Two prominent Web-based programming advocates have left Mozilla for Palm, arguing that the time has come to use browsers to bypass Apple's controlling role in mobile applications.
Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, who help run the Ajaxian site for elaborate Web interfaces and who worked on Mozilla's Web-based Bespin tool for collaborative programming, announced their move to Palm on Friday.
Palm is a logical place for them to go. The Palm Pre has won accolades as a competitive mobile phone, and its foundation for applications is a WebKit-based browser, meaning that Palm programs are essentially Web programs.
"I will be joining Ben, my best friend, partner in crime, and fellow Ajaxian, as we take a new role as directors of the Palm Developer Relations team. We will have the responsibility of the developer experience with Palm. We will be trying to create a rich connective tissue between the company and the Web developer community that we love," Almaer wrote on his blog.
Web-based programs are typically slower and less capable than alternatives that run natively on a computing device. But they have one big potential advantage: written once, they can run on any device with a browser and hardware up to the task.
Although Galbraith and Dalmaer are excited by the possibilities of Web applications and the new era of mobile computing ushered in most notably by Apple's iPhone, Galbraith appears to be concerned about the control Apple exercises over the applications people can use on their phones.
"Clearly, a revolution in hardware is taking place, and it doesn't take a prophet to work out that the future of computing lies along this new trajectory," Galbraith said. "However, my enthusiasm for this amazing new world is tempered by some unfortunate decisions made by some of the players in this space. It seems that some view this revolution as a chance to seize power in downright Orwellian ways by constraining what we, as developers, can say, dictating what kinds of apps we can create, controlling how we distribute our apps, and placing all kinds of limits on what (we) can do to our computing devices."
He didn't mention Apple by name, and I don't want to put words in his mouth, but who else besides Apple could Galbraith be referring to? The programmers and Apple didn't immediately respond to requests for comment.
Apple exerts its control to try to give iPhone users a simple, stable, and useful experience. But that control can be at odds with what programmers and users want, as was most clearly illustrated in Apple's rejection of the Google Voice application--though Apple said it hasn't actually rejected the application.
Meanwhile, as it did with its Latitude location application for the iPhone after Apple rejected a native version of that software, Google is working on a Web-based interface for Google Voice. It also offers a Web-based Gmail application for the iPhone.
What's curious is that the Palm Pre, the Google Android operating system, and the iPhone OS all use a browser based on the WebKit project, and Apple is among those working hard to advance the state of the art for Web application programming through its WebKit work. So there is some philosophical agreement along with the differences.
A nascent technology called WebGL for bringing hardware-accelerated 3D graphics to the Web is getting a lot closer to reality.
Last week, programmers began building WebGL into Firefox's nightly builds, the developer versions used to test the latest updates to the open-source browser. Also this month, programmers began building WebGL into WebKit, the project that's used in both Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome.
Wolfire Games picked up on the WebKit move and offered a video of WebGL in action.
Overall, the moves stand to accelerate the pace of WebGL development by making it easier to try out. But the technology still has a ways to go before people will be able to play Web-based versions of a 3D software such as first-person shooter video games or Google Earth.
"All of these implementations are going to have some interoperability issues for the next little while, as the spec is still in flux and we're tracking it at different rates, but will hopefully start to stabilize over the next few months," said Vladimir Vukicevic in a blog post.
WebGL is one of a several efforts under way to make Web browsers into a more powerful computing platform, increasingly capable of rivaling what software running natively on a computer can do. Even the company with the most to lose from that direction--Microsoft--is embracing it with a Web-based version of Office.
The WebGL plan emerged in March from Mozilla and the Khronos Group, which oversees the venerable OpenGL standard to let software tap into a computer's hardware-based graphics power . WebGL's roots lie with an earlier Mozilla project called Canvas 3D, a cousin of the present two-dimensional Canvas technology for drawing graphics in Web pages.
Although Google is a WebGL supporter, it's also developing a higher-level 3D graphics technology called O3D for browsers. Google is working on building O3D into Chrome, but the fruits of that labor aren't yet available.
WebGL has a ways to go, as well, but developers eager to give it a whirl should probably start thinking seriously about it.
"The WebGL working group is targeting the first half of 2010 for release of the standard, but implementations will show up before that," said WebGL programmer Mark Steele in August.
Those wanting to try it not only have to download the Firefox nightly build, but also have to specifically enable WebGL through the Firefox "about:config" mechanism. Vukicevic has instructions on his blog.
Google's move to let software run natively on Android devices opens the door for a version of Firefox that can run on the operating system.
At present, Android applications are written in Java and run on Google's Dalvik Java virtual machine. Last week, though, Google announced the Android Native Development Kit version 1.0 that lets software run natively on the Linux layer below, though the company sees it as a way not to run full-fledged applications as much as to run components of ordinary Android applications.
"Android applications run in the Dalvik virtual machine. The NDK allows developers to implement parts of these applications using native-code languages such as C and C++," said Google's David Turner in a Native Developer Kit blog post.
That's enough to whet the appetite of Mozilla, the organization that oversees development of Firefox and its mobile incarnation, called Fennec though likely to sport the Firefox name when it arrives in product form.
"Developers are taking a look at the NDK to see if it provides the capabilities we need to bring Fennec to Android. If it's possible, I think our community would be interested in doing it, because Android will be appearing on more smartphones with the capabilities to provide a good browsing experience," said Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of mobile.
A year ago, Mike Schroepfer, then Mozilla's vice president of engineering before he moved to Facebook, said Mozilla wasn't focusing on Android because of the Java constraint and because Android already has a capable browser of its own.
"We've been concentrating on other platforms that don't have browser or didn't have a good one," Schroepfer said in May 2008. "I'm looking forward to (Google) opening up the entire platform. Today I can't get Firefox on Android because I don't have the API (application programming interface) support.
The browser that ships with Android is based on the open-source WebKit project. That's the same foundation for Google Chrome, Safari on Mac OS X and the iPhone, and the browser on the new Palm Pre, making it something of an incumbent power among high-end mobile phones.
It's not a simple choice to releasing software that uses the Native Development Kit. Using the higher-level Java foundation insulates programmers from worrying about what underlying hardware is in a phone or other device, but using native code means the software must be tailored for a specific processor. It also means that software won't have access to many system-level features that are part of Android.
And writing native code can help boost performance, always a problem on mobile phones with limited hardware and battery life. In a parallel situation on PCs, Google has released software called Native Client that lets browsers run software natively processors for better performance.
Mozilla is interested in a variety of sub-PC devices. "We're also very interested in Netbooks across the operating system and chip architecture spectrum," Sullivan added. "Firefox, Fennec, and other Mozilla-based browsers have been demonstrated on Netbooks running Windows CE, various Linux variants, and Moblin," a Linux-based operating system for mobile devices backed by Intel.
Firefox's core use is on personal computers, though. There, a new version is imminent.
"The Mozilla team is mobilizing to ship Firefox 3.5, and it's looking like Tuesday morning" will be the ship time, Mozilla said in a statement Friday.
However, Mozilla also has issued three candidates instead of the expected one, and in the bigger picture added many new features to 3.5 that kept its release back months compared to the earlier, smaller-scale Firefox 3.1 plan, so give the organization some wiggle room.
Yesterday's introduction of Chrome version 2.0.172.28 was touted by Google as being up to 30 percent faster for handling JavaScript. After using the update to the stable release extensively for the past day and running it through two JavaScript tests on two computers, it's conclusively faster than the previous stable version of Chrome.
In addition to being faster, the new Chrome now has a full screen mode.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The two computers I used were a Windows Vista Service Pack 1 desktop with a Pentium 4 processor running at 3.00 GHz and 2 GB of RAM, and a Windows XP Pro Service Pack 3 laptop with a Core Duo T9400 processor running at 2.53 GHz and 3 GB of RAM. Chrome was benchmarked by the Webkit test, SunSpider, and the JavaScript-only sections of the Mozilla test Dromaeo. Chrome was tested with no other tabs open and no other programs running on the computer.
When testing SunSpider, Chrome v1.0.154.65 scored 919.2ms on the laptop, and 1864.2ms on the desktop. Chrome v2.0.172.28 scored 583.6ms on the laptop, and 1323.4ms on the desktop. The laptop score was 36.6 percent faster, and the desktop was 29 percent faster.
Running both versions of Chrome through Dromaeo came up with similar results. Keeping in mind that the higher number is better for Dromaeo's tests, the older Chrome scored an overall 113.25 runs/s on the laptop. The newer one hit 139.90 runs/s, an improvement of 23.5 percent. The desktop results were the inverse of the laptop's.
Where the SunSpider results showed greater gains for the new Chrome on the laptop, the Dromaeo desktop tests showed an improvement of 33.8 percent. Chrome v1.0.154.65 hit 146.63 runs/s while v2.0.172.28 scored 196.29 runs/s.
Also new: Users can set forms to autofill in the Options menu (foreground, right), and selectively remove thumbnails on the New Tab landing page (background, left).
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Actual results will vary based on your hardware and other program running simultaneously, but it's irrefutable that the new version of Chrome, with its updates to the WebKit rendering engine and Google's V8 JavaScript engine, is significantly faster than its predecessor. I strongly recommend that you upgrade if you've been using Chrome for script-intensive Web apps.
Also new in this version of Chrome is the F11 hot key to toggle full screen mode, which drops all hints of the browser frame except for the scroll bars--but only if they're appearing on that site in standard mode. There's also a new form autofill under Options in the Tools menu, and users can selectively remove thumbnails from the New Tab landing page.
Google is tight-lipped about the Linux version of its Chrome browser, but the company's programmers have proved a bit more forthcoming with a brief announcement that they have a crude version of Chrome working on Linux.
"Dude, Gmail works in the test shell on Linux!" said programmer Dan Kegel in a note to the Chromium developers mailing list on Tuesday. It's pretty crude, though: the "enter" key doesn't work, for example.
Chromium is the name of the open-source project behind Chrome. But what's a "test shell"?
Aaron Boodman, who works on Chrome and Gears and spotlighted the Linux accomplishment, had this explanation in his blog post about the Linux Chrome milestone: "The test shell is a very simple browser that the Chromium development team uses for testing our integration with WebKit," the engine that decodes HTML to render a Web page in the browser. "It is the first step of porting Chromium to a new platform."
In other words, Chrome for Linux is in a pretty raw state.
"The team is still a long ways from even getting the Web to render correctly, let alone building the real browser UI (user interface). But it's exciting to see things falling a little more into place each day," Boodman said.
Kegel also indicated in a later e-mail that V8, the engine that runs JavaScript programs on Web pages, is functioning, because he was able to run a JavaScript benchmark test called SunSpider.
"I just did a shootout between test shell and Firefox on Linux by pasting the SunSpider public URL in each. Happily, it ran to completion on both," Kegel said.
Just about every browser out there now is trying to grab the crown for fastest performance for running JavaScript, the programming language that powers many increasingly sophisticated Web-based applications. The latest development is from the programmers behind Apple's Safari.
Mozilla bragged earlier this month about TraceMonkey, a new JavaScript engine due to ship in Firefox 3.1 near the end of 2008. Next came Google's Chrome, a leading feature of which is the performance of its V8 JavaScript engine. Now the WebKit programmers, whose open-source code is used in Apple's Safari browser and the Konqueror browser of the KDE interface software sometimes used on Linux systems, have a new version of their JavaScript technology.
It's called Squirrelfish Extreme, and the WebKit programmers said Thursday in a blog posting that it's more than twice as fast as the first-generation Squirrelfish announced in June and more than three times faster than the current WebKit 3.1 version. They based their conclusions on one benchmark, SunSpider.
"SquirrelFish Extreme uses more advanced techniques, including fast native code generation, to deliver even more JavaScript performance," the programmers said.
For details of Squirrelfish's techniques--bytecode optimization, a polymorphic inline cache, a context-threaded just-in-time compiler, and a regular expression just-in-time compiler--check the WebKit blog.
Charles Ying also performed SunSpider tests that showed Squirrelfish beating Google's V8 and Mozilla's Tracemonkey on a 2.4GHz iMac.
WebKit's SquirrelFish Extreme is faster than its three-month-old predecessor on the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark.
(Credit: WebKit)
Google co-founder Sergey Brin speaks at the Chrome browser launch event.
(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.--Google's new Chrome browser is for PCs today, but company co-founder Sergey Brin expects the technology will make its way to Android, the company's mobile phone operating system and software suite.
Chrome and Android were developed largely separately, Brin said in an interview at the Chrome launch event Tuesday. "We have not wanted to bind one's hands to the other's," Brin said. But you can expect that to change now that both projects are public and nearing their first final releases.
"Probably a subsequent version of Android is going to pick up a lot of the Chrome stack," Brin said, pointing to JavaScript improvements as one area.
And the brand name likely will follow. "My guess is we'll have 'Chrome-like' or something similar," he said.
Chrome and Android's current browser both already employ WebKit, an open-source project for the process of interpreting the HTML code that makes up a Web page and rendering it on a screen.
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