Business Tech

As much as Twitter is a powerful communication and social application, it's a relatively simple Web app. As part of a new contest sponsored by Engine Yard, Ruby on Rails developers are going to turn Twitter into their own application server.

The contest asks developers to program the "Worst App Server Technology Ever" (Waste) using Twitter as the message bus. While much of the contest is being done tongue-in-cheek, it's actually an interesting use case to see if a service like Twitter can take the place of a more traditional message bus like IBM MQ series or AMQP (Advanced Message Queuing Protocol).

Contest participants register up to five Twitter handles and code the function that each would perform in a program. When the contest challenge is issued on November 12, participants will have to use at least 10 of the pre-designated Twitter handles (other than their own) as endpoints to perform functions on data sets located at unique URLs. All messages will work through a series of automated public Twitter replies.

This is somewhere between an application server, a social game, the "telephone game" and service-oriented architecture (SOA) where Twitter plays the role of the enterprise service bus and the Twitter API is the broker between data sources. SOA relies on services exposing their functionality other applications and services can read to understand how to utilize those services. In this case, Twitter can be used as an application server in the cloud. (Take that buzzword bingo players.)

The funny thing is that as absurd and comical as this sounded when the Engine Yard guys told me about it, I've started to think about this as a way to possibly achieve a real technological breakthrough. And while I don't think that Twitter will be the "cloud bus," I do think that there is a lot to be learned from applying this type of constraint to a data flow process.

Engine Yard VP of marketing Michael Mullany told me that the contest shows how developers can leverage a relatively straightforward platform in innovative ways. But it's also another example of an interesting marketing effort to use Twitter as the vehicle for one's own benefit. Also, in true open source fashion, developers wind up building new applications based on code written by their peers.

Let's hope Twitter can handle the attention and developers are not greeted by the ever-lurking fail whale. You can check out the contest and learn more details at Engineyard.com

Betting that the benefits of the move will outweigh the risks, Yahoo has released the source code underlying in-house software called Traffic Server that can speed up Web site operations.

The software works by moving some data and operations closer on the Internet to the people trying using those services. Yahoo released it as an "incubator" project under the auspices of the Apache Software Foundation, a seasoned organization for managing open-source projects and also the site that houses the Hadoop open-source project Yahoo favors for large-scale data-processing challenges.

Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing, plans to announce the move at the Cloud Computing Expo in Santa Clara, Calif., on Tuesday in a keynote speech, but the software actually arrived at Apache last week.

Shelton Shugar, Yahoo's senior vice president of cloud computing

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"We've donated Traffic Server to Apache because we think it's a great piece of code, and we want to build a community around that in the same manner we built a community out of Hadoop," Shugar said in an interview.

Traffic Server is a battle-hardened package with more than 200,000 lines of C++ code. Yahoo originally got the software through its acquisition of Inktomi earlier this decade, and it's been using it ever since. Today, the software delivers 30 billion Web objects and 400 terabytes of data each day.

And Yahoo can rightly be proud of Traffic Server's performance: that comes from a surprisingly small number of Yahoo servers--between 100 and 150, said Chuck Neerdaels, vice president of data services at Yahoo. The software is set up particularly to run multiple tasks at the same time, a design well-suited to today's servers with multicore, multithreaded processors.

Source code is what humans write in a higher-level programming language; only after it's been translated into binary machine code can a computer actually run that program. When associated with an open-source project, this software is available for anyone to see, modify, and distribute, in contrast to the locked-down world of proprietary software such as Microsoft Windows. So in effect, Yahoo is allowing others not only to use Traffic Server for their own ends, but also to modify it--for example, by taking advantage of its ability at to accept plug-ins that can adapt it for different tasks.

Giving away the farm?
So isn't there a risk that Yahoo is giving away some pretty important technology that's central to its business? Plenty of start-ups today are trying to grow to Yahoo's scale, and many of them are competitors.

Some Yahoo rival might very well gain as a result, but on balance, the company thinks that it'll come out ahead. For one thing, Traffic Server in isolation is not as powerful as Traffic Server woven into Yahoo's computing fabric, the company argues.

"What we're giving up is a generic building block. What makes it really interesting at Yahoo is how we've connected it with other things to make a bigger service," Neerdaels said. As for Yahoo's major rivals: "We suspect our larger competitors already have some solution they're happy with."

Yahoo expects a number of benefits from broader development and use of Traffic Server.

"We think a lot of folks can benefit from this, and by raising the tide, we think we can benefit as well," Shugar said.

For one thing, making Traffic Server open-source software will mean that people will grow familiar in its use, making it easier for Yahoo to hire engineers who already are up to speed.

"By virtue of basing services on open-source software, we attract people who want to work on open source. They like it, and they like the idea of it. It's a skill they can take with them from one place to another," Shugar added.

For another, Yahoo can benefit from others adapting the software to a broader range of uses, he said.

Gaining influence among developers
There are intangible benefits, as well, when it comes to recognition among programmers, whose influence in some ways makes them the digital elite. Microsoft long ago learned that much of its power comes from developer allies, and Google is trying to put that lesson to good use as well by releasing many open-source projects--Google Chrome being one recent example.

Yahoo isn't in the business of selling technology to others in the manner of Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google App Engine. But having solid technology is essential to Yahoo. While it's willing to sell its search business and engineering skills to Microsoft, it still needs in-house expertise to power its many Web properties and to reduce its operating costs.

Here, Traffic Server is important. For example, one area where Yahoo uses Traffic Server was at Yahoo Sports for handling scores. A regular Web server sends out the Web page to a person's browser, but Traffic Server handles the JavaScript technology that periodically refreshes the contents of a scoreboard element on that page.

It's only a "trickle" of data, but at Yahoo's scale, that can be some pretty heavy work. "When they moved to using the Traffic Server front end, they shaved something like 200 machines off their back end because session management was more efficient," Neerdaels said.

Another part of Yahoo operations retrofitted with the software is Yahoo Mail, he said. Traffic Server can be used to process the cookie text files on a person's browser to figure out whether that person can be logged in automatically or the person needs to authenticate anew. It also can route traffic appropriately when, for example, a person who is "homed" to Yahoo's servers in India visits the site while in the United States.

Traffic Server also manages a lot of more nuts-and-bolts tasks. For example, it can cache Web data closer to browsers so the original Web servers that house the data aren't as overtaxed. And it can store a Web address stored in the Domain Name System to speed up network speeds.

What's it good for?
Some of these chores can be handled by existing software, such as Squid, which is already open source. But Yahoo is on a roll with its open-source work, as the company seeks to advance its internal cloud-computing infrastructure. Expect more to come.

"As various pieces of our cloud get to a point of maturity, we will open-source specific pieces," Shugar said. Future candidates include Yahoo's foundation for hosting its Web applications on a virtualized, more flexible foundation, and its Sherpa and Mobstor services for storing data.

Winning open-source allies can be difficult, and Neerdaels said it takes an engineer a good six months to fully comprehend all Traffic Server's code, so immediate gains beyond fostering goodwill are unlikely.

But in the long run, Yahoo's program could pay significant dividends. Building a series of significant open-source packages could lead to a Yahoo infrastructure that's high-power but more standard than custom-made.

It's not every day that large, significant software packages arrive on the Net in open-source form--much less a series of them that are increasingly relevant to a competitive market of large-scale Web sites.

In this case, Yahoo's gift may indeed become Yahoo's gain.

For years, open-source advocates have been praying for someone to free us from Microsoft's proprietary grasp. We've prayed in vain as Linux, OpenOffice, and other open-source software programs have failed to dent Microsoft's dominance.

Until now.

Google, not Red Hat or Sun, appears to be the long-awaited redeemer of both personal computers and servers, and has even staked a credible claim in the mobile world, as well. Google achieves this, in part, by writing copious lines of open-source code, but pays for this "generosity" with insanely profitable proprietary services, services that have long appealed to consumers but increasingly appeal to enterprises, too.

Google, in other words, is arguably not the open-source savior we were expecting, but it's probably the one we deserve.

(Credit: Matt Asay)

Despite more than a decade of trying to make "pure" open-source software businesses work, it's telling that only one company--Red Hat--has managed to pull together more than $100 million per year in revenues for its troubles. For its part, Red Hat is quick to downplay the relevance of its revenue model for just about any other business.

Hardly a rallying cry to the still-growing open-source ecosystem.

Yes, MySQL got to $94 million before Sun gobbled it up, and yes, other start-ups (my own, included) are getting closer to the mark, but none, including MySQL, is wholly dependent on selling open-source software subscriptions to achieve this goal.

We also include proprietary add-on value. Like Google.

So we're left with Google, which is, perhaps, the world's largest open-source company, contributing more open-source software and resources than any other, in my estimation. (Sun likely wins on sheer volume of code, but being an "open-source company" involves more than simply code.)

How does Google do it? Well, for one thing, it learned long ago that monetizing open-source software directly is tough. So it simply uses open source to shepherd prospective customers to its other services, like Search or Google Apps.

Indeed, it is the success of these proprietary products that enables it to be such a generous open-source benefactor, much like IBM, Intel, or, for that matter, Sun (which sells a lot of proprietary hardware). Take away these companies proprietary product lines, and overnight we'd see dramatic decreases in their investments in Linux, Apache Software projects, etc.

And we'd all be the poorer for that.

In an ideal world, open-source software companies would thrive by simply giving away lots of code, and having enterprises and government organizations serve their long-term interests by paying for support.

We don't live in that world. Some organizations do buy support for open-source software, of course, though many others do not, and some only pay long enough to become self-sufficient whereupon they dump their support contracts, as former CTO of NBC iVillage Jon Williams once declared.

Until we cross the border into Utopia, we're going to continue to see the biggest investments in open-source innovation come from Google and its peers: companies with wallets fat with proprietary profits.

As I said, this may not be the open-source world for which we've hoped, but it's the one we deserve, because it's reflective of what we value and, hence, what we pay for.

See also Mark Hinkle's response to this post.

iStockphoto's Kelly Thompson

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google's Gears technology may not have caught on widely in the world of Web programming, but operators of the iStockphoto photo sales site have become believers.

Among other things, Gears enables browsers to store data on a local computer, which most notably means that Web applications can be adapted to work even while offline. But for iStockphoto's purposes, it primarily means better performance for people using the site and secondarily lower operating costs for the Getty Images photo sales subsidiary.

"We're not requiring anyone to install Google Gears," the company said on an explanatory Web site. "If you do install Google Gears, though, iStock will work much faster."

Google launched the open-source Gears software in 2007, but so far, the sites that use it--among them Gmail, Google Reader, WordPress, and MySpace--are the exception rather than the rule.

Speed and money
The main motivation for the change was getting a faster site, which benefits iStockphoto's financial results, said Kelly Thompson, iStockphoto's chief operating officer.

"It was 95 percent performance and end-user experience, but let's face it: if I can get more pictures pumped out faster, with more searches, we sell more," Thompson said. "Cutting down a page load time for a user is more valuable to me than the money I'll save on bandwidth."

The company adopted Gears with no prompting from Google, he added. "We did this on our own," with Web programmers jumping on the project because "it's sexy for them to work on it."

iStockphoto activated its Gears support September 30, Thompson said. In the first 16 days of use, Gears saved the company from paying for the transfer of 132GB of data over the network and lightened its Web servers by 8.7 million communication requests--and that's with only 19,000 Gears-installed users, a "tiny portion of our traffic," he said. Those without Gears benefit, too, since iStock's Web servers are unburdened somewhat by those who do use it.

The technology works by locally storing various Web page ingredients--photo thumbnails, JavaScript program code, Cascading Style Sheet formatting files, for example. Older files are flushed periodically so the users' hard drives don't get too cluttered.

"It's a pretty basic implementation right now: the second time a user sees any image or requests a JavaScript file, it loads instantly," Thompson said. One of his developers described it as "the opposite of a drug dealer: the first hit isn't free, (but) every subsequent hit is."

Google is trying to propagate Gears, which is available as a browser plug-in. In a more aggressive move, it built Gears into its Chrome browser. And in the longer term, the HTML5 standard under development reproduces the local storage abilities of Gears, a move that stands to spread the technology more widely.

HTML5 good, IE 6 bad
Thompson is a fan of another HTML5 technology: built-in video. iStock licenses video content, as well as photos and other content, and currently streams it with Adobe Systems' Flash technology.

"We'd love to be able to ditch Flash on the video side, but it's probably a ways out," Thompson said, citing widespread use of Internet Explorer.

IE is widely loathed among Web developers for its slow performance and lack of standards compliance, and even Microsoft wishes that people would upgrade from IE 6, but it's still the single most widely used browser out there, even though Microsoft released it in 2001, just before Windows XP arrived. Microsoft released IE 7 in 2006, and it tried to improve standards compliance and security with the release of IE 8 this March.

People are gradually shifting away from IE 6, but not fast enough for Thompson's taste--or plans.

"We announced we'd drop official support for IE 6 in 2010 back at the beginning of the year. I'm not sure we're going to be able to it: the percentage of users is dropping--just not quite fast enough," he said.

From August (top) to September (below), Internet Explorer lost a bit of usage share, compared with rival browsers.

(Credit: Net Applications)

According to Net Applications statistics, IE 6 is used by 24.4 percent of people on the Web today, followed by IE 7, IE 8, Firefox 3.5, and Firefox 3, in descending order of popularity. Overall, IE has 65.7 percent share of usage.

iStockphoto has more early adopters in its population and therefore different browser preferences. The top five browsers on the site are Firefox, with 37.8 percent; IE, with 34.4 percent; Apple's Safari, with 22.3 percent; Google's Chrome, with 3.4 percent; and Opera, with 1.7 percent.

Among iStockphoto's IE traffic, the majority of people use version 7, but the tide is turning.

"We've seen an almost 2 percent migration of (IE) 6 to 8 in the last 60 days alone. We're hoping Windows 7 will push it even more quickly," Thompson said. "For us, even though it's a shrinking percentage, it still represents over 1 million visits per month, so I can't cut them off at the knees."

"I think we're dominated by geeks, designers, and small businesses, all who move more quickly than the enterprise--not to mention we're 35 percent Mac, with the iPhone about to overtake Linux for third place" among operating systems, Thompson said.

Expanding its cloud-computing storage services to a higher level, Amazon.com unveiled a new option called Amazon RDS for companies that want to store information in a database on the other side of the Internet.

The suite of Amazon Web Services (AWS) already included a database option called SimpleDB, a basic database with its own interface standard for storing data and retrieving it. The Amazon Relational Database Service, in contrast, uses a more standard database interface, embodied in this case in an online implementation of the open-source MySQL software, the company said Monday.

"With Amazon RDS, you get full native access to a MySQL database," specifically, version 5.1 of the Sun Microsystems technology, the company said on its Amazon RDS site. "This means Amazon RDS works with your existing tools, applications, and drivers. You can port an existing database to Amazon RDS without changing a line of code--just point your tools or applications at your Amazon RDS DB instance, and you are ready to go."

Amazon raised minimized hassle and increased flexibility as reasons to use the service, which is currently in beta testing.

"Every hour that you don't spend fiddling with hardware, tracing cables, installing operating systems, or managing databases is an hour that you can spend on the unique and value-added aspects of your application," Jeff Barr, the company's Web services evangelist, said in a blog post. "I should point out that RDS enables a lot of really enticing development and test scenarios. You can set up a separate database instance for each developer on a project without making a big investment in hardware."

With its years-long effort, the Net retailer has built Amazon Web Services into a formidable presence in the information technology world. Competitors include Google App Engine, a computing foundation that can run Java or Python programs on Google's own BigTable database technology, and Microsoft's Azure, which is set to offer access to Windows servers in the cloud when it formally launches in November.

One potentially interesting rival is Oracle, already a giant in the database market and, if it can overcome European regulatory concerns, the future owner of MySQL assets. Because MySQL is open-source software, though, anyone may use and modify it, even without its copyright holders' permission.

The biggest competitor to this model is doing things the old way, with companies running their own computing infrastructure. Cloud computing poses security and trust issues for many companies considering whether to put their data and business applications on somebody else's computer systems. But researchers such as Gartner, an influential but not radical analyst firm, now recommend that companies look seriously at cloud computing.

Amazon is working on greater robustness for Amazon RDS. It offers automated backup, and it later plans to offer a "high-availability" option at no extra charge, with which customers can create a separate instance of a database in a different geographic region.

As with all services on AWS, Amazon RDS is priced on an as-used basis--with per-hour charges according to the server memory requirements of the database: 11 cents per hour for a small database of 1.7GB of RAM; 44 cents for large, or 7.5GB; 88 cents for extra-large, or 15GB; $1.55 for double extra-large, or 34GB; and $3.10 for quadruple extra-large, or 68GB. There also are charges for the size of data stored, the number of input-output requests, the amount of data written to the database, and the amount of data read from the database.

With all the hubbub about Snow Leopard and Windows 7, there's another operating system out there you may not have noticed that's getting a significant update: Ubuntu Linux.

Ubuntu backer Canonical plans to release its "Karmic Koala" version on Thursday, and both the desktop and server versions of the open-source operating system take significant steps toward cloud computing. The concept of moving work away from the computer in front of you and into the network does have some merit, but cloud computing is today's fashionable buzzword, and Canonical Chief Executive Mark Shuttleworth is sensitive to its overuse.

Canonical CEO Mark Shuttleworth speaking at the Intel Developer Forum

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

"What frustrates me is the term 'cloud' has come to mean anything with an Internet connection, including some stuff that really looks familiar like internal IT," said Shuttleworth in an interview. It's fair to say that in Ubuntu's case, though, it's not a stretch.

Built into the server version of Ubuntu 9.10 is Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, technology built atop the Eucalyptus software package. Amazon Web Services (AWS), a collection of computing infrastructure accessible over the Net on a pay-as-you-go basis, is among today's most significant cloud-computing efforts, and Eucalyptus implements many of its functions so companies can build their own "private clouds" using the same services.

And in the desktop version of Ubuntu, the cloud connection is a service called Ubuntu One, which lets Ubuntu users synchronize files stored on different machines and back them up on the central service. Storage space of 2GB is free, and 50GB costs $10 per month.

The Ubuntu software itself is free; Canonical sells Ubuntu support services.

The WhiteHouse.gov Web site now employs open-source software called Drupal to manage and publish its content, a high-profile endorsement for the project and the 2-year-old start-up Acquia that supports it.

Drupal is open-source software, meaning that anyone may see, modify, and redistribute the source code underlying the software that's actually installed on a computer. Specifically, Drupal is governed by the GNU General Public License. Acquia sells support for Drupal, and there are plenty of add-on modules to tailor it to particular uses.

The White House's Web site now uses Drupal and other open-source software.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The White House announced the move in an Associated Press story that somewhat clumsily tried explaining, "the programming language is written in public view, available for public use, and able for people to edit." Debugging and upgrading the site's code "now...can be done in the matter of days and free to taxpayers."

Well, sort of. First of all, Drupal is a program, not a programming language, and second, just because software is available for free doesn't mean that using it is free. It takes time and expertise to install, configure, and maintain software. Indeed, Drupal and Acquia founder Dries Buytaert said in a blog posting announcing the White House's use of Drupal that companies involved in the Web site switch included not just his but also General Dynamics Information Technology, Phase2 Technology, Akamai, and Terremark Federal Group.

And although open-source software in general can offer a tight feedback loop between the programmers creating the software and the people using it, there's no guarantee that debugging and security patches automatically arrive faster or that software is easier to maintain than with proprietary software.

This move is just the sort of thing that can lead to a lot of misunderstandings about the idea of openness, a term that's up there with motherhood and apple pie these days when it comes to values everybody wants to embrace. Don't confuse the fact that Drupal is cooperatively created and debugged in public with the openness of the present administration's government.

This line in the AP story in particular raised my hackles: "Aides joked that it doesn't get more transparent than showing the world (the) code that their Web site is based on."

That's just silly. Drupal-powered blogs and forums can enable online information sharing and public participation in discussions, but that sort of thing can be accomplished with proprietary software as well. Likewise, it's perfectly possible to use open-source software in a system that's locked-down and closed.

That's not to pluck the feather out of Drupal's cap--or indeed out of the caps of Red Hat's Linux operating system, Apache software for hosting Web site and powering its search, and the MySQL database, all of which also are used in the White House project, according to publisher, tech pundit, and open-source fan Tim O'Reilly.

It's not without reason that open-source software is very popular to power Web properties, including plenty of high-powered ones such as Google and Facebook. The White House's move is an endorsement that could help others--notably the many customers in the federal government itself--feel more comfortable with open-source software.

ORLANDO, Fla.--Cloud computing? It's got its place, but apparently not one very close to the heart of Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Mark Hurd today.

At the Gartner Symposium here, Hurd said cloud computing has promise but that he and customers he speaks to are leery of moving important applications to another company's infrastructure outside the company's own firewall.

"I think it's a very attractive model, but there will be challenges," Hurd said. "At the end of the day, if you tell a CEO, 'Put our e-mail in the cloud,' a certain amount of CEOs will tell you not (to). If (HP Chief Information Officer Randy) Mott told me, 'Put the general ledger up in cloud,' I'd say go back to work, we're not doing that."

The cloud is real for many consumer services, he said. So why isn't it suitable for HP's core financial records stored in the general ledger? Security, for one thing.

"We get about 1,000 hacks a day. They're more sophisticated every month," Hurd said. "Security and reliability is a huge thing. It's unlikely we'd put anything outside the firewall that's material in nature that we couldn't 100 percent secure."

HP CEO Mark Hurd explains process re-engineering.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Hurd also said cloud computing has a branding issue among CEOs he speaks to. In one gathering he was doing fine until he raised the issue.

"I got a lot of boos after that...From a nontechnical CEO perspective, 'cloud computing' does not sound very clear to them," he said. The message he gets from those CEOs: "If this cloud computing is so cool, try to break this down into simple clear services that help my business be a better business."

Moving beyond services
In an onstage interview, Hurd also described HP's overall strategy, starting with building blocks of servers, PCs, networking equipment, and storage at the foundation, working up through software and putting services at the top.

Well, at the top for now. HP is headed for another layer: specific services packaged for particular customer segments, or "verticals" in industry parlance.

"The natural outgrowth for us will be more focus for us on vertical solutions," he said. HP won't get into practices for human resources or executive compensation, but will work in areas in which it can extend its computing technology ingredients.

Hurd said that spanning this range of products and services means that scale matters, for example in bargaining with component suppliers. Here, he dinged competitor IBM for selling its PC business to Lenovo, though without mentioning Big Blue by name.

"When a company would sell off its PC business, for example, you would have a problem because you would no longer be as big a customer to all those people who supply products to that supply chain," Hurd said.

He also took a potshot when asked about how HP's strategy differs from IBM's.

"I don't follow them very closely," he wisecracked. "It sounds like they're trying to chase us."

Beefing up sales
Gartner analyst Donna Scott said big customers find HP easy to deal with, but for others, the company is fragmented.

Hurd acknowledged there are problems, but said HP is working on them.

"We have a strategy to sell more. If somebody is interested in buying more, our strategies are aligned," he deadpanned.

In particular, when it comes to revenue growth, HP is aiming at smaller companies, he said. At present 70 percent of spending on IT comes from HP's top 2,000 biggest accounts.

Hurd pointed to an emphasis on sales as one area where he's trying to shift HP's culture.

"(Company co-founder David) Packard used to say, 'If we build great products customers will find them,'" Hurd said. "We actually want to sell them too."

Revamping HP's own IT
Hewlett-Packard has focused on cutting costs of its own computing infrastructure. In 2004, the year before Hurd took over as CEO, "We had $79 billion in revenue. We made $3.5 billion (in net income). We spent $75.5 billion." So, he asked the company's staff, "What do you spend it on?"

IT was a big part of it, accounting for $4.2 billion. Of that 82 percent was just to keep things running.

"One of our big spends was IT. We had more IT professionals in the company than we had salespeople," he said.

"We had IT spread out. Everybody had a little bit of ownership," Hurd said. There were 87 data centers, 6,000 applications, 19,000 people, 24,000 servers, 20 petabytes of data stored at 700 data marts.

The company "flipped the model," cutting expenses and redirecting funds to the future instead. "Our spend is down 40 percent and our innovation is up 2X in dollars."

It was painful and HP made mistakes on the way, but it was a personal priority for Hurd.

"I get a lot of CIOs who show me how bad their IT is," Hurd said. When he sees it, "My first reaction is it's because of a bad CEO."

The upcoming version 3.6 of Firefox will be able to tell if you're listing to starboard--and pass that information along to applications running in the browser.

That's because the browser will be able to detect the orientation of laptops and mobile devices equipped with accelerometers that can tell which way is down. The reason for the work: Web applications running in the browser will be able to use the information, useful for labyrinth-type games with virtual marbles rolling around boards, and any number of other gaming situations.

A demonstration application that shows Firefox adjusting a Web page graphic according to how a MacBook is tilted.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard announced Firefox's coming orientation interface Monday.

"One new feature that we're including as part of Firefox 3.6 is support for web pages to access machine orientation information if it's available," Blizzard wrote. "Many modern MacBooks and ThinkPads contain devices and drivers that expose this information. We've added support for Linux, Macs and some ThinkPads where drivers and devices are available."

Mozilla is working on the technology for mobile devices, too, where orientation-aware games are a big deal.

The move is one of many by browser makers eager to transform their software from passive receptacles for showing Web sites to an active foundation for interactive applications. Firefox 3.6 is scheduled for beta testing shortly and final release later this year.

Yahoo has worked on browser-based orientation technology through its BrowserPlus software.