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Chrome reaches second birthday, version 6 goes stable

by Ryan Paul | Last updated September 2, 2010 7:25 PM

When Google launched its Chrome Web browser in 2008, it was clear that the product had considerable potential. Its emphasis on performance and its intriguing minimalistic user interface attracted a lot of well-deserved attention. Today, exactly two years later, Chrome has over 80 million users, a 7.52 percent global market share (21.87 at Ars, making it the second most popular browser here behind Firefox), and is gradually creeping into the mainstream.

It wasn't entirely clear at first if the browser would have real staying power or if it would be cast aside unfinished like so many of Google's other ambitious *cough*Wave*cough* experiments. But Google's commitment hasn't waned, and it's increasingly evident that the browser is an important part of Google's platform strategy and long-term aspirations for the future of the Web. To mark Chrome's second anniversary, Google has announced the official release of Chrome 6, a new major stable version of the browser.

Intel to buy final piece of the mobile puzzle from Infineon

by Jon Stokes | Last updated August 30, 2010 2:41 PM

After nearly a month of rumors foreshadowing the deal, it's now official: Intel is buying Infineon's wireless unit for $1.4 billion in an all-cash transaction that will close in the first quarter of next year. To really understand what this purchase will do for Intel, you need a bit of technical background.

Wireless devices like smartphones and laptops historically have two major functional blocks inside them: an application processor (AP) and associated logic, and a baseband processor (BP) and associated circuitry. The application processor is an SoC that corresponds to the CPU northbridge in a PC—it has a general-purpose CPU core that runs the OS and applications, and it typically also has some embedded graphics functionality (often a full-blown GPU) and a few I/O blocks (e.g., USB, camera, GPS, Bluetooth, HDMI, etc.). The application processor is also connected to a pool of main memory (DRAM) and backing storage (flash). All told, the application processor, along with any GPU (on- or off-die), and DRAM (on- or off-package), makes up the part of the mobile device that we typically think of as a "computer," because it runs the OS and application stack.

Netgear offers 500Mbps powerline networking via next-gen standard

Even as the IEEE P1901 working group was set to meet this week to recommend its draft standard for broadband over powerline networks for official status, Netgear announced its line of Powerline AV 500 adapters that incorporate the HomePlug-compatible flavor of the standard. The new devices theoretically promise up to gigabit Ethernet speeds over home electrical wiring, and are the first to incorporate the newest standard.

The Powerline AV 500 comes in either standard or power pass-through versions, and are available in two-adapter "kits" to set up a source and destination point for your network. While hardcore geeks won't settle for anything less than running Cat 6 cable all throughout the house, powerline adapters have the benefit of being able to utilize existing electrical wiring to move data from point to point, and could be convenient for homes or apartments where running new cable would be impractical, prohibitively expensive, or just not allowed by your landlord.

While the IEEE P1901 standard promises speeds up to 1Gbps, no powerline adapters come close to the top theoretical speeds (and to be fair, neither does most wireless networking hardware). Still, it can provide greater and more consistent bandwidth for applications like networked AV equipment or gaming consoles compared to increasingly crowded home WiFi networks.

"Almost every new home entertainment device today can be connected to the Internet. This puts tremendous demand on the home network," Netgear product manager Chris Geisersaid in a statement. The new Powerline adapters are up to 2.5 times faster than competing products and provide a useful supplement to WiFi networks, he said.

The Powerline AV 500 line starts at $159 for a kit, and will begin shipping this fall according to Netgear. The P1901 WG expects its standard to be submitted the IEEE for adoption as an official standard at the end of this month.

$99 Apple TV drops storage, integrates Netflix

by Clint Ecker | Last updated September 1, 2010 2:25 PM

Apple’s September music event wasn’t entirely about iPods and iTunes this year. Alongside the music players, Apple announced a smaller, black Apple TV that costs $99, has no built-in storage, streams content from iTunes or iOS devices, and fully integrates Netflix into the existing Apple TV interface. Apple's new black box will be available later this month

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who made a point of again calling the Apple TV a "hobby," brought out lines we’ve heard before, about how no one—including Apple—has figured out how to make a big impact when it comes to the living room, despite many companies' best efforts. With that as his preface, he announced a product which is a radical departure from the old Apple TV.

Cloud load testing suite can impersonate a million iPhones

by Jon Stokes | Last updated July 21, 2010 5:22 PM

Prerelease testing is definitely the least glamorous part of software development, but the drudgery aspect isn't really the reason why cloud applications are commonly "load tested" for the first time when millions of users start hammering them simultaneously. No, the real problem is that existing tools aren't made to simulate millions of users simultaneously taking different paths through a cloud-hosted Web application. That's where a startup called Mu Dynamics comes in.

This past Monday, Mu Dynamics introduced Mu Studio Scale, which aims to let developers test cloud and mobile applications at Internet scale before deployment, not after. If you need to simulate 4 million iPhone users with a brand-new app banging on your system, Mu's new product is the only one we're aware of that lets you do this.

AMD Fusion won't kill the GPU, but what if it kills the CPU?

by Jon Stokes | Last updated August 10, 2010 7:57 AM

AMD's Godfrey Cheng has a post on the company's blog, saying that AMD's upcoming CPU + GPU "Fusion" chips will not, in fact, kill the venerable and much-loved discrete GPU.

Cheng claims that he's frequently asked if AMD's "APU" plans—where APU stands for "Accelerated Processing Unit," and is AMD's term for a chip that includes a CPU and GPU on the same die—will result in the eventual demise of discrete graphics. It's plausible that he's asked this quite a bit, because this has been a common misconception since the idea was first floated with the AMD/ATI merger.

Cheng's detailed answer is quite good, and it's likely that anyone from Intel or NVIDIA would've written substantially the same thing. In a word, no, the discrete GPU will not die out because its particular arrangement of vector hardware and memory represent a very efficient use of transistors for certain types of very important workloads. Some variant of that arrangement will always be better for those workloads than a general-purpose CPU, which is why Intel's erstwhile Larrabee project was aimed at pushing x86 a bit further in that direction.

Net neutrality protestors lay siege to Google (for an hour)

about 17 hours ago - by Matthew Lasar | Posted in: Law & Disorder

On Friday about 100 activists trekked to the Googleplex in Mountain View, CA to protest the company's new watered down stance on net neutrality. We followed along with a question: can the open Internet movement prevail without Google?

"We had a bunch of papers which had, like, talking points so that we could all be on the same page," explained the net neutrality activist leaning over the front seat of our chartered bus. "But we can't find them."

Laughter erupted from the rest of the vehicle. Nobody cared. It was Friday afternoon. And after all, this was San Francisco, where two or more people being on the same page about anything is a misdemeanor.

With that, a dozen or so protestors (and Ars) rode from the city's Opera Plaza to Mountain View, California, headquarters of Google, now fallen from grace since the release of its watered-down net neutrality manifesto with Verizon.

The objective—to deliver 300,000 signatures protesting the move.

"But what we do have, so that everybody will be really loud and excited and show the press how important this is, we have a few, like, rally cries," our bus captain continued. "You guys want to practice?"

We'll spare you the results. Suffice it to say that 40 minutes later we and several other caravans arrived at the Googleplex—maybe 100 people all told, plus reporters. The Save The Internet and Moveon.org staff who organized the rally kept the crowd on a grassy knoll about 20 yards south of the Google campus' main entrance.

Inside the final Internet Explorer 9 Platform Preview

by Peter Bright | Last updated August 4, 2010 4:41 PM

The fourth and final Platform Preview for Internet Explorer 9 was released today, along with a raft of new HTML5 demos and tests. Though a full beta of the new browser is expected next month, Microsoft promised to release previews every eight weeks or so. With this new release, Redmond has kept its promise.

The message is still "the same markup": Internet Explorer 9 is a browser built for HTML5, and pages built to target Web standards will work properly—or, at least, degrade nicely.

As has been common throughout the preview period, Microsoft is touting the new browser's substantially improved performance, both relative to its predecessor and, thanks to its hardware acceleration, relative to other HTML5-capable browsers. The new version leapfrogs Safari 5 in the SunSpider benchmark, though still marginally trails behind Chrome 5 and 6, and Opera 10.60. Still, the mere fact that Internet Explorer 9 is competitive is a vast improvement.

Europeans realize dream of single charger for all cellphones

by Priya Ganapati, wired.com | Last updated August 6, 2010 1:15 PM

Cellphone battery dead? No problem: Just borrow a charger from a friend. Oh, wait — you can’t, because your friend doesn’t have the same phone as you, and his charger won’t work with your phone.

That annoyance will end next year, for Europeans at least. Thanks to the efforts of the European Commission, most cellphones sold in Europe will have a one-size-fits-all charger starting in 2011. So far, 10 major cellphone makers, including Apple, Motorola, Samsung and Research In Motion, have signed on to the agreement.

Mozilla's Tab Candy is the first step to sweeter browsing

by Ryan Paul | Last updated July 29, 2010 10:25 AM

Tabbed browsing has arguably had a significant impact on the way that people use the Web, but the feature hasn't really scaled to accommodate the increasing complexity of the average surfing session. The existing tab management and overflow handling mechanisms that are present in modern browsers are dated and suffer from some fundamental limitations that significantly detract from user productivity.

As more software shifts into the cloud and users increase their reliance on the browser for daily computing tasks, browser tabs will have to evolve from a primitive mechanism for switching between documents into a full-blown task management system. The mainstream browser vendors have been slow to address this issue and haven't applied much innovation to the problem over the past few years. Mozilla has stepped up to plate and is aiming to hit the ball out of the park with some unique and truly compelling improvements to the tab concept.