Apple

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!"

Updated 8:53 p.m. with download links and further details and 9:47 p.m. with hands-on testing results.

Google released Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux Thursday--but only in rough developer preview versions that the company warns are works in progress.

"In order to get more feedback from developers, we have early developer channel versions of Google Chrome for Mac OS X and Linux, but whatever you do, please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM," Google product managers Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg said in a blog post, evidently trying to employ a little reverse psychology. "Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

Until now, Google's open-source browser has been a Windows-only product, and some Mac and Linux users have been clamoring for their own version. Google coders have been working to rebuild some Chrome components, such as its graphical interface and its sandbox that isolates different processes from each other, to move beyond just Windows.

Google offers three versions of Chrome: stable, beta, and developer preview. The Mac OS X and Linux versions fall into this last, category, the most buggy and least tested and complete.

The Flash plug-in won't work, for example, so forget watching YouTube videos. Printing or bookmark management aren't implemented yet. And privacy controls aren't fully baked. Google said there are more than 400 bugs that need to be stomped.

Even though only released for the experimental crowd, the new versions are a big step forward for the browser. First, the versions will plug into Google's auto-update service that automatically downloads new versions. Second, the products bear the Google Chrome brand, not just the Chromium label of the only incarnations available until now. And third, a much larger audience will be helping Google debug the code through automated crash reports of the new versions.

Not everyone can try the Mac and Linux versions, though. Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya said the Linux version is supported only the Debian and Ubuntu incarnations of Linux, and the Mac OS X version only works on Intel-based Macs.

I gave the Mac OS X version a 40-minute whirl and was delighted to find one of my favorite Windows features--fast launch. Pages loaded reasonably quickly, too, though a few times the browser seemed to hang while loading one.

The only pages that didn't work for me were Yahoo Mail, which told me I had an unsupported browser, and those that required Flash. But a number of complicated JavaScript-based sites, including Gmail, Flickr Organizr, and Google Docs, had no troubles.

The animation around the tabs is pleasing, but also helps your mind grasp what's going on. A new tab rises up from the window frame. When you close a tab, the adjacent ones slide over to fill the gap. The active tab is lighter, though the other tabs are not as relatively dark as in an earlier build that I tried.

I experienced what I thought was one crash I feared brought down my machine, but after about 15 seconds the browser and machine became responsive again as if nothing had happened.

I was pleased to see the three-finger left or right swipe work to page backward and forward. However, some keyboard shortcuts were flaky--or perhaps I just have to learn new ones.

Google isn't saying when the new versions will make it to beta status, much less stable. "It's unclear. This is a first step," Bencuya said.

After years of near-dormancy when Microsoft's Internet Explorer ruled the roost, the browser world again is on fire, fueled by competition and a new generation of more interactive Web applications. Mozilla is on the cusp of releasing Firefox 3.5, as is Apple with Safari 4 for both Windows and Mac OS X. Opera 10 is in beta, and even battleship Microsoft is slowly starting to speed up with the weeks-old Internet Explorer 8.

According to Net Applications statistics, Internet Explorer remains the king of the heap, with 65.5 percent market share in May 2009. Firefox has 22.5 percent, Safari 8.4, and Chrome has edged up to 1.8 percent since its launch in September.

All this variety means Web developers have to test their sites to make sure they work with more versions. Because Chrome uses the WebKit engine for interpreting and displaying Web page coding, the same engine Safari uses, Google argues that Chrome should be similar. But Chrome uses a different engine for JavaScript called V8, and Web-based JavaScript instructions are at the heart of much of the present proliferation of elaborate Web pages and applications.

The browser challengers argue that having multiple browsers on the market means that Web programmers will aim more for supporting standards such as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language), CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), and JavaScript. And indeed, Microsoft made a standards mode the default for IE 8. However, varying interpretations of standard and varying degrees of support complicate the matter, and a large number of people haven't upgraded from IE 6, much less IE 7.

Google is coming a bit closer to releasing a working version of its Chrome browser for Mac.

Programmers for the company had been building an engine that could render Web pages, but it only ran within a simple framework called the test shell. Now they've begun hooking up the renderer to a full-fledged browser, which among other things can handle multiple tasks at the same time. That's key for a real application, especially one such as Chrome that isolates each browser tab into its own computing process.

The result of the work: a screenshot of Chrome running on Mac OS X posted to the Chromium developer mailing list. "Now we can call it Chrome!" crowed programmer Avi Drissman wrote.

Granted, it's a view of Chrome failing to properly show a Web page, but it's a step in the functional direction. Google has set a deadline of shipping Chrome for the Mac and Linux by end of June.

Moving Chrome from its initial incarnation as a Windows application to Mac OS X and Linux hasn't been easy. Ben Goodger, a Firefox programmer who now leads Chrome's interface work, griped about the difficult balance between preserving Chrome software across multiple operating systems while coping with the different abilities of each.

Google chose to split some of the Chrome interface into a Mac OS X-specific incarnation, despite the maintenance difficulties that imposes, but the choice isn't as easy when wrestling with Linux's interface, he said in a January message.

Goodger said that after some teeth-gnashing, Google eventually decided to create the Linux version of Chrome using the GTK package of graphical interface components used with the GNOME user interface.

"My initial thought was that a Windows-clone would be acceptable on Linux provided the performance of the app itself was outstanding, given the general reluctance of some of the team working on Linux towards UI (user interface). But they stood up and made their case for a GTK UI," Goodger said in a February 4 message, "and...that's what we've decided to do."

A new front has opened in the ongoing arms race between Apple and iPhone hackers, with one hacker group making the iPhone boot with a Linux 2.6 kernel.

The announcement of the successful kernel porting was made on the Linux on the iPhone blog, complete with instructions and source code.

Although a bootloader, kernel and a Busybox terminal are able to be loaded -- many features of the iPhone remain unimplemented: touchscreen, sound, accelerometer, networking. Input to the terminal must be made via a USB interface from another device that the iPhone is attached to (humorously summed up by Geek Hero Comic).

The group that ported the kernel is derived from the iPhone DevTeam group that has been responsible for jailbreaking previous iPhone software.

iPhone Linux Demonstration Video from planetbeing on Vimeo.

Updated 10:00am PT with detail from Verizon's conference call.

The LiMo Foundation is adding several well-known entities to its roster of mobile phone players, including Verizon and Mozilla.

A total of eight companies have agreed to join forces with LiMo to work on a Linux-based operating system for mobile phones, bringing the total number of participants to 40. Verizon and Mozilla are the headliners, but the full roster of new invitees includes Infineon, Kvaleberg, Red Bend Software, Sagem Mobiles, SFR, and SK Telecom.

Reports surfaced over the weekend that Verizon was planning to add a LiMo phone to its lineup, but it's not clear how quickly Verizon will commit to that course. Mozilla's participation is likewise interesting, because it's very likely that browsers will play an integral role in delivering applications to future mobile phones.

LiMo Foundation members are emerging, in a sense, as the anti-Android, although they would likely downplay that kind of talk. Google's bid to unite the mobile phone industry around Linux is similar to LiMo's vision, but there are a few differences.

LiMo is set up more like a traditional industry organization, where members have an equal say in the advancement of the software. Google reigns supreme over the Open Handset Alliance, although it does work closely with its partners to define the spec that will become Android. Plenty of companies, however, such as NTT DoCoMo and Texas Instruments, are hedging their bets by participating in both groups.

LiMo has one advantage: an actual product out in the wild. Release Candidate 1 was formally unveiled at the CTIA Wireless conference in April, but has been shipping for a while on phones like Motorola's Razr 2.

UPDATED: Verizon held a conference call in the pre-dawn Pacific Time hours to discuss its decision to join the LiMo Foundation. Reuters reports that Verizon's vice president of network Kyle Malady committed the company to releasing a LiMo phone in 2009, saying, "We'll start with a few simpler devices and work our way up."

He also said that the LiMo software would become Verizon's "operating system of choice," according to Reuters, which seems odd given the company's pledge to become an open service provider willing to accept a wide variety of handsets. Malady said that's still the case--at some point Verizon customers will be able to use any type of device that works with its network--but this deal would give Verizon a way to maintain control over the look-and-feel of the software on its handsets for certain customers.

Google's Android may get all the attention, but there's more than one industry consortium working to unify Linux development for mobile phones.

The nonprofit LiMo Foundation plans to announce the launch of LiMo Platform Release 1 at the CTIA show in Las Vegas Monday. Release 1 gives handset makers and carriers the basic operating system software needed to run a phone, leaving it up to them to put a crowd-pleasing user inferface and applications on top of that phone software.

"This is a significant achievement for LiMo in that we now have a complete fully released version of the platform that our members are free to distribute," said Andrew Shikiar, director of global marketing for the LiMo Foundation. More than 30 mobile-phone companies are members of LiMo, including heavyweights Samsung, Motorola, Vodafone, NTT DoCoMo, and newest member Texas Instruments.

There's no shortage of interest among the mobile-phone industry elite in using Linux on their phones. Linux provides a compelling alternative for the mobile world to commercial operating systems like Symbian or Windows Mobile since it's cheaper and not controlled by a huge company (Nokia and Microsoft, respectively). Also, its modular nature allows handset makers and carriers to put together an implementation that makes the most sense for their customers or geography.

However, that's also part of the problem with mobile Linux. All those different implementations of Linux force application developers to tweak their programs for each different implementation; that's a ton of work. The resulting fragmentation has limited Linux to lower-end mobile phones, with the higher-end smartphone development community largely organized around Symbian, Windows Mobile, Research In Motion's BlackBerry, and Apple's growing iPhone business.

Hence the LiMo foundation's goal, which is to produce a common platform that various members can use to run mobile phones, and ensure application compatibility across different devices. Unfortunately, Release 1 falls short of that goal.

Broader application portability will be accomplished with Release 2, expected out in early 2009, Shikiar said. The second release will also improve the multimedia capabilities of the operating system. By then, however, the Google Effect will have made its first impact on the mobile phone market.

Android, and the Open Handset Alliance created by Google last year, have very much the same goal as LiMo: to unify Linux development for mobile phones. Google boasts a roster of many of the same companies that founded the LiMo foundation just months before Android made its debut, perhaps a hint those companies have now set their sights elsewhere for Linux mobile-phone software.

The first phones to use Android are expected to arrive this summer or fall, just a few months after the first Release Candidate 1 phones arrive. Shikiar said LiMo doesn't see itself as a competitor to Android per se, but it's hard to see how the two organizations aren't jockeying for space inside the same phones.

Phones with Release 1, however, are already in the market, such as Motorola's Razr 2 and Rokr E8. Others are expected to be released later this year, Shikiar said.

Apparently Nick Negroponte is willing to work with some huge powerful corporations whose interests compete with his own.

Negroponte told IDG News Service Wednesday that the OLPC project is working with Microsoft on a version of the XO laptop that would be capable of booting either Linux--the current OS--or Windows. It appears the two organizations are shooting for something like Apple's Boot Camp: not true virtualization, but the ability to boot either operating system depending on the applications you'd need to run.

This could help the OLPC address some of the reasons why a few governments have spurned its XO laptop in favor of Intel's Classmate, which runs either Linux or Windows, but not in dual-boot fashion. While the XO's design is certainly innovative compared to many of the other options out there, the support model is not. XO customers are essentially responsible for supporting the product themselves, and some governments haven't wanted to snap up an unproven technology product with the additional support burden.

Microsoft and the OLPC have been talking for months about getting Windows to run on the XO laptop, but until now the discussion had appeared to indicate that project would result in two different XOs, a Linux one and a Windows one. A dual-boot XO is an entirely different prospect altogether, one that might require additional processing power, storage, memory, or all three.

The news comes less than a week after the bitter divorce between the OLPC and Intel over Intel's Classmate PC. The OLPC wants Intel to stop selling in the same markets in which the OLPC--equipped with an AMD processor--is being promoted.

Microsoft has also derided the OLPC in the past, preferring to focus on its Windows Starter Edition product or an entirely different notion of bringing computing to the developing world on cell phones. Just this week at CES, Bill Gates said "OLPC hasn't done that well. We're in literally over 100 countries with special versions of Windows, including Starter Edition. OLPC is nowhere compared to where we are on this thing."

Who knows whether this is another marriage doomed from the start, but give Negroponte credit for recognizing the need for Windows on the XO. Like it or not, it's a Windows-dominated world, and pretending that developing nations won't want access to the huge library of Windows applications out there isn't really serving their needs.

And a dual-boot solution is an elegant way of supporting both operating systems without forcing one or the other on the user. I wonder if a dual-boot XO would require beefier hardware, and therefore nudge that cost up a little more, but it's unclear right now what type of performance requirements we'd be looking at with this version of Windows.

Phone makers aren't the only ones interested in Google's Android software.

Of the 34 companies that agreed to join Google's Open Handset Alliance, Intel's decision to participate is yet another sign that the chipmaker is looking for alternative software to run on its Mobile Internet Device (MID) project. Most of the attention around Android focused on the mobile-phone market, and with good reason, as that area will be the first to get a sense of whether Google and its partners can actually make headway in this area.

But the world's largest chipmaker would still like to be the world's largest chipmaker in 5 or 10 years, when the personal-computing market might look very different. Intel has scrapped its own plans to enter the smartphone market, and so it's approaching the future of mobile computing from the other side, trying to shrink PC technology into compelling devices.

To date, this hasn't really worked. Smartphone sales are growing every day, while the Origami/Ultra Mobile PC initiative hasn't caught on at all, and Intel's now reorganizing its mobile plans around the MID with plans to ship Linux-based devices alongside Windows ones. But hardware-wise, the Menlow generation of MIDs looks very similar to the older UMPCs, and I wouldn't expect the 2008 MIDs to sell dramatically better than the ones currently on the market.

But in a few years, this project might turn into something more interesting, perhaps around the time Intel releases a chip called Moorestown by 2010. The company has said very little about Moorestown, but CEO Paul Otellini has set audacious power-consumption goals for the project and the company has worked up a few concept models that look more like smartphones than mobile minitablets.

"End users desire the ability to take the full Internet with them, the experience they have on their PC, in a nomadic or mobile fashion," said Gary Willihnganz, director of marketing in Intel's mobile group. That's language straight from the playbooks of Apple's Steve Jobs and Google's Eric Schmidt, both of whom this year have emphasized their commitment to delivering a PC-like Internet experience on a handheld device.

Android comes into play here because Intel and its hardware partners will need software to run the Moorestown-class devices. At the Intel Developer Forum in September, company executives spent a fair amount of time emphasizing non-Microsoft software as part of the MID project. To be fair, they did include the obligatory PowerPoint slide with the usual language about how Microsoft is a very important partner for Intel. Very, very important.

But ladies and gentlemen, now joining us onstage in a special appearance, the developer of Ubuntu Linux, Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth! Ubuntu received several minutes of valuable airtime during Intel mobile chief Anand Chandrasekher's keynote speech, while Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world and Intel's closest partner for decades, was reduced to a single slide.

After it was apparent that the Windows XP-class UMPCs weren't going to succeed, and after Windows Vista appeared to actually take a step back in terms of power consumption, Intel started moving away from its longtime partner. In Beijing in April, Chandrasekher admitted that Intel has been urging Microsoft to develop a more power-friendly version of Windows.

Vista was designed for PCs. It requires relatively powerful processors and significant amounts of memory, and those requirements don't make it easy to develop a small, sleek, handheld battery-powered device that needs to last all day and cost less than $500.

Linux, however, is more modular than some of the other options out there. You don't need to support 20 years worth of legacy code when assembling a Linux mobile phone, or make hard choices about what to exclude from a computer operating system, like Apple did with OS X on the iPhone. You just pick and choose components from various open-source projects to put together everything you need to run a phone, or maybe a minitablet computer.

Sounds easy, but the promise of mobile Linux has gone exactly nowhere over the past few years: "It's still in science-fair project mode," says my colleague Stephen Shankland. Collectively, Linux is the second most widely used smartphone operating system, behind Symbian and ahead of Microsoft's Windows Mobile. But dozens of companies combine to produce that market share, and there's no guarantee that an application written for one flavor of Linux will run on a different implementation.

It would be very hard for a company like Intel to place a bet on any one particular distribution. The company is clearly hoping that Google unifies the Linux market to give Intel a safer option for MIDs.

Of course, it's far from certain what might eventually evolve out of the 34 companies in the Open Handset Alliance by next year. Intel isn't quite sure itself. "We don't have a good feel for what it's all about, or what its capabilities are, much less any idea of how consumers are going to be able to value (Android software)," Willihnganz said. And Microsoft appears to have gotten the message, with a project under way to develop a stripped down Windows kernel.

It's hard to know exactly what to think of Android right now, since we have no idea what it looks like. But don't think of Android as just software for smartphones; if Google pulls this off, it could have much broader implications for other parts of the tech industry.

Can Google's application development prowess be transformed into a next-generation mobile operating system?

It seems increasingly likely that Google, the ubiquitous tech company, is about to throw its hat into the race to develop the next big mobile device. Google's no gadget-maker, but it does develop quite a bit of software, and reports have been building that the company is relatively close to releasing the Gphone. (Our style department says we have to spell it that way.)

Most people who have wandered onto the Internet in the past couple of years are familiar with Google. The company's various applications from Gmail and Google Docs to Google Desktop and the Google Toolbar are likewise familiar to lots of PC users. When it comes to smart phones, Google Maps is almost a must-have application, and it comes standard with the iPhone.

So Google's got experience in taking applications built for a PC and moving them over to a smart phone, which will be a key part of transforming smart phones into true mobile computers. A mobile operating system, however, is an entirely different undertaking.

It's very much a wide-open race to develop the next advanced mobile operating system. Symbian has the lead worldwide thanks to its close partnership with Nokia, the largest shareholder in the company. Windows Mobile is the second most widely used smart-phone operating system, according to Forward Concepts, and Linux is the third.

According to reports, Google wants to expand on that last category with its rumored mobile OS. The Gphone would be based on Linux and supported by advertising, which to many techies probably sounds like the ultimate Silicon Valley marriage made in hell. Try to forget, for a moment, about using a smart phone inundated with advertising messages and think about the implications of a Google-developed smart phone operating system.

It's still the very early days for this type of computing. Symbian and Microsoft have staked out opposing positions, but no company with the size and clout of Google has thrown its support behind the Linux development efforts for mobile computing.

Mobile phone makers are intrigued by Linux because of the constrained memory and power requirements of mobile computers and the ability to customize a Linux base for their products. Lots of work has already been done to make Linux modular, or to create building blocks that can be mixed and matched depending on what is desired. Tomihisa Kamada of Access told me earlier in the year that carriers and phone makers also like the idea of having their own branded interface on the phone, rather than relying on Microsoft and Symbian's branded operating system. If you go that route, that means you have to differentiate your products mostly on hardware, and that can be tricky.

But established phone makers and carriers looking for an answer to the iPhone are finding it hard to bet on a single Linux provider. Palm is floundering, with the recent news that the Linux-based version of Palm OS has been delayed again. Access, the company that acquired former Palm OS developer Palmsource, isn't faring much better. The folks at OpenMoko have gotten some buzz, but when First International Computer is your only hardware partner, you've got an uphill fight ahead of you. MontaVista has had some success with Motorola, and Wind River has been doing some interesting work, but are they in the best position to persuade the world to take a chance on their products?

Google, on the other hand, is Google. They've got open-source credibility, they've got mobile phone pioneers on board with their acquisition of Android in 2005, and some of the best and brightest engineers that Silicon Valley has to offer (not to mention enough cash to fund four or five internal projects that might have produced the eventual winner). As mobile phones start to deliver the same Internet experience as a PC, mobile search will be a vital application.

The part that trips me up is the notion of an advertising-supported Gphone, something also reported by BusinessWeek as a key part of Google's aims for this market, along with its intention to go after the 700MHz spectrum auction. You're going to have to offer people something pretty special to have ads--even targeted ads--be an integral part of the phone experience, which has thus far been mostly ad free. BusinessWeek thinks Google could be trying to do a television model on your phone, where voice and data minutes are free when the phone user agrees to accept advertising. While that might work to a certain extent, I think people have shown themselves quite willing to pay for things that get around the increasing reach of advertising. The New York Times reported Monday, however, that Google may be forgoing a licensing fee for its software in favor of the advertising model, which could make the software that much more attractive to phone makers.

Despite a lack of smart-phone experience, Google has to be taken seriously in this market. It has the talent and the assets to worm its way into mobile phones, a consumer-friendly brand, and the industry heft to stick around through a few development cycles. The look and feel of any Gphone will be crucial to its chances, and without any solid information to that effect, it's hard to say whether this thing will be a success or a flop. But it's not hard to imagine that Google is making mobile development executives at Symbian, Microsoft, and Palm think long and hard about the current projects they have under development.

UPDATED, 10/9 5:40 p.m: Corrects spelling of Tomihisa Kamada's name.