforts to add political elements into open-source and free-software licensing--for example, one variation of the GNU General Public License that prohibited military use of the software. And deeply held philosophical and ethical beliefs are certainly no stranger to the open-source and free-software realm.
Even if a company, project, or individual does conclude the license isn't onerous, that extra line adds a lot of busywork to the collective and never-ending task of evaluating software. I'm all for humor, principled positions, and honest debate, but I prefer it to take place where it won't hobble some other software project's prospects.
I know I sound stuffy (or perhaps "risk-averse" and "disconnected from the community," as Aaron Boodman would have it), but I hate to see good work fall by the wayside for what seems to me a reason that's secondary at best.
Updated 1:38 p.m. PST to clarify the nature of JSMin-PHP.
Mozilla Messaging hopes to release Thunderbird 3.1 in early April, a date that reflects a new frequent-release strategy adopted from the better-known Firefox effort at Mozilla.
Dan Mosedale, a programmer for the open-source e-mail software, published the date in a Thunderbird schedule draft he announced Thursday.
"If we're lucky, we relabel 3.1RC1 [release candidate 1] as final and ship it on Tuesday, April 6. Otherwise, there's an RC2," Mosedale said in the planning document.
The new version is due to get an updated Web browser engine. Using the same Gecko project that Firefox is built atop means Thunderbird messages can integrate with Web activity such as Google Calendar.
Another possibility for 3.1 is a revamp of the Thunderbird start page, Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher said Friday. That redesign, which Ascher described in May, could show more useful information than the present splash screen--for example, information about what activity people has been up to help pick up where they left off.
"The 'start page,' which makes a lot of sense in Firefox, never made a huge amount of sense to me in Thunderbird. In particular, it's shown only when a folder is selected, and no message is selected. That's hardly a logical time to show the (colorful, pretty, but fairly useless) page we show now. Instead, why not show information about the selected folder and help people who clearly intended to select a folder, so most likely wanted to do something related to that folder," Ascher said in the blog post.
The faster Thunderbird release cycle is just one attribute the Thunderbird team is trying to adopt from Mozilla's higher-profile Firefox effort. Also on the longer-term plan is financial self-sustenance. Those are big challenges, though. An easier adoption will be fun names.
Starting now, Thunderbird versions will be named after beaches, Ascher said in a blog post this week.
"Firefox releases have cool code names while in gestation," Acher said. "Firefox picks national parks as code names, as metaphors for the values that go into making a Firefox release. The idea made a lot of sense to us, so we decided to follow suit for Thunderbird. Rather than parks, we picked beaches."
First up: Hawaii. Thunderbird 3.1 gets the name Lanikai, Ascher said, adding that he misspelled it "Lanakai" in the blog post.
Mozilla, racing to release Firefox 3.6 by the end of the year, issued a fifth, and likely final, beta version of the new browser.
The open-source browser backer announced the new Firefox beta (download for Windows and Mac OS X) in a blog announcement Thursday.
Firefox 3.6 builds in a feature called Personas for customizing the browser's appearance, adds the File interface for better file management such as selecting what to upload, and, my personal favorite, placement of new tabs next to the ones that spawned them.
A total of 127 bugs were fixed since the fourth beta, but this time Mozilla didn't announce any new features. The first Firefox 3.6 beta arrived in October.
Mozilla had considered issuing its first Firefox 3.6 release candidate this week: "If we can go to build today or tomorrow, QA [quality assurance] will scrap Beta 5 and we'll release RC to the beta audience ASAP," the Mozilla meeting notes said.
Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, and JVC are among 14 consumer electronics companies named in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed Monday in New York by the Software Freedom Law Center.
According to the complaint (PDF), the defendants sold products containing software application BusyBox in violation of the terms of its license, the GNU General Public License version 2 (GPLv2).
The entire list of companies named in the suit is as follows: Best Buy; Samsung; Westinghouse; JVC; Western Digital; Robert Bosch; Phoebe Micro; Humax USA; Comtrend; Dobbs-Stanford; Versa Technology; Zyxel Communications; Astak; GCI Technologies.
Read more of "Best Buy, Samsung, Westinghouse, 11 more named in GPL lawsuit" at ZDNet's Between the Lines.
Cloud computing providers have a difficult marketing challenge, in my opinion. Think about it--no matter what service model or deployment model a provider is delivering, they must differentiate their service while meeting the "commodity" needs of as many customers as possible. It would seem these businesses are stuck between providing least common denominator service capabilities and being accused of intentional customer lock-in.
(Credit:
Jake Shepherd/Flickr)
From a customer perspective, it is equally challenging when one is "looking for servers and storage" and must choose between a bunch of services that essentially run Linux or Windows and store your files. How does one choose? How do the cloud providers set themselves apart in the customers' eyes?
Unfortunately, I've been inundated of late by an increasing number of cloud service announcements that lack any sense of differentiation. Hosting providers are announcing "on-demand server capacity billed on a pay-as-you-go basis." Platform vendors are simply announcing what language they support, and how much they charge for services. Software-as-a-Service vendors have the easiest job to differentiate service, as they can do so based on functionality alone if they wish, but even there some vendors struggle to differentiate themselves by anything other than the fact they run as a cloud service.
This has to change. Forrester's James Staten is telling us that clients are getting "cloud weary." I believe a lot of this has to do with the ridiculousness of "cloudwashing" that we've seen for some products and services, and the relative monotony of pitches for things are arguably cloud services, especially in the IaaS space.
Below is a list of five key categories of competitive differentiation for cloud computing. It is not a complete list, nor do I think all vendors would look at this question in the same way. However, if you are looking to acquire cloud services, these are the elements I think you start with as you evaluate any service, be it SaaS, PaaS, or IaaS. If you are selling these services, consider this an outline for your next requirements document.
Ease of operations. Yeah, I could have kept things simple and just said "ease of use," but "use" in the cloud computing service sense is much more than how humans interact with the system. For instance, how does a company with hundreds of applications in the cloud strewn across a dozen or more vendors monitor and manage those applications to manageable service levels?
And yes, phenomenal user interfaces will set some providers apart from others, but it will be the "behind the scenes" interfaces--such as APIs, publish and subscribe event streams, transparency and auditability systems, etc.--that will make the most significant differences between providers.
Will many of the aspects of "ease of operations" be standardized? Sure. The Open Cloud Computing Interface (OCCI) is an example of an attempt to deal with a large part of this challenge. However, differentiation will still be possible through extensions, quality of features and--yes--some custom interfaces.
Configurability. One of the things about today's best-known cloud computing environments is that they are essentially infrastructure and software architecture frameworks that dictate a lot about the application architectures that can be built on them. For example, the Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) allows each server to be on one widely shared network. No separation of management traffic from DMZ traffic here (at least not explicitly from the point of view of the OS).
No, application architects are instead forced to consider how they would build and operate their application in the infrastructure architecture given them. Good books have been written with this in mind, but ultimately the complexity of the problems we wish to solve with information technology will dictate the amount of configurability we require from our infrastructure systems--even if they are delivered as a service by a third party.
The low-hanging fruit here for IaaS vendors are things like network architectures, data storage options, server options and so on. Also useful here are services that enhance the infrastructure, like security systems, message queueing, and storage tiering.
Performance. One public relations contact I got recently was quite interesting. A hosting company sent me an email indicating that they have an increasing number of customers coming to them from AWS, and finding that their applications actually perform better in the former than the latter. I haven't confirmed the truth of that claim, but it is an interesting claim nonetheless.
Processing speed, memory speed, storage access, read and write speeds, latency, bandwidth--these are all things that are tunable by the cloud provider, either through technology acquisition, or through superior engineering and operations expertise. And, as with servers and storage, the fastest speeds per dollar spent will generally win.
I would not be surprised if we saw a cloud performance war, similar to the RDBMS benchmark wars, especially in the IaaS category (though it would make sense in the PaaS and SaaS categories as well).
Reliability and security. I debated combining these two elements, as they represent different aspects of the same concept. However, that core concept--risk mitigation--is at the heart of so much of the decision over whether public cloud services are better than private data centers, that I think they will often be viewed through the same lens.
Companies will need time to demonstrate differentiation in both of these categories, but features can be introduced today to increase the transparency of both operations and security in any provider. Redundant distributed data stores, "early warning" DDoS detection events, auditability APIs; these are all features that would "open the kimono" in a controlled fashion and increase customer's ability to trust that their provider has made the protection and availability of their data and functionality a core competency.
Customer service. After I wrote my closing post for the "big rethink" series, Kevin Magee, COO of ZeroTouch IT, wrote a post in which he noted several additional predictions for the effect of cloud computing on IT. Most notably, he pointed out that cloud will change "[h]ow Vendor Relationship Management will become a key discipline in IT organizations." Amen, brother, and I completely agree.
In a tongue-in-cheek post from early 2008, I noted that system administrators should "get good at waiting on hold for customer service representatives." In reality, there is truth to that, but the providers have a lot of room to craft that experience.
One thing they can do is advance the technical leading edge in terms of customer self-service and operations transparency. (Hmm. Has anyone else noted how often 'transparancy' comes up in this discussion.) I noted some ideas about this in a previous post. Smart providers will find others.
Cloud computing is one of those truly disruptive market opportunities that makes or breaks companies. The winners will find ways to differntiate. Those that don't almost certainly can't win. So, please, no more press releases that fail to differentiate in any meaningful way.
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.
Gordon, Go's gopher mascot
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.
Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny mascot, looks similar to Gordon, Go's gopher mascot. Both were drawn by Rob Pike's wife, illustrator Renee French.
(Credit: Bell Labs)"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.
Mozilla, racing to release Firefox 3.6 before the end of the year, has released a second beta of the open-source browser for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Firefox 3.6 beta 1 introduced most of the new features, most visibly the ability to customize Firefox's look through Personas, less than two weeks ago. But among the 190 patches in the new beta is what Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, described in a blog post as "a mechanism to prevent incompatible software from crashing Firefox."
There also are a number of deeper changes in Firefox 3.6 that Web developers likely will be more interested in. Note that one of them, the ability to use color gradients with formatting technology called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), has changed syntax in between Firefox 3.6 beta 1 and beta 2.
Mozilla is trying to accelerate the pace of Firefox releases; Firefox 3.7 is set for release in the first half of 2010 and 4.0 some time later that year. The project faces new competition from Google's Chrome browser.
Five years ago, Mozilla made it clear that the browser wars weren't over after all.
In the 1990s, Netscape had lost its dominance in the browser market to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and the Netscape-spawned open-source project called Mozilla had sunk into obscurity. Even a federal antitrust suit accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive practices with its browser and Windows was not enough to turn the tide.
But on November 9, 2004, Firefox 1.0 emerged to fight back again.
The project, originally named Phoenix to symbolize rebirth from Netscape's ashes, has now clawed its way back to account for nearly a quarter of the browser usage today. Microsoft may not be on the run, but it's on the defensive, gradually building its browser development effort back up into fighting form.
... Read moreMOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Thunderbird 3, an update to the e-mail software that Mozilla hopes will give it some of the advantages its Firefox browser has enjoyed, is due to arrive in near-final form next week.
Mozilla Messaging plans to issue release candidate 1 of Thunderbird 3 as soon as Monday, with the final version expected later in November, the e-mail-focused subsidiary of the Mozilla Foundation said Thursday.
"We're down to the last few bugs," said Chief Executive David Ascher. "Feedback with the last beta was enthusiastic." Thunderbird 3 beta 4 can be downloaded for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Mozilla Messaging CEO David Ascher
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)Thunderbird doesn't get as much attention as Firefox, the chief product of the Mozilla Foundation's other subsidiary. But with Thunderbird 3, Ascher and Mozilla Messaging are trying harder to take advantage of one technology that's helped the browser's fortunes: add-ons. They could be written for Thunderbird 2, but only with what Ascher termed an act of heroism; Thunderbird 3 makes add-ons much easier.
One area where add-ons show up is a new Thunderbird 3 feature, Google and Yahoo calendar functions in the software--using its built-in Firefox engine for handling Web pages, naturally.
"There are a bunch of actions that start in e-mail that really involve the Web," Ascher said. Another example he said Mozilla Messaging will write if some enterprising person doesn't do it first: an add-on to help people assess whether to follow a particular Twitter user who just signed up to follow you.
Another add-on that's already under way is Lightning, which parallels Outlook's calendar functions. A Thunderbird 3-compatible version should arrive about the same time, he said. Ultimately, Thunderbird should be able to integrate with either Lightning or Web-based calendars, including the automation of operations such as accepting event invitations.
Better search
The add-ons also dovetail with a significant new Thunderbird feature, improved search. With Thunderbird 2's folder-based search approach, people often didn't set up searches so they could find what they needed. With Thunderbird 3, it returns all results that match the text, not just what's in a particular folder.
"It's really important to search everywhere," Ascher said. As with Google, "You type a word, and you get results."
Of course that can retrieve a lot of unwanted results. So the search results page offers a variety of ways to winnow that search down--limiting it to particular people, to messages with a specific tag, or to a particular time frame selected from a timeline that presents messages using the search term.
These functions to refine the search, which Mozilla Messaging calls "facets," are another area where add-ons can help, Ascher said.
Also coming in Thunderbird 3 is a simpler start-up process. The software is set up in advance to automatically set up the increasingly complicated server configuration for various accounts. I tried it with Gmail, and it indeed was up and running in moments after I entered only my name, e-mail address, and password. The software comes with several profiles built in, and it makes intelligent guesses if it doesn't know, but people will be able to write their own modules that can be shared, too.
Another feature in the new version is the archive, a feature borrowed from Google's Gmail that's a kind of digital purgatory. E-mails sent to the archive are still available through search, but they don't clutter up the inbox. Folders are still available for those who want to file messages the traditional way.
"The original idea of e-mail, putting messages in folders one by one, was reasonable when we got ten messages a day. Now that we get a couple hundred or more, that's a huge burden," Ascher said. "We made archive really easy and complemented it with (an) easy-to-use search experience.
Streamlined interface
One big interface change is the addition of tabs. Mail accounts, folders, and individual messages can show as new tabs rather than new windows. It's one of a number of efforts to provide a more streamlined interface.
One other is moving some message-specific operations to the message window--reply, reply to a mailing list, forward, archive, and other options. Another: the main toolbar has been cleaned up so only essential actions show, though others can be added through customization. And people can be added to the address book with a single click of a star next to their names--not unlike Firefox 3.5's one-click bookmark operation.
Some routine tasks--labeling a message as junk, for example--are designed to be faster, he added.
"If you look at the number of seconds saved over the population of Thunderbird users, it tends to be several lifetimes per year," Ascher said.
One new feature in Thunderbird 3 is a simplified account setup. You enter three bits of information, and Thunderbird often can take it from there.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)
More people will get a chance to try out bookmark synchronization with Monday's release of a beta version of Google Chrome for Windows.
Google introduced the bookmark sync feature for the developer-preview version in August, but now it's also in the better-tested beta version, Chrome 4.0.223.16. However, there's still no Chrome beta for Mac OS X or Linux.
In a video explanation, Google's Anthony LaForge somewhat breathlessly describes how the sync feature can keep bookmarks the same on multiple machines. That's a fair point, but let's be realistic here--bookmark sync in Chrome is more catch-up than paradigm shift. Indeed, with the popular Xmarks extension--in the works for Chrome, people can synchronize bookmarks among multiple browsers, not merely multiple computers.
And Chrome's clever message-based sync technology notwithstanding, Chrome bookmarks would be a lot more magical if they synchronized with the Google bookmarks service, which is linked with iGoogle and the Google Toolbar.
Speaking of extensions, one of the 4.x series' biggest features is the ability to accommodate extensions, but because Google is shifting the extensions interface, the feature isn't enabled in the beta version. Chrome is released in three versions: the roughest, fastest moving developer preview, the more stable beta, and the stable edition for the broadest audience.
The 4.x series has other significant features, too, though it's not clear whether they'll arrive in the beta or stable versions. One is Google's Native Client, which lets JavaScript applications take more direct advantage of a PC processor's horsepower through a careful security mechanism. Another is WebGL, a 3D interface that does the same with hardware-accelerated graphics.
Together, the features have the potential to dramatically improve the power and sophistication of Web-based applications. That's particularly interesting given that Google is building Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system.
The Mac version isn't in beta yet, but it's a priority.
"Our goal for this Friday is to be able to count our Mac P1 M4 release blocker bugs on one hand (we're in the 20s now)," said Chrome programmer Mike Pinkerton in a mailing list announcement on Monday. P1 bugs are priority-one; M4 refers to milestone 4, or version 4.0.
And Google is willing to put more manpower onto the Mac version, he added. "Everyone should have their P1 list practically at zero by the end of this week. If you are not going to be able to reach this, let me (or other triage folk) know ASAP so that we can get you some help.
Chrome edged up to 3.6 percent of browser usage for October, its highest showing so far in Net Applications' statistics since the browser's first public release 14 months ago. That's within striking distance of third-place Safari at 4.2 percent, but still well short of second-place Firefox at 24.1 percent and dominant Internet Explorer at 64.6 percent.
Chrome has helped fan the browser war flames even without becoming dominant, though. In particular, it's helped increase the emphasis on performance such as the speed to load the software, load Web pages, and run Web-based JavaScript applications. Here, more than with bookmark sync, Google's chest-thumping has some merit:
"As with every release, this new beta comes with many speed improvements. In particular, as Web applications we use every day become increasingly dynamic, browsers like Google Chrome need to be able to construct and change elements on web pages as fast as possible," said programmers Idan Avraham and Anton Muhin in a blog post. "We've improved performance scores on Google Chrome by 30 percent since our current stable release, as measured by Mozilla's Dromeao DOM Core Tests, and by 400 percent since our first stable release."
There has been some slowdown with the arrival of Chrome extensions, though, so Google will have some more optimization work to do to keep the browser in fighting trim.
Updated 9:57 p.m. PST with further details on the Mac OS X beta priority.
