Programming

VP9, the successor to Google's VP8 video compression technology at the center of a techno-political controversy, has made its first appearance outside Google's walls.

Google has built VP9 support into Chrome, though only in an early-stage version of the browser for developers. In another change, it also added support for the new Opus audio compression technology that's got the potential to improve voice communications and music streaming on the Internet.

VP9 and Opus are codecs, technology used to encode streams of data into compressed form then decode them later, enabling efficient use of limited network or storage … Read more

For a while there, the browser was winning the war.

New startups launched online services rather than packaged software. Browser makers raced to transform the Web from a place to publish documents into a general-purpose programming platform. People spent more and more time using the Web instead of software that ran natively on devices.

Then the era of modern smartphones and tablets began. And in 2012, it became clear that Web app advocates will have to work a lot harder to build a universal software foundation. Here's a look at what happened this year in the world of the … Read more

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) today took two significant steps down its double-track path toward standardizing HTML, the core language of the Web.

First, it released a "candidate recommendation" of Hypertext Markup Language 5, which means HTML5 is settling down in the eyes of the standards group. Second, it released a first draft of HTML5.1, a smaller set of changes it's developing simultaneously.

"CR [candidate recommendation] is the stable branch into which only bug fixes go, [and] 5.1 is the new line for improvements," said Robin Berjon, one of the five newly appointed HTML5 editors. … Read more

The Microsoft Bing team is doing more than building a search engine that competes head-to-head with Google.

Part of the team, as I've blogged previously, also built some of the first Microsoft-branded consumer apps for Windows 8.

But it turns out there's another team inside the Bing organization that is working on Windows 8 apps, too. There's an Augmented Reality (AR) team inside Bing that is building both an AR framework and AR applications that will ship on Windows 8 tablets and other unspecified devices.

In keeping with Microsoft's new charter as a devices and services company, … Read more

Microsoft has sold 40 million Windows 8 licenses since October 26.

Tami Reller, chief marketing and financial officer for Windows, announced the tally today during her appearance at the Credit Suisse Annual Tech Conference.

Microsoft had not released any sales figures for Windows 8 other than saying the company sold 4 million upgrade licenses of the operating system to those with previous versions of Windows during the first three days it was available. Microsoft launched Windows 8 commercially on October 26.

How does this compare to Windows 7 sales? Microsoft said it had sold 60 million Windows 7 licenses from … Read more

Windows 8 will have sole custody of DirectX 11.1, according to a Microsoft engineer.

Responding to a question on an MSDN forum, Daniel Moth, a Microsoft program manager, broke the news that "at this point there is no plan for DirectX 11.1 to be made available on Windows 7."

That same holds true for versions prior to Windows 7, leaving the new DirectX version exclusive to Windows 8, Windows RT, and Windows Server 2012.

DirectX is a collection of programming interfaces from Microsoft that enable 3D animation and other multimedia effects used mostly in games. Developers … Read more

REDMOND, Wash. -- Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer said the company has sold 4 million copies of Windows 8 to consumers since the operating system debuted on Friday.

Ballmer made the announcement today at the start of the Build conference, a show Microsoft is hosting on its campus for more than 2,000 developers. Microsoft is hoping to convince developers to create applications for its new operating system and the Windows Phone 8 operating system that debuted yesterday.

"In a sense, what these launches really do is the kick off the golden age of opportunity for you as developers," … Read more

Within a year, the newly launched Windows 8 will likely be powering almost 400 million PCs and tablet computers.

Microsoft has built an application marketplace, the Windows Store, right into its new operating system. It's a place for consumers to find software programs to make their new machines more productive, more useful, and more fun.

But even though Microsoft announced the Windows Store more than a year ago to developers, the marketplace has about 5,000 applications for users in the United States, a few thousand more globally. If the opportunity is so big, why are the offerings so … Read more

Google released its first stable version of Dart, a programming language for Web applications that it believes improves on the incumbent JavaScript language.

"I'm pleased to announce that the M1 release of Dart is ready...This release is a more stable and comprehensive version of Dart," said Lars Bak, a programmer and key figure in the project, in a mailing list message today about the milestone 1 release. "Moving forward, we'll mainly focus on performance and completeness without introducing breaking changes to the Dart programming language."

It's hard to get new programming languages … Read more