Who's winning the new browser wars? We are. By "we," I mean consumers.
Just look at the stuff that has happened in the last couple of years. We've got a mature Safari, based on WebKit and the Squirrelfish engine, running just about as fast as any browser. Chrome is also based on WebKit but uses a completely new JavaScript engine named V8, and it blows the doors off of just about everything else. Firefox has hit 3.0 and now 3.5, with improved Gecko rendering and Spidermonkey / Tracemonkey keeping the browser competitive and all the extensions keeping it attractive to large numbers of users. Even IE has bumped up a couple of versions to 7 then 8, and there's no reason to call it a pig, either. (Oops, I forgot Opera Unite!)
Just imagine what we would have had in 2004 if IE hadn't won the original browser wars and sat at version 6 and 95% of web traffic for five years.
Chrome OS will basically be the Linux kernel, a new windowing system (which I assumes means something other than Xorg, and not just a window manager), and Chrome. There will be no other applications. ("There is only Zuul.") All applications will be web apps. It will run on ARM and x86.
However, the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web. So today, we're announcing a new project that's a natural extension of Google Chrome — the Google Chrome Operating System. It's our attempt to re-think what operating systems should be.
Moblin emphasizes on-line possibilities, too, but has many more local applications to connect with.
UNR sits slightly above Mobin, with a standard operating system and an innovative interface.
And then there's Windows 7, which will "run" in 1GB, but sertainly won't be a speed demon. Even though MS dropped the hard three-application limit, you'll still be limited to somewhere near that number by RAM requirements.
I predict those levels are basically how the market will break out, too. The ultra-cheap netbooks based on ARM and intended solely for surfing will get Chrome OS; Moblin and UNR will take the low-end of the marke; and Win7 will get the top 50-70%.
Ubuntu was the choice based on the memory usage, completeness, and overall look. Apparently, everything worked out of the box. The only problems UNR had were with playing an uncompressed MP3 and opening a MS Word document quickly.
Congratulations, Ubuntu. You've gotten some respect from a major mag.
Tridge again steps up his game and gives Linux a great way forward, this time in the FAT patent situation. Let's look at a little background about that situation before we find out how Tridge soved the dilemma, shall we?
FAT (or FAT16) is an ancient system originally used on DOS and only supported eleven-character filenames (commonly called the 8.3 format). Windows used a backwards-compatible variant of FAT, called VFAT or FAT32 which supported longer filenames while still having the shorter names. Long filenames were written as is and shortened to 8.3 for the legacy system. This is origin of the "C:\Progra~1" jibe common in *nix circles ten years ago when referring to "C:\Program Files." Microsoft filed patents for the process of having both long and short names on FAT partitions, and those patents were granted (patents #5,579,517 and #5,758,352 in the U.S.) in 1996 and 1998, respectively.
In 2008, Microsoft decided to start suing businesses over infringement of these patents, and they started with TomTom, a manufacturer of in-car navigation devices (shown above) that are Linux-based. The message to everyone was clear: "Linux infringes our patents. Don't use it in your embedded devices." Despite community attempts to find prior art and nullify the patent, which are still being carried on by the Open Invention Network, TomTom was forced to settle the suit and remove FAT functionality from its hardware. The Linux community was rocked and considered pulling FAT from the kernel completely, virtually killing it's ability to read thumb drives and otehr removable media.
Wait! What's that on the horizon? Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it's Tridge in his super-suit here to save humanity ....
How did he solve this riddle and allow Linux to keep FAT? The key was in the patents. They cover methods to have both short and long filenames. Tridge proposed a patch which would write the short filename if under eight characters, and write only the long name if it was over eight. Since Windows will crash without the short name, the method writes invalid characters to the short filename space, not creating a valid short filename, and also not crashing Windows.
All hail Tridge! ;)
On an aside, this is my 256th (2^8) post, meaning that I have averaged over one post every three days for the two-plus years I've had this blog. Cheers. I hope to be around for another byte's worth of posts.
I write about Vala fairly often because I think it's a new and interesting part of the Gnome desktop. For those who don't know about Vala, it's a C# and Java-inspired language which pre-compiles to C and eventually becomes native binaries. This means that Vala programs don't need a VM and are suitable for embedded operations, etc. Vala supports the following interfaces
Vala 0.7.4 was recently released, and added support for array properties, support for implicit and explicit GValue casts, initial support for generic methods, and Postgres bindings.
There have been a couple of popular IDEs for Vala, namely Valide and MonoDevelop, but Gnome's default text editor has been left out until now. Sure, it's had Vala highlighting, but that's not enough for a lot of people.
Welcome Valencia, a Vala plug-in for GEdit that offers the following features:
no configuration needed: simply open a .vala file and browse its symbols immediately
jump to definitions of classes, methods, fields, and variables
build your project within gedit, with build output in a gedit pane
double-click any build error to jump to the line where it occurred
use the Run command to run your program, with output appearing in a gedit pane
The Valencia Wiki gives the following installation instructions.
To build Valencia, you'll need to have the following programs and libraries installed:
valac, the Vala compiler. We recommend using a relatively recent version, but you cannot build Valencia with valac 0.7.4 due to a Vala bug.
You can download the latest source release at valencia-0.1.0.tar.bz2 . Or check out the latest code (possibly unstable) at svn://svn.yorba.org/valencia/trunk. Then run make and make install. (Do not run sudo make install. Valencia installs in your ~/.gnome2/gedit directory, and if you install as root the permissions will be wrong.)
To enable Valencia in gedit, go to Edit->Preferences->Plugins and check the Valencia checkbox.
Adam Dingle, the developer, says
I know that there are a growing number of Vala IDEs and plugins available today. I believe that Valencia's particular strengths are its ease of use and its symbol browser; Valencia was designed to make it effortless to jump between symbols even in a large Vala program. Feedback, patches or code contributions are welcome!
This is not an online diary so I don't often put in any personal information, but I'm going to make an exception here because the news will affect my writing.
I'm moving at the end of August. I'm not just moving, though, I'm selling almost all my stuff and going to another country. The period before and after the move will be busy and stressful. Expect very few articles in the next two months.
Once in my new home, I'll have two months off and will have a ton of time to write. I'll try to make up for the dry spell then.
Opera released he preview of Unite, a web server in a browser for sharing your files and photos.
Opera Unite allows you to easily share your data: photos, music, notes and other files. You can even run chat rooms and host entire Web sites with Opera Unite. It puts the power of a Web server in your browser, giving you greater privacy and flexibility than other online services.[1]
In case you don't want to run a pre-release version of Opera, you can get similar results with Meiga. It's written in a combination of Vala and C. According to the website:
The current trend in the Internet is to publish contents in centralized servers to be shared to other people. Nevertheless, sometimes it's handy for users to be able to serve their own contents directly from their desktops in a convenient way (instead of using a pendrive, for instance). Why bothering about publishing y
our contents if you can share them directly from your desktop to the LAN or even to the whole Internet?
To satisfy this need we've created Meiga, a tool that makes possible to share selected local directories via web. But that's only the beginning. In fact, the ultimate goal of the project is to serve as a common publishing point for other desktop applications, such as the file manager, picture viewers or music players.
It can punch holes through uPnp-aware routers to make the operation automatic. Meiga can even publish an RSS feed of your shared items. The program's lighter than gnome-user-share since Meiga doesn't use Apache. Since Meiga uses Gnome technologies, it fits right into the standard Ubuntu desktop. Packages are available for Hardy, Intrepid, and Jaunty.
Image by Sam Cornwell via Flickr![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uF0Lec7DqWewACS72EfD6gk4pxjvHGwQ3rpxYi79dPS19plqXd7jBOAsPtP1U2kzJiQDLyr6XcFz2_Elo9b7Xr1x2M4cdlPjWY1PWqZmSHD9h-ccmDVBS03OhV8WKSxNKmbE4gdwW7I48XApImpcgI=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vrH6QL2ydh-r8IEZ0zi4fda8z_Lqu-yvvCg22KORj2d2CVJGWn19s7SgMfF4ADjs40Mfr5wMbWi8HyIQn0KUAEcezOIEmvGsqvyvQcRdHMv23U2a8KGxn2rzh4J1OER3qTFJesJJHlzpZrgzrPjk0=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_uC7JSwlsZNd6bSofVD6PcYSv2G7RdNQqSQxY6quUHhILtbnUxtKyBUrHieWDYOBCuumlKIxItCeWBDKHNXMiSVK9F9XkLeVCVk_EPBXI0aNu1m2jTBftdqvDPW9W9lxAwrzt5YwM-yJAvWDlRX8VIn=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vkrzRmqWnUOv840TxgYOd182bg23SHu4qEnfRRcJ1riXcIHM4Ji77rzJUuitDeSUfupJJ7NrsoMQDQtmeLOP194mHZXVtiFiQEOTsQfwqyJ1G7Hc0Y2oRKLMLZ8h1MVNIMFe3JXc75E2mTFFK5adbm=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_ufhXNy7YN4iGvRm39B_MjT06-xKBmJvfuHHw9UNOeNshX9M-fmgWL_zD5xsa3l7xiHu6PzthOOwSimUWoXVVJjOhtZVAqq7LAZK9GJvefWiSI_872qEcI5IVGqUdN3ZuraHI8V4zQqYgh7aBGinsM=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_vFOgJXILMH_5dQ-mkfCmmgr2SHgk119aJnDsGwbeGqBzWaEMeodobqLEg_f-OM2MqVDwNfwOrPd44Zgt-5jvxldnPWWBBHnInUexwwdQS_PET9A_etkESu9IwHhBrAZknS4UcgTBnMYNp08eOZTtqO=s0-d)
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/blogger_img_proxy/AEn0k_tM0c7CsEfjMs0djARapbGglIChUyCahuWFuTkso88k9BYcNoP8h-qz2c-psc_RByWnAmRMCB40rJDogAqmaB4TW60LX4bDadMOqCJRvhBirgLWzMc_lIiM27ZYoJ5qKbJpzU2PgK4QBwX8Gh7pn5s8=s0-d)
