"Google Chrome browser on Linux" by sermoa on Flickr (CC-BY-SA)

Google has announced that Google Chrome, their web browser, will be using a new open-source algorithm for diffing binaries of software updates. The algorithm, called Courgette, produces binary diffs roughly 10% the size of those created by bsdiff, the diffing algorithm they used previously:

Rather than push put a whole new 10MB update, we send out a diff that takes the previous version of Google Chrome and generates the new version.  We tried several binary diff algorithms and have been using bsdiff up until now.  We are big fans of bsdiff – it is small and worked better than anything else we tried.

But bsdiff was still producing diffs that were bigger than we felt were necessary.  So we wrote a new diff algorithm that knows more about the kind of data we are pushing – large files containing compiled executables.

This is great news, especially for those on slower connections. However, even though they’ll be open-sourcing the code for the algorithm, I have to wonder about the patent situation. Does Google have any patents on the algorithm itself and, if so, will they agree not to enforce them?

• Announcement on Chromium Blog
• Chromium Dev article with technical details

Chrome logo - Credit: http://google.com/chrome

Google has announced that they plan on releasing their own operating system, called Chrome OS.  They claim that it will be “Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel.”

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year we will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because we’re already talking to partners about the project, and we’ll soon be working with the open source community, we wanted to share our vision now so everyone understands what we are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year. The software architecture is simple — Google Chrome running within a new windowing system on top of a Linux kernel. For application developers, the web is the platform. All web-based applications will automatically work and new applications can be written using your favorite web technologies. And of course, these apps will run not only on Google Chrome OS, but on any standards-based browser on Windows, Mac and Linux thereby giving developers the largest user base of any platform.

It really doesn’t make any sense that it’s Chrome on top of Linux.  Can it really live with no GNU utilities?  Honestly, I’m not sure how I feel about this.  I suppose it’s a good thing because Google has the muscle to really compete with Apple and MS.  I’m imagining another Xandros.  Any other thoughts?

• Google Blog
• Ars Technica

Red Fox - Credit: mikebaird on Flickr (CC BY)

Firefox 3.5 has been released.  Of much importance to free culture, it supports the HTML5 <video> and <audio> tags.

Originally envisioned as a quick follow-up to 2008’s release of Firefox 3.0, Mozilla ended up packing in quite a few extra features into its flagship browser and spent months making sure that Firefox 3.5 was the fastest, most powerful Firefox yet.

Firefox 3.5 brings with it entirely new and much faster rendering engines for both static web pages and the JavaScript code that powers today’s complex web-based applications. There are new privacy features, new capabilities for playing video and audio files and improved search tools. There are also a handful of other new features that should prove useful for both Firefox devotees and newcomers alike.

Yay FF.

• Web Monkey

Open Standards - Credit: developer.mozilla.org

Mozilla has given the Wikimedia Foundation $100,000 to fund the development of the Ogg, Theora, and Vorbis.

Mozilla is integrating support for the Ogg format directly into Firefox 3.1, so the next version of the popular open source web browser will be able to play Ogg media without requiring any plugins or external software. The Ogg format will be supported through Firefox’s implementation of the HTML 5 video element, which allows video to be seamlessly interwoven with conventional HTML content and manipulated through the DOM. Mozilla has recently demonstrated the video element feature being used for streaming video. Opera is also integrating standards-based video support into its browser and has a working implementation of Ogg for HTML 5.

Although the technology is starting to fall into place, it will take time for the standard to be supported broadly enough to encourage adoption by sites that stream rich media. The lack of DRM support inherent in the open implementation will also likely impede adoption by major commercial content creators. Standards-based solutions may never manage to displace Flash, but the first big steps need to be taken for this to even be a possibility.

Yay for free codecs.

• Ars Technica

Groklaw reports that Mozilla, after the negative reaction from the community, has decided to forego having the next version of Ubuntu display an End-User License Agreement upon first use of the Firefox browser.

Here’s a screenshot of the latest language from Mozilla, and as you’ll see, they absolutely have listened to the community’s EULA concerns (if you click on the image, it gets larger). Instead of a EULA, the new page you get on install is a notices page with no “I agree” requirement, along with a link to an optional services agreement, and instructions there on how to avoid having to accept the services, if you don’t want them. The notices inform you about the license being the MPL, that Mozilla’s trademarks are theirs, not ours, and the link to the services offerings. I believe trademarks are important to protect, as you probably know from reading Groklaw.

This is far better than an EULA, especially because it both addresses the real issue at hand (trademarks, not copyrights) and because it exists in a human-readable short summary.

• Groklaw
• Slashdot

Firefox

Recently a subcommunity within the Ubuntu community became upset because Mozilla required that Firefox show an EULA on first startup. Mozilla has alterred their stance since then.

“There is a need for something, something to explain the license I’m not sure I would call it a EULA because that has a meaning to many people of adding restrictions to software and we won’t be doing that,” Baker said. “We’ll be having a license agreement much as Red Hat has a license agreement that says the software is available under the GPL and don’t use our trademarks etcetera. So we’ll have a license agreement but we won’t think of it as a EULA.”

The move away from a EULA to something more in line with other open source approaches to licensing on Linux is something that Baker noted has been in process for some time.

I really think that free licenses should consider adding a clause about trademark so that stuff like this can’t happen.

• Internet News
• Slashdot

Firefox

Mozilla is requiring that Ubuntu show the Firefox EULA to continue calling the browser Firefox.

I think it’s perfectly reasonable for Mozilla to have requirements and guidelines for the use of their trademark – we have the same for Ubuntu, and many other free software projects do the same. I would in fact consider it a best practice to have a good brand on a free software project, which means having trademark guidelines.

That said, I would not consider an EULA as a best practice. It’s unfortunate that Mozilla feels this is absolutely necessary, but they do, and none of us are in a position to be experts about the legal constraints which Mozilla feels apply to them. We had extensive conversations with Mozilla in order to find the best possible way of meeting their requirements while preserving the flow of use of the system for our users.

This trademark stuff is so sketch.  I’m not really digging Mozilla as of late.

• Launchpad (Shuttleworth’s response)
• Launchpad (EULA)
• Slashdot
• Wikipedia (Firefox)

Google has launched their own browser, chrome.

A Google browser has been rumored for so long that most people have stopped talking about it. But the folks in this room know that the talking will soon begin again. Chrome is due to rock the Web just 16 days from this meeting.

It turns out the state of the release is … not so bad. At Release Build Minus One — ideally, the last version before the public beta hits the streets — there are only five “blocking” bugs, all of which Rakowski and team deem fixable. “Things are looking good,” says Mark Larson, one of the tech leads.

Uh oh.  It seems that Chrome is built on free software (Chromium) but is not actually free itself.  Can anyone verify with licenses?

• Wired
• Chrome

Ubiquity introduces human-language driven commands to make firefox do whatever you want.

Ubiquity 0.1

• Lets you map and insert maps anywhere; translate on-page; search amazon, google, wikipedia, yahoo, youtube, etc.; digg and twitter; lookup and insert yelp review; get the weather; syntax highlight any code you find; and a lot more. Ubiquity “command list” to see them all.
  
• Find and install new commands to extend your browser’s vocabulary through a simple subscription mechanism
  
• Read about Ubiquity In Depth, or see a number of the commands in action (with screenshots) in the Ubiquity Tutorial.

All of the code underlying the Ubiquity experiment is being released as open source software under the the GPL/MPL/LGPL tri-license.

Go to the link and check out the video…it’s pretty cool.  I’m still not a fan of Mozilla because of trademark stuff, but this could keep me hooked on FF for a while if I can’t figure out how to get this to work with Konqueror.

• Mozilla Labs

Google has free’d browser sync after development was discontinued.

Open Sourcing the Google Browser Sync client was something we’d always planned to do, and we’re pleased to say that the code for it is now yours for the taking. Given our recent decision to discontinue support for Browser Sync, we wanted to make sure that the code for it was available for the developer community to use and improve. While we’re no longer doing active development, we’ve released the code in the hopes that those folks who asked for it will use it to develop something cool. For example, it would be great to see the server ported to Google App Engine, or support for Firefox 3 implemented.

You can check out the code using any Subversion client, and we have posted a short tutorial explaining how to build and run it.

Happy Hacking!

So what license is it?  I checked out the code, and it appears to be an MIT license.

• Google’s Open Source Blog
• Google Code
• Slashdot