Monthly Archive:: March 2011

According to a post on the mozilla.dev.planning Google Group by Mozilla Senior Director of Engineering, Damon Sicore, the ship date for the stable version of Firefox 4, Tuesday 22 March, has been approved by Mozilla's IT and Marketing teams. Sicore notes that, should the developers discover any last-second blocker bugs that would prevent the final release, a second release candidate would be issued "as soon as possible" and the ship date would be reset. So far, the first RC has "received a very warm welcome", said Sicore.

"At Google we're constantly trying to make the web faster - not just our corner of it, but the whole thing. Over the past few days we've been rolling out a new and improved version of show_ads.js, the piece of JavaScript used by more than two million publishers to put AdSense advertisements on their web pages."

"Google has released a preview WebM filter for Windows Vista and Windows 7. When installed, the filter will allow Windows programs - including Windows Media Player, Windows Media Center, and perhaps most importantly of all, Internet Explorer 9 - to play back WebM-encoded video." This is simply a Media Foundation codec - not a browser plugin.

InfoWorld's JR Raphael provides an in-depth comparison of Android productivity suites, including DataViz's Documents to Go, MobiSystems' OfficeSuite Pro, Quickoffice Connect Mobile Suite, ThinkFree Office Mobile, and the Google Docs mobile Web app. Each tool is vetted for word processing, spreadsheet editing, and presentation management. Raphael also examines additional tools for accomplishing other basic office tasks, such as dealing with PDFs and Photoshop files, piecing together the best overall package for your Android smartphone at work.

A comment on the recent article about the Bali release of Googles WebM tools (libvpx) claimed that one of the biggest problems facing the adoption of WebM video was the slow speed of the encoder as compared to x264. This article sets out to benchmark the encoder against x264 to see if this is indeed true and if so, how significant the speed difference really is.

Carlos Garnacho shows how you can use CSS to style GTK+ apps. There are four other articles in English and Spanish in the new edition of GNOME Journal, including an interview with GNOME cofounder Federico Mena Quintero. He answers the question, "what is GNOME badly missing?"

Yes, yes, yes - that's what you get for releasing Internet Explorer 9 in the middle of the night, Microsoft! A post on OSNews that's late! I'm sure that'll teach you. Anywho, as you may have noticed, Microsoft is back in the browser game - Internet Explorer 9 has been released.

Two bits of news from Palm: first, the TouchPad will launch in June. Second, webOS for PCs will see its first beta at the end of the year, and will run... Inside a browser. This means we now have an idea of what Palm wants - no dual boot, but something that runs inside Windows. My guess is that webOS applications will eventually just run inside Windows like everything else.

"While Intel may already be worried about ever gaining a foothold in the mobile chip market. ARM is starting to push into the high-end server market too with news of a 480-core, low power server in the works. The company behind the new server is a data center startup called Calxeda. Its focus is on building a processor platform that will have a significant impact on IT costs and energy consumption. They go so far as to claim a factor of 10 reduction in costs and a 5x, or even 10x performance gain over what is currently available."

"When Nokia CEO Stephen Elop announced that Nokia was abandoning its development of its own smartphone platforms and APIs, and betting the farm on somebody else's, many people asked why it was necessary." The answer is incredible: for years different Nokia teams were fighting amongst themselves, developing competing user interfaces that were all eventually abandoned by new CTO Rich Green. And while all this pointless development continued, nobody bothered to modernise the Symbian UI, leaving the company with a user experience that was almost as bad as it had been four years before.

"Right now, someone, somewhere is developing the killer operating system feature of the future - a feature that will change computing and make us wonder how we lived without it. However, the person responsible probably isn't grafting away in the labs of Microsoft, Apple or Red Hat - he or she is more likely to be working in a bedroom or loft. We'll look at the best alternative operating systems, with the potential to change the computing landscape over the next decade."

When you install OpenSUSE, one of the first things you may wish to do is to install new applications or support for restricted media playback. To do this, you'll need to configure your repositories. This blog post explains how it's done.

Symbian might have been taking a beating over the past few months, but that doesn't mean the world's most popular smartphone platform (I doubt the installed base hase been overtaken by Android yet, although I might be mistaken) is just going to sit idly by. While Nokia gets its first Windows Phone 7 devices ready, work on Symbian^3 continues, and the Dutch (yeahaw!) product manager for Nokia Benelux has confirmed that a massive overhaul of the platform will be pushed to phones later this year .

"Now that Linux is the most popular free Unix-like operating system, it shouldn't be a surprise that some projects have begun treating non-Linux operating systems as second-class citizens. This isn't out of contempt for the BSDs or OpenSolaris, it's just a matter of limited manpower: if almost all the users of the application have a Linux operating system and if all the core developers are using Linux themselves, it's difficult to keep supporting other operating systems. But sometimes the choice to leave out support for other operating systems is explicitly made, e.g. when the developers want to implement some innovative features that require functionality that is (at least for now) only available in the Linux kernel."