SAN FRANCISCO -- Microsoft's not the only big tech player taking a gamble on a new direction. Mozilla made an aggressive argument for Firefox OS to Web and app developers Monday night at its confusingly named Mobile Monday Mixer -- confusing because the company held the event last night at its San Francisco office.

As the lights from the Bay Bridge blinked in the background, Jay Sullivan, Mozilla's vice president of products, laid out why developers should care about Firefox OS. "If you're looking to build and develop mobile software without the 30 percent toll [Apple … Read more

Enough with having separate Web programming tutorials from Google, Apple, Opera, Mozilla, and Microsoft.

These five major browser makers, along with Facebook, Adobe Systems, Nokia, and Hewlett Packard, have become stewards of a new effort to centralize developer resources at the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). This Web Platform Docs project will include not just help on to use a bewildering array of new Web technologies, but also will detail which ones are accepted standards, how well the various tools work across multiple browsers, and how stable the standards are.

"A key part of this project is that it … Read more

HTML5 fans got a very large splash of very cold water in their faces yesterday.

Facebook has been a big fan of building mobile apps using HTML5 and related Web standards, but no less than founder and Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg called Facebook's HTML5 app "one of the biggest mistakes if not the biggest strategic mistake that we made."

Those are powerfully damning words, and many developers will likely take them to heart given Facebook's cred in the programming world.

But there are subtleties here -- not an easy thing for those who see the world … Read more

Illustrating one of its selling points for its software subscription plans, Adobe Systems has updated Muse three months after it first released the tool for designing and publishing Web pages.

Adobe released Muse along with the Creative Cloud subscription service, which lets people use the full panoply of Adobe Creative Suite 6 (CS6) software along with some online services including Web hosting, Web fonts, and file synchronization. Part of the Creative Cloud sales pitch is that Adobe will update its components as new features arrive, meaning that subscribers get new abilities without having to wait for CS7.

The new version … Read more

SPDY, a Google project to try to speed up the Web, is gaining new allies interested in using it as a basis for rebuilding a fundamental Internet technolog that's remained largely unchanged since 1999.

SPDY reworks HTTP, the Hypertext Transfer Protocol by which Web browsers request Web pages and by which Web servers deliver those pages over the Internet. Every time you load a Web page, you use HTTP or its securely encrypted sibling, HTTPS. An upgrade would bring improvements to a vast number of people -- but on the flip side, making changes to something so basic and … Read more

With an open-source project called Collide, Google has released remnants of a tool that brings a collaborative, browser-based interface to programming.

The software runs on a server, letting multiple programmers tap into a project at the same time. It's similar to how Google Docs lets members of a group simultaneously edit the same document and thus a new example of the cloud-computing approach to software that Google advocates so fervently.

But apparently Google wasn't so fervent about Collide, because the two programmers who announced it, Scott Blum and Jaime Yap, said it's actually an ex-Google Project now. … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO--It began with a mere toolbar, an add-on that gave browsers a handy Google search box.

That modest project is what eventually led to Google Chrome, now used by 310 million people by Google's tally. It's what got the project's leader, Sundar Pichai, promoted to senior vice president of Chrome and Apps. And it's what led to a very lucrative new source of profit for the company.

Chrome has spread steadily over its three-and-a-half years of public existence. It launched on Windows, extended to OS X and to Linux personal computers in the months afterward, … Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Adding offline editing abilities to Google Docs may sound like a modest, incremental change, but it's actually a major step ahead for the company's Web-based services.

And those services will take two more steps soon: Offline editing is coming to the Presentations and Spreadsheet apps, too.

"You'll see that coming out before long," Alan Warren, senior director for Google Docs and Drive, said in an interview at the Google I/O show here. Both of the apps will allow users to read and edit files offline, he added, with editing abilities coming &… Read more

SAN FRANCISCO -- Google Play, Google's online market for Android apps, movies, music, and books, now lets people purchase movies instead of just rent them.

"We're also adding TV," announced Chris Yerga, an engineering director for Android, at the Google I/O show today here. "You'll be able to purchase episodes or entire seasons."

Google has partnerships for the service with a range of producers, including NBC Universal, Sony Pictures, Disney, Bravo, Paramount, Virgil Films, and Sundance, he said.

Also new are magazines, purchased individually or by subscription, he said. Google has deals … Read more