Programming

Mozilla has begun building a new technology called IonMonkey into Firefox to improve its JavaScript performance.

High JavaScript performance is essential in today's hotly competitive browser market, because JavaScript is the language behind complicated Web sites and Web apps such as Google Docs and Facebook. IonMonkey has now been packaged into the "nightly" version of Firefox 18 for hardcore developers; that version is scheduled to become the mainstream version of the browser early in 2013.

IonMonkey is what's called a just-in-time compiler, or JIT for short. In olden days, JavaScript would run line by line in … Read more

The Internet Engineering Task Force has standardized the Opus audio compression technology as RFC 6716.

The move paves the way for much broader use of Opus for anything from playing music to online voice chats. Opus is what's called a codec because it defines how to encode and decode a stream of data for more efficient storage or transmission.

"Opus is the first state-of-the-art, free audio codec to be standardized. We think this will help us achieve wider adoption than prior royalty-free codecs," Jean-Marc Valin, a Mozilla employee and author of Opus, said in a blog post today. … Read more

Compared to Apple's Siri speech-activated personal assistant, IBM's Watson is a genius.

Zooey Deschanel might ask Siri, "Is that rain?"

She might ask Watson, "Who's the author that wrote, 'It was a dark and stormy night'?"

(Edward Bulwer-Lytton, for the literary-minded among you.)

Until now, Watson's tech has been too big to cram into a mobile device. All those smarts takes a room full of servers, an incredible amount of calculations and a thick wire into the electrical mains.

That's about to change.

The power consumption behind Watson's performance is &… Read more

Illustrating one of its selling points for its software subscription plans, Adobe Systems has updated Muse three months after it first released the tool for designing and publishing Web pages.

Adobe released Muse along with the Creative Cloud subscription service, which lets people use the full panoply of Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) software along with some online services including Web hosting, Web fonts, and file synchronization. Part of the Creative Cloud sales pitch is that Adobe will update its components as new features arrive, meaning that subscribers get new abilities without having to wait for CS7.

The new version … Read more

For more than three years, Skype has worked to improve online audio through involvement in a project now called Opus. But perversely, Skype's new owner, Microsoft, is undermining Opus just as a Web standards effort is poised to carry it into the mainstream.

Opus is an audio "codec" -- technology to encode and decode media streams for efficient transmission over the Internet or storage on computing equipment. Opus backers besides Microsoft's Skype division include Google, Opera, and Mozilla.

Opus has a lot of potential to improve online audio, something that's increasingly important as more communications … Read more

I just pray that Microsoft doesn't cave to pressure from partners to punt on Surface.

The first public plea came this week from Acer, which, in effect, begged Microsoft to drop Surface.

If that happens, Microsoft will lose the consumer to Apple for good. Probably sooner rather than later.

And if Acer is that worried about Surface, then it should out-design Microsoft or look elsewhere. Right now I don't see anything from Acer that would make me chuck my MacBook and iPad.

But Surface could. And it gets even more interesting when I see that Redmond is already working on Surface 2. … Read more

With Intel's annual conference just around the corner, its next-gen silicon is always a hot topic.

And this year, that's Haswell. Why should you be interested in Haswell? Well, it's going to be inside some of the thinnest, lightest, most powerful ultrabooks, MacBooks, and tablet-ultrabook hybrids to date. (And throw Microsoft's next-gen Surface tablets into that mix too).

Haswell's marquee feature -- besides being a new microarchitecture -- is that versions of the processor will put more of the PC's core functions inside one chip package than any Intel processor to date. And that … Read more

Microsoft is bulking up design teams for next-gen Surface devices, despite the pleas of PC partners like Acer.

Acer recently asked Microsoft to reconsider its Surface strategy, but Redmond seems to be doing just the opposite, as dozens of job postings on its career page attest. Some of the job postings seem to imply that Surface products are the true expressions of Microsoft's vision.

"The Surface Team focuses on building devices that fully express the Windows vision," a few of the job listings say.

And that's the whole point of Surface, isn't it? Microsoft needed … Read more

OAuth 2.0 promised to improve authentication on the Net, but its author has resigned from the project after concluding the standard "is a bad protocol."

"When compared with OAuth 1.0, the 2.0 specification is more complex, less interoperable, less useful, more incomplete, and most importantly, less secure," Eran Hammer-Lahav said in a blog post yesterday. "I resigned my role as lead author and editor, [withdrew] my name from the specification, and left the working group...Deciding to move on from an effort I have led for over five years was agonizing." … Read more