Google wants to catalyze the era of Web applications with its Chrome OS project, but Mozilla has no plans for its own browser-based operating system, at least for now.
"We're really focused on making the Web the right platform of whatever operating system one is using. That's a fair amount of work," Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker said. "I think we're going to continue to focus for quite awhile on the Web itself as a platform and the capabilities of the Web rather than build an operating system of our own and pull everybody into our world."
Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker
(Credit: Mozilla)Baker shared the thoughts in an interview about the Mozilla Foundation's report of $79 million. The foundation isn't strapped for cash, but it is financially tiny compared to the three main rivals in the browser market today, Microsoft, Apple, and Google.
Microsoft was largely dormant when Firefox was getting its start five years ago, but the company is lighting a fire under its Internet Explorer developers for IE 9. Among the features the company touted are faster execution of Web-based JavaScript programs, better compliance with Web standards, and higher performance in general.
Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser in use today. Today, the elderly IE 6, dating from 2001, still is the most widely used version, and its widespread use is an anchor that keeps Web developers and therefore other browsers from advancing as fast as they might. So, unsurprisingly, Baker was comfortable with the prospect of a higher-powered IE being resurgent.
"If it could resurge enough to pull the hundreds of millions of people still using IE 6, we'd all be ecstatic," she said. "A lot of people are going to continue to use IE. They get it on their machine. If Microsoft makes that product more capable so the Web can move forward, there's good in that."
The Mozilla Foundation, of which Firefox developer Mozilla Corp. is a taxable subsidiary, gets the bulk of its revenue from Google through a search-ad deal that runs through 2011 at present. Search traffic that stems from Firefox's built-in search bar is set by default to go to Google, and a portion of the resulting Google search-ad revenue goes back to Mozilla.
Mozilla is looking to diversify its revenue sources, though, Baker said, and has taken some small steps.
"We did some small diversification in search, for example in Russia," using Google rival Yandex's services, she said. "We look at diversification, but we're not rushing into it."
And she's comfortable with today's funding situation because it doesn't force Mozilla to take Firefox in a direction it doesn't want to go.
"We have search in the product because we want it. We don't have any other discussions with Google about what the product is," she said. "The search and revenue relationship is completely distinct from the product development relationship."
Though Mozilla's revenue grew only at 5 percent from 2007 to 2008, compared to 12 percent the year before, Baker isn't concerned. "It matches our projections" of slow, steady growth, she said. "We're pretty much in line."
Digging into the financial statement, it should be noted that the foundation's $79 million in revenue is after a $7.8 million unrealized loss in the value of its investments. As the economy improves, it's possible those investments will recover some of their value.
The foundation is making more money than it loses. Expenses were $49 million for 2008, according to the financial statement.
"We have adequate resources to do what we have planned, plus save a little bit," Baker said. "Right now we're not bumping up against the ceiling. Our revenue is adequate to meet our needs. We try to be careful with money."
The Internal Revenue Service is scrutinizing Mozilla's corporate structure--a foundation with two taxable if not exactly for-profit subsidiaries. The foundation disclosed the scrutiny a year ago, and that investigation is continuing, Baker said.
"The IRS can be a very slow-moving organization. It's still an open discussion," she said, and the foundation is taking the matter seriously. "We don't have a clear idea what the IRS is thinking."
Two years ago, the Mozilla Foundation established its second taxable subsidiary, Mozilla Messaging, which focuses on the Thunderbird e-mail software and more recently on the Web-based Raindrop universal communications service. For now, that project gets its funding from the Firefox side of the house, but Baker plans to increase its financial focus once the near-final Thunderbird 3 is finished.
"The task now is to ship first Thunderbird 3. We expect to see that this year," Baker said. Mozilla overall is set up to be sustainable, not to be a money machine, but Mozilla Messaging will need to generate more revenue on its own eventually to help with that sustainability effort.
The Mozilla Foundation's revenue grew 5 percent to $79 million in 2008, with its Firefox search-ad deal with Google still the biggest benefactor, the organization said Thursday.
The figure is notable for an open-source effort, but the growth tapered off significantly. For 2007, by comparison, the Mozilla Foundation reported $75 million in revenue, a 12 percent increase over 2006.
Mozilla Chairman Mitchell Baker revealed the latest Mozilla figures on her blog Thursday.
Update: for further details and commentary from Baker, check this follow-up interview.
Firefox has won over about a quarter of the world's users of Web browsers, taking most of that share from Microsoft's still dominant Internet Explorer. The browser faces new challenges, though, in the form of newcomer Google Chrome and Microsoft's resurgent effort to improve Internet Explorer. On Wednesday, Microsoft showed off some elements of the forthcoming IE 9, and Thursday, Google released the source code underlying its Chrome OS, a browser-based operating system for lower-end computers.
Google supplies "the bulk" of the Mozilla Foundation's revenue through a deal that currently lasts through 2011, the foundation said. Under that deal, people performing searches through Firefox using the default Google search engine see and sometimes click on search ads at Google; Google and Mozilla share the resulting revenue. In 2007, Google supplied 89 percent of Mozilla's revenue.
Google isn't the only revenue source, though. Here's how Mozilla described its sources in an FAQ:
"The majority of this revenue is generated from the search functionality in Mozilla Firefox from partners such as Google, Yahoo, Amazon, eBay, and others. Mozilla takes in additional revenue from donations, online affiliate programs, the Mozilla Store, and income on our invested assets. In 2008, we expanded our Firefox partnerships with new firms such as Yandex (Russia Search), Canonical (Ubuntu), and Nokia (Mobile).
Intel Labs Europe is joining a handful of French institutions to investigate large-scale computing challenges that face today's information technology industry.
The Exascale Computing Research Center will investigate machines that can perform 1,000 times more calculations than today's top supercomputers, Intel said, and the chipmaker is spending millions of dollars on the three-year partnership.
The effort also includes Commissariat a l'Energie Atomique, Grand Equipement National de Calcul Intensif, and the Universite de Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines. Those organizations will jointly match Intel's investment, Intel said.
"France has taken a leading role in driving high-performance computing research in Europe. We chose to work with these three organizations because of their world-class software competency in exascale and high- performance computing," said Steve Pawlowski, general manager of the Intel Architecture Group's central architecture and planning, in a statement.
The move also raises the company's profile in a jurisdiction that's been tough on Intel. The chipmaker ended up on the losing end of a European Commission antitrust judgment, and is now appealing the resulting fine of 1.06 billion euros ($1.58 billion). Intel just settled a separate antitrust case brought by rival AMD.
Intel Labs Europe employs 900 researchers in Europe, the chipmaker said.
Canon's new S90 high-end compact camera.
(Credit: CNET)Adobe Systems released beta software on Wednesday to support raw images from Canon's higher-end new compact cameras, the Powershot S90 and G11, Olympus' rival E-P2, Panasonic's FZ38, and a host of SLRs.
The software updates are betas of Lightroom 2.6, the Camera Raw 5.6 plug-in for Photoshop CS4, and the DNG Converter 5.6. All the software uses the same raw-image processing engine.
Raw images provide more flexibility and image quality but require more processing; typically only higher-end cameras support raw file formats. Most folks are happy with JPEG, but many photography enthusiasts prefer raw.
It's a hassle, though: Adobe and various competitors spend a lot of energy reverse-engineering each new camera's format before software such as Lightroom, Aperture, or Picasa can open and edit the photos.
Raw images are the norm for SLRs. The new beta software supports raw images from Canon's higher-end EOS 7D, and Nikon's new professional-grade D3s, the Pentax K-x, and Sony's A500, A550, and A850. Also on the list are medium-format models from Mamiya and Leaf. For a full list, check the blog post announcement from Lightroom Product Manager Tom Hogarty.
The new software also corrects an error in Lightroom 2.5 and Camera Raw 5.5 that could mar images from some Sony, Olympus, and Panasonic and from various medium format digital camera backs. The glitch only affected people with PowerPC-based Macs.
Update 8:02 p.m. PST: As Michael Reichman observed on the Luminous Landscape site, Canon's S90 is a member of a newer breed of camera that corrects lens distortion on its own, making parallel lines parallel again. Naturally, I was curious if Adobe's raw processing techniques did the same, because the distortion can be pretty severe, and fixing that manually is impossible in Lightroom and a hassle in Photoshop.
So I asked Adobe. The answer: yes.
"The S90 raw support in the release candidates (Camera Raw 5.6 and Lightroom 2.6) provides distortion correction that allows our raw processing results to match the optical characteristics of the JPEG output and what's viewed on the camera LCD," Hogarty said.
With Internet Explorer 9, Microsoft showed Wednesday it's trying to retake the browser initiative.
IE remains the Net's dominant browser. But perversely, it became something of a technology underdog after Microsoft vanquished Netscape in the browser wars of the 1990s and scaled back its browser effort.
That left an opportunity for rivals to blossom--most notably Firefox, which now is used by a quarter of Web surfers, but also Apple's Safari, which now runs on Windows as well as Mac OS X, and Google's Chrome, which aims to make the Web faster and a better foundation for applications.
Microsoft has been pouring resources back into the IE effort, though, and at its Professional Developers Conference in Los Angeles, some fruits of that labor were on display. In particular, Windows unit president Steven Sinofsky showed off IE 9's new hardware-accelerated text and graphics.
The acceleration feature takes advantage of hitherto untapped computing power in a way that's more useful than other browser-boosting technology--Google's Native Client to directly employ PC's processor and Mozilla's WebGL for accelerated 3D graphics, for example--according to Dean Hachamovitch, general manager of Internet Explorer.
"This is a direct improvement to everybody's usage of the Web on a daily basis," Hachamovitch said in an interview after Sinofsky's speech. "Web developers are doing what they did before, only now they can tap directly into a PC's graphics hardware to make their text work better and graphics work better."
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Earlier in November, Firefox surpassed 25 percent usage share of Web browsers, according to Net Applications.
(Credit: Net Applications)Mozilla released a third beta of Firefox 3.6 on Wednesday, adding stability and performance features, and said it hopes to lock down the code soon for its first release candidate.
The new beta, for Windows, Mac, and Linux, includes a component directory lockdown that makes it harder for other software to meddle with the open-source browser's state by preventing that software from sidling into the same folder as the browser's own components. The result should be fewer crashes, said Mozilla's Johnathan Nightingale in a blog post, and Firefox still is open to third-party extensions via its official add-on mechanism.
The change should improve security, too, added another Mozilla programmer, Vladimir Vukecevic, who wrote in his own blog post that Mozilla is considering bringing the change to Firefox 3.5, too.
"Creating binary components to interface with the operating system or with other applications is fairly straightforward, though ultimately dangerous. Binary components have full access to the application and OS, and so can impact stability, security, and performance," Vukecevic said.
Also in the latest beta of 3.6 is a feature that lets the browser run some Web-based JavaScript programs asynchronously, which is to say without being so picky about the order the scripts run. This can improve the speed that Web pages load, Mozilla said.
The biggest Firefox 3.6 feature most folks will notice is Personas, the reskinning add-on that's now being built in. More than 10 million Personas have been downloaded so far, Suneel Gupta and Myk Melez of the Personas team said Wednesday.
Mozilla is working to release a final version of Firefox 3.6 before the end of the year, and one sign the project is wrapping up is that the developers are locking down the features and changes that can be added into the release candidate 1. Code freeze for RC1 is scheduled for Wednesday but might be at risk, a Mozilla planning site said this week.
Firefox is steadily gaining in use. Last week, Web traffic monitoring firm Net Applications announced Firefox cleared 25 percent share of those using browsers worldwide--not dethroning Internet Explorer by any means but still winning over new users. Mozilla estimates there are more than 300 million Firefox users total, and this week said there are more than 300,000 testers using the Firefox 3.6 beta
Google's Chrome, meanwhile, is appealing to some of the same browser enthusiasts who were Firefox's first users. One of its big selling points is speed, and Google is working on other ways to make the Web faster, too. Chrome gives it a vehicle to test such ideas out in the real world, a strategy that Apple, Opera, and Firefox have employed to advance the Web state of the art.
One Mozilla programmer, Alexander Limi, revealed a speedup technology called Resource Package for Mozilla, too, on Tuesday. His proposal calls for bundling many Web page elements up into a single compressed file that can be retrieved in a single Web-page request action. Browsers are limited in the number of such actions they can take in parallel, so consolidating the interactions can make pages load faster. The approach is backwards compatible with existing browsers that don't support the feature, he added.
"If the feedback is good we're likely to try and get this implemented for Firefox 3.7," said Mozilla evangelist Christopher Blizzard in a blog post Tuesday.
Salesforce Chatter gives a social-networking angle to the company's Web-based business services.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Salesforce.com on Wednesday announced a social networking service called Salesforce Chatter for its customers' in-house operations, giving a corporate flavor to a technology that's largely been for personal use.
Salesforce Chatter lets employees set up profiles to connect with coworkers, issue status updates to say what they're up to, and subscribe to feeds from people--and from applications. Also for collaboration, it lets people join groups to share updates and content. And the service integrates with today's two hot social-networking services, Twitter and Facebook.
Chief Executive Marc Benioff announced the service in San Francisco at the company's Dreamforce conference, which he said drew 19,000 attendees. Salesforce.com is a high-profile proponent of the idea of Web-based services, broadly called cloud computing.
In a statement, he said the service is working for his own company internally: "Why do I know more about strangers on Facebook than my own employees? Now, through Salesforce Chatter, my business is tweeting me. My employees can use the models they love to get the collaboration they need."
IT consulting and analysis firm Gartner expects social networking to catch on widely in corporations, and some services such as LinkedIn have a business angle.
Salesforce Chatter is due to arrive in 2010, the company said. It will be included in some paid services, but the company also will sell a specific Chatter Edition for $50 per user per month that includes Salesforce Chatter, Salesforce Content, and Force.com services.
The developer preview version of Chrome now promotes an as-yet unworking link to an extensions gallery.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Google is on the verge of launching a Web site to showcase its extensions to customize what its browser can do.
The company's latest developer preview edition, Chrome 4.0.249.0, promotes the feature on its opening screen and its new-tab page. "New! Google Chrome now has extensions and bookmark sync," the page reads, offering a link to a site that's not public yet, https://chrome.google.com/extensions. (Bookmark sync is already available.)
Extensions and support for Mac OS X and Linux are the headline features of Chrome 4.0. It's available as a beta for Windows, with Mac OS X and Linux beta availability expected in early December. According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta is planned for December 8 release and the stable release of Chrome 4.0 is due January 12.
A number of third-party galleries for Chrome extensions already are available, but programmers for the project have said on mailing lists that a Google site is planned. Earlier this year, Google shipped a version of Chrome that pointed to a collection of visual themes before the Chrome themes gallery was actually live to the public.
Extensions are a key asset of one Chrome competitor, Mozilla's Firefox; extensions permit people to customize the browser and add new features without burdening the overall project. Firefox is getting a new extensions framework, Jetpack, starting with version 3.7 due in the first half of 2010, and Mozilla has just launched its own Jetpack gallery.
Adobe Labs on Monday released test versions of two closely related foundations for Net-based applications, Flash Player 10.1 and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) 2.
Flash is widely used to bring streaming video, interactive graphics, and games to browsers; AIR, with Flash built in, is a foundation for other desktop applications. Both are instrumental to Adobe's effort to stay ahead of the gradually broadening feature set of HTML and related Web standards.
Notable Flash Player 10.1 is support for not just Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux computers, but also a variety of smartphones, though that support isn't yet built in. What is available is hardware-based decoding of the popular H.264 video format, which Adobe said improves performance and saves battery life. It also supports HTTP streaming linked with Adobe's content protection technology.
A version of Flash Player 10.1 for Palm Pre smartphones is expected later this year, Adobe said, and the final version for all systems is due in the first half of 2010.
AIR 2.0, which includes Flash Player 10.1, brings tighter integration with desktop computers. For example, it can communicate with some USB storage devices, monitor multitouch user interfaces, tap into microphone audio data, render Web pages using HTML5 and CSS version 3, and use UDP networking useful for in-game chat.
The final version of AIR 2 also is due in the first half of 2010, Adobe has said.
At the same time that Intel settled Advanced Micro Devices' antitrust lawsuit for $1.25 billion, the chipmaker settled another legal matter as well by hiring A. Douglas Melamed as its new top lawyer.
Melamed, who most recently worked as a partner at the law firm of WilmerHale, is expected to assume his new role this month, said a source familiar with the situation. Melamed has been based in Washington, D.C.
He has extensive antitrust experience, which could come in handy given Intel's remaining legal issues with the European Commission, the New York attorney general, and the Federal Trade Commission. From 1996 to 2001, he was acting assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department's Antitrust Division. Before that, he was the Justice Department's principal deputy assistant attorney general, where he was responsible for "civil non-merger and merger investigations and litigation involving most of the division's litigating sections; the division's appellate matters; policy matters involving, among others, the communications, electricity and tobacco industries; and international antitrust enforcement matters," according to WilmerHale.
Intel declined to comment on the matter. The Wall Street Journal reported the new hire Thursday.
Intel's previous general counsel, Bruce Sewell, left Intel to take the top legal job at Apple in September.
