Placefav is a social-bookmarking service for places. It was pitched to me as a cross between the currently defunctMuxtape and Delicious. A better thing to compare it to is the list-making feature on reviews service Yelp.

The ultimate aim is to pass your list along to someone else as a self-contained city guide. Things like this are useful when somebody asks you for a list of places or things to do if they’re visiting your hometown, or a vacation spot you might have a little extra local knowledge of. The site also offers the option to favorite other users and explore the lists of people nearby.

Like Muxtape, Placefav limits you to just a dozen spots for your favorite places. You can customize the colors, and if you’ve put in the addresses there are quick links for pop-out Google Maps. If you don’t know the address it will do its best to guess the address of a place based on the name and city it’s in. The entire list is self contained with its own vanity URL and can be accessed fairly quickly on mobile phones. Creator Kyle Bragger tells me he’s hoping to build an iPhone application that makes use of the device’s GPS to make entry and browsing a little faster.

Coming in later versions will be the option to make even larger lists and simply e-mail your places and have the service add it to a new or existing list. Bragger also hopes to include SMS support once he’s got the e-mail squared away. You can check out the list I made by clicking the screenshot below.

Compiled here is a list of food joints I put together in a few minutes. Each one has a map and any related photos pulled from the Web. Like Muxtape you can only put together a dozen places and each list you make has its own vanity URL.

(Credit: CNET Networks)

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Google's Chrome gets a 78 out of 100 on the Acid3 test

Google’s Chrome browser is outperforming the latest “stable” builds of both Firefox 3 and Internet Explorer 7 in the popular Acid3 test. The Acid test, for those who do not know, tests how well a browser complies with a given set of Web standards. While all three browsers pass the Acid2 test, Chrome currently clocks in at 78 out of 100 on Acid3, while Firefox and IE7 stand at 71 and 14 respectively. The only release quality build to beat Chrome is Opera, which scores an 83.

Even though Google has the stable builds edged out, we have to remember that Chrome is still in development, where it is topped by a number of other “unstable,” development builds, including Firefox 3.1 Beta 1 (85), Opera (91), and Safari 4 (100). It is interesting that the Safari 4 Developer Preview performs so much better than Chrome, given that they are both built on Apple’s WebKit framework.

Whenever a new browser or an update to a browser is released, one of the first things that techies tend to look at is how it fares on the Acid test. The latest iteration of the test, Acid3, is the hardest yet and no “stable” browser builds have achieved a 100 out of 100 on the test, although the Safari 4 Developer Preview has.

Passing the Acid3 test is an important goal for browser developers and it’s great to see that Chrome is performing so well on its first attempt.

Update:
A reader, Benjamin, writes in saying that under Vista SP1, Chrome shows scores ranging from 74 to 79 on the Acid3 test. Running it again right now, the test showed a score of a 79. Some of the initial variability could have been due to the servers for the Acid3 test being hammered as a result of Chrome’s release.

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This should, in no way, be considered an official review–see CNET and CNET News for the proper shebang. I’ve just been using Chrome for a few hours and thought I’d dash off some quick thoughts.

First: It is fast as you-know-what. It feels super-responsive, so much so that I first thought it must be a trick. The tabs almost seem to click themselves; the autocomplete is so speedy that I thought it was reading my mind. After download and launch, it pulled in not only my bookmarks but, apparently, also my Awesome Bar history. Once I loaded it up and typed “T,” Twitter.com was almost already loaded in the tab. It was slightly terrifying, actually. One note: Chrome did not import my Firefox Live Bookmarks–the RSS feeds that appear in a drop-down from the menu bar, and it sadly doesn’t have this as a feature at all.

The “tabs-on-top” interface is actually a tiny bit off-putting at first. I’m so used to tabs being below the URL bar that I initially felt confused about which ones I had opened. Also, there are no traditional menus for…well, anything. There’s almost no text whatsoever at the top of the browser window. No File, Edit, View, Tools, etc. You’ve got a wrench for the very minimal selection of customization settings and a button to the left of that where you access the menu items you normally find in “File,” “Edit,” and “Tools,” along with a Developer option where you’ll find Chrome’s Windows-style Task manager (and a JavaScript debugger and console, which I think I might really need…see below).

There’s not even a separate search bar; you conduct everything from the URL bar. I did discover that the Ctrl-K keyboard shortcut that normally puts your cursor in the search bar in Firefox adds a little question mark to the Chrome URL bar, so the browser knows for sure that you’re conducting a search. But it’s not really necessary. If you type anything but a URL into the URL bar, Chrome does a search. I like it, but it takes a little getting used to.

Now for the negatives. In my short use, I found that Chrome’s got some problems playing nice with JavaScript–or at least, I’m assuming that’s the problem. A Safari user told me he’s encountered some of the same issues I had, so I suspect it’s related to the open-source WebKit on which both browsers are based (and some quick searching seems to bear that out).

Among the issues I ran into today: I attempted to sign up for Hallmark.com to send an e-card. The site launches its sign-in window as a JavaScript pop-up. Once I’d registered and tried to sign in via the pop-up, the window got caught in an infinite refresh loop. I couldn’t keep my cursor in the text field or type. Sorry, Hallmark! On Facebook, as I attempted to page through an album, I got about eight photos in, and then, as I clicked Next, the page would display the next photo, then immediately jump back to the previous one, and it wouldn’t progress any more than that. Finally, as I attempted to sign in to Hipster Cards (I need to send an e-card today!), that site’s online form failed me at the Captcha field: every time I tried to click in it, the cursor leaped out and plopped itself back in the “First name” field. Firefox to the rescue.

I thought maybe Chrome was trying to tell me something about the e-card sites, but then, as I searched for an answer to the WebKit/JavaScript problem, I got this error on a result page:

So, that’s pretty terrifying, and I guess as security features go, it’s hard to miss. Hopefully it’s not a false positive. In any case, like I said, I haven’t done exhaustive testing on Chrome, and I haven’t yet tested it with Google Docs or other Web-based Google apps. But at first blush, I like the speed, but it’s certainly not ready to be my daily browser. At least not if my mom ever hopes to get an anniversary e-card.

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Aiming to react quickly to Google’s Chrome announcement, Microsoft focused on how Chrome stacks up against Internet Explorer.

“The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online,” Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch said in a statement.

Just last week, Microsoft released the second public beta for its IE 8 browser.

(Credit: Microsoft)

Hopefully for Redmond, though, it recognizes this as far more than an attack on Internet Explorer 8. Google was already a big supporter and partner of Mozilla. If it really just wanted a better browser, it would have just stepped up its investment in Firefox.

In Google’s own words, Chrome is as much about being a platform for Web applications as it is a means for viewing Web pages.

“What we really needed was not just a browser, but also a modern platform for Web pages and applications, and that’s what we set out to build,” Google said on the company’s official blog.

Although today one needs Windows to run Chrome (Mac and Linux versions are coming soon), it is not hard to see how Chrome is a threat to Microsoft’s operating system dominance.

Imagine, in the not too distant future, a Linux-based machine with Chrome and lots of Chrome apps. Hmm…That’s starting to sound like a pretty big threat to Microsoft indeed.

That said, people have predicted the browser would overtake the operating system since the Netscape days and the OS has remained important. The key question for Microsoft is can it create enough experiences that are better outside of a browser/Web app engine to maintain the OS as not just relevant, but worth an extra $100 in the cost of a PC.

The competition, though, is not limited to PCs. A more competitive browser-as-platform from Google could mean more headaches for Microsoft on the mobile front as well. Microsoft is already playing catch-up in the mobile browser arena as it tries to take on the iPhone’s Safari browser. Microsoft has promised to have a version of Internet Explorer 6 on Windows Mobile by year’s end, but it is unclear how close that will get the company to its already existing competition, let alone new entrants.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

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Google introduced Chrome in part because it wants faster browsing and the richer Web applications that speed will unlock. So how does Chrome actually stack up?

Google's Chrome overpowers the other browsers on the five subtests by which Google measures its browser's JavaScript performance.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

Lars Bak, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, said at the launch event Tuesday he’s confident Chrome is “many times faster” than the rivals at running JavaScript, the programming language that powers Google Docs, Gmail, and many other Web applications.

But when pressed for specifics, he told me to try them out. So I did.

Google offers a site with five JavaScript benchmarks. On each one of these tests, Chrome clearly trounced the competition. I hope benchmarking experts and developers will weigh in with comments about how well these tests represent true JavaScript performance on the Web–either for ordinary sites or for rich Web apps.

Here’s the site description of the speed tests:

• Richards: OS kernel simulation benchmark, originally written in BCPL by Martin Richards (539 lines).

• DeltaBlue: One-way constraint solver, originally written in Smalltalk by John Maloney and Mario Wolczko (880 lines).

• Crypto: Encryption and decryption benchmark based on code by Tom Wu (1,689 lines).

• RayTrace: Ray tracer benchmark based on code by Adam Burmister (3,418 lines).

• EarleyBoyer: Classic Scheme benchmarks, translated to JavaScript by Florian Loitsch’s Scheme2Js compiler (4,682 lines).

Google's overall score is head and shoulders above the competition for executing JavaScript.

(Credit: Stephen Shankland/CNET News)

A few notes: First, your mileage may vary; I ran these tests on my dual-core Windows XP machine.

Second, my apologies here to Opera, whose browser I don’t have installed.

Third, I tried to run the SunSpider benchmark tests as well, but perhaps because a lot of other curious people had the same idea on the day Chrome launched, I couldn’t get to the site.

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The official press conference launching the Chrome browser is scheduled to kick off at 11 a.m. PDT. See the live blog below for my blow-by-blow commentary. Google also plans to host a video stream of the conference in two formats: Windows Media Player | Real Player.

See all of CNET’s Chrome coverage.

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Google Chrome is a warning shot over the bows of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari, and Opera.

The open-source software project, to be detailed later Tuesday at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, Calif., should dispel any lingering thoughts that the browser wars are over. To be sure, it’s less cutthroat now than in the 1990s, but one of technology’s most powerful companies is now on the battlefield.

So how does Chrome change the competitive landscape?

Google Chrome has many competitors to contend with, according to these August stats.

(Credit: Net Applications)

Initially at least, it’s not likely to change the market share rankings. According to Net Applications’ browser market share statistics for August, IE has 72 percent share, Firefox 20 percent, Safari 6 percent, and Opera 1 percent.

But even before Google’s browser became available for download, its repercussions were traversing the industry. There are plenty of implications from a company as large as Google that builds a browser tuned to advance the company’s agenda of Web-based applications.

Here are some possible implications for the four major alternatives to Chrome.

Internet Explorer
IE still claims the dominant share of the browser market, and it still has the hard-to-beat distribution channel of being built into the most widely used operating system.

Firefox has been chipping away at IE’s share for years, but the dominance has remained fairly secure, and unless Chrome offers revolutionary new abilities, it’s not likely to do more than perhaps increase the chipping rate a bit.

Microsoft has lit a fire under its IE team, and given that Google is such a powerful Microsoft rival, that fire doubtless will burn all the hotter because of Chrome. The forthcoming IE 8, with beta 2 released last week and the final version officially due to ship by the end of January, is a sign of how serious Microsoft is.

Officially, Microsoft welcomes the competition. “The browser landscape is highly competitive, but people will choose Internet Explorer 8 for the way it puts the services they want right at their fingertips, respects their personal choices about how they want to browse and, more than any other browsing technology, puts them in control of their personal data online,” Dean Hachamovitch, Internet Explorer general manager, said in a statement.

Vast numbers of people haven’t upgraded from IE 6, which is ancient in Internet years. That cuts both ways for Microsoft: it’s hard to get people to upgrade to IE 7 much less to IE 8, but those folks aren’t moving to the competition either.

Of course, with Google’s Web application agenda, the bigger long-term threat is to Microsoft’s Office team, not to its IE team.

Firefox
Firefox potentially stands to lose the most from Chrome.

It’s the leading alternative to IE and the standard bearer for those who love open-source software and revile Microsoft’s technology, its business practices, and its philosophy. If you’re hell-bent on taking down Microsoft, you could pick worse allies than Google.

Mozilla has something for the philosophical purists that Google lacks, though: a measure of independence. “Uniquely in this market, we’re a public-benefit, nonprofit group, with no other agenda or profit motive at all,” Mozilla Corp. Chief Executive John Lilly said in a blog posting Monday.

Survival is a powerful motive even if profit isn’t, though, and the Mozilla Foundation, the parent of the Mozilla Corp., relies on Google for tens of millions of dollars each year in exchange for prominent placement of Google in the browser’s search. Happily for Mozilla, Google just signed up for three more years of subsidizing Mozilla, so Firefox and other foundation activities should be financially sound at least for the time being.

Firefox has built a massive grassroots fan base, though. And even Google, for all its charisma, money, and power, will have a hard time replicating that.

Finally, though Chrome at first blush is bad news for Firefox, there’s a subtler reality at play: IE is the dominant browser, and the greater the number of credible underdogs that exist, the more that dominance can’t be taken for granted. Don’t be surprised to hear Mozilla and Google present themselves more as allies than foes.

Safari
Apple has expanded its Safari ambitions from Mac OS X to Windows, most notably by letting the browser hitch a ride along with the iTunes update software. However, Safari has yet to become a force to be reckoned with.

But Safari could benefit indirectly from Chrome: both browsers are based on the open-source WebKit rendering engine.

If Google sponsors aggressive Webkit development–and doesn’t end up wrestling with Apple for power over the project–both browsers stand to gain. Google’s Android browser for mobile phones, it should be noted, also is based on WebKit.

Opera
Opera has a small share of the browser market, so it’s the most likely to drop in position if Google Chrome catches on. It already fights for relevance against the bigger players.

But Opera is a scrappy company. Not surprisingly, it prefers to look at its own growth rather than its sliver of share, and CEO Jon Tetzchner points out that its share has grown each time a new browser has emerged as a viable competitor to Internet Explorer.

“Last year, we had more than 50 percent growth in our user base,” Tetzchner said. “I think we’ll do quite well this year as well. It seems every time there’s talk of new browsers, that’s been a positive thing for us. It has been good there is focus on browser alternatives.”

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

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Moments ago, Google went live with its Chrome Web Browser. I immediately clicked download, but not before I saved a copy of its terms of service. I like to know what I am agreeing to.

Here are a few things that stood out to me.

1. Google reserves the right to automatically update and install Chrome.

This is becoming standard fare with much software these days, but worth noting.

“The software which you use may automatically download and install updates from time to time from Google. These updates are designed to improve, enhance and further develop the services and may take the form of bug fixes, enhanced functions, new software modules and completely new versions. You agree to receive such updates (and permit Google to deliver these to you) as part of your use of the services.”

2. Although you retain any copyrights to content you own and use in the browser, Google says it has a right to display some of your content, in conjunction with promoting its services. Here’s their exact wording.

“By submitting, posting or displaying the content you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free, and non-exclusive license to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any content which you submit, post or display on or through, the services. This license is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the services and may be revoked for certain services as defined in the additional terms of those services.”

3. Don’t be surprised to see more ads.

Traditionally, it is Web pages and not the browser itself that serves ads. Google isn’t saying it will change this paradigm, but it’s terms of service don’t rule that out either.

“Some of the services are supported by advertising revenue and may display advertisements and promotions. These advertisements may be targeted to the content of information stored on the services, queries made through the services or other information.

The manner, mode and extent of advertising by Google on the services are subject to change without specific notice to you.”

Also worth paying attention to are the settings when you install it. By default, Chrome will add all manner of shortcuts, so if you don’t want it to do that, be sure to click “customize these settings.” Of note, it does not make itself the default browser without a user agreeing to do so.

Click here for full coverage of the Google Chrome launch.

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Google has released the beta version of a new browser, Chrome. In its comic-book pre-announcement, Google stated correctly that watching videos, chatting, and even playing Web-based games didn’t exist when browsers were first invented. For the user, Google wants the browser to disappear and to focus on the applications and pages users are viewing, rather than on the border with its tools, and such. Google has rethought the Internet browser–some of its basic underpinnings are quite novel–but users will recognize some features as they exist in other, open-source browsers on the market today.

At the moment, only the Windows version of Chrome is available for download. Plans call for Mac OS X and Linux versions in the near future. That said, Google has released Chrome in 43 languages and in 122 countries.

Chrome is based on the open-source project Webkit, the same rendering engine used by Apple Safari. If a page renders in Safari, it will render in Chrome. Webkit is also the basis for Android, Google’s mobile platform, so it seems that Google is planning to use Chrome in mobile environments.

For more details, see the Chrome First Take on CNET.

The interface in Chrome is very different from other browsers and takes a little getting used to. Instead of the traditional Netscape/IE-style toolbar across the top, Chrome uses tabs. Moreover, the tabs are detachable, so the terms "tabs" and "windows" become interchangeable within Chrome. Detached tabs can be dragged and dropped into the browser, and tabs can be rearranged at any time.

(Credit: Robert Vamosi / CNET)

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MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.–On the Web, a site that responds a few milliseconds faster can make a big difference in people’s engagement. It’s for this reason that Google believes its new Web browser, Chrome, is a project worth investing in rather than a footnote in the history of the Internet.

Chrome, Google said during its Tuesday launch event, is much faster at showing Web pages than the most widely used browser, Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Google’s hope is that performance will open up the bottleneck that chokes the speed and abilities of today’s Web-based applications.

In short, Chrome is more of a long-term competitive threat to Microsoft Office and Windows than it is to Internet Explorer.

That may sound a little grand, but the evidence is on display in Google’s own lobby, where the search company’s computer kiosks present a browser only–no start menu, no desktop shortcuts, no operating system.

Why speed means money
Google benefits materially from fast performance. First, when it comes to search, Google discovered when its search page loads fractionally faster, users search more often, which of course leads to more opportunities for Google to place its highly lucrative text ads. Second, a faster Web application foundation means that Google’s online applications for e-mail, word processing, spreadsheets, and calendars can become faster and fuller-featured.

Note that Google likes to talk about its three main efforts: search, ads, and apps, and with Chrome or a faster browser in general, all three benefit.

“Our business does well if people are using the Web a lot and are able to use it easily and quickly,” Google co-founder Sergey Brin said.

Google faces many challenges with Chrome–convincing anyone other than a few early adopters and Web developers to adopt it, matching the pace of development of rival browsers, and assuring the Google-phobic that it’s OK for the company to be in charge of yet another essential element of computing. But Google’s influence is strong enough that just talking about performance and rattling its chrome-plated saber is probably enough to advance its Web-application agenda.

Brin was loathe to call Chrome an operating system, but it was clear at Tuesday’s event that he defines Chrome’s success in terms of the applications that can be run.

“The word ‘operating system’ comes with a lot of baggage. We have a lightweight, fast engine for executing Web applications,” Brin said. But, he added, “I think we’ll see more and more Web applications of greater sophistication. All the things (you see) today are pretty challenging to do.”

And, Brin added, Google benefits even if Chrome has no other influence than to get the competitive juices flowing faster among developers of competing browsers: “Even if IE 9 was much, much faster as a result of Chrome, we would consider that a success,” Brin said.

Chrome’s V8 engine
Google’s has a two-part claim to faster performance. One is its use of the open-source WebKit project, also used in Apple’s Safari, to render Web pages on the browser screen engine for showing Web pages. More important for Web applications, though, is the brand-new V8 project for running programs written in JavaScript.

JavaScript has grown from modest beginnings into the language of many fancy, interactive Web sites and the foundational technology for rich Web applications using a technology called Ajax. However, for many applications, it’s not powerful enough, which is why Picnik’s online photo editing tools use Adobe’s Flash and why Microsoft is pushing its own technology called Silverlight.

Google, Yahoo, and others, though, are JavaScript fans, and speeding it up will boost countless Web sites, not just bleeding-edge applications such as Google Docs. Faster JavaScript performance is why Mozilla is so eager to talk about a project called TraceMonkey coming with Firefox 3.1, why WebKit programmers are working hard on a project called SquirrelFish, and one reason why Microsoft is eager to move people to its forthcoming Internet Explorer 8.

With a JavaScript speed test Google showed during the event, Chrome trounced IE 7, Microsoft’s current browser, but I was leery of generalizing too much from a press conference demonstration. Lars Bak, though, the Google engineer who was the technical leader for V8, is confident in the technology.

Bak wouldn’t share any specific numbers, but he said Chrome is “many times faster” than IE 7. How about Firefox, now and later with TraceMonkey? “Many times faster. I guarantee you.”

Of course, Bak was basing his claims on Google’s own suite of JavaScript benchmarks, available on the V8 Web site. But at first blush, the tests, with 11,000 lines of code, aren’t a wildly skewed set.

New horizons for Web developers?
Faster JavaScript means that applications can be faster, but also that programmers can push the Web application limits farther. “You can include more code in the browser. It really opens up the creativity of the Web app developer,” Bak said.

And Sundar Pichai, a Google vice president of product management, was salivating over the possibilities.

“Most developers don’t use JavaScript a lot because it doesn’t run very fast,” he said. V8 “will enable a whole new class of applications for tomorrow.”

The biggest buzzkill for Google’s vision, though, is that the Internet is just as much a boat anchor as an engine of innovation. Firefox has achieved notable market penetration and has inflamed the passions of many Net aficionados, but it still lags the market share of Internet Explorer 6, which was introduced in 2001, when the first Internet bubble was still in the process of bursting.

And Google didn’t have much to convince me that average users would be moving to Chrome anytime soon. Faster browsing and various features for user interface, security, privacy, and search are handy, but not enough to get most people to take the trouble of downloading and installing a new browser.

But even if Chrome never gets far beyond the stage of publicity, don’t discount the power of Google promotion. The company has a lot of power in setting the technology agenda. And as long as the company is willing to count a faster IE as a successful outcome, its Chrome project looks like it’ll be a win.

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If you’ve been on the fence about ditching Outlook for Google Apps you might want to give Google’s efforts another look. In a blog post this morning the company outlined some of the ways Google Calendar has improved over the past month with a handful of small, but important features. Many of them are aimed squarely at business users.

One of the new improvements, flexible reminders, seems like the most minor–but it’s not. Setting up reminders in the previous system had presets on when you’d be able to get the message. The new system is far more customizable and lets you drop in whatever time you want, complete with an option for days, which means you could set a reminder years in advance. You can still set whether you want it as a pop-up, e-mail or SMS message, the last of which I find to be the most useful if your mobile phone doesn’t sync up with Google Calendar.

The other major improvement, which is more business-centric is the option to selectively e-mail meeting attendees. Like Outlook you can now get a separate list of people who have replied yes, no, or maybe and e-mail specific groups without perturbing the others. In both the business and social world, this is a great way to send notices and reminders without spamming the in-boxes of people who have already responded.

Alongside these two features is a slight upgrade to the event creation tool which now allows for overlapping events, as well as a new two-click calendar subscription shortcut that lets you subscribe to someone else’s calendar without having to deal with special invites or permissions.

One of the updated features is the option to create new draggable calendar events over other ones. Previously you'd have to create it elsewhere then drag it over–making it a two-step process.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

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In a move to make videos easier to understand without volume or for the hard of hearing, YouTube has given users the option of embedding closed captions that show up as semitransparent overlays. Caption files that have text dialogue synced up to the proper timestamps can be uploaded during the time of upload or afterwards, and YouTube has provided multiple language support to let viewers swap between different languages of a single video without having to leave playback.

Videos with closed captioning have it as an option in the lower right-hand corner menu; a part of the user interface that also houses the toggle to turn video annotations on and off. Even with the inclusion of closed captions you can continue to keep annotations enabled, although the two may overlap if annotations have been ledged on the bottom of the screen.

Videos with closed captions appear as on-screen overlays. You can also swap between multiple languages if the video author has provided that as part of the file.

(Credit: CBS Interactive)

For now closed captions can only be seen on YouTube. Embeds do not yet have the option to have them toggled on, just like annotations are not yet available.

Also, no news yet on if this feature will be making its way to mobile versions of the site, particularly the iPhone application which does not yet have support for YouTube’s warp or on-screen annotation features. Considering that the iPod Touch does not have an external speaker built-in, having closed captions on the go could make for a much richer mobile experience.

There’s already a small handful of content providers including closed captioning in their videos, including CNET, MIT, and the BBC. Of the bunch I think the most useful is for video lectures, although for non-native language speakers, seeing a video in your own language (if available) is pretty darn useful. If you want to see it in action go check out this episode of Blassreiter which is entirely in Japanese–and awesome.

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Mozilla and Google have extended a search deal through 2011, providing some financial security to the backer of the open-source Firefox Web browser.

“We’ve just renewed our agreement with Google for an additional three years. This agreement now ends in November of 2011 rather than November of 2008, so we have stability in income,” Mozilla Foundation Chairman Mitchell Baker said in a blog post Monday.

Google pays for prominent placement in Firefox, including the default home page and the default choice in the search box.

The deal has been lucrative for the Mozilla Foundation, whose two subsidiaries create Firefox and the Thunderbird e-mail software. In 2006, Google supplied $56.8 million of Mozilla’s revenue–85 percent of the total for the foundation.

Google is the default search provider in the Firefox search bar.

(Credit: Mozilla/Google)

And the money will come in handy. Firefox grew to its current position as the second-ranked Web browser during a hiatus when Microsoft rested on its Internet Explorer laurels.

Now Microsoft is fighting back hard with Internet Explorer 8, and Apple is spreading its Safari browser to Windows, the iPhone, and iPod Touch. Even fourth-ranked Opera Software is determined to stay in the game.

Mozilla hopes to release Firefox 3.1 by the end of the year with improvements to JavaScript execution speed, the ability to run JavaScript tasks in the background, and built-in video and audio support.

(Via TechCrunch.)

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Digg has always made its message clear: it’s not social news, it’s democracy.

The company’s executive team–founder Kevin Rose, and CEO Jay Adelson–thumbed their noses at the DMCA complaint they received when users “dugg” a crack code for the now-defunct HD DVD technology. They also decided to connect with their users through “town hall” events webcast live four times a year. So it’s perhaps fitting that for the company’s third quarterly town hall, Rose and Adelson set up shop in the “Big Tent” new-media hall at the Democratic National Convention in Denver. (Digg is a “Big Tent” sponsor.)

It’ll be following up with an event held in partnership with MySpace at the Republican National Convention. The company also kicked off a “Digg Dialogg” event series, in which executives ask users’ questions to prominent guests. Adelson, who called it a “perfect alignment of Digg and elections,” interviewed House of Representative Speaker Nancy Pelosi in the inaugural interview, in partnership with CNN’s iReport.

“They’re your raw questions,” Rose said, his characteristic mop-top haircut forsaken in favor of a buzz cut. “They were completely unfiltered.”

To be fair, Digg owes a lot to politics–its energetic base of news hounds loves election coverage, and the national elections inevitably pull a lot of traffic to the site.

The questions were largely technical ones that dealt with the minutiae of Digg culture: Adelson said that the “shout” communication system will be tweaked to limit spamming and a private message system is on the way, better technology to flag duplicate stories (”I hate this!” Rose said on the problem with duplicate story submissions) is coming this fall, and Digg is working on a way to let members flag stories as “not safe for work.”

Most of Rose and Adelson’s answers, which they breezed through more quickly than with previous town halls due to time constraints on the Denver stage, fell into the niche of “good suggestion, and we’re working on it.”

One question asked if Digg could institute a forum for members. That was a more contentious point for the company executives. “We do want to have forums for our users to communicate and support each other,” Adelson said, but added that he’s working on matching up the authentication system so that it uses the same credentials as Digg itself rather than an external forum system.

Rose was less enthusiastic. “Everyone has forums and it’s always the same crap,” he said. “It doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re helping elevate the good questions and helping the conversation come through.”

A few genuinely good ideas came up: one question suggested “geotagging” for stories to group them into local news stories, something that could make the site legitimately compete with sites like Outside.in and city blog networks like Gothamist. “Yes,” Rose said. “We’ve thought about this as well and it would be really cool if we could start to group different events around you.” Adelson added that Digg has “a few projects on the way…think 2009, realistically, for some of this stuff.”

Despite the somewhat dull nature of many technical questions about recommendation engines and comment improvement, Adelson and Rose insisted that those are the questions they want to hear beause it’s where Digg users can really make a difference in shaping the site’s direction. “It’s really important to know what you guys are thinking. it keeps us honest,” Adelson said.

The next Digg town hall will be held on November 6–two days after the U.S. presidential election. Its next meetup, however, will be off American shores: Rose will be taping his Diggnation podcast live from London on October 10.

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An annoying and long-lived bug is preventing some users from viewing Web videos. There’s a workaround, but for many, the cure is as bad as the disease.

The bug is that Flash videos don’t play for certain Firefox 3 users on Windows XP or Vista, when using the current Flash player version 9. On YouTube, CNET TV, and other sites, embedded videos will start, but they halt after two seconds. Both Mozilla and Adobe have been aware of the issue since late May, but as yet no solution has been found. For some people suffering from this bug, it’s intermittent. For others, it’s a consistent block to viewing online videos.

One workaround solution is to install the Flash 10 player, which is still in beta. Unfortunately, many Flash video sites don’t recognize that Flash 10 is a valid and current player. CNN, for example, thinks Flash 10 beta is older than Flash 8, asks users to upgrade to Flash 9, and thus won’t play at all.

The cure is worse than the disease.

Since the bug is serious and has been known for some time, I called both Mozilla and Adobe to see what’s going on. I spoke first with Mike Beltzner, Mozilla’s “phenomenologist,” aka head of user experience. He pointed me to the record in Bugzilla where they’re tracking the issue and gave me some of the issues they think are responsible for this one. In a nutshell, Mozilla thinks there’s a miscommunication between plug-in and browser but doesn’t know which product is the culprit.

He also took a minute to trumpet Mozilla’s open-source philosophy. Since Firefox’s code is open, Adobe can look at it to try to determine what is going on. But Mozilla’s team can’t look into Flash. Beltzner didn’t blame Adobe for the bug itself, but he did say that Adobe’s traditional closed software architecture is slowing down their investigation. “We hit a wall when it’s a closed-source solution,” he said.

An Adobe spokesperson, who asked not to be named, said Adobe is looking into the issue but isn’t yet sure if the problem is isolated to Firefox 3 and Flash 9, or if there is a third culprit–another plug-in, perhaps–that is throwing things off for the Flash player.

Finger pointing is common in software troubleshooting, and I give both Mozilla and Adobe credit for only generally waving, not pointing, their fingers at each other. Unfortunately, neither team seems to have developers who can reproduce this issue, which just keeps the ping-pong game going.

What I find most interesting is the way the differing philosophies of Mozilla and Adobe are slowing down resolution of this issue. If both companies were open then any developer–at Mozilla, Adobe, or elsewhere–could get into things and start experimenting to find a fix. If both companies had closed philosophies then their engineers could swear each other to the secrecy, swap source code, and together fix the issue. But right now I get the sense that the two very different companies simply are not meshing well. And because of that, I can’t play my videos.

Flash 9 works just fine in Internet Explorer.

See also: Two quick fixes for Firefox 3.

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