Rishi

When Chrome got its start, the browser was svelte and fast-loading if limited.

Now, it's got plenty of features, but two years later, it's nearly three times bigger. And Google, deciding that's not a good thing, has set up a task force to curtail Chrome bloat.

The task force is "aggressively looking at options to bring down the size of Chrome distribution binaries," said Anthony Laforge, Chrome technical program manager, in a mailing list message this month. Binary files are the ones computers understand; they're created from human-comprehensible source code.

With broadband connections, large file sizes aren't necessarily a showstopper. But they can cause plenty of problems. Chrome Developer Ian Fette described two:

    1. We do distribution deals with Chrome, where we bundle Chrome with other products. These get difficult when our binary grows. 2. We see increased download failures / install dropoffs as the binary grows, especially in countries with poor bandwidth like India. India also happens to be a very good market for Chrome (we have good market share there and growing), so that's also very problematic.

Added another Chrome programmer, Adam Barth:

    At a more macro level, adding MB to Chrome is pretty invisible to developers. It's a tragedy of the commons, where each of us grazes our cows just a bit and piles on just a few more KB. Performance would be the same, except we're fanatical about not regress startup or page load performance. Maybe we need to be more fanatical about not regressing binary size?

Chrome has grown from 9.0MB with version 1.0 to 26.2MB for version 10.0 on Windows. Despite being dogged by reputations of being bloatware, Firefox 4.0 is 12.0MB for the Windows version.

Chrome has proved to be influential. It increased the relevance of the open-source WebKit browser engine project on which it and Apple's Safari are based. Mozilla has embraced Chrome's fast-rev ethos, starting after today's release of Firefox 4.
Google Chrome logo

And although it's hard to find a direct link from external statements, it seems likely that Chrome helped to add fuel to the fire Microsoft lit under its Internet Explorer developers. With IE9, released last week, Microsoft once again has a competitive browser. (For a walk down memory lane, check this superb tour of Internet Explorer 1.0 through 9.0.)

Google updated its Chrome logo last week, though the change won't arrive beyond the developer version of the browser until Chrome 11 reaches beta and stable versions.

"Since Chrome is all about making your web experience as easy and clutter-free as possible, we refreshed the Chrome icon to better represent these sentiments. A simpler icon embodies the Chrome spirit -- to make the web quicker, lighter, and easier for all," Google designer Steve Rura said in a blog post yesterday.

If the most notable escape artist and magician of all time had managed to escape death, he'd be 137 today.

Born Eric Weisz in Hungary in 1874, Harry Houdini immigrated to the United States with his family at the age of four and later changed his name.

He got his start in performing with a stint doing card tricks in the circus but soon moved on to escape acts and illusions, many which featured in his later film career. Houdini died in 1926, at the age of 52, after suffering from complications from a ruptured appendix.

Google's Doodle in Houdini's honor showcases an old-school circus-esque poster, reminiscent of the ones that would advertise his shows.

The irony for Microsoft is pretty hard to escape.

The federal judge overseeing Microsoft's 2002 settlement with antitrust regulators noted at a hearing today (subscription required) that the software giant had made "extraordinary" progress in resolving outstanding issues. But just consider the much bigger story of the day: Mozilla's new Firefox 4 browser was downloaded 6.5 million times in less than 24 hours. (Check out Mozilla's real-time Firefox 4 download data here.) Compare that to Microsoft's Internet Explorer 9, introduced a week earlier and downloaded 2.3 million times in the first 24 hours.

Turns out the marketplace is doing a pretty good job of what the court tried to do. The Justice Department brought the case, alleging that Microsoft illegally used Windows to monopolize the browser market. A federal judge ruled against Microsoft, leading the company to ultimately settle with trustbusters, a deal U.S. District Court Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly has spent nearly a decade overseeing.

It may seem odd that a judge is still overseeing the nearly decade-old settlement. But Microsoft's deal with regulators requires it to abide by a series of guidelines--most notably, disclosing key technical information about making software applications compatible with Windows. Kollar-Kotelly continues to monitor Microsoft to make sure it abides by the consent degree.

In the meantime, though, the battleground for computing has shifted. Windows, the source of so much of Microsoft's power, no longer gives the company the cudgel it once used to thwart rivals. It's still the dominant computer operating system. But Mozilla doesn't need to play by Microsoft's rules to reach the masses. That's because the Internet, of course, matters much more than Windows.

Just look at the browser market. When Microsoft settled the antitrust case, it controlled more than 90 percent of the browser market. In February, according to Net Applications, Internet Explorer held 57 percent market share. It's still the leader. But Firefox has 22 percent of the market, followed by Google's Chrome with 11 percent and Apple's Safari with 6 percent. Certainly one reason for that shift is that the rival browsers are every bit as good, and sometimes significantly better, than Internet Explorer.

Firefox 4's outpacing Internet Explorer 9 in downloads is to some extent Microsoft's own doing. The company put itself at download disadvantage by making IE9, released March 14, incompatible with Windows XP, which, though long in the tooth, is still used by more than 40 percent of Web surfers. The company said it wanted to have a browser that could take advantage of the modern graphics technology of its newer operating systems. And surely, it doesn't hurt to encourage folks using the old operating system to upgrade by limiting the availability of the latest software.

To be fair, the antitrust case has played some role in shrinking Microsoft's power. It'd be hard to argue that the terms of the settlement have prevented Microsoft from using Windows to monopolize other markets. But the antitrust case raised the specter of drawn out regulatory hurdles to major acquisitions, likely tempering Microsoft's acquisition ambitions. And the company instituted corporate accountability guidelines in the wake of the settlement intended to curb the abuses that led to the antitrust case in first place.

The antitrust settlement is set to expire May 12. Much has changed in the intervening years. It faces emboldened rivals such as Google and Apple, as well as new technologies harnessed by Facebook and Twitter. Today's technology landscape would have been unthinkable when Kollar-Kotelly agreed to the antitrust settlement. The biggest change of all may be that Microsoft no longer dominates computing the way it once did. Just ask the folks at Mozilla.

Nearly 13 million American adults who use social networks are more than willing to accept friend requests from strangers of the opposite gender, a new survey from Harris Interactive has found.

According to Harris Interactive, 18 percent of men will accept a woman's friend request, even if they do not know the person. About 7 percent of women will accept an unknown man's friend request. A total of 5 percent of U.S. adults will accept every friend request they receive.

The key to stealing a person's identity is built with just a handful of pieces. And much of it is available on social networks.

Only 50 percent trust that their connections will keep their information private. Yet more than 24 million Americans leave their personal information "mostly public" on social networks.

The results are based on a survey last month of 1,011 Americans 18 and over, including 387 who are on social networks. ID Analytics, a consumer risk-management firm, commissioned the survey, which was released today.

Leaving personal information public and allowing practically anyone to view your profile is a dangerous prospect, Harris Interactive observed. The company said that the basic information found in a social profile can help "build the dossiers [that criminals] need to beat challenge questions and other security measures on financial accounts." It's a sentiment with which ID Analytics agrees.

"Americans' lack of caution in friending members of the opposite sex online is striking," Thomas Oscherwitz, chief privacy officer at ID Analytics, said in a statement. "Friending someone online is not risk-free. Most social networking profiles contain personal information that can be used by fraudsters, and when you friend someone, you are giving them access to this information."

One other interesting tidbit from the survey: respondents were twice as likely to say that having more business contacts than personal contacts in their list of friends is desirable.

Firefox may be under fire from Microsoft's newly competitive browser, but with more than twice the downloads in its first day, Firefox 4 today soared over its rival by one measurement.

Microsoft, not without reason, boasted that IE9 was downloaded 2.35 million times in the first 24 hours after its release last week. And that is indeed a big number, especially for a browser that tech enthusiasts had scoffed at for years.

But less than 24 hours after its own launch, Firefox 4 cleared 4.7 million, according to the Mozilla Glow site that logs downloads.

Firefox logo

That's a lot less than the 8 million copies of Firefox 3 downloaded in that version's 24-hour debut in 2008, but that event was a heavily promoted "Download Day," and it should be noted that Firefox 4's full day hasn't finished yet.

And it does signal that at least a very sizable chunk of the Net-connected population is, in Firefox's apt phrase, choosing to "upgrade the Web." New browsers bring new Web standards, new performance, and often a new auto-update ethos that likely will lead to browsers staying continuously updated. That could simplify lives for Web developers who constantly wrangle with the difficulties of supporting old browsers.

Firefox 4 brings a raft of new features--new security and privacy options, faster loading and JavaScript, support for a variety of new standards including WebM video and WebGL 3D graphics, and 3D acceleration that extends even to Windows XP.

Mozilla expects that its arrival will lead to an increase in usage. The browser maker said it has 400 million Firefox users and counting, but as a percentage of worldwide browser use it has lost share to Chrome, which now accounts for more than 10 percent of usage worldwide.

I worry that our whole world is being systematically systematized.

The more our youngest and brightest minds offer their working souls to the Facebooks and Twitters of this firmament, the more they are asked to define every single human event and emotion by digits.

And yet I still found myself sensing a momentary twitch of the single gray hair between my eyebrows when I heard that Google had been awarded a patent for its doodles.

I suppose there will be some who will say: "But, of course! Google's doodles are unique works of art! Van Gogh would have secured a patent if he'd actually managed to sell one of his paintings!"

But these people might not have read the patent. You see, this isn't a document that craves some proprietary claws over artistic genius.

Instead, it claims Sergey Brin as its inventor and is titled "Systems and methods for enticing users to access a Web site."

Of course. Art has to have a system, doesn't it? It can't be about inspiration.

This is Google. Everything must be systematized. The abstract makes this entirely clear: "A system provides a periodically changing story line and/or a special event company logo to entice users to access a Web page."

You see, the word "system" is there straight away.

But there's more: "For the story line, the system may receive objects that tell a story according to the story line and successively provide the objects on the Web page for predetermined or random amounts of time. For the special event company logo, the system may modify a standard company logo for a special event to create a special event logo, associate one or more search terms with the special event logo, and upload the special event logo to the Web page."

A first glance at all this suggests that Google's systematic originality lies in, um, drawing something, and then, well, uploading it.

But there's perhaps an even more painful hidden message inside: that all those nice people who sit at their computers and try to create amusing versions of the Google logo to celebrate some meaningful day are merely the movable (and removable) parts of a system.

It seems that they always have been. Indeed, Google filed this patent application almost 10 years ago.

I know that there will be many wise and legal minds who will tell me that this was a necessary measure, as everything even vaguely interesting must be patented in order to protect its intellectual property.

But how sad that Google didn't try to patent something like "inspiration," "artistry," or, you know, "magic."

Here's what I can tell you about the drinking water situation in the tiny Rwandan village of Mwite. The few closest spring catchments--basically cement basins with a pipe of flowing water--are working, but not producing as much water as they should. The catchment further to the west, a handmade system nearly a century old, is no longer functioning, so the best bet will probably require a walk to the northernmost safe water source in the area, the newest cement-encased spring catchment, built in 2007.

I didn't speak to anyone in Rwanda for this story, or to anyone who had recently been to Mwite, north of the capital city of Kigali, but I can confidently relay details about the water situation in that far-flung rural village thanks to...what else? An Android-based app.

The agencies and nonprofit organizations that work to ensure that places like Mwite have clean drinking water will tell you that infrastructure is just one challenge, among others being highlighted today on World Water Day. After the pipes and pumps are installed, there's the never-ending task of monitoring and maintaining thousands of sites spread across the challenging terrain of places like Rwanda, Liberia, or Bolivia.

For years, teams would go into the field with pounds of paper questionnaires, cameras, and maybe an expensive GPS, and gather data on individual sites--all of which would then be stuffed in a file cabinet somewhere back in the capital city, spending most of its time collecting dust.

Today's high-end smartphones combine all those monitoring tools into a single, inexpensive, convenient device that not only collects data on water projects but can also analyze, map, and share it--tasks that would have in many cases taken an unthinkable amount of time just a year ago.

That's when Water for People, a Denver-based nonprofit working on water and sanitation projects in 11 countries, started thinking about an easier way to monitor its projects. The group brought in developer Dru Borden of Gallatin Systems to design an application that could handle survey results, photos, and geolocation data in a single package. The result is Field Level Operations Watch, better known as FLOW. Water for People deployed a team equipped with smartphones loaded with FLOW for the first time in Rwanda last August.

"Now what you can do is go into a village with a cell phone, take a GPS coordinate, take a picture, answer all the questions (in the questionnaire asked of villagers) and then all the information is there," said Water for People CEO Ned Breslin, who together with his group recently won a social entrepreneurship award from the Skoll Foundation for their efforts. "If you have a cell phone network, it sends it directly into the data analysis part of the program and right on to Google Earth, and you can see real-time results right away."

Breslin says the FLOW technology is nothing short of game-changing, allowing for fewer errors, more rapid responses to problems, and greater transparency. He adds that choosing Android as the platform for FLOW was a bit of a gamble, but one that looks like it will pay off.

"We bet that Android technology is going to become much more readily available around the world, that the cost of the phones is going to go way down, that more and more people will start using it, and we're starting to see that."

Water for People is so confident in that trend that it will soon be rolling out a sister program in India featuring what Breslin calls "mobile mechanics"--essentially a corps of plumbers on bicycles riding from village to village doing repairs on hand pumps, armed with FLOW-enabled phones. The application will keep track of the spare parts needed for repairs, payments for the plumbers, and response time to water emergencies.

"The dream is for a woman in the village whose hand pump goes down to indicate it through FLOW, and then there's a response," Breslin said. "Down the road, as Android technology moves forward and becomes cheaper, I think there's great potential... but right now you can buy the phone that runs this thing in Kenya for 80 bucks, and it just keeps going down, so I think it's a good bet we made."

That could be a bit of an understatement. FLOW has been such a success in the months since its debut that Water for People has had a hard time keeping up with the dozens of organizations that want to use it.

One of the highest-profile names to roll out its own FLOW-based initiative is the World Bank, which will soon release results of its efforts to map the more than 7,000 waterpoints in rural Liberia using FLOW.

The bank allowed CNET to take a look at a preliminary draft of results from Liberia, and the massive amount of data gathered with the help of FLOW yielded some interesting insights, including the fact that a certain brand of pump seemed to have lower stamina, breaking more quickly after installation than other types. The project also allows for easy mapping and visual representation of areas that remain completely without safe waterpoints.

Maximilian Hirn, of the bank's Water and Sanitation Program, just returned to the capital Monrovia from rural Liberia. He writes in an e-mail to CNET that the bank adapted Water for People's version of FLOW to be able to deploy it on a national scale for the first time.

"We acquired 75 Android smartphones, loaded the FLOW software onto them, and then hired and trained 75 teams of mappers, gave them motorbikes and sent them out all across Liberia to map all safe waterpoints in the country. Our teams managed to complete this task in about 30 days of intense work...and in the very challenging environment of Liberia, thus really testing its merits under difficult conditions."

Hirn added that the challenges included Liberia's still sparse and expensive mobile phone network. But he says downloading data off SD cards proved to be a workable backup.

Like Breslin and his group, the World Bank is already looking at ways to use FLOW and Android in other areas.

"...just in Liberia there is already a separate pilot-project that plans to use the FLOW software to give local communities an easy way to monitor illegal fishing trawlers that frequent their local waters," writes Hirn. "The communities would fill in a short survey about each spotted illegal trawler, take a picture, a GPS location, and then send the information to a central database."

FLOW doesn't represent the only use of technology to help ensure clean water and sanitation systems for all, however. In Argentina, one technologist uses mathematical analysis to get cleaner water to the slums. IBM is looking at distributed and networked computing to model and improve watersheds. And at least one company has come up with a straw that can filter even the filthiest water for drinking.

For Breslin and Water for People, one of the most surprising benefits of using Android was the cost savings. He describes a grueling process of bringing thousands of paper questionnaires back from the field and the many hours spent matching them up with photos, GPS coordinates, double checking for errors... That expense in time and labor has since been replaced by FLOW, which he estimates costs a total of about 82 cents a month to keep up and running.

But Breslin sees potential for FLOW and Android beyond trimming the bottom line. He and others have "heard rumblings" of mapping and monitoring every waterpoint worldwide. And after that comes applying Android to the world's other challenges, like health care, just for starters.

Adding another chapter to a long, drawn-out legal saga, a New York federal district court has rejected the controversial settlement in a class-action suit brought against Google Books by the Authors Guild, a publishing industry trade group.

"While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would simply go too far," a court document explains. "It would permit this class action--which was brought against defendant Google Inc. to challenge its scanning of books and display of 'snippets' for on-line searching--to implement a forward-looking business arrangement that would grant Google significant rights to exploit entire books, without permission of the copyright owners. Indeed, the ASA (Amended Settle Agreement) would give Google a significant advantage over competitors, rewarding it for engaging in wholesale copying of copyrighted works without permission, while releasing claims well beyond those presented in the case."

The settlement would grant Google the right to display excerpts of out-of-print books, even if they are not in the public domain or authorized by publishers to appear in Google Books. When the settlement was initially announced in mid-2009, opposition flooded in from lawyers on behalf of Microsoft, the Electronic Frontier Foundation, and a coalition called the Open Book Alliance who decried it as anticompetitive.

"Google and the plaintiff publishers secretly negotiated for 29 months to produce a horizontal price fixing combination, effected and reinforced by a digital book distribution monopoly," a lawyer for the Open Book Alliance said at the time. "Their guile has cleared much of the field in digital book distribution, shielding Google from meaningful competition."

The settlement was revised, primarily to deal with objections coming from the European Union, but concerns remained that it would give Google too much power over out-of-print book titles.

The most recent court docket, filed today, explains that Google has digitized over 12 million books since the original 2004 announcement of Google Books and its set of partnerships with several major universities to digitize their research libraries. In 2005, the class action suit was filed over the fact that many of the out-of-print books included in the mass scanning were still under copyright. Settlement negotiations began nearly five years ago.

Last year, the Authors Guild said that it chose to settle rather than head for a court battle because it didn't want to repeat the well-publicized mistakes that the music industry made while policing digital piracy.

But concerns about the settlement have ranged from the aforementioned antitrust qualms, international law issues related to overseas copyrights, and privacy concerns regarding how much information Google could glean about readers.

The docket filed today, authored by Judge Denny Chin, asserts that "the ASA is not fair, adequate, and reasonable."

"This is clearly disappointing, but we'll review the Court's decision and consider our options," a statement from Google managing counsel Hilary Ware explained. "Like many others, we believe this agreement has the potential to open up access to millions of books that are currently hard to find in the U.S. today. Regardless of the outcome, we'll continue to work to make more of the world's books discoverable online through Google Books and Google eBooks."

John Sargent, CEO of Macmillan, issued a statement on behalf of the publishers that had joined the plaintiffs' side of the lawsuit. "While the March 22 decision of U.S. District Court Judge Denny Chin on the Google Book Settlement Agreement that was filed on November 13, 2009 is not the final approval we were hoping for, it provides clear guidance to all parties as to what modifications are necessary for its approval," he said. "The publisher plaintiffs are prepared to enter into a narrower Settlement along those lines to take advantage of its groundbreaking opportunities. We hope the other parties will do so as well."

Adobe today released a fix for a critical vulnerability in Flash Player that affects Adobe Reader and Acrobat and which reportedly has been exploited in attacks via Flash files embedded in Excel files distributed via e-mail.

The vulnerability, reported last week, could allow an attacker to crash a system or take control of it. Adobe is not aware of attacks targeting Adobe Reader and Acrobat, the company said, also noting that Adobe Reader X Protected Mode, a sandboxing technique, prevents an exploit of this type from executing.

The bug has been identified in Adobe Flash Player 10.2.152.33 and earlier versions (Adobe Flash Player 10.2.154.18 and earlier versions for Chrome users) for Windows, Macintosh, Linux, and Solaris operating systems, and Adobe Flash Player 10.1.106.16 and earlier versions for Android, according to the bulletin.

A separate bulletin fixes a related critical vulnerability in the authplay.dll component that ships with Adobe Reader and Acrobat X (10.0.1) and earlier 10.x and 9.x versions for Windows and Macintosh operating systems.

Adobe has made Reader 9.4.3 available for users of Adobe Reader 9.4.2 for Windows and Macintosh and recommends users of Adobe Acrobat X (10.0.1) for Windows and Macintosh update to Adobe Acrobat X (10.0.2).

"Because Adobe Reader X Protected Mode would prevent an exploit of this kind from executing, we are planning to address this issue in Adobe Reader X for Windows with the next quarterly security update for Adobe Reader, currently scheduled for June 14, 2011," the company said.

Google included an updated version of Flash Player in a Chrome update last week.

Three years ago, Firefox 3 set the record for most downloads in a 24-hour period, cracking 8 million and positioning itself as a viable alternative to Internet Explorer.

Firefox 4, released today to the public at large after 12 public betas, two release candidates, and nearly a year of development, faces a hugely different landscape. Microsoft's Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser. And in less than three years, a significant chunk of the browser market has taken a shine to relative newcomer Google Chrome.

Mozilla flips the switch from version 3.6.15 to version 4 as Firefox possesses more than 400 million active users. The new version of the browser sports several massive changes, including a radically redesigned interface, significantly faster browsing speeds, strong support for the still-in-development HTML5 and other "future-Web" tech, and competitive features like synchronization, restart-less add-ons, and tab grouping. The official CNET review of Firefox 4 is available at the Download.com pages for Firefox for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

Browser speed remains an important point of comparison. But as the five major browsers have developed over the past year, their speed differences have become more muddled. For example, Mozilla noted that when Firefox 3 was released, it took "60 milliseconds to change Gmail from showing one message to another with Firefox 3... compared with 413 milliseconds for IE 7 and 227 for Firefox 2."

Current browser benchmarks that look only at JavaScript place them all in the same ballpark now, so the point of comparison has begun to shift to graphics processing unit (GPU) hardware acceleration. This allows the browser to shove certain rendering tasks onto the computer's graphics card, freeing up CPU resources while making page rendering and animations load faster. These tasks include composition support, rendering support, and desktop compositing, and there are few benchmarks that are capable of testing it.

One interesting publicly available benchmark is the new JSGameBench from Facebook, which looks to test HTML5 in real-world gaming situations. The Firefox 4 beta was the fastest tested without WebGL and was the second fastest with it. Mozilla's own tests put Firefox 4 at three to six times faster than Firefox 3.6.

Mozilla remains a leader in developing the Web, and interestingly that role has led it to hold back on building out one of the more interesting minor features in Firefox 4. The new do-not-track feature supports a header on Web sites that tells sites and advertisers not to track you, so you don't see targeted ads as often. Internet Explorer also supports the header, and it includes robust, configurable support for blocking ad trackers; Firefox 4 relies on add-ons like AdBlock Plus to gain the list blocking.

"Beyond blocking the ad loads, which you can do with add-ons, this is a business social trust situation between sites and users. We need people to vote with their feet, or at least want to have that conversation. We've spoken to a lot of advertisers. And by and large, they want to be good citizens here," Nightingale said. As a current solution, though, that makes users entirely dependent on advertiser behavior, which is likely to fall short of what people want.

Another security repair in Firefox 4 fixes a hole that affected all browsers until last summer--a vulnerability so old that it was mentioned in the documentation for CSS2 a decade ago. The exploit is a CSS sniffing history attack, in which malicious code can gain access to your browser history by manipulating link appearance and style. What made the bug so difficult to repair is that the simplest solution--to prevent all link style manipulation--would be like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, Nightingale had said in an interview at Black Hat 2010.

Nightingale also addressed other changes in Firefox 4 as providing the feature in question without playing fast and loose with a user's data. Firefox 4 removes the "lucky" automatic search result jumps from the location bar's search functionality because Mozilla had "concerns about sending a lot of private data from the location bar to search engines. We will get there," he added, "but like with Sync we want to do it right."

Sync is another new feature in Firefox 4 and is possibly one of the best implementations of the feature across the competition. Not only can you synchronize your data across traditional PC versions of Firefox, but you also can sync your bookmarks, passwords, preferences, history, and tabs with your Android or Maemo-running phone or tablet. However, Sync debuted in 2008 as an add-on and had a notably rough beginning. Fortunately for user data, which it used to delete seemingly at will, Mozilla fixed the problems with it.

Along with the Android support, Sync gets two security features right. One is that Firefox encrypts your data before sending it over an encrypted connection to its servers, where it remains encrypted. Mozilla said it could not access the data even if somebody there wanted to. The second is that you have the option of setting up your own personal sync server. In an age in which private data stored by corporations gets hacked and stolen with shocking regularity, setting up a personal sync server is one way to ensure that you bear the responsibility for your own data. The only problem with the feature is that it doesn't yet support syncing add-ons, a factor that is at least partially tied to Firefox's nascent restart-less add-on network, also debuting in version 4.

Other big changes in Firefox 4 include a minimalist interface with a condensed menu button that closely resembles that of Opera 11 and Chrome 10; app tabs; tab groups for keeping tabs organized; an overhauled add-on manager that also supports restart-less add-ons; and expansive support for HTML5, CSS3, and the aforementioned hardware acceleration for Direct2D and Direct3D on Windows, OpenGL on Mac, and XRender on Linux.

One "future-Web" tech that Nightingale said probably won't come to Firefox before version 5 is support for WebSocket. "The specification had security problems, so we turned it off," he said. He added that users can enable it at will through the "websocket" options in about:config.

Although it took more than two and a half years for Firefox 4 to get here, expect that time to get axed like a tree in a rainforest for Firefox 5. Mozilla plans to put Firefox on an accelerated release schedule, much like Google has done with Chrome.

Microsoft filed suit today against Barnes & Noble as well as the makers of its Android-based e-reader and tablet devices for patent infringement, part of its broader campaign against Google's mobile operating system.

The software giant alleges that its patents cover a range of functions "essential to the user experience." The company specifically cites the way users tab through various screens on the Nook e-reader and the Nook Color tablet, both of which run Android, to find the information they're after, as well as the way they interact with documents and e-books.

"The Android platform infringes a number of Microsoft's patents, and companies manufacturing and shipping Android devices must respect our intellectual property rights," says Horacio Gutierrez, Microsoft's corporate VP and deputy general counsel for intellectual property and licensing, in a press release.

Microsoft says it's tried to no avail to reach licensing agreements with Barnes & Noble and its hardware partners. "Their refusals to take licenses leave us no choice but to bring legal action to defend our innovations and fulfill our responsibility to our customers, partners, and shareholders to safeguard the billions of dollars we invest each year to bring great software products and services to market," Gutierrez says.

The suit was filed with the International Trade Commission and the U.S. District Court of the Western District of Washington. Microsoft also named Foxconn International Holdings and Inventec Corporation as defendants in the case.

A Barnes & Noble spokeswomen declined to comment on the suit, saying the company doesn't comment on litigation as a matter of policy. Google, though, fired back. "Sweeping software patent claims like Microsoft's threaten innovation. While we are not a party to this lawsuit, we stand behind the Android platform and the partners who have helped us to develop it," Google spokesman Aaron Zamost said.

Microsoft previously sued Motorola, alleging that several of its Android devices infringe on Microsoft patents. Microsoft would prefer that companies making Android devices follow the lead of its longtime partner HTC, which worked out a deal last year covering its own Android devices.

Despite its many patents, Microsoft rarely sues over infringements. In a blog post, Gutierrez says that this suit is the seventh proactive patent infringement case brought by Microsoft in its 36-year history. "We simply cannot ignore infringement of this scope and scale," Gutierrez writes.

Microsoft, which is losing ground to Android in the marketplace, is pushing hard to take the fight to the courthouse. One tactic: make using Android, which is offered for free to manufacturers, more costly by raising the specter of litigation. Microsoft has claimed over the years that Linux-based products infringe on its patents, which has led to several licensing deals with companies making devices using the technology. And Android is based on the open-source operating system.

As Todd Bishop of GeekWire notes, the patents Microsoft is alleging infringement of are different from the ones cited in the Motorola case. This time, Microsoft is suing over patents such as ones that cover editing electronic documents, and capturing and rendering annotations.

The market for mobile devices is so lucrative that litigation is a key strategy to keep rivals off balance. Last year, Apple sued HTC for infringing on iPhone patents covering the graphical user interface and the underlying design. And Oracle, too, sued Google, alleging it infringed on patents related to Java in Android.

A once loyal partner

The size of the market is clearly one reason why Microsoft is willing to take on Barnes & Noble, long a loyal partner and customer for a variety of products and services. A decade ago, Barnes & Noble was one of Microsoft's marquee partners for its Microsoft Reader software, an early entrant into the electronic book market. Back then, Barnes & Noble created an eBook superstore, using the Microsoft technology, for customers who wanted to read books on laptops and the existing hodgepodge of dedicated reading devices that used Microsoft's technology. That business has since shuttered.

Barnes & Noble also partnered with Microsoft on its ill-fated Windows Live Search Cashback program, which paid rebates to customers who found products with Microsoft search engine and purchased them. And Barnes & Noble lent its name to the list of customers touting its business intelligence software back in 2004.

In addition to a permanent injunction barring the defendants from infringing on Microsoft's patents, the company is also seeking compensatory damages "with interest and costs, and in no event less than a reasonable royalty" as well as treble damages for the defendants "willful and deliberate" patent infringements.

A group of researchers who describe kicking a habit as "a war that consists of a series of momentary self-control skirmishes" have found a link between texting and controlling cravings among a group of 27 heavy smokers in Los Angeles who participated in two related studies.

In the first study, the findings of which are reported this month in the journal Psychological Science, the smokers performed a basic self-control task while three regions of their brains most involved in impulse control were scanned using fMRI. They then described their cravings and smoking patterns, and their urine and lungs were tested to determine their physical addiction levels.

In the second study, whose findings are reported in the journal Health Psychology, the participants underwent a three-week smoking cessation program, during which each smoker received eight text messages a day to monitor cravings, moods, and actual cigarette use.

Using data from both studies, researchers at the University of Oregon, the University of Michigan, and UCLA confirmed previous findings that regular-interval monitoring of cravings--via texting or the use of other handheld devices--helps get rid of memory biases (i.e., remembering something being more difficult or more rewarding than it actually was) that occur when cravings and use are reported only once a day.

They also found that when it comes to the "brief interval assessment" of people trying to quit, text messaging is at least as effective as using the type of palmtop devices that are more commonly employed in cessation programs--which is handy given that texting tends to be less expensive, easier to use, and more immediate.

"Text messaging may be an ideal delivery mechanism for tailored interventions because it is low-cost, most people already possess the existing hardware, and the messages can be delivered near-instantaneously into real-world situations," the authors report.

Finally, the researchers found that fMRI imaging can help predict an individual's ability to suppress cravings, as the smokers with the most brain activity in impulse-control regions were most likely to resist cravings as documented by the texts.

The researchers note that these findings may make it possible to tailor cessation programs to individuals based on their abilities to inhibit responses to cravings. Whether monitoring by text will soon be a mainstay of cessation programs remains to be seen, but research already links one's likelihood of quitting smoking to the smoking habits of one's social network.