Google Chief Executive Eric Schmidt said Thursday evening that, for six years, he resisted the idea of building what became the Chrome browser and (soon) operating system, before succumbing to the enthusiasm of Google Co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
Lately I’ve been worried about Firefox. Ever since its debut in 2004, the open-source Web browser has won acclaim for its speed, stability, and customizability. It eventually captured nearly a quarter of the market, an astonishing achievement for a project run by a nonprofit foundation. But recently Firefox seemed to go soft.
A pair of researchers has discovered a way to use modern browsers to more easily build darknets–those underground, private Internet communities where users can share content and ideas securely and anonymously.
The NY Times is running an article about a bunch of illustrators complaining that Google offered to promote their work for free as special skins for its Chrome browser.
Software maker SAP is about to make its second foray into the world of online software.
In September 2007, SAP unveiled an online version of its management software aimed at small businesses. The product languished, with the company’s co-CEOs last year saying that they wouldn’t sell it because it didn’t make any money.
In theory, getting users to ditch one Internet search engine for another should be an easy sell. But doing so is likely to cost Microsoft every penny of the roughly $100 million it plans to spend on an advertising campaign that starts Wednesday for its new Bing search engine.
In economist speak, there are virtually no “switching costs” for a consumer that wants to change from one search engine to another, other than the burden of typing Bing.com into a Web browser instead of Google.com.
The Street seems to be backing away from the theory that Apple will introduce a cheaper version of the iPhone with a smaller screen and reduced functionality.
Yesterday, Bernstein Research analyst Toni Sacconaghi noted that the company does not appear to be pursuing his idea for an “iPhone Nano,” and that any new iPhones are likely to include both a browser and access to the App Store.
Yesterday’s flare-up about the Terms of Service for Google’s new browser Chrome, followed by the company’s rapid backtracking on the demands it was making of users, left many people wondering about Google ToS in general.
Apart from a few specific issues, many of Chrome’s best features are already available in Firefox 3, proving yet again the power of extensibility. Let’s take a look at how you can bring some of Google Chrome’s best features to Firefox.
Google’s release Tuesday of a test version of its new open-source web browser, Chrome, marks an important moment in the ongoing shift of personal computing from the PC hard drive to the Internet “cloud.”
Why is Google building a browser? A better question is, why did it take so long for Google to build a browser? … “The browser matters,” CEO Eric Schmidt says. He should know, because he was CTO of Sun Microsystems during the great browser wars of the 1990s
Historians typically trace the origins of the World Wide Web through a lineage of Anglo-American inventors like Vannevar Bush, Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson. But more than half a century before Tim Berners-Lee released the first Web browser in 1991, Paul Otlet described a networked world where “anyone in his armchair would be able to contemplate the whole of creation.”
Back on May 30 of last year, Google released Google Gears, a browser plug-in designed to help Web-based applications work even when they couldn’t connect to the Internet. I was pretty jazzed up about it, and so were my PC World colleagues: We eventually named Gears as the most innovative product of 2007. I still think that Gears is a fabulous idea. But I’m beginning to worry about its viability.
Last week Steve Jobs took the stage at the Apple town-hall meeting and announced two major things for the iPhone: 1) support for Microsoft Exchange and 2) the iPhone SDK. The Exchange support was a relatively unexpected move, but in retrospect it makes perfect sense. In order to unseat BlackBerry as the No. 1 wireless player in the U.S., Apple needed to have an enterprise story. What’s more, Apple has realized that the days when people carried two phones are over.
With support for the enterprise (one device for both home and business use), together with its utility as a music player, camera and Web browser, the iPhone is well positioned now to be that “one phone.”
Remember how the writers’ strike was forcing people to shut off their TVs and turn to their Web browsers? Think again: Nielsen says video viewership actually dropped 5% from December (6.2 billion streams) to January (5.9 billion). Not surprising, then, that YouTube, the dominant purveyor of Web video, also slipped from 2.64 billion streams in December to 2.57 billion in January. Unique viewers at YouTube were also down slightly from 67.2 million to 66.2 million in January. But YouTube kept its 42% market share of total streams.
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