Webware

Adobe Systems, evidently stung by recent criticisms of its widely used Flash Player browser plug-in, has promised better performance on Mac systems.

"Given identical hardware, Flash Player on Windows has historically been faster than the Mac, and it is for the most part the same code running in Flash for each operating system," said Adobe Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch in a follow-up comment to his own blog post. But Adobe and Apple have been cooperating to make things better, he said. "In Flash Player 10.1 we are moving to Core Animation, which will further reduce CPU usage and, we believe, will get us to the point where Mac will be faster than Windows for graphics rendering."

Things should get better with video, too, one of the primary reasons Flash has thrived on the Web. "Video rendering is an area we are focusing more attention on--for example, today a 480p video on a 1.8Ghz Mac Mini in Safari uses about 34 percent of CPU on Mac versus 16 percent on Windows (running in BootCamp on same hardware). With Flash Player 10.1, we are optimizing video rendering further on the Mac and expect to reduce CPU usage by half, bringing Mac and Windows closer to parity for video."

The words reflect an Adobe effort to explain itself while under competitive threat. HTML is gradually encroaching on the turf Flash has had largely to itself, and some are taking advantage of the opportunity to bash Flash.

Adobe also is taking on the matter of bugs.

In particular, it's answering a security problem Matthew Dempsky reported in September 2008, shortly before Flash Player 10 was issued. Dempsky took Lynch to task for his statement in the comment that "we don't ship Flash with any known crash bugs, and if there was such a widespread problem historically Flash could not have achieved its wide use today."

Flash Player manager Emmy Huang apologized for the issue in a separate blog post.

"We picked up the bug as a crasher when it was filed on September 22, 2008, and were able to reproduce it. Remember that Flash Player 10 shipped in October 2008, so when this bug was reported we were pretty much locked and loaded for launch. The mistake we made was marking this bug for 'next' release, which is the soon to be released Flash Player 10.1, instead of marking it for the next Flash Player 10 security dot release. We should have kept in contact with the submitter and to let him know the progress, sorry we did not do that," Huang said. "It slipped through the cracks, and it is not something we take lightly."

And for those who are interested in helping Adobe track down problems, Adobe's Ted Patrick called on people to try the Flash Player 10.1 beta.

In week since Mozilla released the first Firefox browser for mobile phones, we've had a better chance to explore the Web on the Nokia N900. Firefox for Maemo, as it's called, is also available for the N810 Internet Tablet.

We go over some of our observations in the First Look video here, pointing out that extensions, in particular, are the browser's most notable innovation for Firefox mobile.

There are some limitations to the way Firefox handles the add-ons screens. For a start, the search engine icons you see when you begin a search (for Google, Wikipedia, or so on) count as pre-installed add-ons. That makes removing them easy, but it also takes up space in the add-ons manager, which is knock against Firefox for Maemo since maximizing screen real estate is the gold standard of the mobile experience. In this case, that precious space should be devoted exclusively to showing off add-ons.

So far, new add-ons are hard to find. Firefox mobile surfaces five recommended extensions at a time; expect the YouTube Enabler and Weave Sync to be at the top of a newcomer's list. Although there is a search bar, there's no way to browse the add-on catalog from the device. Your best bet is to discover what you want from the online catalog, which is clearly less than ideal for mobile users. Mozilla's Firefox developers might consider creating one screen for managing add-ons you already have, and another for discovering new ones, just like with NoScript, Adblock Plus, and TwitterBar.

Mozilla on Friday pulled two programs from its Firefox browser add-on site for containing malware. Sothink Web Video Downloader 4.0 and all versions of Master Filer were found to contain Trojan horse code aimed at Windows users.

In a blog post, Mozilla stated that the Master Filer add-on was able to bypass AMO's security tests.

Mozilla user CatThief discovered the threat, it said. And when Mozilla added two more security checks to its vetting process and rescanned its entire catalog, it discovered that version 4 of the Sothink Web Video Downloader also contained a Trojan horse program. Sothink Web Video Downloader contained Win32.LdPinch.gen, and Master Filer contained Win32.Bifrose.32.Bifrose.

Master Filer was removed from Mozilla's Firefox add-on site on January 25, and the Sothink video downloader was removed on Tuesday. CNET Download.com ceased hosting the Sothink add-on on Friday before noon.

Sothink Web Video Download 5.5.90819 had been a mildly popular Firefox add-on at Download.com, receiving 697 downloads in the past week and 63,716 downloads since it was first added to the site in June 2007.

Because the Trojan horse programs are tied to Firefox, Mozilla warns, host computers won't be infected until Firefox started. Uninstalling either add-on is only part of the solution, if the infection has already attacked the host computer. Mozilla recommends that users who suspect that they are infected use one of the following security applications to sweep and clean their computers after uninstalling the threatening add-on:

Infected users should note that only Avast and AVG are free.

Mozilla did not immediately respond to requests for comment. We'll update this post as we learn more.

Google has filed at least four patent applications for technology it's building into its Chrome browser to try to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications.

Three patent applications concern Google's Native Client, a technology for letting downloaded software modules run directly on a processor rather than more slowly through on-the-fly decoding as with the commonly used JavaScript. And one patent application involves O3D, a technology to let browser applications take advantage of 3D acceleration of graphics hardware.

Brad Chen

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Patents can serve a variety of purposes. They can be used to keep competitors away from new technology until the patent expires. They can be licensed to others for their use or used as bargaining chips when negotiating patent cross-license agreements that let companies use each other's patents. They can be hoarded for defensive purposes, ready for deployment in a patent infringement countersuit if one company is sued by another. They can be used to gain more favorable terms in the creation of industry standards that relate to the patents. And of course they can bolster corporate chest-thumping when it comes time to boast about levels of innovation.

Thus far, Google hasn't proven to be a litigious company, but its presence is looming ever larger over the computing industry. The new patents are in a particularly fast-moving area, the development of Web browsers and associated technology for making cloud computing a more powerful foundation for applications.

If you're a frequent user of Amazon.com and find its product image viewer a little clunky, it's worth checking out new Firefox add-on PictureFox. Once installed it grabs full-quality versions of each product shot, along with the photos provided by other customers, and puts them in a simple, Cover Flow-style image viewer.

Each image is scaled to be as large as possible--that is, compared to the size of your monitor. This means you don't have to use Amazon's zoom box viewer to see the tiny details. To hop between images users can simply click on the next shot, use the arrow buttons on their keyboard, or spin their mouse's scroll wheel. This can be especially cool when cruising through a big set of images, which the add-on seems to handle with ease.

(Credit: Addons.Mozilla.org/CNET)

Another nice thing about the add-on is that it leaves Amazon's own photo viewer untouched, which means you can still use it to access things PictureFox does not pick up, like user-added notes and profiles. It also automatically tweaks Amazon's long URLs to the much shorter ASIN URL ID system--something that usually requires another standalone add-on to achieve.

PictureFox is currently an experimental add-on, meaning it hasn't been vetted by Mozilla's extension testers. You can download it at your own risk over on Mozilla's add-ons site.

In a decision that deprives open-source foes of some rhetorical fodder, the group that licenses patents for the widely used H.264 video-encoding technology chose to renew a streaming-media freebie through 2015.

MPEG LA licenses more than 1,000 H.264-related patents on behalf of 26 companies that hold the patents. The group's existing policy, which runs through the end of 2010, has been not to charge royalties to Internet sites that streamed video using the technology--as long as the video was free for viewers.

Many have been waiting to hear what MPEG LA would announce for the licensing terms beyond 2010. On Tuesday, the group said it extended the free-streaming policy until December 31, 2015.

That extension could help encourage Web sites to use it instead of rivals such as Ogg Theora, which isn't encumbered by patents, or On2 Technologies' VP7 or VP8.

H.264, Ogg Theora, and VP8 are what's called codecs--technology that encodes and decodes digital information. In the case of digital video, codecs compress the original material for storage or transmission, then expand it again for viewing. The highest-profile Web streaming site using H.264 is a doozy: Google's YouTube.

H.264 opposition
Given some significant opposition to H.264 in Web streaming that contrasts with its widespread use, it's not too surprising MPEG LA chose not to add the new royalty.

Google is trying to acquire On2 but hasn't disclosed in detail what it hopes to accomplish beyond saying, "We believe high-quality video compression technology should be a part of the web platform."

But the more overt rival at this stage is Mozilla, which has been agitating against H.264 and promoting Ogg Theora, which it uses for handling video built into Web sites with new HTML5 technology under development. Mozilla had been raising the specter of new streaming video royalty payments, but the MPEG LA decision defangs that argument for the time being.

Still, the rhetoric continued Wednesday, when Mozilla Chief Executive John Lilly tweeted, "Regarding that MPEG LA announce: it's good they did it, but they sort of had to. But it's like 5 more years of free to lock you in 4ever."

Why so opposed? Patents on Web plumbing raise a big red flag for those who remember when Unisys started seeking licensing revenue for the GIF format based on its image compression patents. The didn't start until 1999, years after the format grew popular. Mozilla wants to steer clear of patents

But the ambitions of HTML5 video fans is complicated by this codec issue. Firefox supports Ogg Theora, and Opera Software is working on following suit. But Apple's Safari supports H.264. Google's Chrome supports both, and Microsoft's Internet Explorer supports neither.

Consequently, in 2009, HTML5 specification editor and Google employee Ian Hickson reluctantly decided that HTML5 couldn't specify a particular codec.

Not just about the money
MPEG LA offers the patents under what it calls the AVC/H.264 Patent Portfolio License. It's also known as MPEG-4 Part 10.

Although that's been royalty-free in the Internet-streaming context, it costs money for commercial streaming, cameras, video editing software, media players, and Web browsers. MPEG LA plans to announce later this year the new royalty rates for those uses, it said.

And browsers is one area H.264 gets complicated: open-source software typically may not use patented technology unless license agreements explicitly permit it. That's not the case with H.264, which is one reason Mozilla doesn't support the technology in Firefox, which is distributed not just by Mozilla but also by Linux companies and others who use Firefox derivatives.

Even if Mozilla wanted to license the code, it's not a simple matter: Mozilla said the H.264 license would cost $5 million.

Open-source software such as Firefox or free software such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player, which includes H.264 support get no special treatment, according to a comment by Allen Harkness, MPEG LA's director of global licensing.

"Licenses do not make any distinction for products offered for free (whether open source or otherwise)," he said.

And although companies making products with H.264 support must pay royalties, Harkness raised the specter of much broader consequences for those using unlicensed H.264 technology. "While our licenses are not concluded by end users, anyone in the product chain has liability if an end product is unlicensed," Harkness said.

Among the companies whose patents are licensed through the H.264 policy are Apple, with a single patent, Microsoft, with dozens, and several consumer electronics companies that also have dozens of patents involved. A full H.264 patent list in PDF form is available on the MPEG LA site.

Update 1:48 a.m. PST: Added more detail about H.264 licensing and open-source software.

A difference of opinion among developers has become a high-profile debate over the future of the Web: should programmers continue using Adobe Systems' Flash or embrace newer Web technology instead?

The debate has gone on for years, but last week's debut of Apple's iPad--which like the iPhone doesn't support Flash--turned up the heat. Before that, Adobe had been saying with some restraint that it's happy to bring Flash to the iPhone when Apple gives the go-ahead.

But Chief Technology Officer Kevin Lynch took the gloves off Tuesday with a blog post that said Apple's reluctance to include Flash on its "magical device" means iPad buyers will effectively see a crippled Web. And he played the Google Nexus One card, too.

"We are now on the verge of delivering Flash Player 10.1 for smartphones with all but one of the top manufacturers," Lynch said, specifically mentioning the Nexus One as one such device and adding that the software also works on tablets, Netbooks, and Net-enabled TVs. "Flash in the browser provides a competitive advantage to these devices because it will enable their customers to browse the whole Web...We are ready to enable Flash in the browser on these devices if and when Apple chooses to allow that for its users, but to date we have not had the required cooperation from Apple to make this happen."

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Flash has indeed spread to near-ubiquity on computers, with better than 98 percent penetration, according to Adobe's statistics. Its roots lay with graphical animations, but its success was cemented by providing an easy streaming video mechanism to a Web that had been plagued with obstreperous and incompatible technology from Microsoft, Apple, and Real.

But a collection of new technologies--including a rejuvenated HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) standard used to write Web pages--are aiming to reproduce some of what Flash offers.

Bruce Lawson, Web standards evangelist for browser maker Opera Software, believes HTML and the other technologies inevitably will replace Flash and already collectively are "very close" to reproducing today's Flash abilities.

"The Web (including video, games, animation) is too vital a platform for business, communication, and society to be in the hands of any single vendor," Lawson said. "But it'll be a while; there is a huge body of existing content that uses Flash."

It's not just a matter of the installed base of Flash on the Web, though. Although HTML5 and its associated technologies are maturing rapidly, and because they evolve concurrently with browser support, they're arriving and relevant now even though incomplete. But many developers are likely to sit on the sidelines until things settle down in 2010 and perhaps beyond.

Open Web allies
After years of HTML standardization disarray, browser makers Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and most recently Google now are hammering out new directions for Web standards.

Perhaps the most visible HTML5 aspect is built-in support for audio and video, but there are other HTML abilities under way: storing data on a computer for use by an application, Web Sockets for periodically pushing updates to a browser, Web Workers for letting Web programs perform multiple tasks at once, and Canvas for better two-dimensional graphics.

At the same time, these allies marching under the "Open Web" banner also are creating new standards such as WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics on the Web, enabling better typography through CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and Web fonts, beefing up support for others including SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), and improving the power of JavaScript for writing Web-based programs.

Even Microsoft, despite sitting out much of the last decade's browser development activity and having a Flash rival called Silverlight to promote, is getting involved. It pledges interest in Web standards and in recent months engaged in HTML and SVG development. "The positive response has been overwhelming," said Patrick Dengler, a senior program manager on the IE team, in a blog post Monday about SVG Microsoft's SVG involvement.

In addition to some philosophical opposition to Adobe's proprietary Flash software, there's a practical complaint, too: crashes. It's a major reason Mozilla is rushing out a new "Lorentz" version of Firefox that isolates plug-ins into a separate computing process so problems don't bring down the whole browser.

Here's one new example in action: a browser application that lets people drag an image onto the browser, which stores it locally on the computer, enables various editing abilities, resizes it to a small size, and uploads it to TwitPic using Twitter login credentials. And some more: a Star Wars imperial walker animated in CSS, Windows 3.1 reconstructed in JavaScript, and a first-person gifter game using Canvas.

But there are real-world sites, too, that forsake Flash. For example, the iPhone Google Voice application runs in the browser.

Flash advantages
It's far from game-over for Flash, though.

The Open Web work is chaotic, fluid, and scattered, and browser support for its various elements is inconsistent when it exists at all. Flash is a single browser plug-in that provides consistency from one computer to the next. And unlike with browsers, where Microsoft's 2001-era Internet Explorer 6 has only recently been dethroned as the most-used browser, most people upgrade to new Flash versions relatively rapidly.

Formal standardization proceeds slowly. HTML5 editor and Google employee Ian Hickson opened the last call for HTML5 comments in October for WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group), which has been working on HTML5 for years. But that group works jointly with the more straight-laced W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) to come up with the standard.

So today, if you're publishing The New York Times' graphical tour of the federal budget proposal, Flash is the obvious choice.

The difficulties of HTML5 video is a good illustration of difficulty of matching Flash. Flash video can use a variety of "codecs" for encoding an decoding video as it's sent from server to viewer. Viewers don't need to know anything beyond how to click a video's "play" button, a contrast to Net video's incompatibility-fraught early days.

But with HTML5, though, there are two prevailing codecs right now: H.264, supported by Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome, and Ogg Theora, supported by Firefox, Chrome, and, according to plan, Opera. IE, the dominant browser, doesn't support any at HTML5 video at present.

What's a video streamer to do? If a Web site supports HTML5 video at all--YouTube just started experimenting with it--it's safest to include Flash as a fallback for the vast number of people whose browsers today can't use HTML5 yet.

Another thing: the Open Web allies may be close to reproducing what Flash has today--but not necessarily what it's getting tomorrow. Adobe's Lynch last year pledged to advance Flash, keeping it "a leading agent in terms of exploring what's possible in the Web."

Finally, programming tools aren't as mature for the hodgepodge of Open Web tools.

One reason for that immaturity is that HTML5 and related technologies aren't finalized yet, Lawson said. Another: "You're relying on browsers interoperating--which historically has never been the cleverest bet, although as the specs become final there's a better chance," he said.

Cooler heads
HTML vs. Flash has the potential to become a religious war. As long as there have been programming languages, there have been arguments about which tool is the best for getting the job done, and this issue has some extra elements that add some emotion to the mix.

There are plenty of Firefox-using open-source fans who chafe at proprietary plug-ins, and they're accustomed to making their opinions heard. Another group enjoys bashing Flash as a conduit for in-your-face online advertising. Add a little Apple iPad love-hate invective into the mix, and you've got great potential for Flash bashing.

"People want a certain 'killer' narrative: Good guys vs. bad guys, open vs. proprietary, blah blah," said John Nack, Adobe's Photoshop principal product manager but also a defender of Flash in his spare time.

Indeed, it's probably wiser to take a deep breath and accept that both technologies will prevail and neither will conquer the other any time soon.

Perhaps the gulf isn't as wide as it appears. Don't forget that Adobe has HTML authoring tools as well, and its AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software foundation includes not just a Flash player, but also the WebKit HTML-handling engine that's also in Safari and Chrome. Adobe has a big investment in Flash, but count on its HTML interest increasing as that technology matures.

In the big picture, Adobe sees a place for both but not a day when the Web can dispense with Flash.

"Longer term, some point to HTML as eventually supplanting the need for Flash, particularly with the more recent developments coming in HTML with version 5," Lynch said. "I don't see this as one replacing the other, certainly not today nor even in the foreseeable future."

A mock-up of a Chrome OS tablet from Google's Chromium developer site.

(Credit: Google)

Who could resist the months of hype that paved the way for Apple's iPad debut last week? Apparently not Google, which has shown its interest in tablet computing with its browser-based Chrome OS.

On Monday, Glen Murphy, a user interface designer for Google's Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system based on it, pointed to image and video concepts of a Chrome OS-based tablet that went live two days before the iPad launch. Apparently nobody noticed initially, because only now did Murphy tweet, "Apparently our tablet mocks have been unearthed."

The site also shows the array of devices Google envisions for Chrome OS.

"While its primary focus is Netbooks, Chrome OS could eventually scale to a wide variety of devices. Each would have vastly different input methods, available screen space, and processing power," according to the Chromium form factors site. Chromium is the name of the open-source developer project that underlies the branded Chrome product.

It's possible that Chrome OS could be an easier sell on tablets than on Netbooks, the class of device on which Google said it plans to launch Chrome OS. Netbooks often are used as general-purpose PCs, so the browser-based philosophy of Chrome OS is a more jarring transition.

Today's tablets, in contrast, tend to focus more on a collection of specialized uses such as reading books, surfing the Net, and chores that only require light typing. With that approach, Chrome OS' break from the PC world could be less jarring. The tablet market isn't as big as the Netbook market, though.

Greasemonkey scripts are an easy way to create single-serving enhancements for Firefox, and now they work natively on Google Chrome, too.

Google Chrome 4 and above now natively supports many Greasemonkey scripts.

(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)

In a blog post Monday, Aaron Boodman, the developer of the Greasemonkey add-on for Firefox, announced that Chrome version 4 and later will support most of the JavaScript-coded Greasemonkey scripts without any additional tweaking necessary. This includes all available builds for Windows (stable | beta | dev), Mac (beta | dev), and Linux (beta | dev). Chrome converts the JavaScript directly into a Chrome extension as it's being installed, and the new add-on lives as an extension in Chrome's Extension management window.

While this potentially adds 40,000 Greasemonkey scripts to Chrome's growing extension catalog, Boodman estimates that between 15 and 25 percent of them won't work on Chrome because of coding differences between Google's browser and Firefox.

He rightly warns readers that Greasemonkey scripts can give the script author unfettered access to personal data, so it's important to check reader comments and ratings before casually installing one. In my test of Flickr Image Size, a script that forces all available images sizes to appear as links in Flickr, I encountered no problems.