Firefox 4 for Mobile Enters Beta

Enhanced speed, responsiveness, and stability come to Mozilla's Fennec platform.

The Mozilla Project announced the release of Firefox 4 beta 1 for Maemo and Android. Significant improvements in the performance and responsiveness of the mobile browser are two of the most instantly noticeable changes in beta 1. Especially when pinching to zoom, moving around a webpage, and rendering zoomed images.

This is because of Electrolysis and Layers, a pair of optimization tools that Mozilla is banking on to supercharge Fennec for these platforms. Electrolysis made its first appearance in the Fennec alpha and in the desktop version of Firefox, beginning with 3.6.4. Users can thank Electrolysis for protecting against browser crashes when a plugin fails because it splits processes across multiple processors, allowing for the components of Firefox to be addressed independently. In Fennec, Electrolysis works in a similar, but scaled down way, by separating the browser interface and rendering process to run independently from one another.

Layers allows for hardware accelerated rendering on mobile devices and it removes the canvas-tile-cache rendering typically used when panning and zooming in a mobile browser (for a great example of this, see Opera Mini). Layers can instead use XUL elements. For even more detail on Layers and Electrolysis, check out Mozilla member Mark Finkle's blog.

Hardware compatibility is another major issue in the Fennec browser. Mozilla says that Fennec supports ARMv7 features such as Thumb-2 and NEON, but that running the app on low-end Android phones and specifically, Samsung's build of the OS isn't advisable -- at least until the Samsung 2.2 image is available. Instead, the programmers are focusing more on high-end smartphones, as they see the devices as being the industry norm by this time next year.

Personally, I've been playing with the app on a Motorola Droid 2, which is a reasonably powerful Android phone with a 1 Ghz OMAP processor and the factory version of the OS installed and despite multiple attempts at reinstalling Fennec beta 1, I cannot get the browser to recognize input from the slide-out keyboard and I cannot raise the touchscreen keypad. This was an issue with the alpha I tested as well. However, the app tested fine, if not a little unresponsive on Rikki Kite's stock HTC Incredible, which is similar in specs to a Droid 2.

Android Apps Secretly Sending GPS User Data to Advertisers

Privacy has been a long-held concern with the Android OS and the news that a significant number of popular apps sending GPS location data to advertisers certainly won't quell these concerns.

Ars Technica reports that researchers from Duke, Penn State and Intel Labs have confirmed that of the 30 popular applications they tested, half sent data to remote advertising servers without the users' knowledge. The researchers performed this test with an application called TaintDroid, named so because it uses dynamic taint analysis to detect and report when applications send sensitive information.

Any Android user who has installed an app knows that before installing, the app prompts the user with a list of phone features the app will be able to access. A user looks these over and if they approve of the features, approves the app and it installs. It's a safety feature designed to give users control and reveal permissions that might seem fishy.

But when an app already uses location features to function, there's no way of knowing what else the app will use those features for, based on the generic description.

Firefox Never Coming to iPhone

Mozilla blog dispels possibility in no uncertain terms.

I a recent blog post on the official Mozilla blog, Prabhakar Raghavan laid out future plans for Firefox Home and in the process put the question of whether the popular open source browser would ever make the jump to the iPhone.

The blog, titled "Firefox Home -- looking to the future," Raghavan outlined new features for Firefox Home, the cloud-based iOS app that synchronizes bookmarks, passwords, and tabs between Firefox and an iOS device. Some new features mentioned in the post include the ability to share links, reviews, and comments directly with Facebook friends and Twitter followers via Firefox Home.

The Mozilla Project plans to bring Firefox Home to BlackBerry and Symbian soon. There is no need to bring Home to Android, as Mozilla is already had at work on the Fennec mobile browser for the platform. An iPad-specific version of Home is also being considered.

In the conclusion, Raghaven dispelled the rumor that Fennec was being developed for iPhone.

"There are technical and logistical restrictions that make it difficult, if not impossible, to build the full Firefox browser for the iPhone," Raghaven said.

The title of the section was unambiguously "No Firefox for the iPhone."

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Canonical Demos Physical Awareness Prototype in Ubuntu

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Sep 20, 2010

Prototype uses webcam to sense user activity and trigger appropriate reactions.

Over at Canonical's design blog, Christian Giordano introduced an early prototype for a user-aware framework that tracks a user's movements and responds by triggering different actions.

The blog details a few examples such as having the computer initiate full-screen mode when a user leans back in their chair. Canonical also toyed with a parallax technique that shifted the desktop's reference point depending on where the user was positioned in relationship to it.

It's one thing to try and describe these processes and another to demonstrate them. Check out the video: http://vimeo.com/14959854

No word on when or even if this prototype will make it to a future version of Ubuntu, but with this, along with the uTouch framework Canonical released a few weeks ago, the company seems to be extremely interested in new ways to interact with a PC.

If you're ready for a deeper look, Linux Magazine gives you a view behind the scenes.

Don't miss out on the tools, tutorials, and reviews you'll need to unlock the secrets of Linux.

 

What Oracle wants

Oracle wants to own its ecosystem.

On the surface it’s a reasonable request. The technology history of the last decade is filled with companies trying to directly control the hardware, software, and actions of their customers. This is at the heart of Microsoft’s strategy, of IBM’s, of HP’s, of the phone carriers’.

What’s wrong with it?

It’s the strategy of a consolidating, slowing, failing industry. It’s the process that gave us Coke and Pepsi, Budweiser and Miller, WalMart and Target. It’s a natural business process, but it’s not what technology should be about.

Technology should be about rapid growth, about carving grand new niches that pour out opportunity in every direction. It should be about tapping a vein that no one company can exploit on its own, that sees perpetual change as the only constant.

Linux is like that. That’s the secret of open source. There are Linuxes for clouds, Linuxes for desktops, Linuxes for mobile devices. There are Linuxes meant for enterprises, and Linuxes meant for individuals. Each distro seeks to carve out its own niche, and the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Larry Ellison rejects this. Just as Steve Ballmer does at Microsoft, just as Carly Fiorina and Mark Hurd did at HP, just as Michael Dell did by buying Perot Systems. Just as the carriers do in “support” of Android. Control of the customer is all. Anything that falls to another vendor is waste, a profit leak to be plugged.

That’s what Ellison’s OracleWorld announcement of a new Oracle Linux is all about. That’s what its Exalogic cloud in a box is all about. Your hardware, your software, your operating system, your cloud, it all comes from one vendor. One throat to choke. Buy the brand.

Everyone wants to be IBM under Tom Watson.

The problem with that strategy is it’s a form of surrender. It screams “I” in a world where “we” should be powerful. It’s not just that it’s a proprietary attitude, that it threatens (say) Red Hat or Novell. It’s that it denies the very idea of innovation by anyone else.

As I said at the top, this is a natural force. An industry explodes onto the scene and gradually consolidates, like a lump of stellar gas coalescing into a planet. But the world of technology need not be a planet.

It should be a galaxy.

 

Novell releases new version of appliance toolkit

Novell is releasing Version 1.1 of its SUSE Appliance toolkit.

“It s delivering the broadest cloud support of any imaging solution,” enthused Michael Applebaum, director of Linux and appliances marketing for Novell.

“It has The most enterprise use cases. It’s the fastest way to bring applications to the cloud today.”

The new version has a number of important new features, he added.

“We’re adding support for Amazon EC2. You’ll be able to run your SUSE application in EC2. We’re adding support for building those applications within SUSE Studio, the solution that’s part of the SUSE Appliance toolkit. We’re also adding KVM and ODS support.”

Applebaum gave an example of how this will work in practice.

“If you’re a retailer and you have a large network of stores, you want to keep your system flexible by having storage separate from the devices, and having them reboot over the network when you change software.

“Instead of having a complicated store you can then manage it separately and remotely, assuring security, assuring patching, and expanding the use cases.” The company talks about going “from zero to cloud in a month.”

SUSE Studio began as a stand-alone offering a year ago. The idea at the time was that independent software vendors would use it to make their applications cloud-ready.

Applebaum said that over the last year the company has heard from many enterprises who are looking for their own cloud-prep solution “We’re now calling on in house IT shops, because we can package their applications and ready them for any cloud development.”

These remain early days in the cloud era, Applebaum concluded, with people thinking about clouds in many different ways.

“I’m not sure if they’re confusing or equating clouds and boxes per se, but they’re increasingly understanding the key tenets of the cloud approach, and they’re looking for practical solutions that work in an incremental way, without having to have a completely siloed management approach.”

 

Open source runs a house of cards

All software is a house of cards.

(This picture, from CBS, shows the world record-breaking card house, from Bryan Berg, of the Venetian Casino. The man who controls the Venetian empire, Sheldon Adelson, formerly ran the Comdex computer shows.)

It’s inherently fragile. For any software program to work it must be perfect, or it collapses. The larger the system, the harder this is to maintain.

Then there is the fact that you have all sorts of people trying to blow holes in it all the time — the number and tenacity of such people increases as the software becomes more critical.

The difference between “open” and “closed” software is mainly a legal one. You can see and edit Microsoft code. Criminals do it all the time. Both open and closed source are equally vulnerable.

But most people are not criminals. Most people are good. Most people even follow EULAs, that’s how good they are. This is the social reason why open source works. Both types of software have people trying to blow holes through them. But open source can bring more resources to bear in fixing them.

Anyone who has tried to build a large, proprietary system from scratch knows how hard it is. It gets exponentially harder as the system scales. You might call it Moore’s Law of Software Degradation. Bigger stacks mean more things can go wrong.

Thus we have Steve Jobs’ secret source. Every once in a while he drops what he built before and starts again from scratch. The Mac OSX is large, but based on an open source LinuxUnix, so it can maintain. The iOS is new, and relatively small — everything old becomes new again.

Innovation can happen within smaller systems. The houses are smaller. They can be built by small teams. So throughout my 30 year career I’ve watched constant reiterations of the same old things. Web games of the ’90s copied PC games of the ’80s. Phone games of the ’00s were the same. Apps, again, mostly, the same. Only the displays get better.

As a system gets bigger the need for an open source process grows, the need to cooperate grows if this skyscraper of cards is to keep standing and growing.

That’s why Mozilla joined the Open Invention Network — to protect its growing code base. It’s also why the Bilski case matters little in the end — the incentive for people to cooperate despite patents is too great.

Once you understand that all software is a house of cards, subject to Moore’s Law of Software Degradation, the need for open source becomes clear.

If it didn’t exist we’d have to invent it.