<IT WORLD> Firefox refreshes itself
By Martin J Young
HUA HIN, Thailand - Firefox, maker of the world's second-most popular web
browser, released a new version this week and halted security support for the
previous one. Mozilla's Firefox 5 was available for download on Thursday, when
users of version 4 were prompted through the auto-update feature of the
software.
With rival Google gaining ground with its Chrome browser, which gets an upgrade
every six weeks or so, Mozilla launched Firefox 5 just three months after the
release of 4 (see
Firefox 4 outruns foes, Asia Times Online, March 26, 2011). Mozilla
chief executive Gary Kovacs stated: "The world of the Internet is moving at a
faster pace than ever, so we realized we had to start innovating faster."
As noted with rivals Apple and Google, the only way to keep a product in the
spotlight is to keep tweaking it and making announcements about the upgrade.
Firefox 4 users will see very little difference with 5 as most of the updates
are under-the-hood security-related ones. Mozilla claims there are over a
thousand. A couple of new features have been included such as support for CSS
(cascading style sheets) animations, more tools for developers to write
add-ons, do-not-track technology for Android users, better support for add-ons,
and some performance enhancements.
Industry
Google is in hot water again this week as US federal regulators prepare court
orders as part of an investigation into whether the search giant manipulates
its search results into steering users towards its own sites and services.
The Federal Trade Commission investigation bears remarkable resemblance to
those that were issued against Microsoft in the 1990s over its monopolization
of desktop computer software. Google has been investigated in the past over
similar anti-trust issues, but according to the Wall Street Journal this will
be the largest investigation yet made towards the company and its operations.
Google has refused to comment, although it has previously denied all such
allegations with the claim that it is helping its consumers find what they are
looking for faster.
Businesses and organizations keen to promote openness and transparency on the
Internet made this comment about Google's practices on the fairseach.org
website: "Anti-competitive practices include scraping and using other
companies' content without their permission, deceptive display of search
results, manipulation of search results to favor Google's products, and the
acquisition of competitive threats to Google's dominance. Google's practices
are deserving of full-scale investigations by US antitrust authorities."
According to figures from ComScore Google still holds a commanding lead in the
search race with 65.5% of the US search market compared to Yahoo's 15.9% and
Microsoft's 14.1% last month.
Telecoms
Apple fans have been getting excited on rumors regarding the next generation
iPhone. According to several reports, iPhone 5 will feature an entirely new
case design and will debut in August.
Last week, Apple began selling an unlocked, unsubsidized iPhone 4, fueling
speculation that it purposely created a high-cost barrier for the smart phone
so that consumers would wait for a few months to buy the iPhone 5 with
subsidized lock-in deals from certain carriers.
Its specifications and design are still the subject of debate. Apple is
remaining coy, no doubt hoping the topic will remain in top tech headlines due
to the fervor whipped up by people with absolutely no details to report on.
Hardware
Japan has taken the title for the world's fastest supercomputer, a race
previously won by the Chinese-made Tianhe-1A supercomputer last November with a
performance of 2.57 petaflops. The K-Computer lives at the Riken Advanced
Institute for Computational Science in Kobe n and churns out a whopping 8.2
petaflops, which equates to 8.2 quadrillion calculations per second.
In simple terms, the mighty machine has the equivalent computing power of a
million desktop PCs; it comprises 627 cabinets and costs an estimated US$10
million per year to keep running.
Originally the K Computer was developed by Hitachi, Fujitsu and NEC, but
following the global recession in 2009 only Fujitsu remained to persevere with
the project, with a little funding from the government.
The company created its own processor for the beast, an eight-core, 2 Gigahertz
Sparc46 CPU - which doesn't sound that impressive, except that there are 68,544
of them in the K. The US's Jaguar supercomputer at Oak Ridge National
Laboratory in Tennessee takes third place in the supercomputer rankings, which
are updated every six months to reflect changes in technology.
Martin J Young is an Asia Times Online correspondent based in Thailand.
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Industry
