A few years ago we moved our company completely off of Internet Explorer to Firefox because you wrote in your column that IE had security holes and lacked speed. Our IT Services provider has told us that IE9 has solved all the pitfalls of previous versions, it’s the safest yet, and there are many business-oriented sites that are much friendlier to IE. So is it OK to go back?

A:

I haven’t done a comparative browser review in a while, but I do agree that Internet Explorer has improved tremendously in speed, security and features. I think IE9 is a good browser and a reasonable choice, assuming you are a 100% Windows shop. IE is the only major browser that lacks a Mac version.

Some caveats: Each of the major browsers has improved, and, by some measures, some competitors beat IE in speed. A new, fast-rising contender since I wrote that old column is Google’s Chrome, which I find to be fast and reliable. IE’s market share, while still the highest, has shrunk dramatically and the browser market is more balanced. Finally, the number of business-oriented sites that require or do better in IE has been greatly reduced from, say, five years ago.

Earlier this week, Google and Mozilla said they had struck a deal to renew their search royalty agreement for another three years.

What the pair declined to add: The search giant will pay just under $300 million per year to be the default choice in Mozilla’s Firefox browser, a huge jump from its previous arrangement, due to competing interest from both Yahoo and Microsoft.

Sources said this total amount — just under $1 billion — was the minimum revenue guarantee for delivering search queries garnered from consumers using Firefox.

Google’s main rival in the bid, sources said, was Microsoft’s Bing search service, which was aggressively trying to hip-check it from the main search spot on the browser.

That’s because the software giant has been spending a lot of money in efforts to grow Bing’s market share in the search market.

Microsoft, of course, also owns the still-dominant Internet Explorer browser, but Google’s Chrome has recently been making major gains over both IE and Mozilla’s Firefox.

Still, Mozilla’s recent negotiations with both companies was about search market share.

Yahoo was also in the mix, even though Microsoft powers its search technology, because a hookup with Firefox was considered a plus in holding on to its declining search market share.

But the deal, which was being pushed hard by Yahoo’s Chief Product Officer Blake Irving and its search head Shashi Seth, was determined to be too costly for Yahoo.

Costly indeed, since the new price is much higher than Google had previously ponied up to Mozilla. In 2010, Google contributed 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue.

A previous version of the partnership had expired at the end of November, and the new talks were done against a backdrop of simmering tension between Google and Mozilla over Chrome.

As Liz Gannes wrote earlier this week:

Since the first search royalty deal was signed in 2008, Google’s own Chrome browser has become a significant competitor. Just last month, Chrome overtook Firefox in global usage for the first time, according to StatCounter. Both browsers — software which is used to navigate the Internet — have about 25 percent market share.

Even with the new default deal with Google, Mozilla still also has partnerships with other search providers, including Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon and eBay.

Of course, everybody declined to comment on my queries to hand over all the financial deets stat.

But Google’s SVP of Search, Alan Eustace, said in a statement: “Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come.”

Great, perhaps, but also much more expensive — so presumably Firefox is worth it.

Motive

As the saying goes, people are motivated by either greed or fear. I think for many big companies, it’s more the latter. And Microsoft has a lot to be scared about.

If you poke behind its $71 billion in revenue and 39 percent operating margins, 30 percent of the goldmine comes from multiyear volume licensing agreements, which Microsoft calls Enterprise Agreements (EAs). According to industry analyst firm Forrester Research, “these profitable agreements bring in the kind of regular revenue preferred by financial-market analysts that monitor Microsoft’s performance.”

What motivates a customer to sign up for an Enterprise Agreement instead of simply buying Microsoft products, like Office, off the shelf? Well, historically, Microsoft pitched EAs as a way to ensure you can cover your workforce with Microsoft products at a discounted price level.

With companies investing in post-PC devices like smartphones and tablets, and evaluating alternatives to Microsoft productivity solutions, such as Google Apps or Salesforce.com, CIOs are starting to wonder whether renewing their EA is still a top priority.

In response to this threat, Microsoft is now pushing its Software Assurance (SA) licensing model, which allows customers to upgrade to newer products and also use its cloud services. The reason for the possible shift, Forrester says, is that “the twin revolutions of client mobility and cloud servers will kill device-based licensing, which is Microsoft’s existing model.”

So if Microsoft doesn’t embrace the cloud in a big way, the EA gravy train could come to an end.

Means

Apple is cool. Facebook is friendly. And Google isn’t evil. Yet look across a sea of computers in a typical company, and you’ll still see Microsoft everywhere.

And I’m not just talking about Windows. Microsoft has two key assets that will help it win the enterprise cloud:

• Office: While the Web and Web-based apps are fabulous for consuming content and even collaborating around it, Microsoft Office is still the standard in productivity to create corporate content. Love or hate those PowerPoint presentations, but they are still how most companies run. And for flexible analysis, Excel is unmatched. Heck, the Macintosh Business Unit at Microsoft (which is primarily Office for Mac) is a $350 million business on its own.
• Outlook/Exchange: For many workers, Microsoft Outlook (with Microsoft Exchange Server on the backend) is the first thing they boot up to start their workday, and the program they remain in all day long. According to industry analyst firm Radicati, 301 million corporate mailboxes used Outlook in 2010. Indeed, some companies have switched from Microsoft Outlook/Exchange to Google Apps and back, because users are too addicted to the interface and functionality of Microsoft Outlook.

So Microsoft still owns two of the key ways “knowledge workers” work with knowledge.

Opportunity

Microsoft isn’t working from a standing start. It actually jumped into the cloud relatively early in 2008 with its Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), a hosted platform for collaboration. While BPOS suffered from many challenges, mainly because it was based on a platform that wasn’t designed for the cloud, Microsoft made it clear several years ago that they are “all in” as a company in the cloud.

This year, after many delays and much anticipation, Microsoft finally announced its first platform built for the cloud, Office 365. The new version of Exchange is finally on par with its on-premise alternative. Microsoft SharePoint Online is now flexible enough to meet many enterprise use cases. And Microsoft Lync Online, a real-time chat and videoconferencing system, could be a game changer for company productivity.

In parallel, Microsoft is working away on Windows 8, its big bet on the tablet revolution. With all of Microsoft’s failed past attempts at mobility and tablets, some level of cynicism is expected. But some believe Microsoft’s conviction is real. If Microsoft even gets it 80 percent right on tablets, they will likely win in enterprises that are used to the manageability of Windows, and will be attracted to the inevitably deeper Office integration.

Conclusion

Don’t get me wrong: The innovation in the cloud is coming from all over, mainly from start-ups. For many of these start-ups and other non-enterprise organizations, a non-Microsoft approach will likely be the winner. But for the millions of you working in corporate America, Microsoft is probably the one bringing the cloud to a desktop near you.

Nick Mehta is CEO of LiveOffice and has served in senior operating roles in the enterprise and consumer technology markets for much of his career. He spent more than five years at Symantec Corporation and Veritas Software Corporation (now Symantec), where he served as vice president and general manager of the Enterprise Vault information archiving and discovery software business.

Mozilla is set to announce that it has signed a new three-year agreement for Google to be the default search option in its Firefox browser.

It’s a critical renewal for the Silicon Valley software maker, since its earlier deal with the search giant has been a major source of revenue to date.

The companies said the specific terms of the commercial agreement are not being released. But, in 2010, Google contributed 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue.

A previous version of the arrangement had expired at the end of November. Mozilla said at the time that it was in “active negotiations” with Google.

The relationship has not been without some tension of late. Since the first search royalty deal was signed in 2008, Google’s own Chrome browser has become a significant competitor. Just last month, Chrome overtook Firefox in global usage for the first time, according to StatCounter. Both browsers — software which is used to navigate the Internet — have about 25 percent market share.

Mozilla also has partnerships with other search providers, including Microsoft’s Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon and eBay.

Here’s the full announcement Mozilla will soon put out:

Mozilla and Google Sign New Agreement for Default Search in Firefox

We’re pleased to announce that we have negotiated a significant and mutually beneficial revenue agreement with Google. This new agreement extends our long term search relationship with Google for at least three additional years.

“Under this multi-year agreement, Google Search will continue to be the default search provider for hundreds of millions of Firefox users around the world,” said Gary Kovacs, CEO, Mozilla.

“Mozilla has been a valuable partner to Google over the years and we look forward to continuing this great partnership in the years to come,” said Alan Eustace, Senior Vice President of Search, Google.

The specific terms of the commercial agreement are confidential and are not being released.

This is part of a user sign-in feature that is now part of the stable Chrome 16 release, which came out Wednesday. The main intent of the feature is to help people sync their bookmarks across multiple devices, and to separate saved passwords and extensions for multiple people who use a single computer.

(And, of course, some day these Chrome profiles may well be tied into that whole unified Google+ identity system they’re attempting to pull off.)

But, oh man, this could have a greater and more immediate effect on those of us who have personal Gmail accounts and professional Google Apps accounts.

If you use a different email provider, or prefer desktop mail clients, this may not seem quite as cathartic as it does for me.

But for those of us who maintain multiple Google Web mail accounts and use various Google services, Google seems to be perpetually confused about who we are. The various capabilities Google offers for switching accounts are constantly breaking, and when they fail, they often log users out of everything.

The solution that many people — including Google executives! — have found themselves using is to keep multiple browsers open for their different Google accounts. So, for a long time, Safari was my work mail browser, and Chrome or Firefox was for everything else.

One prominent Google exec recently admitted to me that he always has a development version of Chrome and the current release running, so he can keep his personal and professional accounts separate.

But in the new Chrome, users can configure multiple accounts. Then each new window they open, and all the tabs within it, are associated with one of the accounts.

Yesterday, after I downloaded the new Chrome, I created an “ATD” and a “personal” profile, and associated a little cartoon image with each. Now each of my browser windows has one of the icons in the top right corner. And if I open up a Google site like YouTube in an ATD window, it’s logged into that account. Then, over in a personal window, I can have a different self logged into YouTube simultaneously. Whoa!

I know I sound kind ridiculous right about now, but this used to be so hard!

Also, I should say I’m not sure how easy and natural it will be to deal with this extra identity layer. At the start, at least, it feels awkward. Maybe some keyboard shortcuts to toggle between my personas would be nice.

Here’s Google’s explanation of how to set this up:

To try it out, go to Options (Preferences on Mac), click Personal Stuff, and click “Add new user.” A fresh instance of Chrome will open, ready to be customized with its own set of apps, bookmarks, extensions and other settings. A badge in the upper corner lets you know at a glance that this new Chrome browser belongs to you, and you can customize the name and badge as you like. Clicking this badge drops down a menu of all the users on that computer, so you can easily switch between them. In addition, each user can sign in to Chrome to access their own personalized Chrome across all their computers.

A spokeswoman for Google said she didn’t know how many people have both Google Apps and personal Google accounts. However, more than four million businesses use Google Apps, and I think it’s safe to say many of their employees use Gmail, too.

That designation comes from Web video tracker Visible Measures, which says the official upload from Apple, plus unofficial uploads and derivative clips (parodies, “responses,” etc.), generated 28 million views this year.

Runners-up for the “most viral” title, according to Visible Measures: Ads featuring Lady Gaga, the International Space Station, PlayStation 3 and YouTube gaming god Freddie W. (One of these things …)

It’s worth noting that Visible Measures’ methodology and classifications for this one are a bit particular. For instance, it includes ads for videogame platforms, but not the games themselves. There’s some logic to that, because while videogames have many, many more views, the bulk of them come from “game play” videos that players upload themselves.

Which is fine, but that also means that straight-up ads like Jonah Hill’s Call of Duty spot don’t make the list. And that one has racked up  a minimum of 17.7 million views this fall.

But at the very least we can say that these are five very, very popular Web videos from the past year.

Google Chrome’s “The Web is What You Make of It” Campaign: 22 million views

YouTube/Spacelab: 17 million views

Sony PS3 “Michael/Long Live Play” ad: 15.8 million views

YouTube star Freddie W’s Samsung “Gamer Commute” ad: 11.5 million views

Here’s Mozilla’s full statement:

Our search relationship with Google remains positive for both of us. We are in active negotiations and have nothing further to announce at this time.  We have every confidence that search partnerships will continue to be a strong and growing generator of revenue for the foreseeable future.

Mozilla said it also has partnerships with other search providers, including Bing, Yahoo, Yandex, Amazon and eBay.

Mozilla’s overarching organization is a non-profit, but historically it has made most of its revenue via a royalty deal for searches made through the featured Google toolbar in its Firefox browser. In 2010 Google contributed 84 percent of Mozilla’s $123 million in revenue, as ZDNet writer Ed Bott detailed in a post questioning Firefox’s viability.

Google and Mozilla had in 2008 said their deal was extended to November 2011. That was a significant vote of support from the search giant as it was right around the same time as the first release of its own browser, Chrome.

But Mozilla hadn’t publicly indicated that the deal was extended past this November, Bott pointed out.

Now, three years later, Chrome has just overtaken Firefox for the first time in browser market share, according to the analytics firm StatCounter. The timing is eerily precise.

Last month Chrome had 25.69 percent share compared to Firefox’s 25.23 percent. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer still leads both of them.

I would add that I recently visited Mozilla’s new swanky top-floor San Francisco office with a deck directly overlooking the Bay Bridge (see photo above). The swanky setting didn’t project any particular concern about incoming revenue.

Google, which doesn’t do a lot of this kind of advertising, has posted a commercial on television for its social networking effort, Google+.

The search giant has done it before for its Chrome browser and other products, but it’s a rare occurrence. So, here’s the ad, which pushes the motto: “Sharing, but like real life. That’s a plus.”

The reference is to the onerous method of sorting all the various people in your life into “circles” as part of the service. While many find it exhausting (me!) to constantly be defining social relationships, it is apparently now a marketing plus.

Get it? Plus!

Google has bought Apture, the start-up that makes a browser plug-in that adds additional contextual information to Web pages for the Internet’s most prominent publishers.

The financial details of the acquisition were not disclosed.

A Google spokesperson said the search giant was interested not only in Apture’s product, but the team and the partnerships it had built.

Apture CEO Tristan Harris has spent some of the last four years wearing out the carpets in the offices of major online publishers.

In an interview today, Harris said that the Apture staffers will join the Chrome team at Google.

“We started the company to help people have more frictionless access to information,” he said. “And those features will take on new forms in the Chrome browser.”

Apture has raised $4.1 million in venture funding so far, including a $3.5 million round from Clearstone Ventures.

Safari accounted for 5.02 percent of global browser usage for September, according to Net Applications. That marks the first time that its share has topped five percent, the firm said.

The Mac itself now accounts for 6.45 percent of Web access worldwide, rising from just over six percent in August (the first time that Apple’s computers had accounted for that level of Web usage). Apple typically gains in September, Net Applications said, pointing out that September marks the start of the back-to-school season.

In the U.S., Apple’s share of the operating system market hit 13.7 percent, the firm said.

Globally, Windows still accounts for 92 percent of the desktop market, while Linux accounted for just over one percent.

On the browser side, Internet Explorer had 54 percent of the market, followed by Firefox with 22 percent and Google’s Chrome with 16 percent. That marks another in a long run of gains for Chrome, while Internet Explorer lost share for the seventh month in a row. Firefox was down just slightly from August.

And how often does a start-up host its own conference for partners and developers? Box.net did that today, too. It was from there that CEO Aaron Levie called me today after delivering a keynote address. I began by asking him about the new syncing service, but naturally what I really wanted to know about was the funding.

AllThingsD: Talk about your syncing feature. What’s that all about?

Levie: Basically, in the consumer space you see a lot of technology that helps you synchronize your information. It’s one of the biggest trends in software and the cloud. And so what we’re trying to do here is just do that for the enterprise. You have to take a different approach. The scale of the management and the security and the collaboration and getting it into business work flow, that’s what makes it enterprise ready. We’re syncing on the Mac and the PC and it’s going to work in your enterprise.

And you’re going to get to other devices — the iPad and Android devices — later?

Yeah. Syncing has a different connotation and purpose on a tablet because you’re syncing less data, but core sync for Mac and PC is what’s going to change the game in the enterprise space.

You’ve done some social things, too. We all know there’s a lot of buzz around social collaboration in the enterprise. Where does Box.net fit there?

That relates to two major themes that we’re really focused on. We’re trying to be the most open platform that you can be. That’s really the power of the cloud. So, unlike Microsoft, where they want you to integrate all their technology together so that you’ve got one big Microsoft vertical stack, our vision is that you’ll use different best-of-breed tools to solve different problems. So you’ll use Salesforce.com for CRM and Google Apps, and Workday or Netsuite. And we really want to integrate the content you have in Box securely with all those applications. And that is now a really big deal for the social space. So our vision is to work with Yammer, Jive and Chatter and any other kind of leading service that emerges so you can take your content from Box and use them with those services. And one thing we announced today is that Salesforce has invested in Box and that we’re working on integrating with Chatter. We’re also going to be building some direct social features into Box directly.

So let’s talk about that round of funding. It’s supposedly $50 million and Salesforce is in. Who else is in?

There’s a little confusion about this. The funding hasn’t been announced officially yet. It is more than $50 million. And yes, Salesforce is in. We’ll say more about it after it’s all closed.

You’ve also disclosed new numbers around customers, right?

We have 7 million users and 100,000 businesses, and it’s being used in 77 percent of the Fortune 500.

Let’s go back to the syncing. How does it work in a practical sense?

You install Box Sync on your Mac or PC, you can synchronize that information back and forth automatically to the cloud. If you add collaborators, they can access that information too. And then on top of that are the social features. We want you to be able to comment, and get a work flow going, to see the updates from the people around you.

You had a big conference today, which I think is your first. Isn’t having a conference like this a big deal for a company that’s still really just a start-up? Who’s there and what do they do?

It’s really a customer and partner conference. I think it will evolve over the years. It’s about CIOs and IT leaders who want to be more innovative using the cloud. It’s also for our partners who are are here to support our customers as well. So you’re seeing companies like Google Chrome, Motorola, Okta, Good Data, Netsuite, and Yammer. They all have booths and are talking about how they integrate their data with the cloud.

I understand you’re working with a little company that’s also based in Palo Alto called Hewlett-Packard. What’s that about?

Box Sync is going to be on small business PCs, and then eventually on their enterprise PCs as well. Eventually part of our vision is to get Box Sync on any system that is creating content.

Is it true that you turned down a $500 million offer for your company?

It is true that people are talking about that. We’re not saying much about that. The high level is that it’s a super-exciting space, and there are companies that want to accelerate their growth into it. We’re focused on staying independent and growing Box. We’ve only completed about 1 percent through the vision of this company.

Flickr, which has 68 million registered users, is “for people who care about photos,” said product head Markus Spiering.

So the Android app puts special emphasis on retaining high-resolution images, even if photo filters are added, and offers options to modify the flash, ratio selection, and shutter focus from within the viewfinder. Users can also scroll through their libraries of photos — though like on the Web, non-paying users can only see their 200 most recent photos.

Flickr previously released an iPhone app in 2009, which will be updated soon, said Spiering.

The other new Flickr feature, called “Photo Sessions,” helps users set up URLs they can share with rooms of 10 people where everyone can flip through, zoom in on and draw on photos in real time. So, for instance, a family could set up a time to virtually flip through an album of photos together and text-chat about them. Photo Session URLs last 24 hours and are only available in Safari (including on iOS devices), Firefox and Chrome. It’s kind of like Google Hangouts, without the video.

Yahoo’s Steve Douty, who is VP of applications and mobile product management, pitched the new Flickr features as part of a larger Yahoo strategy toward building an “interest graph” for its users and giving them “deeply personal digital experiences.” Yahoo had been a part of the Facebook platform announcements last week, and is now offering a personalized view of Yahoo News that shows users what their friends are reading.

Seriously. That’s what Wibe Wagemans, the SVP of brand advertising and analytics of Rovio, said today at Mobile Future Forward in Seattle.

“We are now the fastest-growing consumer brand in history,” said Wagemans, a former Microsoft Bing executive.

It doesn’t hurt that the Finnish company known for the Angry Birds mobile game — which has branched out into everything from stuffed plush toys to educational books and movies — is a marketing powerhouse.

The major growth has been driven not just by tons of consumers being addicted to throwing birds at a bunch of building blocks, but from being on several platforms, including mobile, the Chrome app store and the newly launched Google+ social games.

Today, Wagemans said Chrome has tens of millions of active users a month and that Angry Birds is the top game on Google+ (supposedly beating Zynga, Wooga, Electronic Arts and others). In total, he said, across all platforms, Rovio has 120 million monthly active users playing its games.

All that adds up to more users than other fast-growing global companies within 20 months of launching their brand, he said.

Other companies are still clearly bigger, just not growing as fast, if you trust the company’s methodology and metrics.

Zynga has more than 273 million monthly active users on Facebook alone (not to mention the users it has on Google+ and mobile).

But perhaps that’s just a matter of time.

As Wagemans points out: “We haven’t even launched on Facebook yet.”

That look will come next week at the company’s Build developer conference in Anaheim, Calif.

Microsoft has already shown a fair bit about where it is headed. At D9 in May, the company showed off a new look for Windows, led by a start screen that bears more resemblance to Windows Phone than to the traditional desktop. Other features revealed on stage include an App Store and support for apps written in HTML and Javascript.

The company has also said it wants an operating system as at home on an eight-inch tablet as it is on a powerful desktop connected to large-screen monitors.

“It’s ‘no compromise’ and that’s really important to us,” Windows President Steven Sinofsky said in a May interview with AllThingsD.

Microsoft’s choices here are critical as its traditional strength in desktops and laptops is coming under assault from a variety of challengers ranging from new mobile devices to Google’s ChromeOS to Apple’s resurgent Mac business.

In recent days, the company has offered a bit more detail on Windows 8 via several blog postings from Sinofsky and others.

Among the details Microsoft has shared are plans for much faster boot times (a perennial promise) as well as a controversial move to bring Office’s “ribbon” interface to the Windows desktop.

One of the side shows in Anaheim next week will be the competition among chipmakers vying for attention from both developers and the press. In the past, Windows was largely an Intel show, with rival AMD playing the supporting role. However, Microsoft is widening the playbill with Windows 8. As announced back at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Windows 8 will run on ARM processors from Texas Instruments, Qualcomm and Nvidia, in addition to traditional x86 chips from Intel and AMD.

A key thing to watch next week is just how much progress Microsoft has made on the Windows-on-ARM effort. If Microsoft hands out code to developers, as widely expected, will it be for both ARM and Intel chips, or only the latter? Also, will developers get all the tools they need to port their Windows applications to run on ARM?

The conference will also provide an opportunity to see how much progress Microsoft has made in tailoring its own applications for Windows 8 — how well they run on ARM processors as well as which ones have been revamped to take advantage of the new-look interface. Microsoft showed a version of Internet Explorer 10 that runs in the new look in May and previously showed parts of Office running on ARM processors.

Conference attendees will be eager to see what kind of hardware Microsoft gives out. At a past Windows developer conference, Microsoft handed out custom Acer laptops running an early build of Windows 7. Expectations are high that the company might give out Windows 8 tablets, after a Microsoft worker hinted that one was being prepped to give away at an upcoming conference. The company briefly showed Windows 8 running on a tablet at its partner conference in July.

The Acer deal is specific to Android, while the Viewsonic deal covers both Android and Chrome-based devices, indicating that Microsoft may also have Google’s browser-based operating system in its legal crosshairs.

For those keeping score at home, Microsoft has struck Android-related deals with HTC and a number of smaller companies, while taking legal action against Motorola and Barnes & Noble.

As I’ve noted before, this pattern looks familiar to longtime Microsoft watchers, who saw the company take a similar approach with Linux, though it was more hesitant to file suit in that instance.

As part of its new “more wood behind fewer arrows” approach to business, the company is discontinuing its Google Toolbar for Firefox, a browser add-on that provided direct access to an array of Google services. The company said Thursday that it will not support Google Toolbar beyond Firefox 4. Which means the Firefox 5 folks who had been eagerly awaiting its release are out of luck.

Why end support now? Google argues that many of the features provided by its Toolbar are now already built right into the browser. That’s true, to an extent — but not entirely, as Search Engine Land’s Danny Sullivan observes.

“The argument that many features of the Google Toolbar are built into the browser doesn’t wash,” he explains. “Firefox doesn’t offer a native way to perform site-specific search, not to view cached pages, nor to perform specific vertical searches on Google, not to get PageRank data. Firefox also doesn’t feed back into Google Web History. Only the Google Toolbar does that, which means Google has now permanently broken a part of personalized search for Firefox users going forward.”

Makes you wonder if this is not just part of the broader Google project housecleaning we’re seeing, but a move to further promote the company’s own Chrome browser…

Indeed, the version of Flash running on the latest stable build of Chrome OS is not the latest version of Flash.

“This doesn’t bode well for Google’s security boast,” Kaspersky’s Roel Schouwenberg said in the Securelist posting. “ChromeOS is supposed to be all about being able to trust Google to take care of security for you. Google has gone through great lengths to secure ChromeOS itself, but security doesn’t stop there. A platform needs to be properly managed if it intends on being and staying secure.”

However, a Google representative said there are indeed additional security patches applied to that version of Flash, closing the vulnerabilities corrected with more recent releases of the Adobe software.

Either way, the issue highlights the different approach Google is taking with security in its new operating system.

With most computer operating systems, the software providers are responsible for providing patches, but it is the user who decides whether to update his or her system, either manually or automatically applying the updates.

With Chrome OS, Google has changed the approach.

Chrome OS-based computers, known as Chromebooks, run software only within Google’s browser, and Google is in charge of managing the browser and its core add-ons, such as Flash.

Users are leaving the decisions of how and when to update the system to Google. That has both positive and negative implications, though Google maintains that Chrome OS is inherently more secure and eliminates the need for third-party security software.

On the downside, those who like control will feel a lack of power. In addition, the individual has little ability to take action in advance of any security measures taken by Google on behalf of all Chrome OS users.

However, Google has staked its reputation that Chrome OS will be secure, giving the company a strong incentive to quickly close holes. The operating system also has a “verified boot” system in place to check at start-up for any modifications, potentially mitigating the impact rogue code might have.

Are you ready for a laptop that has almost no storage space to hold your personal files, photos and videos, and is designed around the idea that you’ll keep all that precious personal stuff on remote servers?

How about a laptop that can do almost nothing unless it has an active Internet connection; for instance, one that wouldn’t let you read and write email, or check your calendar, offline? Would you buy that?

Google is hoping you will. This month it introduced a line of just such radical machines, in partnership with two laptop makers, Samsung and Acer. They are called Chromebooks, after Google’s Chrome Web browser, which is the gateway for everything they do. And they are meant to challenge the two dominant computer platforms, Microsoft’s Windows and Apple’s Mac OS X.

These laptops are “cloud” computers—essentially full-screen Web browsers designed to do everything via the Internet. Instead of using traditional programs, you will rely on “Web apps” accessed through the browser—email programs, word processors or photo editors, for example.

Series 5 Chromebook by Samsung, one of Google’s partners on the new laptop.

I’ve been testing one of the Chromebooks, the Samsung Series 5, a handsome, relatively light machine with a 12-inch screen. It costs $430 for a Wi-Fi version and $500 for a model that also includes a built-in modem for cellular Internet connectivity, which requires a monthly fee if you exceed the modest amount of free data Google gives you.

My verdict is that, while the Chromebook is a bold idea that may be a harbinger of the future of computing, it’s too limited and buggy today to be the main computer relied upon by mainstream users. I can’t recommend it over a standard laptop, except perhaps as a secondary machine for techies or early adopters.

The Chromebook does have some advantages over Windows and Mac laptops. But Google concedes these traditional laptops can run all the same Web apps as a Chromebook, in addition to running local programs, storing all your files and operating offline. Even tablets, like Apple’s iPad and competitors based on Google’s Android operating system can run hundreds of thousands of locally installed apps and Web apps as well. And they can run offline and store files locally. The Chromebook offers only about 5,000 Web apps today. Plus, tablets weigh less than half the 3.3 pounds of the Samsung Series 5, and are much slimmer, though they have smaller screens and lack the Chromebook’s physical keyboard.

As for price, there are numerous Windows laptops that cost the same or less. You can buy a Toshiba Satellite with a 15-inch screen, three gigabytes of memory, and a 320 gigabyte hard disk for $400. And it’s powered by one of Intel’s latest and most powerful processors, while the Samsung Chromebook uses the wimpy Intel Atom processor, primarily found on inexpensive netbooks.

But Google is a smart, forward-looking company and there’s a logic to the Chromebook, which it sees as the first laptop designed for the Internet era. And it does have some attractive advantages over PCs and Macs:

• Cloud computing is here to stay and many people already rely daily on Internet-based software, like Web mail programs or streaming video services. So a cloud-centric computer isn’t a crazy idea. To help find useful Web-based apps, the Chromebook has a Web app store, similar to the app stores on tablets and smartphones. (The same store is built into the Chrome browser on PCs and Macs.)
• The Chromebook starts up almost instantly—in 10 to 15 seconds in my tests—much more quickly than most Windows machines. This is partly because it’s really just a big Web browser. In my tests, Apple’s MacBook Air started just about as quickly, but it costs twice as much.
• The Chromebook claims very long battery life—a whopping 8.5 hours for the model I tested. I didn’t do a formal battery test, but I was able to go for several days of intermittent use without charging it.
• Because all your apps, settings and files are stored in the cloud, if you lose your Chromebook, or wish to use someone else’s Chromebook, you can just log into your Google account and all your stuff will appear on the new machine.
• Google automatically updates the operating system, so you don’t have to deal with manual updates.
• Google claims that, because every app runs in a tab in the browser, and those tabs are walled off from the rest of the system, the Chromebook is much more secure than other computers and doesn’t require security software. The system even checks to see if it has been tampered with every time it starts.
• As for the offline problem, Google provides a small amount of memory to which you can save some files. You can insert a flash memory card or USB flash drive containing files. Some of these files, like images and PDFs, can be viewed offline in the browser, but not edited.

And the machine contains crude built-in music and video players, and a simple note-taking function, which work offline. Google says a handful of Web apps today work offline as well, and it is planning this summer to bring the same offline functionality to its own Gmail, Google Docs and calendar apps.

Top left, you can log into someone else’s Chromebook and find all your stuff there; while the keyboard is nice, the touch pad was clumsy to use.

But there are problems. For instance, I found watching a live baseball game to be a jerky, halting experience. Google blames this on the weak processor it’s using. And Netflix doesn’t work at all. Google says it’s working on this.

Also, while the keyboard is nice, and even includes special keys for switching between Web pages and browser windows, I found the touch pad on the Samsung to be imprecise and clumsy to use.

The Chromebook also crashed on me four times, mostly because of a “memory leak” problem Google says it will fix.

Printing, which only works over Google’s “cloud print” service and can’t be done via a cable, worked only some of the time for me.

And common files don’t automatically open in Web apps, though Google says it is also working on that.

It’s important to note that when you use a Chromebook you are trusting Google with the privacy and security of your data, and the company has run into occasional issues on both counts.

The bottom line: The best and most numerous programs are still designed for Windows and the Mac, and we still live in a world without ubiquitous, speedy, low-cost, unlimited wireless connectivity. So typical laptop users are better off with computers designed for the current hybrid world, where both robust offline and online functions are needed.

Find all of Walt Mossberg’s columns and videos at the All Things Digital website, walt.allthingsd.com. Write to him at mossberg@wsj.com.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110622/google-unveils-a-laptop-with-its-brain-in-the-cloud/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110613/samsungs-chromebook-torn-down-costs-322-to-make-isuppli-says/ http://allthingsd.com/20110613/samsungs-chromebook-torn-down-costs-322-to-make-isuppli-says/#comments Mon, 13 Jun 2011 12:50:52 +0000 Arik Hesseldahl http://allthingsd.com/?p=85780 The picture at right is what a Samsung Chromebook looks like once it’s been taken apart. The new Google-powered notebook, formally called the Series 5, along with a similar one from Acer, will go on sale Wednesday with a Wi-Fi only version, costing $430, the other with built-in 3G wireless access for $500.

The Chromebook line is Google’s first big hardware bet on its cloud-centric Chrome operating system, which is essentially a Web browser capable of running applications that are hosted in the cloud. The point of doing that is that it takes the hassle and the cost of maintaining the software out of the hands of the person or business using it. Google thinks that over the long term it has a chance to erode Microsoft’s dominance of enterprise notebooks.

So what goes into building one? The teardown experts at IHS iSuppli took a look at the 3G version, and have shared their findings with AllThingsD. I talked with analyst Wayne Lam, who worked on the teardown. While you might expect it to essentially be a stripped-down build with as little emphasis as possible on the hardware, it’s actually an interesting study in what can happen when there’s no payment to Microsoft built into the cost assumptions, Lam told me. Added up, the components used cost a total of $322.12.

Since the hardware requirements for storage and memory are lighter, Samsung was able to spend more on hardware that improves the user experience like the display, the battery and the outer enclosure. “The lower overhead in hardware allowed Samsung more leeway on things that people will notice, like a bigger screen and a bigger battery,” Lam said.

The most significant batch of component costs is found on the motherboard (pictured top and bottom, click the images to make them bigger), amounting to $86.37 or about 26 percent of the overall hardware cost. The Chromebook’s microprocessor is a dual-core Intel Atom N570. Samsung, which is the world’s largest manufacturer of memory, supplied its own DRAM chips. Also on the motherboard are power-management chips from Texas Instruments and Intersil.

German chipmaker Infineon supplied a Trusted Computing Platform chip, which is interesting because this is something usually seen in enterprise-level servers and not personal notebooks. The chip helps protect the system by running a thorough security check every time the system is booted up, ensuring that the hardware hasn’t been tampered with and that unwanted software hasn’t been added. Given the bet that Google has made on the cloud, and the attacks it has been fending off of late, this is an understandable move.

Samsung also used its own shop to supply the display. It measures 12.1-inches diagonally and features an improved light-emitting diode technology that boosts its overall brightness. Lam says the display cost $58 and is the second most expensive component in the Chromebook.

The third most expensive component is the battery, which Samsung supplied as well. A key part of the Chromebook experience is long battery life. Samsung opted for a six-cell battery pack that is intended to last all day. It added $48.20 to the hardware cost.

Wireless chips combined for the fourth most expensive set of costs. Hon Hai Precision Technology, the Taiwanese contract manufacturer that’s better known to the world as Foxconn, built the 3G wireless module using four chips from the wireless chipmaker Qualcomm. In order to keep costs down, Samsung opted to use an older Gobi 2000 baseband chip. Wireless chips added $42.85 to the hardware cost. Qualcomm’s newly acquired Atheros unit supplied a Wi-Fi chip.

A few other interesting points that Lam found during the teardown. The memory chips are soldered on to the motherboard, meaning that the computer’s memory isn’t upgradeable by the user as it is on most PCs. It ships with 2GB of memory on board; if you’re a business or educational user paying a monthly subscription fee, by the time you start thinking you may need more memory, it will probably be ready for a hardware refresh. Google is taking even that level of routine management — plus the associated cost — out of your hands. Is the world ready for that?

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110613/samsungs-chromebook-torn-down-costs-322-to-make-isuppli-says/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110606/nice-empty-space-you-got-there-mind-if-we-run-a-web-ad/ http://allthingsd.com/20110606/nice-empty-space-you-got-there-mind-if-we-run-a-web-ad/#comments Mon, 06 Jun 2011 11:00:24 +0000 Peter Kafka http://allthingsd.com/?p=82816 There are two schools of thought when it comes to Web advertising right now. Some people want to improve ads by figuring out who’s looking at them.

Then there are the folks trying to make sure you can’t look away from their ads.

We can put Undertone’s new “PageSkin” ads in the latter category. I don’t love the name, but the idea is simple enough: The ad network’s newest unit fills up the empty vertical borders on the sides of  many, but not all, Web pages.

Like so:

Straightforward, right? You don’t have to like it, but that doesn’t mean Web publishers won’t try it: Consider it the digital equivalent of sticking ads in front of movies, or on PBS, or any other place that didn’t use to have them but does all the time now. Undertone CEO Mike Cassidy says he will “easily” get “double-digit” CPMs for these.

The persistence of the ad unit does run a little counter to other in-your-face ads other Web publishers have been adopting in the last year or so. Like “pushdown” ads that temporarily, um, push down the content you want to see to make room for an ad.

Then again, I’ve already adapted to those, or at least I think I have. I’m now conditioned to expect an ad-sponsored hiccup before I get to the stuff I want, so my brain takes a little pause as the page loads up.

Meanwhile, here’s an approach that I definitely like: Run an ad in a place where you expect to see ads–but run a different kind of ad.

I’ve questioned Google’s attempts to promote its online products with offline ads before, but I do applaud the company for attaching its Chrome Browser to Dan Savage’s “It Gets Better” campaign with a TV campaign.

Even more interesting is that while Google has run the spot during “Glee”, it’s also made a point of venturing farther afield: I’ve now seen it during a TNT NBA playoff game, and during daytime runs of ESPN. It shouldn’t be interesting that an explicitly pro-gay ad appeared on big-time sports broadcasts in 2011, but it is. And that’s sort of the point.

[Excerpt image via Lord Jim]

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110606/nice-empty-space-you-got-there-mind-if-we-run-a-web-ad/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110601/want-one-of-the-first-google-chromebooks-try-gilt-groupe/ http://allthingsd.com/20110601/want-one-of-the-first-google-chromebooks-try-gilt-groupe/#comments Thu, 02 Jun 2011 02:46:26 +0000 Ina Fried http://allthingsd.com/?p=81799 I have a feeling there won’t be a mad rush on the first Google Chromebooks when they go on sale mid-month. But for those who can’t wait that long, Google is teaming with luxury seller Gilt Groupe to distribute some of the first machines.

“We were able to get our hands on some early Samsung Chromebooks before they go on sale June 15, so we wanted to find a way to make them available to our biggest Chrome enthusiasts,” a Google representative said in a statement. “We teamed with Gilt Groupe to provide early access to our eager applicants of the Chromebook pilot program last year.”

Google also promised Chromebooks to all attendees of its I/O developer conference, but no word on when those will be arriving. Samsung showed off its Chromebook at an event following last month’s conference.

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110601/want-one-of-the-first-google-chromebooks-try-gilt-groupe/feed/ 0 http://allthingsd.com/20110512/with-chrome-os-samsung-makes-a-bet-on-future-of-computing-again/ http://allthingsd.com/20110512/with-chrome-os-samsung-makes-a-bet-on-future-of-computing-again/#comments Thu, 12 May 2011 11:00:46 +0000 Ina Fried http://mobilized.allthingsd.com/?p=7672 Samsung’s introduction of the Series 5 Chromebook on Wednesday represents a pretty bold bet that the computing world is ready to break with three decades of tradition.

But this isn’t the first time Samsung has bet big on a radically different computing idea. Flash back five years ago when Samsung partnered with Microsoft on Project Origami, a bold bet that the industry could deliver a slimmed-down touch computer that cost less than a PC, was easier to use and had all-day battery life.

The effort eventually led to the introduction of Samsung’s Q1–however, the ultramobile PC ended up costing more than a laptop, had poor battery life and, because it had full-blown Windows at its core, was actually quite difficult to use without a keyboard and mouse.

Indeed, it was the same Jason Redmond that was at Wednesday night’s Series 5 launch event that helped lead Samsung’s marketing efforts for the Q1.

But while Samsung stuck with the idea for several revisions, even adding a slide-out keyboard and making other changes, Microsoft largely abandoned Origami and returned to making more traditional tablets.

And, after years of nibbling at the edges of the global PC market, Samsung is now one of the fastest growing global brands, selling lots and lots of traditional notebooks built around Microsoft’s traditional Windows operating system.

Of course, another company made a run at that idea of a $500 tablet with all-day battery life and instant-on capabilities. And Apple has managed to sell more than a few iPads.

Samsung’s Redmond acknowledges that the timing was probably off with the Q1 but insists that the world is ready for a product like the Chromebook.

This time around, Redmond says he’s aware that this might not be an overnight hit and he insisted both Google and Samsung are in this “for the long haul” regardless of what the initial demand is for the first crop of Chromebooks.

“It will grow over time,” he said. “We’re not looking for an immediate explosion in demand for these devices.”

]]> http://allthingsd.com/20110512/with-chrome-os-samsung-makes-a-bet-on-future-of-computing-again/feed/ 0