Arstechnica - Open Source

Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

As more software shifts into the cloud and users increase their reliance on the browser for daily computing tasks, browser tabs will have to evolve from a primitive mechanism for switching between documents into a full-blown task management system. The mainstream browser vendors have been slow to address this issue and haven't applied much innovation to the problem over the past few years. Mozilla has stepped up to plate and is aiming to hit the ball out of the park with some unique and truly compelling improvements to the tab concept.

Read the comments on this post

The developers behind the GNOME project have gathered in the Netherlands this week for the annual GUADEC conference. During a meeting that took place at the event, the GNOME release team made the difficult decision to delay the launch of GNOME 3, the next major version of the popular open source desktop environment.

The new version has been deemed unready for mass consumption and will need another round of refinements before it can achieve the level of maturity and robustness that is expected by the software's users. Although the news will likely disappoint some enthusiasts, it is consistent with the GNOME development community's conservative approach to release management and strong emphasis on predictability.

Read the comments on this post

Mozilla has announced the availability of the second Firefox 4 beta. This prerelease introduces several new features and brings further refinement to the open source Web browser's new user interface.

We took a close look at Firefox's visual refresh when we tested the first beta earlier this month. The tabs have been moved to the top, above the main toolbar and URL text box. The menubar is gone, replaced with a single menu button that is embedded in the top corner of the window. These changes move Firefox into conformance with the prevailing user interface paradigms that are already used by Opera and Chrome.

One of the major user interface additions in beta 2 is support for "application" tabs. When you convert a regular tab into an app tab by selecting the relevant option from the right-click context menu, the tab will shrink down to just the icon and move to the far left-hand side of the tab bar. When the implementation is complete, the app tabs will eventually persist across sessions. The idea seems similar to the tab-pinning feature that is available in Chrome.

Mozilla is planning to institute a more radical overhaul of tab management and overflow handling, as the organization demonstrated in its recent Tab Candy prototype. You can look forward to reading our full hands-on report about Tab Candy in the near future.

Mozilla is also working to improve the browser's rendering, scrolling and startup performance, and handling of emerging Web standards. CSS3 transitions and transformations are supported in the new beta. Users who want to test the new beta can download it from the Mozilla website. For more details, you can refer to the official Mozilla blog.

Read the comments on this post

Read the comments on this post

Google announced today via the Chromium Blog that it plans to release new stable versions of Chrome every six weeks. Though the team has managed to ship five major revisions in less than two years, the new accelerated pace means we could see Chrome 9.0 by the end of this year.

According to program manager Anthony Laforge, the increased pace is designed to address three main goals. One is to get new features out to users faster. The second is make the release schedule predictable and therefore easier to plan which features will be included and which features will be targeted for later releases. Third, and most counterintuitive, is to cut the level of stress for Chrome developers.

Laforge explains that the shorter, predictable time periods between releases are more like "trains leaving Grand Central Station." New features that are ready don't have to wait for others that are taking longer to complete—they can just hop on the current release "train." This can in turn take the pressure off developers to rush to get other features done, since another release train will be coming in six weeks. And they can rest easy knowing their work isn't holding the train from leaving the station.

Mass transit metaphors aside, Chrome will be revving the major version number with each stable release, with 6.0 expected pretty soon, and then shortly followed by 7.0. 8.0. and 9.0. However, warns Laforge, "please don't read too much into the pace of version number changes—they just mean we are moving through release cycles and we are geared up to get fresher releases into your hands!"

Read the comments on this post

Google's Linux-based Android mobile platform is rapidly gaining traction around the world. Recent reports suggest that it is on a trajectory to become the dominant mobile operating system in China, a region with a large population of mobile Internet users and enormous growth potential.

Although this may seem like an unambiguous victory for Google on the surface, the implications are actually not that clear. It's important to understand that the Chinese mobile ecosystem is producing its own variant of Android, called OPhone. It's a fork of the platform that largely cuts out Google as the middleman. The fork offers Chinese handset makers and mobile carriers considerable autonomy, because it allows them to circumvent the licensing policies and technical mechanisms that Google has traditionally used to exercise control over the platform.

Read the comments on this post

A group of cloud computing stakeholders have announced a new project called OpenStack, which aims to produce a standard open source cloud computing software stack. It will allow adopters to host their own elastic computing clouds and scalable storage grids. Key participants include hosting company Rackspace and NASA.

The project consists of several interoperable components that will be released incrementally as the code is made ready for public consumption. The OpenStack Object Storage framework, which is based Rackspace's Cloud Files service, is the first OpenStack component to be made available.

Read the comments on this post

Mozilla has long had a policy of offering a monetary reward to developers who find new security vulnerabilities in the Firefox Web browser. In a recent change of policy, the organization has bumped the bounty from a modest $500 to $3,000. The offer has also been extended to Firefox Mobile and other new products.

The discovery of a previously unknown security vulnerability opens up a lot of opportunities for profit. Security researchers can get a ton of press exposure and publicity by publishing an exploit of an unpatched zero-day flaw. It is also increasingly common for security researchers to sit on undisclosed vulnerabilities for a long time so that they can whip them out for a quick and easy win during competitions that offer cash prizes.

It's clear that perceptions about vulnerability disclosure and the value of security bugs are changing in the software industry. Following the Pwn2Own competition last year at CanSecWest, security researcher Charlie Miller gained attention for his controversial "NO MORE FREE BUGS" campaign. He contends that vendors should pay for knowledge about previously undocumented vulnerabilities.

Mozilla's decision to offer $3,000 for legitimate new security threats is beneficial to users because it will encourage timely and responsible disclosure of new exploitable flaws.

Read the comments on this post

The openSUSE project has announced the official release of openSUSE 11.3, a major update of the popular Linux distribution. The new version brings several noteworthy technical improvements and new features for users and developers.

It ships with version 2.6.34 of the Linux kernel and Xorg 7.5. The new open source Nouveau driver is used by default for NVIDIA-based graphics cards now and kernel mode setting is enabled by default for supported hardware. openSUSE's Zypper command-line tool got several improvements in this release, including support for removing dependencies that are no longer needed.

Although Oracle's impressive Btrfs filesystem is still not ready for production use, it is made available as an option in openSUSE 11.3 for users brave enough to give it a test run. You can select it in the installer for your main system partition, but you will have to configure a separate boot partition because grub can't run from Btrfs yet.

KDE SC 4.4.4 is openSUSE's default desktop environment, but users can also choose GNOME 2.30.1. The lightweight LXDE environment, which is great for netbooks and low-cost tablets, was introduced in 11.3 as a new desktop environment option.

openSUSE 11.3 is available for download from the project's website. Keep an eye out for our hands-on review, which is coming next week.

Read the comments on this post

Intel has confirmed that it will not be able to include the Poulsbo chipset driver in MeeGo due to licensing issues. The Poulsbo trainwreck continues to undermine the credibility of Intel's Linux efforts.

Read More: Phoronix

Read the comments on this post

A new draft of the Open Source Hardware Definition was published today.

Read More: Open Source Hardware Definition

Read the comments on this post

Although Symbian still holds the crown as the world's most widely used smartphone mobile operating system, it is rapidly losing ground to more modern alternatives. The Symbian Foundation's efforts to revitalize the platform—improving both the user experience and developer tools—is moving forward, but it may not be fast enough to save the platform from irrelevance.

Gartner analyst Nick Jones has issued a wake-up call to Symbian's backers in a recent blog entry. He says that the mobile platform is losing market share at an accelerated pace and that the upcoming Symbian^3 update isn't going to remedy the platform's fundamental lack of competitiveness. The user experience is still too weak, he says, and he doesn't think that the Symbian Foundation can afford to wait until 2011 to address that issue with S^4. He complains that developers shouldn't be wasting time on projects like improving multitasking and internal architecture while the poor user experience continues to cripple the platform's chances of success.

"So if the weak UI is threatening Symbian's very survival the Foundation ought to be seriously worried, right? Wrong. I just looked on the Foundation web site and blogs at the roadmap and features for future releases. What I see is too much effort on stuff that really doesn't matter," he wrote. "The situation is now serious enough that any developer who isn't working on something directly related to a new UI is wasting their time."

Jones' concerns about the Symbian Foundation's pacing and priorities are well-founded, but the issue isn't as simple as he makes it sound. There are a lot of developers working on Symbian, but not all of them are infinitely versed in every aspect of the platform. The developers who are working on multitasking at the kernel level, for example, are probably not trained as designers and might not even have much familiarity with the userspace software stack at all. Fixing multitasking and improving the user experience aren't mutually exclusive efforts.

Read the comments on this post

GamePark Holdings is preparing to release an updated version of its Linux-based GPX2 handheld device.

Read More: LinuxDevices

Read the comments on this post

Google has announced a new browser-based visual development tool called App Inventor that allows users to create Android applications without having to write any code. It appears to be aimed primarily at students.

App Inventor enables user interface design with a simple drag-and-drop layout system. The behavior of the user interface elements can be programmed via a visual development system that the user manipulates by organizing blocks with specific programming characteristics into various structures. The blocks can be dragged around and snapped into each other to form relatively sophisticated programs. This aspect of App Inventor is based on Scratch, an MIT visual programming language.

The compiler that translates the blocks into Android bytecode is built on top of the GNU Kawa framework, which provides a Scheme-based intermediate language. It's worth noting that Kawa can also be used standalone to build entire Android applications with Scheme.

We were not able to test App Inventor ourselves because it is still in closed beta and is not broadly available to the general public yet. If you want to try it yourself, you will have to register on the Google Labs website and wait for approval. For more details, see the official introduction and demo video.

Read the comments on this post

Linux vendor Mandriva has announced the availability of its Spring 2010 release, an updated version of its desktop Linux distribution. Mandriva originally planned to ship the software at the beginning of June, but had put the launch on hold due to serious financial difficulties that jeopardized the company's future. The Spring 2010 version was finally released last week after some new investors bailed out the company and made it possible for development efforts to continue.

Mandriva, which was previously known as Mandrake, is one of the oldest commercial Linux vendors. The French company was founded in 1998 with the aim of selling a heavily-customized derivative of Red Hat Linux that was designed for ease of use. It achieved considerable popularity among desktop Linux enthusiasts during the tail end of the '90s, because it had excellent hardware compatibility and was easier to install and configure than many other Linux distributions that were available at the time.

Read the comments on this post

Here are your top ten stories from the world of science, tech policy, open source, and more:

Ars reviews Android 2.2 on the Nexus One: The new version of Google's Android mobile operating system brings some significant new features and performance enhancements. Ars takes a close hands-on look at Android 2.2 in this in-depth review.

P2P plaintiffs to get just 28 Time Warner IPs each month : The US Copyright Group has gone after more than 14,000 accused P2P file-swappers this year, but in every case it relies on ISPs to turn IP addresses into real names. Time Warner Cable only has to do 28 of these a month, potentially slowing the entire legal campaign.

Read the comments on this post

Android's share of the smartphone OS market went up between February and May of this year while everyone else took a hit, according to the latest data from comScore. The analytics firm released its three-month MobiLens report Thursday, observing that Android's share of smartphone subscribers had gone up a full four percentage points in the US, though it still remains fourth on the list after RIM, Apple, and Microsoft.

According to comScore, all the major smartphone OS makers experienced a dip in market share among smartphone subscribers during the three-month period except for Android. Microsoft saw the largest drop of 1.9 percent, while Apple was down 1 percent and Palm saw a 0.6 drop. RIM saw the smallest fluctuation, with only a 0.4 percent dip.

Still, RIM kept its top spot with 41.7 percent of the overall market as of May 2010, followed by Apple at 24.4 percent and Microsoft at 13.2 percent. Google/Android stood at a solid 13 percent in May thanks to its four percentage point increase, and could very well overtake Microsoft by the time comScore releases its next MobiLens report.

comScore was careful to note that this data came from just before the iPhone 4 launch (which happened in late June), so there's some possibility that Apple's share will see an uptick before the next report. Keep in mind, too, that there was a high-profile leak about the new iPhone in mid-April, which many believe to have depressed iPhone 3GS and 3G sales as users awaited the new model.

Still, it's hardly surprising to see Android make such a big jump early this year. Android mindshare is way up, and the open source nature of the OS means that there's a new Android phone born every minute. With so many phones on the market targeting so many different types of users, the strategy is quite different than that of RIM, Apple, Microsoft, and Palm.

Finally, comScore points out that everyone is sharing the wealth when it comes to smartphone growth: "Despite losing share to Google Android, most smartphone platforms continue to gain subscribers as the smartphone market overall continues to grow," wrote comScore.

Read the comments on this post

When Canonical unveiled Ubuntu's branding overhaul and new desktop theme earlier this year, the company also revealed that it had commissioned well-known type foundry Dalton Maag to design a new font specifically for Ubuntu. The font will likely be used by default in Ubuntu 10.10, which is scheduled for release in October.

Today Canonical launched a closed beta for the new font, making it available to testers and Ubuntu contributors. I tested it on my desktop computer, running Ubuntu 10.04. After installing the package, I enabled it in the GNOME appearance preference dialog. It matches the new Ubuntu logo font, but it's designed for optimal screen readability. It looks very smooth on my LCD monitors and is very easy on the eyes. I think it's a big improvement over Bitstream Vera Sans, the font that currently ships by default in Ubuntu.

The quality of user interface typography on Linux is often criticized as one of the platform's weak areas. Some key software methods that are needed to achieve high-quality TrueType font rendering are encumbered by patents, which means that open source implementations such as FreeType have to rely on technical workarounds that aren't quite as effective. Sadly, some Linux distros compound the problem by using poor default settings for subpixel smoothing. Another major problem is the general lack of availability of high-quality freely redistributable fonts.

Canonical's new Ubuntu font will ensure that Ubuntu users have great typography out of the box without having to install an alternate default font. The current version that is available through the beta is still incomplete. The bold weight is still being designed and isn't available yet. When the font is complete and ready for widespread use, Canonical intends to distribute it under an open license so that it can be modified and redistributed.

Read the comments on this post

Mozilla on Tuesday released the first official beta of Firefox 4, the next major version of the popular open source Web browser. Mozilla has completely overhauled Firefox's user interface and added several noteworthy new features for Web developers and regular end users.

The new user interface represents a major departure from Firefox's traditional look and feel. It is arguably one of the most significant stylistic overhauls that Mozilla has undertaken since the initial transition from the old Mozilla suite to Firefox.

Read the comments on this post

Google's Android mobile operating system got some significant performance improvements in version 2.2, codenamed Froyo. A high-performance JIT was introduced in Android's Dalvik runtime environment and the browser got some very deep optimizations. These enhancements make Android's performance more competitive than ever.

In our recent review of Android 2.2, we conducted some tests on the Nexus One to measure the extent of the JavaScript performance improvements. SunSpider and V8 benchmarks show that JavaScript execution in Froyo's Web browser is almost three times faster than in the previous version of the platform.

We compared these findings with that of our tests of Apple's mobile Safari browser on the iPhone 4. The results show that the Android device delivers significantly faster JavaScript execution than the iPhone, scoring over three times better on V8 and almost twice as fast on SunSpider. Apple has some work to do it if wants mobile Safari to retake the crown as the fastest mobile browser.

Read the comments on this post