Mozilla guns for Guinness world record with Firefox 3.0

Mozilla aims to make Firefox 3 a record breaker. It wants the release of the next version of its flagship open source browser to be accompanied by a record for the most software downloads in a single 24-hour period*.

Download Day - as Mozilla dubs it - will begin the minute Firefox 3 is generally available and continue for 24 hours. Ahead of this release, expected in mid-to-late June, Mozilla has set up a website (spreadfirefox.com/worldrecord). This encourages people to organise Download Day parties, to run around collecting sign-up pledges at their university or place of work, and to place Download Day buttons on their websites.

Firefox 3 is based on Gecko 1.9, an updated layout engine. The browser features a cleaner layout, better bookmark handling and more stability. And it’s faster.

RC2
Mozilla decided to release a second release candidate for Firefox 3.0 at a meeting on Tuesday, in response to the discovery of 10 performance and stability bugs. The alternative would have been to patch these potential “showstoppers” after the browser shipped. But another round of testing is the safer option - not least from the standpoint of public relations. This will probably set back the official launch by five days or so.

Last November Mozilla hit back at claims that multiple bugs in its forthcoming Firefox 3 browser would be ignored in order to meet release schedules. At that point Mozilla was grappling with 700 bugs marked as “blockers” (i.e. a flaw serious enough to justify delaying a release, or at least merit a closer inspection).

Skip forward six months and we’re at the point where the browser is in fine-tuning to eliminate the last few high-priority bugs.

In a development list posting on Tuesday, Mozilla’s lead developer Mike Beltzner explained the strict patch acceptance policy for Firefox 3 RC2. “Just because we’ve decided to product another release candidate does not mean that we are accepting new patches - only those which fix issues that have been identified as required fixes for RC2 will be accepted, and even then your patch must come with a risk assessment and tests,” he writes. “Many of the issues to be fixed in RC2 have already been patched, reviewed, approved and landed.”

* Mozilla is trying for a record in a new category, according to a representative of the firm. That means it doesn’t have an existing mark to better. The open source browser outfit aims to secure over 1.6m downloads over 24 hours.

Firefox will be available from multiple locations. We must assume the bandwidth and server capacity will be in place to service the rush.

Are you ready for Windows 7?

“Hold the line!” That’s the new rallying cry for the core Windows development team. Add new features. Tweak existing ones. But whatever you do, don’t make Windows 7 any slower or fatter than Vista.

I have little doubt those are the marching orders for Windows 7, given the tight release timeframe of 18 to 24 months plus various reports of early Milestone builds. More ambitious changes would risk another — and potentially fatal — Longhorn-style delay. Windows 7 will be exactly what the internal Microsoft working title conveys: the seventh (actually fifth) generation of the Windows NT code base — the same code base that forms the basis of Windows XP and Vista today.

Shocking? Only if you’re one of the deluded Save XP die-hards who bought into the whole Windows 7 uber alles mystique. For these lost souls, the next Windows is more than just another version. It’s a true panacea, a conduit through which they can pour all of their anti-Vista angst. Don’t like UAC? Windows 7 will fix that. Frustrated by Vista’s sluggish performance? Windows 7 will run circles around it.

Reality check: Windows 7 will be a lot like Vista. In fact, it’ll be more like an extensive Service Pack (think Windows XP SP2 and/or the various NT Option Packs of yore) than a major new release. Big ideas and big new features are what got Microsoft into the whole “Longhorn reset” mess in the first place.

This is actually a good thing. Despite the criticisms leveled against it (including more than one heated diatribe by yours truly), Vista isn’t really flawed in any fundamental way. Yes, it’s slower than XP — but that was to be expected given its more complex code paths. Likewise, the “girth” issues were somewhat inevitable. Meanwhile, the hardware base is slowly catching up to where it needs to be to support a more complex Windows OS.

I’d even go so far as to say that, if Vista were launched today –- with the SP1 tweaks and improved device driver ecosystem in place -– it would fare a lot better than it did. But hindsight is 20/20. The future, in the form of Windows 7, is all about shipping an incremental follow-on to Vista that shores up the NT code base once and for all.

The good news is that this also makes speculating about the next version’s runtime behavior a lot easier. After all, if Windows 7 is just Windows Vista with some performance and usability tweaks, it means we can deduce a lot about the product’s system requirements and compatibility with the installed base by examining performance and usage data collected from systems running its immediate predecessors, Windows “5″ (also known as XP) and “6″ (also known as Vista).

Peering into the future with Windows Sentinel
Enter the Windows Sentinel project. With nearly 2,000 contributing systems, the exo.repository –- which is the heart of Windows Sentinel –- provides us with a representative sample of Windows-based systems running a mixture of versions (XP, 2003, 2008, Vista) and workloads (business productivity, analytics, home/personal).

Basically, we have our finger on the pulse of the Windows landscape. And by measuring that pulse, plus a few other metrics (and some educated guessing), we can tell a lot about how Windows 7 will be received when it ships.

For example, we can tell right now that roughly 29 percent of current systems will be able to run Windows 7, although not always with adequate performance.

This conclusion is based on an analysis of system disclosure data (CPU type/count/speed, memory size) as well as performance indices calculated from runtime data collected over a one-month period. Of the remaining systems, 60 percent have too little memory (less than 2GB) to reasonably host a Vista successor, while 29 percent don’t have the CPU horsepower (less than 2GHz).

We can further break down the “survivors” by analyzing their current workloads. A full 36 percent of them are already CPU bound, with 27 percent of them heavily overloaded. This is per the exo.repository’s Peak CPU Saturation Index, which is a compound index derived from 4 contributing factors: Processor Queue Length; Per-process Instant Delay (a custom CPU metric derived from the Processor Queue value); Per-Process Cumulative Delay (another custom metric); and Event Duration.

Interestingly, of the systems that are most heavily burdened, only 31 percent are running Vista (which is not really surprising since Vista makes up just 16 percent of the overall sample set). The rest are running a mixture of XP and Server 2003/XP-64-bit.

Needless to say, a heavily loaded (in terms of CPU saturation) XP box doesn’t bode well for Vista’s successor. Like Vista, Windows 7 will introduce a much higher CPU burden in the form of additional background services and their corresponding execution threads. Currently, this ratio runs approximately two to one in favor of Vista: A Vista-based PC must juggle roughly twice as many concurrent execution threads as an XP PC while running the identical office productivity workload.

Chances are good that Windows 7 will, at minimum, maintain the status quo in terms of resource requirements. This, in turn, means that customers who were hoping for some relief with Windows 7 will be sorely disappointed. It’s simply not realistic to expect Microsoft to produce a “leaner” OS and yet still add enough functionality to make it worth upgrading. At best, we might see a new version with a resource footprint similar to Windows Vista, which still places it out of reach of more than three-quarters of the systems in our sample set.

Bottom line: Less than 20 percent of the installed base is ready to migrate to Windows 7 today based on all of the factors detailed above. By far, the biggest (60 percent of the base) inhibitor is limited RAM: Like Vista, Windows 7 will have a voracious appetite for memory. Today, 2GB is the bare minimum for reasonable Vista performance. Expect 4GB to be the norm by the time Windows 7 ships. Likewise, the days of the single-core CPU are over. Dual cores are a must, while quad cores are rapidly transitioning from luxury to mainstream necessity.

Fortunately for Microsoft, it has time –- and Moore’s indefatigable Law –- on its side. Assuming Microsoft does indeed “hold the line” on code path expansion and keep Windows 7’s requirements within striking distance of Windows Vista, it can launch virtually anything and still have a winner. Just don’t expect to boot it on that old Pentium III box you stumbled across in your basement.

Goodbye Netscape Navigator, AOL says no longer supported

A web browser that gave many people their first experience of the web is set to disappear.

Netscape Navigator, now owned by AOL, will no longer be supported after 1 March 2008, the company has said.

In the mid-1990s, as the commercial web began to take off, the browser was used by more than 90% of people online.

Its market share has since slipped to just 0.6% as other browsers such as Microsoft’s Internet Explorer (IE) and Firefox have eroded its user base.

The company recommends that users upgrade their browser to either Firefox or Flock, which are both built on the same underlying technologies as Navigator.

“I think we represent the hope that was of Netscape,” Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation which coordinates development of Firefox, told BBC News.

“We have picked up many of the things that Netscape launched but we’ve taken them further in terms of openness and public participation.”

Ms Baker was one of the first employees at Netscape in 1994.

Web window
Netscape was created by Marc Andreessen who as a student had co-authored Mosaic, the first popular web browser.

His company Netscape Communications Corporation released the first version in 1994.

According to Shawn Hardin, President and CEO of Flock, Netscape played an important role in making the internet “a relevant mass market phenomenon”.

“Netscape had a critical role in taking all of these zeros and ones - this very academic and technical environment - and giving it a graphical user interface where an average person could come online and consume information,” he told BBC News.

“During its halcyon days it really felt like the internet and Netscape were really the same thing,” he said.

Other companies capitalised on Netscape’s success, notably Microsoft, which began to bundle IE with its Windows operating systems.

Although this led to legal wrangles over anti-competitive behaviour, IE now dominates the browser landscape with an 80% market share.

As a result, Netscape became unviable.

“While internal groups within AOL have invested a great deal of time and energy in attempting to revive Netscape Navigator, these efforts have not been successful in gaining market share from Microsoft’s Internet Explorer,” said Tom Drapeau on the Netscape blog last year, when the demise of the browser was first announced.

Future return?
For the past week Netscape users have been shown a message alerting them to the end of support for the browser.

“Given AOL’s current business focus, support for Netscape browsers will be discontinued as of March 1st, 2008,” the message reads.

It then suggests users upgrade to either Flock or Firefox.

Firefox is the main competitor to IE, particularly in Europe where it has a 28% market share, according to some statistics.

The open source browser’s development is coordinated by the Mozilla foundation, set up by Netscape staff made redundant in 2003.

It has had more than 500 million downloads worldwide and in countries such as Finland it is the most popular browser.

“Competition is what brings quality,” said Ms Baker.

Flock describes itself as “the social web browser” and allows people to see feeds from community websites, such as Flickr and Facebook, and post to blogs without having to navigate to the page.

“There are lots of ways that people are engaging in having a conversation and Flock is very focused on making that as effortless and convenient as possible,” said Mr Hardin.

However, not all Netscape users are happy about having to change browser.

“I’m sad. Flock still needs improvement and I am not happy with Firefox’s interface. I’m [an] orphan!” read one post on the Netscape blog.

Others who posted comments on the blog predicted the browser will make a return.

“Netscape is a wonderful browser, and it will be so in the future,” read one.

SQL Server 2008 delayed until third quarter

Microsoft said on Friday that it has pushed back the delivery date of its SQL Server database until the third quarter of this year.

The company is planning to have a launch event, called Heroes Happen Here, on February 27 that will be a public coming-out of Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008, and SQL Server 2008.

Rather than release the final product at that time, Microsoft will have a “feature complete” preview, according to a Microsoft employee blog dedicated to SQL Server.

A release candidate for SQL Server 2008 will come out in second quarter with final general availability in the third quarter, according to the blog’s author, Francois Ajenstat, director of marketing for SQL Server.

The blog noted that the timing falls within Microsoft’s previously stated goal of getting SQL Server 2008 out two to three years after SQL Server 2005, which itself suffered from a series of significant delays.

Despite the delays with SQL Server 2005, it has been a successful product. Market research indicates that Microsoft’s database revenue is growing faster than that of rivals Oracle and IBM. Microsoft’s server and tools business is one of the company’s largest and fastest-growing divisions.

Amazon takes on Oracle and IBM with SimpleDB

Companies can now go ahead and fire their expensive database administrators—those engineers who keep the Oracle or IBM databases humming. Amazon has just added an enterprise-class database called SimpleDB to its suite of cloud-based IT infrastructure, which also includes storage (S3) and computation (EC2) available by the drink. Today, Amazon is taking sign-ups for the SimpleDB beta, which should start in a few weeks. As it points out on the new Simple DB page:

Amazon SimpleDB is a web service for running queries on structured data in real time. This service works in close conjunction with Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) and Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), collectively providing the ability to store, process and query data sets in the cloud. These services are designed to make web-scale computing easier and more cost-effective for developers.

Traditionally, this type of functionality has been accomplished with a clustered relational database that requires a sizable upfront investment, brings more complexity than is typically needed, and often requires a DBA to maintain and administer. In contrast, Amazon SimpleDB is easy to use and provides the core functionality of a database - real-time lookup and simple querying of structured data - without the operational complexity. Amazon SimpleDB requires no schema, automatically indexes your data and provides a simple API for storage and access. This eliminates the administrative burden of data modeling, index maintenance, and performance tuning. Developers gain access to this functionality within Amazon’s proven computing environment, are able to scale instantly, and pay only for what they use.

This will be especially attractive for Web startups. Amazon has just taken another major infrastructure cost off the table for them. Relational databases are expensive to buy and maintain. Whatever features or performance SimpleDB lacks, it should make up for in price. Amazon wants to democratize the database by making it available to more businesses, and even individuals, thus leveling the playing field between big companies and startups even more.

And since SimpleDB operates at Web scale, larger companies will wake up to the cost saving opportunities of such a service as well. IBM, for one, is already trying to preempt any customer defections with its copycat Blue Cloud initiative. If speed is of the essence, you might still want to keep your database on your own servers. But the Web is where most software will one day live, whether consumer or enterprise. And Amazon’s got nothing to lose by speeding that day along.

Pricing for SimpleDB is as follows:

Machine Utilization - $0.14 per Amazon SimpleDB Machine Hour consumed

Data Transfer
$0.10 per GB - all data transfer in
$0.18 per GB - first 10 TB / month data transfer out
$0.16 per GB - next 40 TB / month data transfer out
$0.13 per GB - data transfer out / month over 50 TB

Data transfer “in” and “out” refers to transfer into and out of Amazon SimpleDB. Data transferred between Amazon SimpleDB and other Amazon Web Services is free of charge (i.e., $0.00 per GB).

Structured Data Storage - $1.50 per GB-month