HTML5

Adobe Systems today announced a service it hopes will give TV companies a way to let people watch their video where they want--for example, cable TV subscribers who'd like to see a show on their computer, tablet, or mobile phone.

Such sharing has been difficult because of rights management issues: those who create premium video content are leery of seeing it spread willy-nilly, and supporting a multitude of devices is complex and expensive.

The Adobe Pass service--key to an "industry movement known as TV Everywhere," Adobe says--is designed to smooth over these issues using a combination … Read more

In September, Google said it hoped to bring its then-new Google Instant search feature to users of the Opera browser "shortly." A half-year later, there's still no sign of it.

Google still is working on it, though.

"We've encountered some technical barriers that are temporarily preventing us from making Instant available for Opera," Google said in a statement yesterday. "It's difficult for us to estimate when we will overcome these barriers, but we want to bring Instant to as many browsers, platforms and regions as possible."

It's not clear exactly … Read more

Standards groups are unwieldy and slow-moving. But when it comes to expanding what browsers can do, they turned out to be a faster way for Google to bring a handful of features to the Web than its Gears plug-in.

So it comes as no surprise that Google, after letting the Gears project spin down over the last year and a half, is removing the software altogether from its Chrome browser.

"It's finally time to say goodbye to Gears," said Gears team member Aaron Boodman in a blog post. "There will be no new Gears releases, and … Read more

In an effort to bring its Web video technology to a browser that doesn't support it, Google has released an IE9 plug-in to play WebM video.

The move won't bring an end to the industry scuffle over the best way to build video into the Web, but it will mean that allies behind Google's preferred mechanism will be able to reach beyond the three browsers that support WebM today, Google's Chrome, Opera Software's Opera, and Mozilla's Firefox. Apple's Safari and Microsoft's brand-new IE9 support the rival H.264 video codec (though IE9 … Read more

AUSTIN, Texas--Just one year after it initially previewed its new Internet Explorer 9 browser, Microsoft formally launched the software today at the South by Southwest Interactive Festival (SXSW), bringing in representatives from launch partners from The Huffington Post, Foursquare, Groupon, and Pandora to demonstrate an experience that looks less like the Web as we know it and more like the app ecosystem of a smartphone or tablet.

"We're used to the Web getting better because of everything other than the PC," Internet Explorer's Dean Hachamovitch said of how the most innovative kinds of Web development have, … Read more

BARCELONA, Spain--Jeff Jaffe's job requires both patience and impatience.

Patience, because the World Wide Web Consortium--of which he's been chief executive for nearly a year--is an unwieldy standards group trying to encompass the disparate agendas of dozens of companies.

And impatience, because if the W3C doesn't move fast enough, the Web will move on without it.

It was clear from an interview with CNET that Jaffe is trying to strike the right balance. The W3C is tackling a range Web standards from the newer idea of augmented reality to the politically charged overhaul of HTML, the … Read more

Facebook is going to start showing movies (and making you buy credits), Microsoft is staking Nokia $1 billion to distribute Windows Phone 7/Nokia love children, and Sprint may buy T-Mobile USA and create a massive mobile carrier third head. Plus, in data porn, Android tops the U.S. smart phone market, AT&T dominates on downloads, and the iPad 2's dual-core processor is apparently not all that. But iOS 4.3 is! Also: vote for Asian Usher! --Molly

Revving the Flash Player development engine as fast as possible, Adobe Systems has issued a beta of version 10.3 that lets programmers use a variety of new audio tools.

Those audio possibilities could be very useful for those writing Net-based voice communication software. Features include canceling noise and echoes, detecting when a person has started or stopped speaking, and correcting microphone volume levels to even out speech loudness, Flash product manager Thibault Imbert said in a blog post late yesterday.

More broadly, though, the software embodies Adobe's push to keep Flash competitive. The browser plug-in is, if not … Read more

Steve Jobs thinks that HTML5 is the future of media-rich content on the Web, and eventually he might be right. But Web designers and their clients are working with Flash now, so to address this schism between the two, Adobe Labs today unveiled a new free tool called Wallaby that will convert Flash into HTML5.

Originally demonstrated at Adobe's MAX 2010 conference, the conversion process is currently workable but rough, said Adobe Flash Professional Senior Product Manager Tom Barclay. "HTML5 will be an important technology for banner ads and Web publishing," he said but cautioned that Flash … Read more