Webware

It was the kind of detail that only experts in Web traffic analysis could love, but a technical change Google is making turns out to reveal something a lot more people care about: faster search results.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Specifically, Google is trying out a new way to present search results that uses the JavaScript programming language and the related Ajax interface technology, not just regular HTML, to display the information, Google spokesman Eitan Bencuya said.

The reason: with the Ajax-enhanced search results, JavaScript is used to load the actual search results beneath the unchanging boilerplate above, a tactic that means only the search results need to be loaded on subsequent searches.

"These guys are working hard to make things milliseconds faster. They're always experimenting," Bencuya said.

A few thousandths of a second--trivial, right? Wrong. Google found that shaving a smidgen off the time it takes to show results means that people search more often, and more searches means more opportunities to show search ads.

To provide fast results, Google already uses 700 to 1,000 servers to field each query, so a little speed-up on the browser side of the process can be a relatively cheap way to get an edge.

OK, then, how did this all come to light? On the Google Analytics blog Tuesday, team member Brett Crosby announced a change Google plans to make to the "referrer" code that it passes on to a Web site when somebody clicks a link in the search result.

Those who use their own Web analytics software to observe how their search ads are performing--such as tracking when a Google search sent visitors to their Web site, and what they were searching for when they did--will need to update their software to accommodate the change.

It's an arcane tweak, to be sure, but Alex Chitu of the unofficial Google Operating System blog put the pieces together on Wednesday, guessing that the change had to do with how Google presented its search engine results page.

Specifically, he dug up a March video post by Google's Matt Cutts explaining why a Google experiment in presenting search results had shut off referrer traffic in February.

Bencuya confirmed on Wednesday that the referrer change was indeed motivated by the need to fix the experiment's unintended side effect.

"We made this change so we can continue experimenting with different kinds of test results and not break links in the future," Bencuya said.

He wouldn't comment on plans to bring the Ajax change to a broader set of users.

Despite the fact that Microsoft has competing products of its own, some influential folks within the company have seen some merits of "Open Web" technology that's a standard part of browsers.

The interesting case in point is Microsoft Office 14, the upcoming version of one of the company's core products and profit engines. The software, due in beta form in 2009, is of Microsoft's highest-profile efforts to bring its desktop software power to the Web.

Chris Capossela

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Specifically, when it comes to the best tools for building rich Web applications, Microsoft has promoted its own Silverlight plug-in as superior to the lowly JavaScript that's built into browsers.

"I would use Silverlight any place starting new," Brad Becker, who as group product manager for rich client platforms at Microsoft helps oversee Silverlight, said in a 2008 interview. The online Google Docs applications are built using JavaScript-based technology called Ajax, but, he asked, "How many shops out there have the Ajax chops that Google does?"

However, Silverlight might well be easier to program and offer slicker results, but JavaScript has the advantage when it comes to ubiquity. Thus, Office 14 will be built on JavaScript, with optional Silverlight-based features for those who have the plug-in installed, said Chris Capossela, the senior vice president who oversees product management for Microsoft group that builds Office.

"The fundamental premise for Web apps is you want to be able to get at your Web apps no matter where you are," Capossela said in an interview.

Silverlight optional
Though Microsoft has expressed confidence Silverlight will spread broadly--by luring people to install Silverlight to watch the Olympics online for example--it's far from ubiquitous today. And Microsoft wants people to be able to use Office 14 online not just from their own computers, but also from friends' machines or airport kiosks where people don't have administrative privileges to install software, Capossela said.

Microsoft's demonstration of Web-based Excel. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Microsoft)

Silverlight will improve the online Office 14 interface when installed, though Capossela wouldn't share details of how beyond an earlier demonstration of zooming a document to high magnification. But, he argued, Microsoft doesn't have to reproduce all the features of ordinary Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote in its online incarnations.

"You're probably not going to work for three hours straight in a browser, but you're going to want to do some lightweight work no matter what machine you have," he said. And if you're editing documents on your own computer, "We already have something on your machine. It's called Office. It defeats the purpose of doing productivity in the browser."

Balancing act
The view sheds some light on the balance Microsoft hopes to strike between the regular and Web versions of Office. Although the Web version of Office will be available for free in ad-supported form and in a licensed or hosted form for companies willing to pay, the company obviously still considers the PC-based version of Office the cornerstone of the business.

Google, on the other hand, which has no desktop software cash cow either to protect or benefit from, has every incentive to make Google Docs as powerful as possible.

That means Google has a stronger incentive to support JavaScript advances.

JavaScript speed has become a horse race among most browser makers, with Google loudly trumpeting performance of its V8 JavaScript engine built into Chrome. Internet Explorer trails Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Mozilla's Firefox in JavaScript execution speed, though the new IE 8 does better than its predecessor.

JavaScript runs a lot more than just Google Docs on the Web, so Microsoft doesn't have an incentive to retard IE progress just to spite its rival. But the fact that the company does have a version of Office that runs natively on the PC means the company isn't as reliant on JavaScript advances.

Microsoft's demonstration of Web-based PowerPoint. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Microsoft)

"We can make a very good experience in the browser and we don't have to compete with the rich-client experience we have today," Capossela said.

Ultraparanoia
What will be most intriguing to see as Office 14 arrives is whether Microsoft's attitudes shift. After all, Office is widely used, and the company certainly doesn't want people to have a negative experience with online Office overall or online Office in IE when there are competitors. So there are incentives for the company to improve JavaScript in IE, even though they aren't as strong as Google's.

Done right, online Office could help cement Microsoft's power as cloud computing arrives, bringing advantages such as the ability to let multiple people simultaneously edit the same document. Done wrong, it could yield power to Google as it seeks to expand its search power into other domains.

But though Microsoft may not be the first to the cloud with online productivity tools, don't expect it to be complacent. The Office business successfully navigated the transition from software running on isolated PCs to software that relies on a server for e-mail access or collaboration, Capossela said, and the company is paying close attention to the cloud transition.

"The use of these Web apps today is incredibly small," Capossela said. However, "we always feel ultraparanoid about missing out on something."

Ajax DocumentViewer has released a browser helper tool that allows users to view any document in the app's quick preview option. Whenever users find a PDF or Microsoft file type in their browser, they can highlight the link and view it in the Ajax DocumentViewer without downloading it. The free tool is available now and doesn't require any registration.

Acquia, a company that provides open-source software for the Drupal content management system, announced the public beta release of its search tool Wednesday. Those who want to use it can download it from Acquia's site and install it as a module on any Drupal 6 site. According to the company, the search will provide navigation, content recommendations, and configurable results weighting. It's built on a redundant hosted service infrastructure, requiring no servers to deploy or manage. The public beta is free and available now with an Acquia Network subscription.

In other Acquia news, the company also announced that its board has appointed Tom Erickson as chief executive officer. Erickson is a founding board director and has served as chairman of the company since October. Prior to his work with Acquia, he was the CEO of Systinet, a company that was acquired in 2006 for its online service technology. Jay Batson, the former CEO of Acquia, will continue in an executive management role at the company.

Zynga, a social-gaming company that develops mobile apps, announced Wednesday that it has launched Scramble Live for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The company, which also provides the same game for Facebook, will allow iPhone users to play with Facebook users and other players who have the app installed on their devices. Scramble Live is available now for $4.99.

Conveneer, a mobile platform developer, announced Wednesday that it has raised $4.5 million in a round of funding that was led by Industrifonden. According to the company's executives, they plan to put the capital to use on a new mobile platform, which aims at making data on mobile phones accessible on the Web.

Docuter is a free online document host that launched in early January. Like Scribd, Docstoc (which is currently down), and others, it lets you upload documents from your hard drive or a URL. These can be viewed on the site or embedded in Web pages like what I've done below.

Docuter's claim to fame is that it supports "over 200" different types of documents (here's a list). This includes image files, and soon it will include audio and video files. Like Scribd, it lets you upload files of any size, which is nice for uncompressed, image-heavy PDFs, compared to Docstoc's 50MB limit.

The technology is built on top of the Ajax Document Viewer, a service companies can install on their own servers for hosting documents internally or with clients. Coming soon will be support for adding annotations and redactions on top of the document. These will be stored on Docuter's servers and will be separate from the source document. Users will also soon be able to lock down a document to keep users from saving and printing.

If you're looking for a social document-sharing experience, Docuter may not be for you. It does not have a catalog of publicly published documents, or a way to search through anything Docuter members have made public. It's wickedly fast though, both for uploading and processing. The two PDFs I uploaded were ready to view (and share) immediately, which is handy in a pinch.

Updated at 2:40 p.m. PDT with more details about Firefox 3.1 features.

Firefox 3.1 will run many Web-based applications such as Gmail faster through incorporation of a feature called TraceMonkey that dramatically speeds up programs written in JavaScript, Mozilla said Friday.

JavaScript has been very broadly used to add pizzazz or flexibility to Web pages over the years, but in recent years, it's also become the plumbing for many rich Internet applications. However, because JavaScript has been hobbled by pokey performance, Web-based applications often struggled to work as responsively as "native" software running directly on PCs, and programmers writing Web applications have often turned to other options, such as Adobe Systems' Flash and Flex.

Now Mozilla hopes to change the balance of power in JavaScript's favor.

"TraceMonkey is a project to bring native code speed to JavaScript," said Mike Shaver, Mozilla's interim vice president of engineering, adding that JavaScript performance nearly doubles compared to Firefox 3.0, based on the SunSpider test of JavaScript performance. That speeds up many basic tasks, but it also brings image editing and 3D graphics into JavaScript's abilities, he said.

On Thursday, Mozilla programmers built TraceMonkey into the latest developer version of the open-source Web browser, and it will appear in the next released test version, which likely will be the first beta of Firefox 3.1, Shaver said. Firefox 3.1 is due in final form by the end of the year, though Mozilla is willing to let the schedule slip a bit, if necessary.

TraceMonkey dramatically improves the speed of many JavaScript operations. (Click to enlarge.)

(Credit: Mozilla)

JavaScript execution speed can make surfing the Web snappier, so naturally, it's a key part of the resurgent browser wars between Microsoft's Internet Explorer, Mozilla's Firefox, Apple's Safari, and Opera. "We're as aware as anybody that the market is competitive again," Shaver said.

The SunSpider JavaScript test shows a boost of 83 percent, according to programmer and JavaScript pioneer Brendan Eich, who has worked on TraceMonkey and blogged about it on Friday. However, that speed test is an artificial benchmark that is an imperfect reflection of actual JavaScript applications such as Yahoo's Zimbra e-mail software.

Another illustration of TraceMonkey speed is a video of photo editing. Contrast and brightness adjustments take about 100 milliseconds instead of more than 700.

Shaver discussed TraceMonkey on his own blog too.

TraceMonkey explained
TraceMonkey's name is a cross between SpiderMonkey, Mozilla's current engine for interpreting JavaScript code, and a technique called tracing developed at the University of California at Irvine by Andreas Gal and others. Gal is TraceMonkey's lead architect, Shaver said.

TraceMonkey is what's called a just-in-time compiler, one type of technology that solves the problem of converting programs written by humans into instructions a computer can understand.

Most software that runs on people's computers is already compiled in advance into what's called a binary file, but JavaScript usually is interpreted line by line as it runs, a slower process. "We're getting close to the end of what you can do with an interpreter," Shaver said.

A just-in-time compiler, though, creates that binary file on the fly as the code arrives--when a person visits a new Web page, and the browser encounters JavaScript, for example.

TraceMonkey concentrates only on translating selected high-priority parts of software, though. By tracing and recording JavaScript program execution, TraceMonkey finds loops of repeated activity where programs often spend a lot of time. These loops of actual software behavior then are compiled into native instructions the computer can understand.

In contrast, some compilers translate the entire program, a burdensome process that involves mapping all possible paths the computer can take through the code and trying to figure out which are most important. Tracing technology, based on the actual execution of the program, concentrates only on the areas that actually occupy the computer.

"It lets us focus our optimization energy on the parts of the program that matter most," Shaver said.

That concentration means that TraceMonkey doesn't require a lot of memory or a slow-loading plug-in, Shaver said. And it also means that it's good for mobile devices, one of Mozilla's main focuses for browser development.

There's still a lot of work to be done in improving Web-based applications, though. Mozilla's next priority is improving the DOM--the document object model elements of Web browsers that are in charge of drawing and manipulating the Web page overall.

Although TraceMonkey currently is built into the new developer version of Firefox 3.1, it's disabled by default to begin with. "We did that because we want to get wider feedback," Shaver said.

Also in Firefox 3.1
Other significant changes will arrive in Firefox 3.1, Shaver said.

One is support for threading by JavaScript programs. Threads are instruction sequences, and newer multicore processors are able to run multiple threads simultaneously. Software support for that will mean JavaScript programs can execute some tasks in the background better, Shaver said.

Another is the built-in ability to play music encoded with the Ogg Vorbis format and video encoded with the Ogg Theora format. These formats, while not nearly as widely used or as supported as rivals such as MP3, are free from proprietary constraints such as patents, Shaver said, and therefore can be added to an open-source project such as Firefox.

"We're excited to bring unencumbered, truly open-source video to the Web," Shaver said. The support also works on all operating systems Firefox supports.

Mozilla will start encouraging Firefox users more actively to move to the current version soon. In about the next two weeks, Firefox 2 users will start getting messages to upgrade to version 3, Shaver said.

Currently, when copies of Firefox 2 check Mozilla servers to see if there's an update, the servers don't say to move all the way to version 3, so users must manually update.

"We're looking at doing that in the next two weeks," Shaver said. "The majority of users are still on Firefox 2."

Google announced two services Thursday that programmers can use to build services into Web sites that employ a site user's location.

The first is a tool for Web sites built with the Ajax programming method. The Ajax client location property provides Web sites with a rough estimate of a user's location based on his or Internet Protocol address, said Google engineer Steve Block on the Google Code blog. The property can be seen in action in the "news by state" feature on Google's 2008 election site API (application programming interface).

Second is an expected change to endow Google's Gears software with the ability to employ more detailed location information. This Geolocation API is only available to browsers with the Gears plug-in installed; Gears enables a variety of features such as offline browsing that make browsers a better foundation for rich Web applications.

"On mobile devices with Gears installed, the Geolocation API can use the cell-ID of nearby cell towers or on-board GPS (if either is available) to improve the position fix. In the near future, we'll be adding data from your Wi-Fi connection to improve accuracy even further, on both desktop and mobile," Block said.

Not everybody wants Google to know where they are, though, and Google says the Geolocation API takes this into account.

"The privacy of users' location information is extremely important. The first time your site calls the Geolocation API to request a user's location, that user will be shown a permissions dialog where they can choose to allow or deny your site access," Block said. "Users can change that decision at any time via the 'Gears settings' dialog in the browser menu. Google does not keep location information about users when your site uses the Geolocation API."

If ever something was neither fish nor fowl, it's Goosh, a Web-based command-line interface for Google.

On the one hand, Goosh creator Stefan Grothkopp shows off the power of Web 2.0 applications, with the browser becoming much more than a mere vessel for surfing from one hyperlink to another. People type into the browser window, and Goosh interprets their requests, runs them through Google's services, and displays the result.

With Goosh--short for Google shell--typing "web asparagus" retrieves a textual listing of the top four Google search results for the vegetable. Typing "translate en de cat" returns "Katze." Typing "lucky venerable bede" takes you to the top-ranked search result for the Northumbrian monk and scholar.

On the other hand--it's a command-line interface, for goodness sake!

CLIs are adapted more to the computer's way of thinking than to an average person's. But they continue to thrive with technical folks such as programmers or administrators of Unix and Linux machines. Mac OS X, with Unix underpinnings, has a command line, and Microsoft Windows does, too.

I have a soft spot in my heart for the command line, though my vocabulary is tiny and I'm no great master of piped output. What's potentially more interesting is if, as Mashable suggests, Goosh was endowed with external hooks so it could be usable in instant-messaging or other applications.

I like Goosh, though I have a couple beefs with the beta service. For one thing, it would be nice if there were a blinking cursor after the prompt; I only saw one some of the time. For another, using the "lucky" or "video" command performs some browser slight-of-hand that makes it impossible to go navigate back to Goosh.

Goosh gives a Web-based command-line interface to Google.

(Credit: Goosh)

SAN FRANCISCO--Dion Almaer and Ben Galbraith, founders of Ajaxian, took the stage at the Google IO conference here Wednesday morning to talk about one of the technologies that has helped define Web 2.0, and is of course their area of expertise: Ajax.

The technology is one of the things that made Gmail stand out among its other Web mail brethren, with messages and an entire in-box that would load and open without turning the entire page blank--a large leap ahead of preexisting Web technologies.

The Ajaxians talked about a multitude of technologies, from the browser to the plug-ins that go with it.

(Credit: Josh Lowensohn/CNET Networks)

While the two mainly discussed design and the nitty gritty of coding, they stressed the ever-changing landscape of Web programming, and what users have begun to expect out of the apps they use. Examples include Google's suggest-as-you-type search box, which has since been implemented on the mobile variants for the iPhone and upcoming Android platform, as well as popular shopping sites like Apple's online store.

They also went into setting up Web applications to work like the desktop applications we're used to. One of the main cases they brought up is when users want to undo something they've done inside of a Web app. Since user data is typically just rewritten right to the server, whoever has designed the app needs to make sure they set up some sort of history file that can be called up in case of disaster.

The solution? A high level of coding that runs through Google's Gears service that does all that data crunching in the background while you go about your business. You can see something similar in place in Google Docs and Spreadsheets and Box.net, which will keep copies and revisions of your files, even if you've changed them hundreds of times.

So what's in store for the future of Ajax? Almaer and Galbraith say it's all about the browsers. One they say is leading the pack is Apple's Safari, which has a handful of new built-in animations and effects to allow for easy UI eye candy, reflections, and rounded corners that require very little coding effort by developers.

Also in the fray is Mozilla, which has a handful of "monkey-themed" initiatives that are trying to add the most popular and powerful codes and make the software be able to run them faster and better. Also mentioned was IE8 with its upcoming standards compliant-promised effort which Microsoft is currently beta testing.

Google is expected to update its Google Web Toolkit (GWT) this week at its new developer conference, according to eWeek.

GWT is designed to help programmers write richer Internet applications using a beefed-up JavaScript programming technique called Ajax; the project was released as open-source software in 2006 with version 1.3, and the current version is 1.4. There are several GWT talks at the Google I/O conference.

Google has been working on improving GWT's performance, Java compatibility, and developer tools, eWeek said.