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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–John Lilly wants it both ways.

Working at Mozilla Corporation since 2005 and as chief executive since early 2008, he helped oversee a remarkable achievement. Mozilla has built the Firefox browser from a largely unsuccessful remnant of the Netscape era of the 1990s into the browser that nearly a quarter of people on the Web use. Now the challenges are different.

Mozilla Corp. CEO John Lilly

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

First, for new growth, Mozilla must make its open-source browser appeal to an even more mainstream crowd, one that’s more interested in working and playing online than in sticking it to Microsoft or being part of a cause. Second, it’s got to keep the loyalty of the technically savvy early adopters and Web developers that Google now has been courting with its Chrome browser.

“We have to do both,” Lilly said in an interview at Mozilla headquarters here. “We have to be a better browser for your standard everyday user of the Web who uses IE now, but I think we have to redouble our efforts to be good for Web developers.”

The world changed for Mozilla when Chrome burst onto the scene in 2008. Mozilla didn’t see itself as complacent, but Chrome was a wake-up call that “clarified some of our priorities,” Lilly said, including snappy performance.

“It made some things real crisp,” Lilly said.

Indeed, in the months after Chrome’s arrival, these priorities appeared in Mozilla’s Firefox planning: “Observable improvements in user-perceptible performance metrics such as start-up, time to open a new tab, and responsiveness when interacting with the user interface. Common user tasks should feel faster and more responsive.” And future versions of Firefox likely will look more like Chrome embracing some of its less obtrusive framing of Web content and applications.

‘Web-native’ Google
Mozilla’s biggest rivals before, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and Apple’s Safari, came from companies firmly rooted in the era of desktop computers and operating systems. Not so Google, which not only has Web-based applications such as Google Docs and Gmail to support, but also a browser-based operating system called Chrome OS.

“Competing was hard but at some level simple. Google is much more Web-native,” Lilly said.

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Google is an unusual rival. Even as Google and Mozilla vie for popularity, they’re tight allies in the “Open Web” movement to augment Web standards to today’s static pages into tomorrow’s applications. And Google almost singlehandedly funds Mozilla by sending back a portion of search-ad revenue that originates from Google searches within Firefox.

In 2007, the last year for which Mozilla has released figures, Google supplied 89 percent of Mozilla’s $75 million in revenue. Although the Mozilla-Google revenue-sharing deal is set to expire in 2011, realistically, it’s probably safe.

For one thing, Firefox sends a large amount of search traffic to Google–traffic it could easily send to another search engine with the flip of a default setting switch. Second, Google’s browser enemy is Internet Explorer, especially the slow and limited IE 6 that’s still in widespread use eight years after its release. If Google wanted to cripple Mozilla, the time to do it would have been 2008, when the search-ad deal was up for renewal, but Google renewed it.

New standards
One big part of Mozilla’s effort to remain in the vanguard is support for new Web standards.

Mozilla is among those trying to renovate Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) to make it a richer, more capable foundation for programming as well as display. And its significant if not dominant share of usage makes it a major force bringing those “Open Web” technologies to fruition.

“There are still a lot people who think the Web is done–there’s this big mission accomplished banner. It’s not true,” Lilly said. “There are many proprietary technologies, many walled gardens with respect to video and offline technology. There is still is a lot of the Open Web fight to fight,” Lilly said. “Getting to Firefox–a quarter of the Web–shows these technologies are real.”

One thorny one is Web-based video. Today most online video is sent using Adobe Systems’ Flash browser plug-in, which is free; video is encoded with the H.264 standard, which must be licensed. But fees could increase in 2011 with the possibility of new royalties for streaming H.264 video over the Internet.

Mozilla headquarters in Mountain View, Calif.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Perhaps not coincidentally, Google announced plans to acquire On2 Technologies, which has other video encoding and decoding software–or codec–including a new version under development called VP8.

“If VP8 is an open codec and unencumbered (by patent licensing considerations), it’s something we’d implement. That changes the whole landscape,” Lilly said.

The first update in a decade to the HTML standard used to describe Web pages is under way, and one major feature is a video tag that builds video directly into the Web rather than relying on a plug-in such as Flash, Microsoft’s Silverlight, or Apple’s QuickTime. Though Mozilla, Google, Apple, and Opera all like the tag, they don’t see eye to eye about what format video should be encoded in, which complicates how well the technology works in practice.

Mozilla and Opera urge use of the Ogg Theora video format, which may be implemented in open-source software without licensing complications, and Firefox has had Ogg support since version 3.5 of the browser arrived earlier this year.

But Apple’s Safari has H.264 support built in. Google’s Chrome supports both standards, but YouTube supports only H.264. Microsoft hasn’t said what it plans to do. So for now, video plug-ins appear unthreatened.

Microsoft in the wings
At the other end of the competitive spectrum is the incumbent. Although Microsoft’s browser development crept nearly to a standstill after IE won the first browser wars of the 1990s, there’s evidence the sleeping giant is awakening.

IE 8, released earlier this year, attempts to conform to existing Web standards rather than setting its own. And though IE still doesn’t support many of the latest technologies to make the Web into an application foundation, Microsoft now is actively engaged in discussions over those technologies and their standardization. Finally, Microsoft is working on Web applications of its own in the form of an online version of Office 2010, giving the company a strong new incentive to improve its technology.

So far, though, Microsoft’s effect is more theoretical than actual.

“They’ve given notice they will engage. We haven’t seen them influence it a lot,” said Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of engineering. He’s eager about the possibility that Microsoft will embrace new Web standards. “They represent a large user base–some by choice, some not. Those technologies mean a lot more when they make it to more people.”

Something of a wild card factor in today’s browser wars is Apple, which has released a Windows version of its browser. The company rarely ventures out of its home turf of Mac OS X unless there’s a strong incentive–releasing iTunes for Windows to boost the iPod business, for example–but evidently deemed Safari for Windows a high enough priority to fund development and support efforts if not much in the way of marketing.

Going mobile
Apple, though, has a big head start when it comes to the new era of mobile browsing that’s just beginning to mature with high-powered devices such as the iPhone. Like it, Palm’s Pre handset and Google’s Android operating system for mobile phones use a browser based on the open-source WebKit project.

Firefox is moving more slowly into mobile, though. Its mobile browser project, called Fennec, is slated to emerge later this year under the Firefox brand name for Nokia’s Maemo mobile operating system, and Lilly has said Firefox will be available for Google’s Android operating system as well.

“I do more browsing than ever in mobile. The boundaries between desktop and mobile are going to blur,” Lilly said. “We will release (Fennec) as a product called Firefox later this year.”

Lilly likes to look at the bright side of this fluid landscape. “In most ways the world as a Web user is better than it’s ever been. There’s real choice, not just from Apple and Microsoft but from Google and Opera,” he said.

“We’re a unique organization. Compared to open-source projects, we look rather wealthy. Compared to the people we’re competing with–Apple, Microsoft, Google–$50 million, $60 million, $100 million in revenue that to them isn’t really meaningful,” Lilly said. “We’re competing in a low-expense, scrappy way.”

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Excerpted from:
Firefox’s crossroads: Cutting-edge or mainstream?

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–Some new fruits of Mozilla’s effort to speed Firefox development are about to arrive.

Mozilla plans to release the first beta version of 3.6 this weekend or early next week. But what exactly is coming in the new version and its successors?

Mike Shaver, Mozilla’s vice president of product development, and John Lilly, Mozilla’s chief executive, detailed some of the browser’s future in an interview at the corporation’s headquarters here. And the company has an aggressive schedule, with three releases due within about a year.

Mike Shaver, vice president of engineering at Mozilla

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The present version of Firefox was to have been called 3.1, but with significant new features, it became Firefox 3.5–and arrived later than 3.1 had been planned. Version 3.6 is slated for release in final form this year, with 3.7 in the first half of next year and 4.0 about a year from now, Lilly said.

“We’re trying to shrink these development cycles down,” Shaver said.

Getting personal
One of the big changes with 3.6 is building in the Personas add-on that lets people customize the appearance of the browser. It’s about as cosmetic as a change can be, but reskinning software often is popular among users who want to personalize their computers.

Under the covers but more noticeable is prioritized networking that gives the active tab the lion’s share of network capacity to speed its loading. The goal is to speed up multipage restarts of the browser.

Tabs behavior will get a significant change that could throw some people off. New tabs generally will appear immediately to the right of the active tab when opened from a link, rather than at the far right of the tab strip.

Finally, Firefox 3.6 will support Open Web Font, a font format that supports compression and metadata to let the origins of a typeface be tracked down.

Support for new Windows 7 interface features, though, mostly will have to wait. “Aero Peek has landed in 3.6, but Jump Lists and download status in the Windows 7 task bar will have to wait for 3.7,” according to this week’s update. Aero Peek lets people see miniature versions of applications from the Windows task bar; Jump Lists spring up from applications on the task bar to let people take quick actions such as opening a recently used document or Web page.

A mock-up of Firefox 3.7 shows merged reload-stop button, the home tab, and the missing menu bar option.

(Credit:
Mozilla)

Firefox 3.7
For 3.7, the big change will be under the covers: plug-ins such as Flash will be moved to computing processes that are separate from the main browser operation, protecting the latter from problems with the former.

“We’ve seen more crashing since 3.5 came out, especially in last month or so,” Lilly said, pointing to problems from Web-based malware attacks and from issues with Flash. The new design also should help split Firefox up into separate tasks that can take better advantage of all the computing threads offered by multicore processors.

Also coming in 3.7 will be new graphical animation work using Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), two Web standards. And pushing the direction in which Chrome and Safari have been so aggressive, there will be new JavaScript work.

With version 3.0, Mozilla introduced Firefox’s “awesomebar,” officially but infrequently called the Smart Location Bar, which can be used not only to type addresses but also to retrieve the URLs of previously visited sites. With 3.7, expect an upgrade that lets people switch among active tabs by typing in the bar.

Firefox 3.7 also will mark the arrival of some significant changes to the user interface, though final details remain under discussion. Among the likely changes: a combined stop and reload button, a home tab instead of a home button, and the ability to run with the menu bar hidden.

One superficial change Mozilla hopes will make Firefox look less “dated” is work to make the browser fit in better with Windows Vista and Windows 7. There will be some corresponding changes to Firefox’s Mac OS X interface, too.

This mock-up of Firefox 4.0 shows the 'tabs-on-top' option, the side-mounted menu buttons, combined address-search bar–all Google Chrome-like features.

(Credit:
Mozilla)

Firefox 4.0
Bigger changes come with version 4.0. There each browser tab will get its own process. “In Firefox 4 we’ll have a more fully multiprocess architecture for stability and increasingly to take advantage of multiple cores,” Lilly said.

Another big change will be with add-ons. One of Firefox’s biggest assets is the rich array of these customization options–but a corresponding frustration is how those add-ons often break with each update to the browser.

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Firefox 4 will introduce a new add-on framework under development today called Jetpack that, like Chrome’s, uses Web-based technologies for add-on construction. Today’s Firefox uses a foundation called XUL.

Among the other perks besides compatibility, as Mozilla sees it, Jetpack extensions are easier to write and share, and they can be updated as the browser runs without a restart. Still, it will mean a big discontinuity for programmers.

“We want for developers to want to get onto Jetpack and the Jetpack application programming interface,” Shaver said, and the current plan is to drop the older add-on technology with Firefox 4.

Finally, there will be more changes to the browser’s appearance. Some have called it a Chrome copy–features include a merged location bar and search bar, removing the status bar across the bottom, and adding an option to put the tabs at the very top of the browser, all features introduced with Chrome. Lilly, though, bridles at the Chrome-copy idea.

“We’re trying to get as much window space as possible for content,” he said. “I don’t think it’s a move toward Chrome. We’re trying to give space to the content.”

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Read more here:
Firefox’s future features: 3.6, 3.7, and 4.0

Gartner analyst David Cearley

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Stephen Shankland/CNET)

ORLANDO, Fla.–Cloud computing isn’t going to be vapor much longer, Gartner said Tuesday.

The general idea–shared computing services accessible over the Internet that can expand or contract on demand–topped Gartner’s list of the 10 top
technologies that information technology personnel need to plan for. It’s complicated, poses security risks, and computing technology companies are latching onto the buzzword in droves, but the phenomenon should be taken seriously, said analyst Dave Cearley here at the Gartner Symposium.

Gartner's top trends to watch.

(Credit:
Gartner)

Specifically, companies should figure out what cloud services might give them value, how to write applications that run on cloud services, and whether they should build their own private clouds that use Internet-style networking technology within a company’s firewall.

Cloud computing takes several forms, from the nuts and bolts of Amazon Web Services to the more finished foundation of Google App Engine to the full-on application of Salesforce.com. Companies should figure out what if any of those approaches are most suited to their challenges, Gartner said.

Gartner analyst Carl Claunch

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

The advice came as part of a talk on top trends coming in 2010 that companies should incorporate into their strategic planning, if not necessarily their own computer systems. The full list of 10: 1. cloud computing; 2. advanced analytics; 3. client computing; 4. IT for green; 5. reshaping the data center; 6. social computing; 7. security–activity monitoring; 8. flash memory; 9. virtualization for availability; and 10. mobile applications.

Second on the list is virtualization–not just in the broad sense of technology that lets a single computer run multiple operating systems simultaneously, where it’s become a fixture in data centers, but as a means to keep computing services up and running despite computer failures, said analyst Carl Claunch.

Virtual machines can be moved from one physical machine to another today. Later, by keeping two machines tightly synchronized, a failure in a primary machine can be eased over rapidly by moving the active service to the backup machine, Claunch said.

“We should start seeing this roll out in the next year or two from vendors,” he said.

The Gartner hype cycle takes on the PC.

(Credit:
Gartner)

For PCs, virtualization is arriving, too.

“Think of applications in bubbles,” Cearley said. “They can run on client devices or up on a server,” with virtualization providing the encapsulation technology to move the work around. The official corporate computing environment can run side by side with employees’ home computing environment.

That, along with cloud computing, enables more freedom for people using PCs.

“We’re looking at a time when the specific operating system and device options matter a lot less,” Cearley said. “You could use a home PC or a Macintosh with a managed corporate image running on that particular device…We see more companies providing a stipend (for) employee-owned PCs.”

Make your data center modular.

(Credit:
Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Another idea: modular data centers. You don’t have set up your IT gear in storage containers, but do divide them into pods that each have their own computing, power, and cooling, Claunch said. That makes it easier to pay as you go, to adapt to new technologies, and to increase energy efficiency by partitioning hot hardware from cooler hardware.

Green IT is important–and changing in its nature. It’s not just a matter of buying efficient computers, but also of using computers to increase the efficiency of other parts of the business, Cearley said. For example, analytics can improve the efficiency of transportation of goods.

Next comes applications for mobile devices. “That has great potential for creating different experience or stickiness for your customers,” Cearley said.

And mobile x86 processors from Intel and AMD could make software development easier, too, he added.

Social networking will happen internally and externally.

(Credit:
Gartner)

Social-networking applications, broadly defined, also should be on company radar screens. The technology can take the form of internal corporate social networks, interactions with customers, and use of public services such as Facebook and Twitter.

Companies need to get a handle on what’s going on–and potentially business purposes such as understanding how the corporate brand is perceived.

“Social network analysis will be moving from a somewhat arcane discipline to a much more mainstream component of your social computing strategy,” Cearley said.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

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Gartner: Brace yourself for cloud computing

ORLANDO, Fla.–Cloud computing? It’s got its place, but apparently not one very close to the heart of Hewlett-Packard Chief Executive Mark Hurd today.

At the Gartner Symposium here, Hurd said cloud computing has promise but that he and customers he speaks to are leery of moving important applications to another company’s infrastructure outside the company’s own firewall.

“I think it’s a very attractive model, but there will be challenges,” Hurd said. “At the end of the day, if you tell a CEO, ‘Put our e-mail in the cloud,’ a certain amount of CEOs will tell you not (to). If (HP Chief Information Officer Randy) Mott told me, ‘Put the general ledger up in cloud,’ I’d say go back to work, we’re not doing that.”

The cloud is real for many consumer services, he said. So why isn’t it suitable for HP’s core financial records stored in the general ledger? Security, for one thing.

“We get about 1,000 hacks a day. They’re more sophisticated every month,” Hurd said. “Security and reliability is a huge thing. It’s unlikely we’d put anything outside the firewall that’s material in nature that we couldn’t 100 percent secure.”

HP CEO Mark Hurd explains process re-engineering.

(Credit:
Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Hurd also said cloud computing has a branding issue among CEOs he speaks to. In one gathering he was doing fine until he raised the issue.

“I got a lot of boos after that…From a nontechnical CEO perspective, ‘cloud computing’ does not sound very clear to them,” he said. The message he gets from those CEOs: “If this cloud computing is so cool, try to break this down into simple clear services that help my business be a better business.”

Moving beyond services
In an onstage interview, Hurd also described HP’s overall strategy, starting with building blocks of servers, PCs, networking equipment, and storage at the foundation, working up through software and putting services at the top.

Well, at the top for now. HP is headed for another layer: specific services packaged for particular customer segments, or “verticals” in industry parlance.

“The natural outgrowth for us will be more focus for us on vertical solutions,” he said. HP won’t get into practices for human resources or executive compensation, but will work in areas in which it can extend its computing technology ingredients.

Hurd said that spanning this range of products and services means that scale matters, for example in bargaining with component suppliers. Here, he dinged competitor IBM for selling its PC business to Lenovo, though without mentioning Big Blue by name.

“When a company would sell off its PC business, for example, you would have a problem because you would no longer be as big a customer to all those people who supply products to that supply chain,” Hurd said.

He also took a potshot when asked about how HP’s strategy differs from IBM’s.

“I don’t follow them very closely,” he wisecracked. “It sounds like they’re trying to chase us.”

Beefing up sales
Gartner analyst Donna Scott said big customers find HP easy to deal with, but for others, the company is fragmented.

Hurd acknowledged there are problems, but said HP is working on them.

“We have a strategy to sell more. If somebody is interested in buying more, our strategies are aligned,” he deadpanned.

In particular, when it comes to revenue growth, HP is aiming at smaller companies, he said. At present 70 percent of spending on IT comes from HP’s top 2,000 biggest accounts.

Hurd pointed to an emphasis on sales as one area where he’s trying to shift HP’s culture.

“(Company co-founder David) Packard used to say, ‘If we build great products customers will find them,’” Hurd said. “We actually want to sell them too.”

Revamping HP’s own IT
Hewlett-Packard has focused on cutting costs of its own computing infrastructure. In 2004, the year before Hurd took over as CEO, “We had $79 billion in revenue. We made $3.5 billion (in net income). We spent $75.5 billion.” So, he asked the company’s staff, “What do you spend it on?”

IT was a big part of it, accounting for $4.2 billion. Of that 82 percent was just to keep things running.

“One of our big spends was IT. We had more IT professionals in the company than we had salespeople,” he said.

“We had IT spread out. Everybody had a little bit of ownership,” Hurd said. There were 87 data centers, 6,000 applications, 19,000 people, 24,000 servers, 20 petabytes of data stored at 700 data marts.

The company “flipped the model,” cutting expenses and redirecting funds to the future instead. “Our spend is down 40 percent and our innovation is up 2X in dollars.”

It was painful and HP made mistakes on the way, but it was a personal priority for Hurd.

“I get a lot of CIOs who show me how bad their IT is,” Hurd said. When he sees it, “My first reaction is it’s because of a bad CEO.”

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Go here to see the original:
HP’s Hurd dings cloud computing, IBM

A first shot from DigitalGlobe's WorldView-2 satellite shows the AT&T Center in San Antonio, Texas.

(Credit:
DigitalGlobe)

The Henry B. Gonzalez Convention Center San Antonio, Texas, where DigitalGlobe is showing off its first images for the GeoInt 2009 conference.

(Credit:
DigitalGlobe)

Twelve days after it launched WorldView-2 into orbit, DigitalGlobe has released its first images from the satellite, which will supply high-resolution photography for Google’s and Microsoft’s online mapping services.

The first images are of two locations in San Antonio, Texas, where the company is showing off its work at the GeoInt 2009 Symposium this week, and of Dallas Love Airport.

The quality of the images should improve over these first shots, taken Monday. “More refinements to early-stage images can be expected as the ongoing check-out and calibration continues,” DigitaGlobe said.

Microsoft and Nokia sponsored the WorldView-2 launch, but the former’s Bing and the latter’s Navteq won’t be the only services to get the imagery. They’ll share it with Google, which has been the sole online beneficiary of images from GeoEye-1, a satellite launched last year by DigitalGlobe rival GeoEye.

The new satellite is able to capture imagery with a resolution fine enough to detect features as small as 0.46 meters, or 1 1/2 feet, on the ground, though federal regulations permit DigitalGlobe to offer images with only a maximum resolution of 0.5 meters for general commercial use, the Longmont, Colo.-based DigitalGlobe said. Other DigitalGlobe satellites with sub-meter resolution in orbit already are QuickBird and WorldView-1.

“WorldView-2 is expected to improve the speed and rate of imagery delivery to the government and commercial markets with large-scale collection capacity and daily revisit rates,” meaning that the satellite can photograph the same site multiple times during the same day, the company said. The satellite can capture multispectral imagery–eight bands of light, or more than what’s visible to humans–though at a lower resolution of 1.8 meters.

Dallas Love Airport as photographed by WorldView-2.

(Credit:
DigitalGlobe)

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Read more from the original source:
DigitalGlobe’s new satellite yields first images