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Tuesday brought a mixed bag of Microsoft news. On the Daily Debrief, I sit down with CNET News senior writer Ina Fried to discuss the good, the bad, and the downright embarrassing.

Let's start with the good. The company announced the pricing of the new, pay-as-you-go business apps for the Web. The whole suite of business tools, which includes a variety of office communication tools, will run you $15 a month. Individually, the apps will go for $3 a pop. Ina suspects these tools will be very handy for professionals on the go or for companies who choose not to employ IT support.

The bad and embarrassing news is all wrapped into one. On Tuesday, the company launched the Vista Compatibility Center. Yes, you read that right. We're still talking about Vista, the operating system that Microsoft released 18 months ago. The need for the Center speaks volumes about consumers' slow adoption of the OS. Ina makes the point that if this were Apple, the company would have already moved on to a new cat. Oh, and to add insult to injury, the online Center was down and unavailable for most of the morning.

LimitNone, a small software development company, is seeking nearly $1 billion in damages in a lawsuit that accuses Google of reneging on a partnership with the small company and misappropriating its trade secrets for its Google Apps online service.

Specifically, the suit concerns LimitNone software called gMove designed to let people move e-mail, contacts, and calendar information stored in Microsoft Outlook to Google's online service. Google initially helped LimitNone develop, promote, and sell the product, assuring LimitNone it wouldn't offer a competing product, but then reversed course by giving away its own tool, Google E-mail Uploader, to premier-level Google Apps customers, the lawsuit said.

"With gMove priced at $19 per copy and Google's prediction that there were potentially 50 million users, Google deprived LimitNone of a $950 million opportunity by offering Google's competitive product for free as a part of its 'premier' Google Apps package," the lawsuit, filed Monday in Cook County Circuit Court in Illinois.

Google didn't immediately comment for this story.

LimitNone had shared confidential technical and sales forecast details with Google, the lawsuit said.

"Without Google's knowledge and use of the gMove trade secrets and confidential information, Google would not have been able to solve its longstanding Microsoft Outlook to Gmail conversion problem," the lawsuit said. "At a minimum, Google's access to the internal workings of gMove allowed it to gain a significant head start on designing the inner workings for a competing application."

Google's product "copied gMove's look, feel, functionality, and distribution model, including several unique and proprietary operations," the suit said.

And in May 2008, Google changed its user interface, breaking gMove compatibility and forcing the company to provide customer refunds.

The complaint alleges Google misappropriated trade secrets from LimitNone and violated fraud law by inducing LimitNone to share confidential information Google used to develop its competing product.

One advantage of cloud computing is that it's an expert's job to keep the centralized computing infrastructure up and running. But even experts have problems, and that's what's going on Tuesday with Google's App Engine.

The service has been having outages Tuesday, according to a mailing list posting Tuesday. App Engine, launched in April and still in "preview release" mode, is a service that lets people create interactive Web applications written in the Python programming language.

"We've experienced several outages during the past 12 hours, the most recent of which started at 6:30 a.m. PDT and is still ongoing. During these outages, a significant percentage of requests resulted in errors. The errors are related to usage of the Datastore," the note said. "We're working hard to determine the cause of these outages and will continue updating as we make progress."

Google didn't immediately respond to a request for comment about the issue.

Update 5:25 p.m. PDT: Google fixed the problem, according to an update notice Google pointed out to me.

"At around 1:40 p.m. we were able to isolate the issue, and requests are currently serving normally," the update said. "This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries. We have isolated the bug and we're currently working on a fix. Going forward, we're also working to further isolate queries so that in the future a bug like this won't affect the stability of the system as a whole."

(Via TechCrunch.)

Update 12:23 p.m. PDT: The official Firefox 3 download site is live; the record-setting attempt began at 11:16 a.m. PDT. Update 10:53 a.m PDT: See this separate blog post on the Mozilla download site troubles. Update 10:02 a.m. PDT: Mozilla is having some technical issues with the site but expects the download to be available shortly. Update 6:43 a.m. PDT: I added the scheduled launch time, 10 a.m. PDT.

Mozilla plans to release Firefox 3 on Tuesday, and the open-source project is opening a new front in the browser wars.

As the Web transforms from a static repository of content into a foundation for applications such as word processors and graphics editors, browsers are growing up from mere gateways into the tool that makes those applications possible. In this new era, it's Firefox--the heir to the Netscape legacy--that's going up against the victor of the last era, Internet Explorer.

"It gives you the horsepower you need to experience rich Internet apps as they should be from a performance standpoint," said Damon Sicore, Mozilla's director of platform engineering, mentioning Gmail and Google Maps specifically as applications where users don't want to wait. "As these apps get bigger and more complicated, faster browsers are going to become more critical."

The Firefox 3 'awesome bar' can give faster access to Web addresses.

Specifically, it takes 60 milliseconds to change Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3, Sicore said, compared with 413 milliseconds for IE 7 and 227 for Firefox 2.

Microsoft is toiling away on IE8, though, with a first beta released and a second scheduled to emerge in August. The program has been reworked to improve performance, said Dean Hachamovitch, Microsoft's general manager in charge of IE. With no prompting, he mentioned Gmail as one area where the company has received favorable feedback, and he clearly welcomes the competition.

"IE is the browser of choice for more people on the Web than anything else," Hachamovitch said. "There's an all-around quality, whether in ease of use, reliability, the security we stand by, that makes it a better choice."

Vying for share
Mozilla is a force to be reckoned with, with 18 percent market share to 74 for IE, according to Net Applications statistics. That's enough to ensure that major Web sites have to support Firefox.

Apple's Safari--now available for Windows, too, is in third place with 6 percent share. The next contender, Opera, has less than 1 percent, but it's scrappy: "The browser is the single most important piece of software made today, so innovation is incredibly important if you want to extend the reach of the Web," the company said in a statement.

Firefox is the second-ranked browser in market share for May 2008.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Microsoft knows the stakes are high, with a richer Web coming into being. "It is a particularly fertile period. A bunch of pieces started lining up magically in the last couple years to get some innovation going here," Hachamovitch said

Firefox isn't shying away from competition either. To try to heighten its profile, Mozilla hopes to set a 24-hour download record with Firefox 3, which has been code-named Gran Paradiso. The download period is scheduled to begin at 10 a.m. PDT.

Perhaps a more fruitful alternative to whipping fans into a lather through, though, would be to court business users.

"Mozilla needs to show corporations some love," said Forrester analyst Thomas Mendel in a recent report. "Large-scale, companywide deployments are not yet typical. Mozilla continues to expend little energy on wooing IT managers to formally adopt Firefox," for example by offering paid support services, he said.

Firefox 3 features
Faster performance is one Firefox 3 improvement Sicore points to. Two others are better memory handling and what's known as the "awesome bar."

To test memory use, Firefox programmers load 500 pages from top sites on the Web then closes and opens them thousands of times. Through that process, Mozilla stamped out many memory "leaks" under which Firefox 2 wouldn't relinquish memory once it was no longer needed, Sicore said. The company also reduced the amount of memory the browser requires overall.

But memory is hidden under the covers. Front and center is awesome bar, officially called the Smart Location Bar, which lets users type real words rather than sometimes abstruse URL addresses to call up Web sites.

For example, typing "maps" into the bar on my computer retrieves a list of some recent stories I've written involving maps as well as recent maps I've requested off the Internet. That's handy for retrieving recently visited Web sites quickly. Another example of how the feature worked well: I was trying to relocate a Web site I used to monitor Amazon.com's Web site performance, and typing "Amazon" into the bar showed the site--GrabPerf--as one of the options.

Mozilla uses its own formula to determine what results pop up in the list, weighting by factors such as how recently and how frequently you visited various sites. Typing "n" gets me to News.com in no time flat, but your own results will vary according to your browsing habits.

Firefox 3 has been steadily climbing in usage through its testing period.

(Credit: Net Applications)

The awesome bar has its detractors who'd like the feature to be optional. (Tweakers can disable the awesome bar by editing their Firefox configuration.)

Among other features in Firefox 3:

• A prominent warning when a user tries to open a page that has been shown to host malware such as viruses or spyware or that's involved in phishing--the attempt to fool people into entering personal information into a counterfeit Web site.

•  Offline data access, a feature that can make Web applications usable even when the network is unavailable. That's a potential boon for Web apps, but future versions of IE 8 and Safari also support the technology.

Web-based protocol handlers, which lets the browser launch a Web application rather than a PC program for certain actions such as a Web site "mailto" link that otherwise would create an e-mail in software such as Outlook.

• The Cairo graphics engine that lays the foundation for better direct integration with a computer's video hardware. "Video inside the browser is coming," Sicore said.

• animated PNG (Portable Network Graphics), another nail in the coffin of the GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) image type.

• A better full-page zoom feature that devotes maximum screen real estate to the browser. Moving the mouse pointer over a thin strip across the top of the screen temporarily pulls down the browser controls.

• A star button to quickly add bookmarks; double-clicking opens a dialog box that lets users describe bookmarks with tags.

• Support for Windows Vista's parental controls.

• And better support for Mac OS X. For example, it has a Mac-native appearance and has been re-plumbed internally to use Apple's Cocoa technology, a necessary step on the road toward 64-bit support.

Plug-in problems
One of Firefox's claims to fame is the wide collection of add-ons that are available. It's been a bumpy ride coaxing coders to support the new browser, though.

Some major add-ons now have arrived, including Yahoo's Delicious and the Firebug tool for Web site developers.

However, not everybody made the leap. One is Google Browser Sync, which synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, and other settings across multiple installations of Firefox 2. "Phasing out Google Browser Sync was a tough call, but we have decided to focus our efforts on other products, like Toolbar and Gears, that also extend the capability of multiple browsers," Google said of the Labs project in a statement. Happily, there are other alternatives--I like Foxmarks.

Of the top add-ons, "the majority have upgraded 3.0," Sicore said. The laggards will have a grace period "on the order of months" before Firefox 2.0 versions will automatically suggest installing the upgrade.

Google Docs, the online office suite from the search giant, now has some limited but still useful support for PDF files.

PDF files now show in Google Docs' interface.

People using the service now can upload and view documents encoded with the widely used and now standardized Portable Document Format initially created by Adobe Systems. People also can transfer PDFs stored on the Web. (Look below for a screenshot showing the two-pane PDF view.)

The move, announced on the Google Docs blog Friday, isn't much of a surprise. In addition to the fact that it makes eminent sense, close observers already had begun seeing signs that hinted at imminent Google Docs PDF support.

Google Docs, still in beta testing, competes with Microsoft Office but is relatively primitive when it comes to feature support.

However, because it's Web-based, Google can add new features relatively easily; users simply use the Web site, and they appear, one of the chief advantages of the software-as-a-service approach. And given that Google's three big areas of focus are search, ads, and applications, expect lots of resources to be poured into this area.

I found the PDF support snappy and very handy. However, my quick test of the service showed some rough spots with the PDF support.

For example, I couldn't find a way to zoom in or out, which definitely is essential, even on ordinary 1024x768-pixel screens. Being able to hide the minidocument page view pane on the right, which lets you scroll quickly through the document, might help.

Search also doesn't scour the contents of PDF files, a feature whose significance Google, of all companies, presumably understands.

Editing has a long way to go. You can't type text in a PDF, though you can export other Google Docs files to PDF. And copying uses a peculiar box to select text, not the familiar cursor with highlighted words.

You'd better have a screen at least 1024 pixels wide. Most of us with PCs these days do, of course, but what about support for mobile devices?

I also didn't like one user interface moment: the site offered a very unhelpful error page when I tried to upload a file exceeding the 10MB size limit.

Overall, though this is a big step in the right direction.

An example of Google Docs showing a PDF file.

SAN FRANCISCO--The blogosphere is likely exploding with feedback to Apple CEO Steve Jobs' Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address Monday, including his introduction of the new iPhone 3G with GPS and a low-end price of $199.

But we thought we'd go old-school and get some real-life response from real-life developers outside Moscone West, where the conference is taking place this week.

No one was surprised by Jobs' announcements, but they were plenty excited, especially about the lower iPhone pricing, which they say will help get the device into more consumers' hands. They were also excited about Apple's new iteration of its .Mac service, MobileMe--although the name certainly didn't roll off their tongues.

Click the link below to hear interviews with Scott Klauminzer of Seattle, Ralf Mandt-Rauch of Germany, Guy Horrocks and Layton Duncan of New Zealand, Stefan Seiz of Germany, and Claudine Beaumont, who works for The Daily Telegraph in London.

AUDIO

Geek on the Street: Steve Jobs keynote
What WWDC attendees thought of the Apple CEO's iPhone announcements.
Download mp3 (2.37MB)

In March, Apple CEO Steve Jobs announced an upcoming system for downloading third-party applications for the iPhone. At the Worldwide Developers Conference on Tuesday, he brought a parade of developers onstage to show off exactly what those new apps can do.

The apps range from monkey slinging to medical imaging and should be available sometime in early July (along with the iPhone 2.0 software required to run it), according to Apple representatives. Follow the jump to check out demos of each of the applications announced during the keynote speech. We'll update this post with more video demos as they come.

Google plans to release later this week a near-final version of the Google Web Toolkit 1.5, software designed to ease the onerous parts of writing sophisticated Web-based software.

GWT 1.5 includes support for Java 5, a version of the Sun Microsystems programming language released in 2006, and produces software that runs about 1.2 to 2 times faster for complex Web applications, said Bruce Johnson, Google's engineering manager for GWT.

The new software fuels Google's ambition to make the Web a much richer software environment--an ambition on display Wednesday and Thursday at the Google I/O conference in San Francisco. Johnson believes the Web is already "really close" to the abilities of personal computers as a software foundation.

"We've observed that there's no question anymore whether you're going to target the browser or a desktop app. For almost any new exciting app, you're going to target the browser," Johnson said. "For the right set of applications, it's already better than what you can do on the desktop. For extremely low-latency applications, like video editing, I think we're still a couple years out."

Google is trying to shift people toward the Web, hoping to profit indirectly by spurring more Internet searches, its main source of revenue. It's also got some direct but much smaller businesses, including subscription fees for corporate use of online Google Apps such as its spreadsheet and calendar. Also at Google I/O, the company is revealing the fees for heavy users of its new Google App Engine service to host Web applications.

App Engine, which was unveiled in April and now has about 60,000 approved users, is free for starter applications requiring 500MB of storage and network bandwidth to support about 5 million page views a month, Google said. On Wednesday, the service will be open to the 150,000 who've signed up so far and to any others who want to join.

Beyond that, Google will charge 10 to 12 cents per hour of processor core work, plus 15 to 18 cents per gigabyte of storage per month, plus 11 to 13 cents per gigabyte of data transferred out, plus 9 to 11 cents per gigabyte of data transferred in. The fees are similar in broad structure to that of a competing service from Amazon.

GWT: Doing the grunt work
GWT lets programmers write their code in Java, but then converts that raw material into the JavaScript language that's built into Web browsers. One advantage of GWT is that it can handle the significant differences in how different browsers handle JavaScript, Google argues.

"Not all the JavaScript standards are interpreted in different ways," Johnson said. "The truth is it's a minefield."

GWT supports most modern browsers, including recent versions of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari (and other Webkit-based browsers such as that of the iPhone and Google Android), and Opera.

Sun introduced more changes to Java with the current Java 6, but it was Java 5 that introduced several changes to the language. Among them (brace yourself if you're not a coder): generics, enumerated types, annotations, enhanced for/loop syntax, and autoboxing.

Supporting those newer features makes GWT less different from other Java programming environments, cuts down on opportunities for programmer mistakes, and can help GWT produce faster JavaScript, Johnson said.

GWT uses the Eclipse project's JDT to understand people's Java code, then adds a Google-engineered component that translates it into JavaScript, Johnson said.

It's open-source software, and "We get dozens and dozens of patches" from outside contributors. Among those in the current release is support for right-to-left languages such as Arabic.

Just because Google so obviously loves the idea of cloud computing, don't think the company doesn't care about what happens at the other end of the network connection, too.

As former President Bill Clinton used to say, there's a third way: Google wants to improve technology on both the server in the cloud and on the client running a Web browser. The search giant will detail its approach to at least 2,800 developers paying to attend the first Google I/O conference this week in San Francisco.

Vic Gundotra, head of developer evangelism and open-source projects at Google

(Credit: Google)

There's been a long-running tension among computing companies about where the brains of the computing operation reside. In early years, central servers did all the work and people connected through "dumb terminals" that did nothing but display text. Then the personal computer revolution took off, and companies such as Microsoft whose software ran on these "clients" prospered. Now it's the Internet era, and Google wants a little of both.

"We are going to make the cloud more accessible. And we're going to make the browser more capable," said Vic Gundotra, Google's vice president of engineering in charge of developer evangelism and open-source software.

Clouds and clients and connections, oh my
Google isn't showing its Google I/O cards beforehand, but here's my translation of Gundotra's opening keynote themes--"Client, Connectivity, and the Cloud"--into some specific projects under way at Google. For client, think Google Gears for running Web applications even when offline. For cloud, think Google App Engine, a site to house Web applications. And for connectivity, think Android, the mobile phone software package.

The Android software itself is under development at Google, with help from a number of partners in the Open Handset Alliance. To make that project successful--in particular its promise as an open foundation with a vibrant programming community--there needs to be software for Android, too.

Google has been trying to jump-start the Android developer program. It launched a developer contest that drew 1,788 submissions. I'm guessing Google will announce the winner from the top 50 finalists (and click here for a PDF of the top 50 Android apps in slideware form).

A sample Android application, AndroidGlobalTime

(Credit: Google)

More newsworthy, though, is the likelihood of a second software development kit (SDK) for Android. "We are working on those things in the next day or so," Gundotra said of the SDK last week. "Android is a big portion of how we make pervasive connectivity useful."

Google vs. Microsoft
We in the media are doubtless too susceptible to narratives that pit one company against another, but in Google's case, there really is a big rivalry with Microsoft. The search giant is trying to make into reality the fear Microsoft had in the 1990s about Netscape, that the Web browser would supplant the operating system as the way people used their computers.

Gundotra has seen it from both sides. Before joining Google in 2007, he was general manager for platform evangelism at Microsoft, the culmination of a 15-year stint at the company.

But does Google want to dominate the Web platform the way Microsoft has with the operating system platform? Emphatically not, said Gundotra, who took pains to note that the I/O in Google I/O stands for "innovation in the open."

"Today, the most interesting and dominant platform is not the closed, proprietary platforms of the past, but the open Web...It's the platform adopted by all of us because it isn't controlled by any of us," Gundotra said. "Google's motivation is to move the Internet forward as fast as we can."

That's not to say Google isn't interested in bringing home the bacon. But its Web platform work has only an indirect connection to Google's revenue and profits.

Gundotra repeated what's become a familiar refrain to me as I've asked various Google executives about how their initiatives make money: "We have an economic reason to move (the Web) forward. As it gets richer, better apps, it gets more users. More users using more apps leads to more Google searches, and that leads to more revenue for us," he said.

Android is another target aimed at Microsoft. It will become freely available open-source software--or at least 8.6 million of its 11 million lines of code will be--with the specific intent of providing an alternative to Microsoft's mobile version of Windows. Wind River Systems wants to profit from it directly by helping phone companies build it into their products, but Google thus far has voiced no such ambition.

Lighting a fire under Web 2.0
App Engine and Gears together are centerpieces of Google's attempt to bring the Web alive, and we can expect some action there at the conference, too.

But developers are likely to be disappointed in hearing about one area in which they're hungry for news: support for other programming languages besides Python in App Engine. Java, Ruby, PHP, and Perl support are the top four requests in the App Engine issue tracker, and JavaScript, C#, and ColdFusion Markup Language are in the top 25.

"You can assume from that ranking what we're working on, but not what we'll announce next week," Gundotra said. And he wouldn't offer a specific time frame. "We're actively working on it. It's difficult for us to know until development gets further along."

The company is pleased with the progress so far. It's granted App Engine access to 60,000 developers so far, said Tom Stocky, director of product management for developer products.

Gundotra promises that App Engine isn't a lock-in strategy to lure application developers irreversibly to Google's part of the cloud.

"It is hosting the same open LAMP stack people are used to," he said, referring to the combination of the Linux operating system, Apache Web server software, MySQL database software, and Perl, Python, and PHP programming languages to run Web applications themselves. "If you decide you don't want to use it, you could easily revert back to using your own data center."

Well, maybe not easily. App Engine ties into the Google-only BigTable service for housing data. But the company is working on an export ability for data, and there's an open-source implementation of BigTable, Stocky said.

Giving Gears
The company claims to be equally giving with Google Gears, an open-source project that Google released in beta version to enable richer Internet applications. Specifically, it lets browsers store data better in a local database, work offline, synchronize once they're online again, and run JavaScript more efficiently.

It's hard to find Google Gears used beyond Google Docs, Zoho's competing online office applications, and Google Reader. Gundotra is happy to declare the project a success in another way, though: its influence on version 5 of HTML. Indeed, a draft of the HTML 5 specification includes interfaces for handling database storage and offline work.

"You're right on the cusp of seeing a slew of apps come out that use the HTML 5 and Gears features that redefine what a Web app can do," Gundotra said. "We're working to drive that innovation, and also to drive that back into standards...We think we contributed to the evolution of the Web."