Webware

After more than five years as a publicly available test version, Gmail shed its beta label in July. Now one feature key to the Net giant's cloud-computing aspirations, offline access to Gmail, also has grown up less than a year after its debut.

"Offline Gmail is graduating from Labs and becoming a regular part of Gmail," Google programmer Aaron Whyte announced the change Monday in a blog post.

Offline Gmail support, which relies on a Google browser plug-in called Gears, lets people read, search, organize, and compose e-mail even when there's no Net connection; sent messages are queued up in an outbox for delivery when the network access is restored and the account on the computer can resynchronize with the server.

"Offline Gmail has proven particularly useful for business and schools making the switch to Google Apps from traditional desktop mail clients--they're used to being able to access their mail whether or not they're online, and Offline Gmail brings this functionality right to the browser," Whyte said.

Google Apps, a bundle that includes Gmail, Google Calendar, and the Google Docs suite of online applications, is available for free for educational users or smaller organizations. Premiere accounts cost $50 per person per year, and Chief Executive Eric Schmidt called such enterprise-oriented services Google's "next big billion-dollar opportunity."

Gears is built into Google's Chrome browser, but other browsers rely on a plug-in. However, Google has stopped developing Gears in favor HTML5's equivalent features. That overhaul of the standard for displaying Web page includes local data storage on a computer as one feature, and it's now enabled by default in Chrome even though HTML5 isn't a final standard yet.

Updated 1:45 p.m. PST and 5:46 p.m. PST: For some Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard users, Gears doesn't work, hampering use of Offline Gmail.

Google initially said Tuesday that Gears doesn't work on Snow Leopard but later amended its statement, narrowing the problem to Apple's Safari browser.

"It turns out that Gears does work on Firefox for Snow Leopard and Leopard, though it still doesn't work on Safari," Google spokesperson Victoria Katsarou said. "There was a bug that was preventing Gears from downloading on Snow Leopard, but we're fixing it and at we'll be updating our Help Center article and Download page to reflect the change."

She declined to comment on when or even if an HTML5-based version of offline Gmail might arrive.

Offline Gmail didn't even work Tuesday in the new Chrome for Mac beta version. Gears is built into Chrome, but trying to enable offline Gmail with the browser yields a "browser not supported" error message.

For the rest of you, here are Google's instructions for getting set up with offline Gmail:

1. Click the "Settings" link in the top-right corner of Gmail.

2. Click the "Offline" tab.

3. Select "Enable Offline Mail for this computer."

4. Click "Save Changes" and follow the directions from there.

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.

Those keen to try out Mozilla's latest browser--and its new process to update the software more frequently--now can try Firefox 3.6 beta 1 for Windows, Mac, or Linux.

Among the features in the new version, according to Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, and Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard:

• Personas, which lets people customize the browser appearance. Personas has been available as an add-on, so there are plenty of Personas skins to choose from.

• Faster execution of Web-based JavaScript programs, better browser responsiveness, and faster startup time. Mozilla has been working on JavaScript performance for many months, but the urgency of that and other performance improvements increased with the arrival of Google's Chrome browser.

• The ability to drag and drop files from the computer to the browser. This is useful for uploading files to Web sites, as will a feature not in the beta but planned for the final version, support for the multiple-file input tag so more than one file can be added in Web forms.

• Expanded support for geolocation technology so it can provide a Web site with an approximate physical address of the user, not just latitude-longitude coordinates.

• The ability to detect the computer's orientation for machines that offer accelerometer support.

• Video built into Web pages with the HTML5 "video" tag now can be viewed full-screen.

Mozilla also released a full list of Firefox changes developers should know about with more details.

Firefox is at the vanguard of the second generation of browser wars. Although it competes with Google's Chrome, Apple's Safari, and Opera, all those browsers are also allied in a way against Microsoft's Internet Explorer, which though dominant is relatively slow at some tasks and only now complying more fully with Web page standards of yesteryear. The rivals, meanwhile, are pushing ahead with new features in HTML5 in development right now.

Mozilla released the alpha version of Firefox 3.6, code-named Namoroka, in August.

The organization plans to release the final version by the end of the year, with Firefox 3.7 in the first half of 2010 and Firefox 4.0 in about a year.

One complication of the upgrade is compatibility of add-ons that extend Firefox's features; the new browser version makes some changes. Mozilla is debating whether to release Firefox 3.6 as a minor update automatically distributed to 3.5 users or as a major update that requires those users to actively retrieve it.

One major element of Firefox 4.0 is a new add-on technology called Jetpack that eases this compatibility problem.

There's a major movement afoot to rebuild the Web as a foundation for interactive applications. But Adobe Systems, whose Flash technology already plays that role as a nearly ubiquitous browser plug-in, believes its technology will stay a step ahead of the game.

The Web application folks are focused on HTML5, the next version of the Hypertext Markup Language standard used to create Web pages, along with associated standards such as JavaScript for programming. On this agenda is work to let Web applications work while offline, display video without any plug-ins, show accelerated 3D graphics, and churn away at background processing tasks that don't slow down the user interface.

Adobe is fine with that but believes programmers today are better off with Flash. It adopts new technology sooner and with consistency across browsers, said Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch.

"Innovation runs rapidly inside Flash," Lynch said. "A lot of HTML5 is looking to Flash and saying can we do that in HTML. That's great. We're able to be a leading agent in terms of exploring what's possible in the Web."

Lynch will make his case more concretely this week at the Adobe Max conference in Los Angeles, where the company plan to announce Flash Player 10.1. Along with the plug-in comes a related technology for Flash applications outside the browser, version 2 of the Adobe Integrated Runtime, or AIR.

Flash gets the Max spotlight
Flash Player 10.1 comes with support for major smartphone operating systems except the highest profile, Apple's iPhone. AIR 2 gets new abilities to act like a native application that can take advantage of resources on a computer, not just on the network. Adobe plans to release beta versions of Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 later this year and in final form in the first half of 2010, Lynch said.

Although the continued work is essential to ensure Flash's relevance, the technology has a position of tremendous power in the browser market. Not only is it installed in almost all browsers, its automatic update abilities ensure the most recent version spreads fast.

"Flash Player 10 has reached 94 percent in less than a year," Lynch said. "That is unprecedented in terms of innovation engine."

To be clear, Adobe isn't opposed to innovation in HTML. Indeed, the company is participating in the World Wide Web Consortium's HTML5 working group, and AIR employs the open-source WebKit browser engine also used in Apple's Safari and Google's Chrome, Lynch said.

"We see renewed innovation happening in HTML," Lynch said. "There hasn't been as much progress in that space in the last few years, and now there is. We think it's terrific."

But even with Web site design tools such as Dreamweaver in its portfolio, the bulk of Adobe's developer relations activities and programming tools are aimed at Flash and, increasingly, AIR. For example, Mozilla Chief Executive John Lilly said he hasn't seen much Adobe involvement in the HTML5 work.

A consistent foundation
Ralph Waldo Emerson once said: "A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds." But there are plenty of times when consistency isn't foolish. Programming can be one of them, and Adobe believes Flash it has a selling point here compared to HTML.

"If you look at the number of browsers and implementations, historically we've seen a lot of variation," Lynch said. "That variation looks like it will continue to happen, especially as innovation increases. The more expression that gets added, the more challenging it get to keep that consistency."

Lynch didn't mention it specifically, but Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer plays a big role in this new Web application era. Even the new version, IE 8, has slower JavaScript than the faster-moving rivals that are moving to embrace richer Web programming technology. Programmers wanting to reach a broad audience are better off counting on Flash than on the latest Web app technologies, and the unified foundation from Adobe means the application will work the same regardless of browser changes.

"We think there's a lot of opportunity to provide a consistent experience across the browser," Lynch said.

One specific example has been video. Although HTML5 specifies a coding method that lets video and audio play directly in the browser with no Flash or other plug-in, the standard under development doesn't specify which video compression engine to use. Apple likes H.264; Firefox and Opera like Ogg Theora; Google likes both; and Microsoft hasn't weighed in at all.

Flash supports three engines, including the popular H.264, and indeed helped enable video on the Web by smoothing over difficulties that came with other technologies such as Apple QuickTime and Real Networks' RealPlayer.

Flash goes mobile
Taking the spotlight at Max will be Flash Player 10.1, which is getting the ability to run on a wide variety of high-end mobile phones, including those using Google Android, Palm's new WebOS, Nokia Symbian S60, Windows Mobile, and BlackBerry's OS--most of the important operating systems except Apple's iPhone OS.

"We are working on Flash Player 10 for all the major smartphone OSes and for iPhone, but we need Apples' cooperation to integrate Flash Player with Safari on the iPhone," Lynch said. "In the market, we've seen a lot of interest. We believe it's one of the top requests for the iPhone still. I'm hopeful we'll be able to bring flash to the iPhone over time."

Flash Player 10.1 also adds support for multitouch user interfaces, which are all the rage for good reason right now because they can enable an intuitive, direct interaction with computing equipment. There have been experiments with multitouch in Firefox, but it's a complicated issue in general since there's some contention about whether the operating system, a browser, or a browser plug-in is in charge of interpreting multitouch commands.

Adobe had a project called Flash Lite for mobile phones with less horsepower, but the future Adobe's focus is on the full version of Flash Player 10.

That poses a challenge for Adobe, because Flash programmers often have assumed the have the full processing power, large screens, and abundant memory of a personal computer. Mobile phones have impressive hardware compared to lower-end phones, but they're feeble compared to PCs, and now programmers must reckon with them, too.

"My view is there is only one Web," Lynch said. Adobe is trying to help, though: Flash Player 10.1 includes a low-power mode that slows video rendering to preserve power; an it's able to use the processor and memory more efficiently in general. For example, graphics are compressed for use on devices with small screens and a more limited colors, Lynch said.

Consequently, one popular AIR application, Tweetdeck, which provides a polished interface to the Twitter service, requires 35 percent less memory, he said.

AIR 2: more desktop integration
For AIR 2, the software foundation is getting closer to reproducing the features that software running natively on a computer's operating system can take employ. Multitouch is one example, since the software has Flash Player 10.1 built in, but another is support for USB mass storage devices--things like digital cameras or external hard drives.

"You can plug in a device like a Flip video camera, and it'll recognize the devices, generate an event, and the AIR application can talk to that devices," Lynch said. "It's further integration with desktop capabilities. That's the soul of AIR."

Also coming with AIR 2 is an ability to hand off files to software installed on a computer. For example, an AIR application that acts as a front end to files stored on Amazon's S3 online storage system could invoke Excel when a person used the AIR application to double-click on the spreadsheet file name.

Adobe plans to follow with broader USB support for other devices such as Webcams, he added. "Mass storage is our foot in the door. That's our start," Lynch said.

AIR 2 also brings the ability to listen to particular network channels called sockets or ports, which means AIR applications can be used for multiplayer games that set up instant-messaging networks among players, he added.

AIR is popular among the active Twitter crowd and boasts a sizable collection of software. And it has potential to spread farther, especially as Net-centric companies in e-commerce, the media, and social networking seek an easy way to bridge across Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.

Despite some advantages, though, AIR provides is an answer to questions many programmers aren't even asking. Adobe will have more convincing to do before it convinces the world AIR deserves the ubiquitous status of Flash.

Some seeds for overhauling Web browser graphics were planted more than a decade ago, and Google believes now is the time for them to bear fruit.

The company is hosting the SVG Open 2009 conference that begins Friday to dig into a standard called Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) that can bring the technology to the Web. With growing support from browser makers, an appetite for vector graphics among Web programmers, and new work under way to make SVG a routine part of the Web, the technology has its best chance in years at becoming mainstream.

New Web programming standards are hard to nurture, but they do arrive, said Brad Neuberg, a Google programmer and speaker at the conference.

"First they're ignored, then they're hyped, then they're written off for dead, then they start getting real work done," Neuberg said.

Vector graphics describe imagery mathematically with lines, curves, shapes, and color values rather than the grid of colored pixels used by bitmapped file formats such as JPEG or GIF widely used on the Web today. Where appropriate, such as with corporate logos but not photographs, vector graphics bring smaller file sizes and better resizing flexibility. That's good for faster downloads and use on varying screen sizes.

For one example, try the SVG version of the Wikipedia logo using the page-zoom tools in Firefox, Safari, Chrome, or Opera. It's a big SVG file, but it does scale. Another real-world example: the illustrations in Google Docs use SVG, Neuberg said.

But SVG has yet to catch on widely in Web programming circles, in part because the dominant Web browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer, can't handle them. "It's hard to deploy this when you can't use it on most of the installed base," Neuberg said.

Google and various allies are working to change that--its Chrome browser along with Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, and Opera support SVG--and judging by the arrival of Microsoft as a gold sponsor of the conference, things could be turning around.

Other signs: vector graphics topped the list of desired new features in a Web programmer survey. And that result helped encourage Google to release a preview version of software called SVG Web that brings SVG support to browsers that lack it.

SVG Web can hand off SVG chores to browsers that support the standard. For those that don't, it runs a Flash program to handle rendering, Neuberg said. "It will never match the performance of native support. It's not a get-out-of-jail-free card, but it does help developers and users deploy content," he said.

At the conference, Google plans to show the fruits of work with Wikipedia to use SVG Web. Actual deployment of the technology is still one or two months away, awaiting more testing.

One issue for SVG is that it's been part of the evolutionary dead end of Web programming, XHTML. But that's changing: the HTML5 standard under development right now explicitly makes room for SVG so it'll become a first-class citizen, Neuberg said.

There's another way of doing vector graphics in a browser, a standard called Canvas that's also part of HTML5. Canvas is best suited to drawing a shape on the screen that the computer then forgets about, whereas SVG is better when the shape will be manipulated because the computer keeps track of its elements and attributes, Neuberg said. For comparison, equivalents of the SVG and Canvas approaches both are available in Adobe's Flash and Microsoft's Silverlight.

Realistically, though, the bigger vector competitor today is Adobe's Flash, which is in widespread use already. And just to spice things up, there's Adobe's FXG, an SVG-based format for vector graphics within Flash.

An advantage of vector graphics in Web pages is that because they're constructed from text, search engines can see and index content, Neuberg said. For example, labels in an anatomy diagram, along with conditions and medical procedures, are relevant data that would be indexed--or for that matter translated with a service such as Google Translate.

"SVG, like HTML, can have hyperlinks coming in and going out," Neuberg said. "It's part of the Web. It integrates with other technologies, so it's not trapped in a box."

Google released an Internet Explorer plug-in Tuesday designed to let Microsoft's browser use the features and performance of Google's own Chrome browser.

The software, called Google Chrome Frame, lets IE 6, 7, or 8 use Chrome to render Web pages and execute their JavaScript programs, Google said. To use it, people must install the open-source plug-in, currently in the developer preview stage, and Web developers must insert a line of code onto their Web sites that engages Chrome Frame when a person visits the site.

"For users, installing Google Chrome Frame will allow them to seamlessly enjoy modern Web apps at blazing speeds, through the familiar interface of the version of IE that they are currently using," said Google programmer Alex Russell and product manager Mike Smith in a blog post.

But the plug-in might needle its rival more than revolutionize Web browsing. For one thing, it takes a long time to get a lot of Web developers to update their sites. For another, how many people dissatisfied with IE's performance haven't already installed a higher-powered browser?

Google argues that the feature will appeal to some folks, though, including people in corporate settings who might not have a choice of browser and people who prefer IE's interface, said spokesman Eitan Bencuya. And people are familiar with plug-ins as a way to expand what browsers can do.

"It's a much lower barrier to entry than switching browsers," Bencuya said.

He added that Google has built support for the feature into one of its own Web sites, the Google Wave project that's a hybrid of e-mail, instant messaging, and wiki collaboration.

In a rare display of public goodwill between Google and Microsoft, the companies are bonding over Microsoft's decision to actively participate in the HTML 5 standards process.

In a post to the The WHATWG Blog spotted by Ars Technica, Google's Mark Pilgrim, the company's leading HTML 5 evangelist, thanked Microsoft's Adrian Bateman for joining the conversation over HTML 5 development several weeks ago. "On August 7, 2009, Adrian Bateman did what no man or woman had ever done before: he gave substantive feedback on the current editor's draft of HTML5 on behalf of Microsoft. His feedback was detailed and well-reasoned, and it spawned much discussion," Pilgrim wrote.

Despite its role as the developer of the most widely used browser in the world, Microsoft had been practically silent on the development of the HTML 5 standard until August, when Bateman weighed in on some potential choices for how various tags will be implemented in the standard. Since then, Bateman has endorsed the use of the <video> and <audio> tags in the standard, something that Google and other browser developers are very keen in including in the final standard.

HTML 5 is a big part of Google's agenda for the next several years with respect to its Chrome browser and Chrome OS project. Google executives have chided Microsoft for its slow embrace of the project, which would make all browsers more capable of running applications, but have acknowledged that Microsoft's road to HTML 5 is complicated by the fact that many businesses have built applications around the current version of Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser and would be forced to modify or start over from scratch when the new standards are implemented.

"As you might expect, much of the discussion since August 7 has been driven by Microsoft's feedback. After five years of virtual silence, nobody wants to miss the opportunity to engage with a representative of the world's still-dominant browser," Pilgrim wrote.

Google and Microsoft, of course, are otherwise at each other's throats in the day-to-day competition to dominate the tech industry. There's a longstanding animosity between the CEOs of the two companies, and they are each attacking the other's backyard in hopes of defending their current dominant positions. Microsoft has invested hundreds of millions of dollars in developing a worthy competitor to Google search, and Google has taken aim at Microsoft's dominant position in office productivity software while unveiling plans for its own lightweight operating system.

Google announced Tuesday that the third stable release of Chrome is ready for the world, a little over a year after its debut.

Chrome releases evolve from developer previews to beta releases to stable ones, and the third version of Google's Web browser has now earned that coveted status. It's about 25 percent faster than the Chrome 2.0 stable version, and the new version (click here for download) also comes with a few tweaks.

Google redesigned the New Tab page with a click-and-drag mentality, added icons to the Omnibox to distinguish between searches, sites, and bookmarks when entering text in the address bar, and perhaps most significantly, added support for the video tag in the HTML 5 standard in a stable version of the browser.

Bringing HTML 5 technologies into Chrome is a huge part of Google's strategy for both the browser and Chrome OS, coming one day to a Netbook near you. The capabilities delivered by the video tag were a highlight of Google's presentation to developers at Google I/O in May: the tag allows Web developers to embed videos like they were photos, alleviating the need for plug-ins.

Let us know if you have any problems with the stable version of Chrome. Developer preview versions of Chrome 4.0 are well under way, but Google has yet to release a Mac version of the browser despite interest from luminaries such as Google co-founder Sergey Brin.

Today's Web programmers face a big choice when it comes to fancier aspects of their sites: HTML or Flash? One start-up hopes it can bridge the gap with a technology called FluidHTML.

The start-up, FHTML, announced software Monday at the TechCrunch50 conference that's intended to give HTML-style programmers the ability to use Flash features.

FluidHTML's language is an extension of HTML, the company said. "We borrow a lot of the really good ideas from HTML, because why wouldn't we?" said Chief Executive Michael Collette at the conference.

The approach holds some promise--but it also poses some risks. It may be complicated trying to get HTML and Flash programmers to work together, but at least those are established disciplines. FluidHTML requires a language known by neither set of coders right now, and the technology is supported just by a start-up still seeking its own programming staff and $1 million to $2 million in venture funding.

HTML, the traditional language of the Web, got its start showing just text and images with basic layouts. The second, begun by Macromedia and now led by Adobe Systems, is better suited for animations and flashy graphics, video, and increasingly, applications as well.

But a different set of programming skills are required to build Flash-powered sites or applications, so it doesn't always coexist easily on the same Web site. Programming is getting even more complicated as Flash converges with HTML and its companion, JavaScript.

FluidHTML relies on a Flash software module that programmers can embed in their Web pages. It interprets the HTML-esque code to supply Flash features such as vector graphics, sound, and video.

"The markup language supports very powerful commands (tags) and can do remarkable things that take enormous development effort in Flash," the company said. "FluidHTML RIAs (rich Internet applications) can be developed by less expensive programmers and require fewer man-hours to build than Flash."