Firefox for Android beta: A good first effort

The first beta of Firefox 4 for Android arrived Thursday, offering users of Google's mobile operating system a browser interface with both smart new features and some weaknesses.


I tried the new beta on HTC's Google Nexus One, and I came away impressed overall--far more satisfied than with unstable and slower nightly builds for developers that I'd tried before. It's not going to be my default phone browser at this stage, but I'm not going to uninstall it, either.


Fennec background
Before we get to my impressions, though, here's the background. Mozilla is trying to reach the fast-growing and increasingly important mobile world with its "Fennec" version of Firefox. Android is the second operating system it supports after Maemo, which comes with Nokia's N900, which is as much a small computer as smartphone. Today, that market is dominated by browsers based on the open-source WebKit project, including those built into iOS, Android, WebOS, and Bada browsers and coming with BlackBerry OS.
Android is critical to Mozilla's mobile effort: with Apple blocking typical browsers for iOS devices, Google's operating system is the best remaining avenue to mainstream mobile relevance.


Unlike most Android applications, Firefox is native software that runs on the underlying Linux operating system and ARM processor rather than Android's higher-level Java-like foundation (now the subject of Oracle's lawsuit against Google). That native nature means Firefox compatibility is a more finicky issue: you'll have to check the supported devices list, which so far includes four tested phones and five untested.


Firefox, which needs Android 2.0 or later, is feature-packed. It uses the same browser engine as regular Firefox and therefore supports cutting-edge Web technologies such as Canvas and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for 2D graphics, Web workers for background processing, and HTML5's built-in audio and video. It can run many add-ons, a differentiator in the mobile-browsing world. And it's got the new JaegerMonkey JavaScript engine, which was powerful enough to run the full desktop version of Gmail in my tests.

hree advantages over Android
Three things jumped out at me as superior to Android's built-in browser, which by the way I'm using on a phone with Android 2.2, aka Froyo.

A look at Firefox beta 1 for Android

First, there's Firefox Sync. This lets you keep open tabs, browsing history, passwords, and bookmarks synchronized between whatever computers and mobile devices you have running Firefox. In practice, I'm not sure I want to inflict on my mobile phone the dozens of tabs I have openon my personal computers, but passwords sync in particular is a wonderful way to bypass the mobile-phone difficulties of Web page login pages.


Second, there's the superior window management. The native browser lets you move among windows by clicking Android's menu button and going to a window-selection screen.


I much prefer Firefox's approach. The tabs are in a vertically stacked list that's tucked away to the left of the browser window. You can reach it by sliding the main window off to the right with an easy drag gesture. It's set up nicely so you don't do this inadvertently.

A button on the bottom of the list lets you fire up a new tab. When there are more than seven, on my phone, a second vertical column of tabs forms to the right. Each tab has a thumbnail of the page, which can be a little hard to see given that each browser thumbnail is about two-thirds the size of my actual thumbnail. But I still find it a faster way to switch among tabs, something I didn't realize until Firefox I'd been subconsciously avoiding somewhat on the Android browser.


However, I did have one problem: each tab also has a big "X" to close it, and if you're not careful or have big thumbs, it's easy to close a tab instead of select it.


If you slide the main browser window the other way, you get a nice interface for adding a bookmark, going forward or backward through your browsing history, and configuring Firefox. This is the kind of thing that you might expect to see available through the Android menu, which in my testing led only to a blank screen.




Third, I liked the welcome screen. It shows a nicely formatted list of recently visited Windows that I find far more useful than a blank search box in the Android browser. Sure, I like searching, but I do a lot more.

Imperfections
Now onto the gripe list. It's longer, but bear in mind that this is not just beta software, but the first beta Mozilla has ever produced for Android.


First, Firefox isn't fast, even though performance is a focus of this release. Even if you have a Wi-Fi connection, all mobile browsers in my experience are frustrating compared to those running on desktops and laptop. But I found Firefox just wasn't peppy.


Part of this, I suspect, is that Firefox seems aimed to intercept higher-performance hardware coming after today's phones; Mozilla seems to have aimed for features and utility rather than bare-bones practicality. But some performance attributes are quite nice, notably scrolling and panning, which respond quickly and bring "inertia" so you can flick your view around.


And historically, beta software is usually slower than better-tuned production releases, so don't read too much into this.
I had two crashes, once apparently some user-interface interaction that went haywire and once when I tried to load Gmail with eight other windows already loaded. Firefox ground to a halt and crashed. Other times, though, I was able to use Gmail, even with its new priority in-box, an impressive feat.


Another problem I had was with zooming to read text. Firefox, like the iPhone and Android browsers, will zoom into a column of text on a larger page when you double-tap on it. However, unlike those alternatives, it didn't automatically scale the font size to something readable. I ended up rotating the screen to a horizontal orientation to try to squeeze in a few more pixels per letter, and even then I did a lot of squinting.


The good news is this problem is a known shortcoming. And it's not so much an issue with mobile-optimized sites I tried, such as Flickr and Facebook.

Firefox is big--more than 30MB including the application and data, which is much larger than any other application I have on my phone. The closest is Google Earth at half the size, which I had to delete to make room. Mozilla has said it hopes to pare the size down, though.
Another complaint is with the fonts. I found blocks of text less readable in general than with other mobile browsers.
Last, I had some difficulties with the user interface. For example, while setting up Sync, I couldn't move from the username field to the password field by scrolling the scroll wheel, as is customary on Android. Instead, I had to use the back button to hide the keyboard, manually scroll the page with my finger, then tap the next text input field.
Overall, though, Firefox for Android is a reasonable first effort. That's good, given how important mobile computing has become and Android's ascendance within that domain.

Google cleared in YouTube copyright case in Spain

 

News.cnet.com. Google has been cleared in a YouTube copyright-infringement case filed by a Spanish broadcaster.

In its lawsuit against the search giant, Spanish broadcaster Telecinco claimed that YouTube should be held responsible for people who upload videos that infringe on Telecinco's copyrights.

But a federal court in Madrid rejected those claims today, ruling that it is the responsibility of copyright holders to identify such content and inform YouTube if it infringes on their copyrights.

In reaching its decision, the court also noted that YouTube offers content owners tools to remove any material that infringes on their copyrights, further putting the onus on them, rather than on YouTube, to take action against copyright-infringing content.
 
In a blog post today, Google hailed the ruling and called it a "clear victory for the Internet and the rules that govern it." The company said the decision reaffirms European law, which finds that content owners are the ones best suited to determine whether something infringes on a copyright and that YouTube has a responsibility to remove such content only when notified by the owner.

Specifically, Google pointed to its Content ID technology, which gives content owners the ability to notify YouTube of any material that infringes on a copyright. The owner can then tell YouTube whether to block the content, put an ad next to it in order generate revenue, or simply keep track of the number of views. The company said that Content ID is being used by more than 1,000 media providers across Europe.
Google also noted the challenges that it and other online companies would face if they were held responsible for identifying copyrighted content.

"More than 24 hours of video are loaded onto YouTube every minute," according to the blog. "If Internet sites had to screen all videos, photos, and text before allowing them on a website, many popular sites--not just YouTube, but Facebook, Twitter, MySpace and others--would grind to a halt."
Google has squared off against other media outlets over the question of who should be held accountable for copyrighted material uploaded to YouTube.

Earlier this month, a German court ruled against the search giant, finding that YouTube was liable after users uploaded several copyrighted videos of singer Sarah Brightman.

But in June, the company won a decision in a longstanding, $1 billion lawsuit filed by Viacom, which accused Google of encouraging its users to violate copyright. Like the court in Madrid, the judge in that case found that the burden is on the content owners to identify copyrighted material and that only then does YouTube have a responsibility to remove that content.

Going corporate: Chrome getting admin-friendly

Chrome, like Android, got its start as a technology geared for individuals, not companies. And just as Google updated Android with features such as Microsoft Exchange support, Chrome is being refashioned for a broader world of corporate use.
 

News.cnet.com. The results of the work can be seen at Google's Chrome administrative information site. The site includes quick-start guides for administrators, policy templates for setting group permissions, and a list of tweakable settings that can be enforced through policies.

For example, administrators can use the settings to prohibit use of particular plug-ins, set the home page, disable synchronization services, and set the interval for checking Chrome's automated update service. That includes halting automatic updates altogether.

Chrome has caught on among early adopters and has tens of millions of users. Getting corporate buy-in could help the browser's prospects, and with it Google's ambition to make the Web a more powerful foundation for applications rather than just Web pages to visit.

It took years for Firefox to attain some legitimacy among corporations, but Chrome in some ways could have an easier time. With Firefox, Mozilla helped fight for the idea that Web pages should be built to conform to various Web standards rather than to just work on the dominant browser, Microsoft's Internet Explorer.

That message caught on, with the upcoming IE9 aggressively embracing many of those standards. For Google, it means it's easier for a new browser to catch on since compatibility issues are less troublesome.
Even with easier compatibility, though, corporate IT personnel are not known for their enthusiasm for embracing new software. They're often naturally conservative, since change can break internal applications, confuse users, and bring other complications. Letting administrators set Chrome behavior will, though, make it more palatable.

originally posted by : Deep Tech

Is the future PC a smartphone? .. (Nvdia Tegra)

Will small, powerful, connected-to-everything devices running on non-Intel silicon become the personal computer? The CEO of graphics-chip supplier Nvidia thinks so.

News.Cnet. The sentiment, voiced at the company's annual conference this week by chief executive Jen-Hsun Huang, has been expressed before. And like any strong strategy statement from a Silicon Valley CEO, it's self-serving. Nvidia is staking a good chunk of its future--as much as half of its business--on chips based on the ARM design.

But that doesn't mean Huang has got it all wrong, either. Indeed, ARM-based devices such as Apple's iPhone and iPad, Motorola's Droid, RIM's Blackberry, and countless future smartphones and tablets from Motorola, RIM, Apple, and others will use the ARM chip design. "ARM is the fastest-growing CPU (processor) in the world today. It's the instruction set architecture of choice of mobile computing," Huang said. "It is very clear now that mobile computing will be a completely disruptive force to all of computing."
Huang continued. "This (smartphone) is the first computer that is equipped with all kinds of sensors, cameras, microphones, GPSs, and accelerometers. This is the first computer that's context aware. Situation aware. Who knows, someday it may be self-aware," he said.


Huang raises interesting questions about the future. Will a future PC be a powerful, multi-CPU handheld device that wirelessly connects to large displays and a host of other devices--so the PC is carried around in your pocket or small satchel and then connects on the fly to larger devices and/or peripherals?


But the ARM-based vision also presumes that the largest chipmaker in the world, Intel, is standing still. Which it isn't. When asked at last week's Intel Developer Forum conference if Intel was de-emphasizing smartphones, Chief Executive Paul Otellini responded quickly. "Absolutely not. It's still a major focus of our investment. We're moving toward the launch window of a couple of major phones in 2011. And you've got to lock down before that and go through the interoperability testing with networks. And that's where we are. So, there's nothing really to say until those devices launch on the networks next year."

And Intel recently announced that it was acquiring Infineon's wireless unit, which currently supplies key 3G silicon for the iPhone and other smartphones. The company is also putting considerable resources into the MeeGo operating system, which is well suited for small devices. Broadly speaking, Intel's smartphone strategy is to match the next generation of Atom chips with Infineon baseband silicon and 4G technology to eventually offer a full smartphone chip solution. (And Intel isn't doing a bad job with its current Atom design either, which powers over 70 million tiny Netbooks, with many 3G-capable models sold through Verizon and AT&T.)
That said, Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, Samsung, Apple, Nvidia, and other ARM players will build the brains for many of these devices. But Intel and Advanced Micro Devices will too. And, to be sure, Nvidia's future in this market, considering all of the entrenched ARM competition, is probably less certain than Intel's.