The Mobile Fun Blog

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In the first series of comprehensive performance tests comparing Microsoft’s Internet Explorer 9 technical preview, released yesterday, to stable Web browsers in current use today, Betanews confirmed superb speed gains by the IE9 chassis in specific categories. Not everything in the new IE9 was faster than IE8, but in the computational department, the development team’s Chakra JavaScript engine shows much-needed gains.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

A permanent injunction against Microsoft selling versions of Word that contain XML editing ability effectively remains in place today, after a shot-in-the-dark appeal by Microsoft of its appeals loss last December was shot down Wednesday by the DC Circuit Court of Appeals.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Despite the fact that game console manufacturers still drive studios toward exclusivity for individual titles, so that a popular Xbox 360 game isn’t available for PlayStation 3 and vice versa, developers within those studios are insisting more and more upon cross-platform flexibility and portability. While they may be restricted to one console, they don’t want those borders to extend to computers or to handsets.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

The European Parliament today overwhelmingly voted in favor of a resolution compelling participants in multi-national negotiations over the proposed Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA) to report on the status and substance of those negotiations, first to Parliament and eventually to the general public. This after a groundswell of public concern arose in the wake of documents purporting to be official ACTA material, the latest leaked by Wired last November (PDF available here from Wired), spoke of US negotiators’ requests to include terms in the final Agreement that would force Internet service providers to police the content trafficked over their pipelines, or else face penalties.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Tuesday evening, during an event televised over YouTube called Google Campfire One, Google executives lifted the curtain on its cloud-based Apps Marketplace for PC-based applications, with the promise of opening its online store with 50 charter vendors later in the evening. The Marketplace is designed to feature applications that integrate with the company’s existing Google Apps, Gmail, and other cloud-based services.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Should the next version of HTML, the Web standard that embodies how pages are laid out and constructed, include explicit specifications for inline, 2D dynamic graphics? There’s valid arguments on both sides. One side believes that the ability to plot charts and animations would have been part of the original HTML standard anyway, had the technology existed on the back end in the beginning; giving HTML 2D graphics now, they say, plugs a hole left open for too long. Another believes the HTML5 standard should simply specify an API for plug-ins, to let separate groups of engineers evolve a methodology for plotting graphics at their own pace, and on their own track.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

Two years ago, during a private premiere event entitled “Heroes Happen Here” held at the same Nokia Theater in Los Angeles where the Emmy Awards are now staged, and introduced by none other than Tom Brokaw, Microsoft rolled out a truckload of new server software product lines to help cement the company’s new prominence in businesses and enterprises. One of the “heroes” that day, as Microsoft phrased it, was Essential Business Server, an effort to market a ready-from-the-get-go three- or four-server database and mail management package for businesses that have a few dozen employees, but may not yet be enterprises.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In the early 2000s, Web browsers were considered by software architects to be launching platforms for other types of program interpreters, such as Java and .NET. The HTML in the Web page simply got the code going, and the network of pages a business would use to launch Web apps was considered the “intranet.” But as browsers have matured (rapidly in recent months), they have become the interpreter for Web applications — not a launching point for Java, but a proving ground for a highly evolved JavaScript.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

In a precedent-setting win for the company perceived as the originator of “time-shift” video recording, the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals has fully affirmed a lower court’s judgment that satellite service provider EchoStar’s software continued to infringe upon TiVo’s patents even after making significant changes to address its complaints. This despite what EchoStar (whose DVR boxes are also used by former sister company Dish Network) had called “Herculean” efforts to steer clear of TiVo’s intellectual property, and a preliminary US Patent Office rejection last August casting doubt on the validity of TiVo’s patents.

By Scott M. Fulton, III, Betanews

As IE6 and IE7 users throughout Europe turn on their Windows Vista- and XP-based computers to notice, for the first time, the opportunity to switch Web browsers from Microsoft Internet Explorer to something they may have never heard of, their manufacturers are preparing for an influx of new customers.