Down Time

Unless you’ve been living under a rock then you may have heard that Microsoft recently released a public beta version of Internet Explorer 9. Microsoft officials showed off some impressive stats against their competitors, claiming the first and only browser to deliver full hardware acceleration of all HTML5 content. Being first is great but is being second more important?

Microsoft’s bold claims are accurate but one has to remember the product is still in beta. Google on the other hand has a remarkable way of dishing out product updates with lightning speed. The web search giant is currently readying Chrome 7 which it claims will be 60 times faster than Chrome 6. 2D graphics performance and canvas acceleration is now available in trunk and canary builds of Chrome 7. “This system picks the best graphics API to use on each OS that Chromium supports: Windows XP/Vista/7, Mac OS and Linux”, wrote James Robinson, Software Engineer at Google.

During our early tests at Neowin using Microsoft’s Internet Explorer test drive site, IE9 still wins in canvas speed demos but Chrome 7 is greatly improved over previous versions. It’s important to remember that Chrome 7 is still in the very early beta stage so this could change significantly before it’s fully released. Google isn’t the only other browser looking at hardware acceleration. The latest beta builds of Mozilla’s Firefox also include hardware accelerated components for improved performance. It’s not yet clear when Chrome 7 will be available in non-dev form but Robinson says it’s coming. “With Google Chrome’s fast release cycles, we expect to be able to get these enhancements to users quickly and add new performance improvements over time.”

Google has also created a series of demos, ranging from an aquarium to 3D walls of photos. The demos show what is possible with the 2D accelerated APIs.

Google’s upcoming Chrome OS is being primarily designed for netbook computers, which has shown its interest in tablet computing with its browser-based Chrome OS, it could be the ideal operating system to run on a tablet device – and this is an option that Google is considering. More information about how the new operating system could be optimised for such a form factor is revealed in documentation on Google’s Chromium projects website.

On Monday, Glen Murphy, a user interface designer for Google's Chrome browser and the Chrome operating system based on it, pointed to image and video concepts of a Chrome OS-based tablet that went live two days before the iPad launch. Apparently nobody noticed initially, because only now did Murphy tweet, "Apparently our tablet mocks have been unearthed."

The site also shows the array of devices Google envisions for Chrome OS.

"While its primary focus is Netbooks, Chrome OS could eventually scale to a wide variety of devices. Each would have vastly different input methods, available screen space, and processing power," according to the Chromium form factors site. Chromium is the name of the open-source developer project that underlies the branded Chrome product.

It's possible that Chrome OS could be an easier sell on tablets than on Netbooks, the class of device on which Google said it plans to launch Chrome OS. Netbooks often are used as general-purpose PCs, so the browser-based philosophy of Chrome OS is a more jarring transition.

Today's tablets, in contrast, tend to focus more on a collection of specialized uses such as reading books, surfing the Net, and chores that only require light typing. With that approach, Chrome OS's break from the PC world could be less jarring. The tablet market isn't as big as the Netbook market, though.

The ideas are only mock-ups, but Google has established itself as a real if not dominant force in the computing industry. Its Android mobile phone operating system is increasingly influential, and its Chrome browser continues to steadily grow in usage.

Google's end run around Apple's App Store is complete: Google Voice is ready as a Web application.

Owners of the iPhone and Palm's WebOS devices can now get in on the mobile Google Voice experience with the Web app, which will run in the browsers of iPhones with the 3.0 software installed and all Palm WebOS devices, said Vincent Paquet, senior product manager at Google. The application should be available for current users of Google Voice--which is still an invitation-only service--as of Tuesday at m.google.com/voice.

Google Voice allows incoming calls to ring mobile phones, office phones, or desk phones depending on how the user sets their Google Voice profile. It also treats voice mail like e-mail, transcribing voice messages into an in-box where they can be read and deleted.

Last year Google submitted a native version of Google Voice to Apple in hopes of getting the software onto the iPhone. As most will recall, Apple and Google then entered into a semantic war of words over whether Apple rejected the application (Google's version) or merely continues to study it (Apple's version). Either way, the FCC got involved and Google Voice remains in App Store limbo, Paquet said.

"We haven't had any updates regarding our native app for the iPhone, unfortunately," Paquet said. However, now that the Web app is ready iPhone users will be able to get essentially the same experience that the native app would have delivered, although the user interface will be slightly different because the application will be running in the browser. Paquet declined to comment on whether Google plans to continue the App Store approval process with the native version.

The Web application is another sign of Google's strong desire to encourage people to think of Web-based applications as a ready alternative to native applications. The company has spoken about its plans for Web development at length, and even plans to develop a lightweight operating system based on its Chrome browser as a sort of proof-of-concept for the Web development mindset.

Google has announced a bug-bounty program that will pay researchers $500 for each vulnerability they report in the Chrome browser and its underlying open-source code.

In a post to the Chromium project's blog , Chris Evans, who works on the Chrome security team, said the base bounty would be $500, but that "particularly severe or particularly clever" bugs would reap rewards of $1,337 each.

The latter amount is a reference to "leet," a kind of geek-speak used by some researchers; there, "leet" is rendered as "1337."

New vulnerabilities in Chrome, Chromium -- the open-source project that Google uses to craft Chrome -- and plug-ins that ship with Chrome, such as Google Gears, are eligible for bounties, said Evans. Bugs that are ranked "high" or "critical" in Chrome's rating system get preference, he added, but others may be considered.

"We are hoping that ... this program will encourage new individuals to participate in Chromium security," said Evans. "The more people involved in scrutinizing Chromium's code and behavior, the more secure our millions of users will be."

"Internet Explorer, Safari, Firefox...those browsers have been out there for a long time," said Pedram Amini, manager of the security research team at 3com's Austin, Tex.-based TippingPoint, which operates Zero Day Initiative (ZDI), one of the two best-known bug-bounty programs. "But Chrome, and now Chrome OS, need researchers. Google needs people to put eyes on the target."

Google's new bounty program isn't the first from a software vendor looking for help rooting out vulnerabilities in its own code, but it's the largest company to step forward, Amini said. Microsoft , for example, has traditionally dismissed any calls that it pay for vulnerabilities. "This will be beneficial to Google," Amini added. "There are actually very few vendors who play in the bounty market, but Google doing it is definitely interesting."

Both Amini and Google's Evans cited Mozilla's similar program as the first notable vendor-sponsored bounty. Mozilla kicked off a $500-per-vulnerability bounty in August 2004 that it is still in operation. The Mozilla program pays for bugs in the code used to create Firefox, Thunderbird and other open-source applications.

Mozilla declined to comment on Google's decision to pay bounties, or answer questions about the current status of its own bug bounty program.