Webware

With a project called Closure Tools, Google plans on Thursday to start helping developers who aspire to match the company's proficiency in creating Web sites and Web applications.

Google is a strong proponent of using JavaScript to write Web-based programs, part of its Web-centric ethos. Indeed, the company has pushed the language to its limits with services such as Gmail and Google Docs, and it developed its Chrome browser in part to enable JavaScript programs to run faster.

But writing, debugging, and optimizing heavy-duty JavaScript can be difficult--in part because a given JavaScript program sometimes works differently on different browsers. Google's open-source Closure Tools project is an attempt to help with some of these challenges.

The first in the suite of tools is the Closure Compiler, a software package designed to boil down a JavaScript program so it's smaller and runs faster. For example, a function named DisplayAddress() could be replaced with just a().

Along with the compiler come some extra tools that run in the Firefox browser. One, Closure Inspector, is an extension for Firefox's Firebug add-on designed to help programmers understand and debug the rewritten JavaScript--linking a() back to DisplayAddress(), for example. Another add-on for the Google Page Speed extension lets programmers see how much the compiler helped.

Google also plans to make the compiler available as a Web application hosted on its Google App Engine service.

The second element is called the Closure Library, a collection of prebuilt JavaScript code that lets programmers handle relatively sophisticated technology--arrays and string manipulation, for example.

Last are Closure Templates, more prewritten code to ease creation of JavaScript and HTML user interfaces.

In an earlier era, programming tools were expensive packages bought by a select few, but open-source software, new marketing strategies, and new business methods have made that approach the exception rather than the rule these days. Now programming tools are often a means to another end--encouraging programmers to produce the software that will make Windows or the Palm Pre useful and therefore popular, for example.

In Google's case, the objective is often to make the Web more popular because it sees more activity on the Web as corresponding directly with more activity on its revenue-generating search site. Among the high-profile projects to this end are Chrome, Chrome OS, and Android, all subsidized by Google's powerful search-advertising business.

One interesting contrast to Closure is another Google project called Google Web Toolkit. It's designed to accomplish some of the same goals as Closure, including paving over browser incompatibilities and producing high-performance JavaScript. But with GWT, coders write programs in Java that gets translated into JavaScript.

So one last question: why the name?

Google's reply: "Being a functional language, the concept of a function closure is fundamental to the JavaScript language."

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

iStockphoto's Kelly Thompson

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

(Credit: Net Applications)

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

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

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

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

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

Facebook's Ethan Beard outlines what the company is up to in the next six months.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

PALO ALTO, Calif.--Facebook on Wednesday took the wraps off its brand new development road map, unveiling changes and features the company is planning to implement within the next three to six months.

Many of the changes are smaller, simply rearrangements of certain parts of the user interface. However, the company is also making some radical moves like enforcing badly written applications and enabling developers to acquire user e-mail addresses as well as create Facebook-like sites outside of the social network's walls.

Ethan Beard, Facebook's director of platform marketing, who gave the presentation in Facebook's headquarters here, said that the one thing the company kept hearing from developers was that they needed to know what the company was working on ahead of time--and not just for short-term development, but a year down the line. "You want to know what's going on inside of Facebook," he said. "And today is to provide you with a lot more predictability."

That predictability revolves around the company's road map, which now sits on a new developer site. Beard says that it will remain updated with new items, planned changes, and APIs as they are announced. The company is also making publicly available a bug list, which will show developers problems with the site that Facebook is working on, as well as how they are being prioritized to be fixed.

The changes for users

The new user navigation menu takes place of the long bar that used to sit on the bottom of the page.

(Credit: Facebook)

So what are some of the big changes users will see? The first is that Facebook is doing away with many of the visual and organization changes it's made in the last two years. That includes the removal of the Windows Start bar-like app launcher and notification bar that sat at the bottom of the page. That's being moved over to the left side of the page where things like filters currently reside.

The new navigation bar will house new quick jumps to menus for both games and applications--something for which Facebook is making a notable distinction. Both will serve as a way for users to get a bird's-eye view of what's happening in games or the applications they've been using, as well as what their friends are up to. The company will also be making it easier for users to add third-party applications to the left side navigation bar with some new code that makes it a one-click affair.

Alongside the new left side navigation Facebook is also trying to make more of a distinction between notifications that are from apps and those that are sent from other users. This change involves taking notifications out of the sometimes-dreaded notification box (which will be soon be getting the ax) and giving developers a new way to notify users with alert badges that pop up as counters. And for notifications that are sent from other users, these will soon be found in users' Facebook in-boxes instead.

The changes for developers

One of the biggest upcoming changes for developers deals with Facebook's level of user privacy protection. The company will be letting users give app developers their e-mail address. In return they can remove their own Facebook in-box from app notification equation. This also applies to Facebook Connect, so third-party companies that use it for log-ins can send important messages directly to a user's primary e-mail instead of their Facebook in-box where it might get lost.

The Connect program will also be joined by a new developer API called Open Graph that essentially lets site owners create a page on any Web site that has the same features as one of Facebook's fan pages. These will allow users to sign up to be a fan with their Facebook credentials and use parts of the site as if they were on Facebook proper. In turn, their actions will be able to show up on their Facebook profile and news feeds. Beard said that the Open Graph API is simply a continuation of the move to add Facebook objects as well as people to third-party sites. "The graph does not necessarily have to exist in facebook," he said. "It can also live on the Web."

Facebook is improving its analytics with a new system that developers can use with third-party analytics tools.

(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)

Fan pages are not the only thing to escape Facebook's walled garden though. Beard outlined the company's plans to offer developers a way to view a deeper level of analytics for their apps. The reports, which Beard says are much better than the Facebook's current Insight system, will be able to be sent to third-party analytics engines where they can be stacked up alongside performance metrics Facebook wouldn't have otherwise been able to provide.

Keeping bad developers out

Besides some cosmetic and back-end changes, Facebook is also stepping up how it handles developers and applications that don't conform to the site's rules and regulations. Part of that is simplifying its platform policies from 14 pages to just three. Beard says the extraneous language has been cut down, so that hopefully more people will read it.

In addition to policy, Facebook is doing away with its six-month-old verified apps program in place of verifying every single app that passes a certain use threshold. This means that Facebook is going to be evaluating every app on its service to make sure it meets the company's guidelines and getting rid of ones that might have otherwise flown under the radar.

Other tidbits

•  Facebook canvas pages are now getting a special blue bar on top that removes much of the Facebook branding and user interface. Beard said that the move was largely to help developers make their canvas pages more immersive.
•  Profile boxes will be disappearing, and tabs will be slightly more narrow.
•  The new Facebook games tab may implement leader boards
•  Facebook is reworking its friends selector so that when a user is picking friends to invite or send a message, it will let them use the same filters they use to group their friends. Facebook is also working on a way to suggest a shortlist of users based on recent, or overall activity.
•  Developers will be getting a live view into the Facebook Platform status. This is kind of like Twitter's status blog and will show all known problems as well as how hard Facebook's APIs are being hit.

More information about the new developer APIs can be found on Facebook's developer site.

To commemorate last week's third anniversary of the launch of Google's Custom Search tool, the search giant has announced a slate of updates to its customizable search service.

Design options
To kick things off, Google announced the release of six new themes for Google Custom Search. All six themes can be customized by changing "fonts, colors, backgrounds, promotion settings, as well as interactive features such as tabbing and mouseovers," the company said. Users can also decide where the search box and results should be placed (in a contiguous layout or in two columns). All the themes will work with Google's Mobile Custom Search, which the company launched last week. That service allows users to access a site's Custom Search from Android phones, the iPhone, and Palm Pre.

Google Custom now features 6 themes.

(Credit: Google)

Google's Custom Search will be displayed inline on a Web page. A Google spokesman told me Monday that when users search a site equipped with Custom Search, the results will be displayed above the page they're on. If they scroll down, they can view the page's contents. Those site owners who prefer a separate page to display results can still use that option, the company said.

Structured Search
Google has also launched a new Custom Search feature called Structured Search. The new option will allow users to search for information by specific attributes, rather than use general terms, the company said.

If a Web publisher has provided "author's name" as an attribute in the app's metadata, for example, users can search specifically for a particular author and view only the results matching that query, the company said. Google's intention is to make finding specific content easier, but only those "specific attributes that the page content has specified via metadata markup" can be used to tailor results, the company said.

The company also announced that Web publishers can now place thumbnail images or publisher-provided links into the search results. For example, if a story from CNET.com includes an image, the new feature gives users the option to add that attribute to results. When Google displays that particular story, it will include a thumbnail of that image next to it (see the image below).

Google's Structured Search in action.

(Credit: Google)

Wikipedia, anyone?
Finally, Google announced that it has built a Custom Search skin for Wikipedia. Instead of relying upon Wikipedia's search, Wikipedia users can now log in to their accounts and edit their skin to include Google's Custom Search feature. From then on, Wikipedia's search field will be replaced with Custom Search.

Google's Custom Search is on display in Wikipedia.

(Credit: Google)

Instead of just delivering Wikipedia pages matching queries, Custom Search will display three tabs when a user searches the site from a Wikipedia page. The first tab will display relevant Wikipedia results. The second page will display relevant wikis that are linked to the Wikipedia page the user is already on. The final tab displays related third-party sites that are linked to in a particular Wikipedia page. All results will be displayed inline on the same page the user is on.

Google's new Custom Search features are available now. If you want to learn more about the changes made to Custom Search, check out the site's blog here.

If you're not an advanced Web designer, and you don't want to pay a company to create a Web site for you, there are services across the Web that can help you create the site you want. All of the tools listed below are designed specifically for beginners. If that's you, give them a whirl.

Get your design on

Color Wizard: Having trouble finding the right color for a portion of your site? Color Wizard will help you determine which color works with your current color scheme.

When you get to Color Wizard's site, just input the color you want to match. From there, the service will spit out several colors that match well with your base color. If you're unhappy with all the colors on your site, you can also use the site's sliders to create a color you desire. It then gives you a color tag that you can place in your site's HTML. It's a simple, neat tool that I use quite often.

Color Wizard helps you match colors or create your own.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

CSS Typeset: If you're looking to quickly edit portions of CSS from your site, CSS Typeset is one of my favorite tools to do just that.

The premise of CSS Typeset is simple: take some CSS from your site, modify it with the drop-down lists featured at the bottom of the page, and CSS Typeset generates the CSS code you can paste back into your site. You can change the font type, its color, alignment, and more. If you need a little help with CSS, CSS Typeset is the service for you.

CSS Typeset will help you change your site up.

(Credit: Screenshot by Don Reisinger/CNET)

Yahoo released a "final notice" on Wednesday reminding GeoCities users that the free site creation service will be closing up shop later this month.

"On October 26, 2009, your GeoCities site will no longer appear on the Web, and you will no longer be able to access your GeoCities account and file," Yahoo wrote in a statement to GeoCities users.

The company said any GeoCities user that wants to maintain the site will be able to port it to Yahoo's Web Hosting service, which would cost $4.99 per month for a year and $9.95 per month afterward. GeoCities Plus customers can port their sites to Yahoo Web Hosting at no additional charge.

Yahoo first announced that it would be closing GeoCities in April. At the time, the company didn't divulge when the service would finally close.

Yahoo wrote on its GeoCities Help page that its decision to close the site was rooted in its desire to help its "customers explore and build relationships online in other ways."

GeoCities' closure marks an end of an era for the Web. The free site-building service, which Yahoo bought in 1999 for $2.9 billion, was a precursor to many of the self-publishing and social-media tools Web users employ today.

As someone who used GeoCities to create his first personal site, I find it a bit sad to say good-bye. That said, it's about time.

Via (The Business Insider)

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.

Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET)

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.

Google has built its Native Client technology into its newest version of Chrome, endowing the browser with new processing power for running Web applications.

Native Client, or NaCl for short, is an ambitious Google project that, if successful, will help close one gap that separates Web applications from those that run natively on a computer's operating system. That would improve the competitive position of Web applications such as Google Docs compared to Microsoft Office--and thereby boost Google's Chrome OS project in comparison with Windows.

Most Web browsers run programs written in JavaScript or perhaps Flash, both of them running on a programming foundation that makes those programs slower than native software. But Native Client lets programmers write software that directly taps into x86 chip models such as AMD's Athlon or Intel's Core. Secial programming tools and a screening mechanism in the Native Client software itself are designed to provide security for what has historically been the risky process of downloading executable programs from the Net

Chrome Version: 4.0.220.1, released Friday, "introduces the Native Client as a built-in feature for the first time on Windows," said Jonathan Conradt, a Google engineering program manager, in a blog post about the release. Previously the software was available only as a browser plug-in.

Google also offers a variety of basic tests and more elaborate examples of what Native Client can do, though it takes a bit of technical configuration to get them working. Among them are spinning ray-traced globes, the Game of Life, and the Quake first-person shooter video game.

Native Client shows how Google is using Chrome as a vehicle to advance its Web programming agenda. While some competitors such as Microsoft have a strong business of software that runs natively on a computer, Google wants software to run on central servers on the Internet.

This cloud computing approach has some advantages--being able to more easily collaborate and share documents for example, or to see and edit documents using any PC or smartphone. Google was born on the Web and has an incumbent's advantage there over rivals, but as an applications foundation, the Web remains slow and primitive compared to native applications in many regards.

Native Client isn't the only effort to change that situation. Google also has a plug-in called O3D--also a project it's building into Chrome--designed to let programs tap into hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. It works at a higher programming level than a related effort from Mozilla and Firefox called WebGL.

Google first released Native Client in December 2008. In June 2009, declaring confidence in NaCl's security model, Google it announced it was bringing Native Client out of research and into production.

Though Native Client is built into the new Chrome version, there are plenty of qualifiers for the release. First, it's only in the developer preview version of Chrome, and only for Windows right now. Second, it's disabled by default; adding "--internal-nacl" as a command-line switch at Chrome launch will activate it, according to an explanatory page.

The new version of Chrome offers a variety of other features too, notably a number updates for extensions to let people customize the browser.

For example, extensions now appear as an option on the wrench menu for browser settings. More obviously from a user-interface perspective, the browser actions interface (see illustration below) is now available to place extensions in the form of a button to Chrome's main toolbar.

Browser Actions is a new extensions interface that let browser customizations take the form of small icons in the browser's main toolbar. This illustration shows what Google believes to be an overabundance of such extension buttons.

(Credit: Google)