Programming

Mozilla is best known as the developer of Firefox, but it's reaching well beyond the browser with a 2012 strategy that strives to use the open Web to counteract ecosystem lock-in.

Firefox embodied Mozilla's effort to counter the damage that Microsoft's browser dominance caused on the Web. But now, as revealed in Mozilla 2012 plans published Sunday, the non-profit organization is putting the crosshairs on other big competitors, too: Apple, Google, and Amazon.

Those companies, along with Microsoft, each are building an ecosystem encompassing devices, operating systems, app stores, and apps. People should be worried about getting … Read more

In the battle between native apps and Web sites, an Italian startup called Apps Builder wants to help those on the Web side defect to the enemy.

The company offers a subscription-based Web service that converts Web sites into mobile applications. Last month it added Windows Phone app support to its earlier options--iOS, Android, HTML-based Web apps, and Chrome Web apps. And it's seeing some significant usage of its service.

Specifically, the company just passed the milestone of 20,000 apps developed through Apps Builder, and those apps have been downloaded a million times from their various app stores, … Read more

The dominance of Apple and Google mobile browsers is leading to a situation that's even worse for Web programming than the former dominance of Internet Explorer, a standards group leader warned today.

Daniel Glazman, co-chairman of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) group overseeing the formatting and effects standard called Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), said that programmers are overlooking other browsers when they use newer CSS features--even when those other browsers support the features.

The result is that those other browsers--Firefox, Internet Explorer, and Opera, chiefly--might have to essentially masquerade themselves as other browsers. When that happens, the "… Read more

Nginx, a Russian startup that has succeeded where others have failed at challenging the dominant Apache software for housing Web sites, has begun trying to convert its popularity into actual money.

Nginx (pronounced "engine X") yesterday unveiled corporate support offerings for the product, a traditional business model for open-source software. It offers three grades--Essential, Advanced, and Premium--with three- and twelve-month contracts for services including installation, configuration, performance tuning, and maintenance.

"Subscribers to the Advanced and Premium options receive design, implementation and optimization assistance, as well as prioritized development. Premium subscribers will have access to an additional set … Read more

Google today released a beta version of its Chrome browser for Android, a momentous step that marries two of Google's most important programming projects.

The new browser, unlike the stock Android browser, is available in the Android Market so that people don't have to wait for handset makers to offer it through an operating system upgrade. But its reliance on newer hardware acceleration interfaces means it only works on Ice Cream Sandwich, which despite emerging last year on Samsung's Galaxy Nexus smartphone remains a rarity in the real world.

Chrome for Android (review) includes the desktop version'… Read more

Google has released "Duclair," the new version 1.0.0 of its VP8 technology that the company says does a better job encoding video and faster job decoding it.

And it's a good thing, too, because VP8 is taking on not only the incumbent H.264, but also a sequel called High Efficiency Video Coding (HEVC) from the same group that's well under development.

VP8 and H.264 are codecs, technology for compressing video for more compact storage or for more efficient transmission over a network. But the two come from very different backgrounds. Google hopes … Read more

One of the pesky fragmentation issues Android programmers must worry about is different screen sizes.

With resolution changing from one phone to another, programmers have to figure out exactly how much room they can devote to icons, photos, video game backgrounds, dialog boxes. But, Google argues, paying the price upfront pays programmers back in the long run--and helps them avoid the fixed-resolution difficulties that afflicted Palm.

Indeed, even before the first Android phone hit the market, Google had set on an approach designed to accommodate not just different pixel resolutions, but also pixel densities--the number of pixels per inch. Android … Read more

I'll be honest here. I disabled Chrome's autofill ability. I hate it.

Maybe it's because I have too many e-mail addresses, or even regular addresses--I moved a lot in the last couple years. Maybe it's because my wife and I use the same computer. Maybe it's because my international life involves too many formats for phone numbers, postal codes, and codes guichet.

But filling out forms is certainly tedious, so I was delighted to hear that there's going to be a way for Web developers to straighten this out.

Specifically, Google and others are … Read more

Many Web developers have gotten the message: a faster site means people buy more, read more, interact more, and return more.

But apparently the message hasn't sunk in far enough, because the top 2,000 retail Web sites still take 10 seconds to load on average, according to a study by Strangeloop Networks released yesterday. The list of the top retail sites comes from Amazon's Alexa list of top sites.

Strangeloop is in the business of helping customers speed up their Web sites, so it has an agenda to push, but that shouldn't deter developers from taking … Read more