Guru3D interviews Adrian Silasi of SiSoftware about the Sandra 2009 benchmark suite.

It is easy to scoff at Twitter’s bubbly Web 2.0ness and a model that, on the surface, appears self-promotional. Billed as a “microblogging” service, the service permits 140 character updates from the site, any phone, and a growing array of desktop clients. It is easy to wonder what merit can arise from permitting people to speak of themselves from virtually any locale addressed by a cell tower. Yet, a peek beneath the glossy exterior reveals a teeming world of robust and, at times, very personal communication.

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I’m writing this from Google’s new browser - Chrome. The beta was announced and released today. Currently you can download it for Windows only, but the full release will be for Mac OS and Linux as well.

I’m not going to delve into the philosophy or the business case behind Chrome - there are plenty of other talking heads who will do that. You can read my wrap up from earlier today if you want links to some of them. The web will be awash with opinions as to the genius and stupidity of every move Google makes. Instead, I will be talking about my experiences with Chrome.

Chrome is clean. It is fast. It is intuitive.

Will it replace Firefox? For me, possibly. One feature I used immediately, and one from which I may never return, is the ability to open a tab as an “application”. I remember the first time I used tabbed browsing within Firefox. That was the day I ceased to use IE - because it was so compelling that I couldn’t imagine going back to the ‘old way’. I think tabs-as-apps is similar. I already have a desktop shortcut to Icrontic.com. When I Alt-Tab, Icrontic.com is in the launcher. I haven’t delved into the implications yet, but my gut feeling is “this is something”. L.M. Orchard from 0xDECAFBAD says, “Best not to think of Chrome as another browser. Rather, think of it as one of the first “Web OS” window managers.” This is very telling. Chrome has its own task manager, plugins run in their own process, tabs run in their own process, and Chrome generally acts like a GUI for an OS, not just a browser. The line has blurred considerably.

Icrontic as a Chrome app

The “omnibox” (a name I cringe to type) just.. works. After I let Chrome import all my Firefox stuff, I type “I” into the box and hit enter and Icrontic.com is right there. Not because it’s alphabetical but because it’s the “I” that I most often go to. Chrome is supposed to ‘learn’ your browsing behaviors and adapt to it. The end result is that I am going to places more intuitively and faster than I used to. One major problem I’ve had with Firefox 3 is the length of time the address bar takes to enumerate all possibilities of where I want to go. There have been times I’ve wanted to go back to version 2 just because of it.

Chrome is noticeably faster. I went to my online banking page and it was WAY faster than in Firefox. The sites visit the most are all definitely faster. Today in the announcement presentation they threw some benchmark numbers out there showing how much faster Chrome was than IE. Anecdotally, I will tell you “it’s faster”.

I have some minor complaints. Selecting text is a bit difficult for me. I couldn’t easily drag a specific part of a paragraph in a text box and select it. It kept wanting to select the whole chunk. I ended up using the shift-and-arrow keys from the days of yore to navigate around the text box to select exactly what I wanted. I don’t necessarily enjoy the color scheme, and while I realize they probably won’t have skin support in a beta, at least let me change the colors from the default blue. Some sites don’t look great with the blue bars, and it doesn’t match my windows theme that well. I’m a sucker for bling (I’ve been using the PimpZilla skin for Firefox since forever. Leopard print, gold, and diamonds all the way!) I’m sure support will come after release.

As with any new browser, of course you’ll all download it and see. It all boils down to a matter of opinion. Some of my Icrontic friends swear by Opera. It never “clicked” for me. Others still use IE. I don’t get it. Many of you (especially the developers among us) will be sticking with Firefox because of all the developer plugins. But there are those, like me, who will probably be switching to Chrome, because the feature set is compelling and it just feels better.

The tech universe is all a-titter about Google Chrome this morning. Apparently, when one of the largest, richest tech companies on Earth decides to launch a fundamental and critical piece of desktop software in direct competition with another of the largest, richest tech companies on Earth, it’s what we in the industry call “big news” o.O

Instead of rehashing the news, I’ll summarize and provide roundup info. We like doing that here.

• First, the source: Screenshots were nabbed from the Google Gears site (which has since been taken down). This from Blogoscoped, the original scooper.
• Second, the “official” word from Google. Looks like an oopsie. German post was faster than intended, and the comic wasn’t supposed to get there yet. Too late. Spin away.
• TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington seems to think Chrome is really “a coat of paint on top of a monumental hatred of Microsoft”. Lulz.
• David Damore from Admore Solutions says Press Conference at 11am PDT (2pm EST) for beta release, which will be Windows only today.

We’ll keep you updated.

Lunchtime update

Alright, here’s more, as promised…

• BusinessWire has the direct links to the webcast at 11am PST / 2pm EST.
• Mozilla CEO John Lilly tells CNET his take on Chrome - “inevitable”.
• Ten Questions about Chrome from Technologizer.
• A bit more technical: John Resig talks about the Chrome Process Manager.
• General opinion seems to say that Chrome is not aimed at IE or Firefox, but at Windows itself…

Next update will be after the webcast.

Today Philipp Lenssen from Google Blogoscoped received a comic in the mail announcing Google’s open source browser named “Chrome”.

He scanned all 38 pages and put them up.

Google thanks Mozilla and Webkit by name in the comic, but it appears that Chrome uses Webkit’s rendering engine. One of their priorities is Javascript performance, and to that end they are developing a new Javascript engine from scratch called “V8″.

Other features include a simplified UI, a “privacy tab” similar to IE8’s “InPrivate” mode (nothing from that tab’s activity is logged), auto completion that doesn’t suck, and a “speed dial” similar to Opera. Blogoscoped has a thorough, nicely bulleted list of new features if you don’t feel like slogging through the 38 page commercial.

The question becomes: Do we really need another browser?

Researchers from the University of Michigan have developed “CloudAV,” a next-generation anti-virus technology. CloudAV seeks to improve PC resource utilization and virus detection rates by shifting the burden of virus analysis into the computing “cloud.”

Jon Oberheide and Evan Cooke, working under the guidance of Professor Farnam Jahanian, tout the cloud’s significant advantages over traditional client-side anti-virus:

• The cloud aggregates the detection results of many anti-virus engines; a feat that would be improbable, if not impossible, on a client system.
• The cloud offers enough resources to provide virtual behavioral analysis.
• The client buys reduced disk and CPU usage at the cost of increased network utilization.
• The burden of application maintenance is completely removed from the client side.

The engine currently consists of detection routines and signatures from Avast, AVG, BitDefender, ClamAV, F-Prot, F-Secure, Kaspersky, McAfee, Symantec, and Trend Micro. Analysis reveals (PDF) that the combined signature databases of these varied anti-virus applications yields a 91% detection rate.

While the technology sounds similar to centralized anti-virus, such as Symantec Corporate, it is quite different. Today’s corporate anti-virus products centrally manage user policies while leaving the burden of scanning and detection on the client end. Under this model, a significant processor and memory footprint is incurred.

Behavioral analysis is one of the more exciting aspects of this technology, according to the developers. Cooke and Oberheide explained that “behavioral analysis allows us to open a file in an emulated environment and trace the execution of a file through a system.” The cloud has enough resources to execute a potentially infected file in a virtual sandbox to determine its impact. This is a significant advance in anti-virus technology that would be impractical to run on a desktop, much less a smartphone.

Other new functionality includes the caching of files in the cloud so that detection isn’t a constant resource drain. Once a file signature is cached, it does not need to be reanalyzed. In effect, a single user that may be running Microsoft PowerPoint would submit the signature data for that version of PowerPoint to all PowerPoint users in the cloud. Because a single computer can contribute all the necessary information, deployments that have a swath of similarly-configured computers would benefit from reduced network overhead.

While the technology is being used in a production environment on the University of Michigan campus, there are no plans to commercialize the product. Agents have been developed for Windows, Linux, BSD, Nokia Maemo, and sendmail. Cooke and Oberheide envision implementations of these clients for ISP, campus and corporate deployments.

We were concerned about privacy in the cloud; specifically, we wondered whether or not we would want our ISP to scan sensitive files for us. They envisioned a hybrid system with a lightweight detection engine on the client side for files somehow tagged as private. Meanwhile the CloudAV technology would remain for system files, executables, and other non-sensitive information.

You can find more information on their website, including links to white papers about the technology.

Steve Jobs was proudly touting the latest numbers from Apple’s iPhone App Store in an interview with the Wall Street Journal. The WSJ reports that, while half the apps were free, that still leaves $30m in revenues for the newly-launched service.

However, tech bloggers like Julia Roy are realizing that downloading a glut of apps during the honeymoon was not necessarily a great idea.

Not because I don’t like them or find them useful, but because they make even the simplest tasks like texting and emailing really slow to load and I’ve been having serious keyboard slowdown.

Apparently there are still issues to be worked out before the app store can really shine. In the meantime, Steve will be counting his gold coins.

YouGamers argues real in-game versus synthetic benchmarks.

Chris Brogan gives us a list of 50 extremely useful web apps, summarizes their cost (many are free), categorizes them, and gives links. A handy little list.

Apple Releases iTunes 7.7.1 Update

Phoronix forum members have hacked SplashTop “Instant-On Linux,” the cool environment usually found in ASUS motherboards.

OMG HI UR 2 CUTE

TechCrunch revealed today that Fox Interactive Media’s Myspace social networking phenomenon has agreed to start implementing OpenID authentication. This brings their 200 million user accounts to the already-300-million-strong OpenID userbase.

No, this does not mean we’ll be hearing the latest hits from Estelle and Kanye West or having “glitter bling” on OpenID-enabled sites.

Single sign-in is something of a panacea for those of us who live on the web. Perhaps one day OpenID will be the one.

Last month we had talked about the scaling issues and load problems that Twitter is experiencing. And experiencing them they are - just last night Twitter was down for over an hour. One of the reasons Twitter has so much load is that third party applications (such as Twhirl) have to use Twitter just like the rest of us - make a request, wait for the servers to deal with it, and then do something with the response.

TechCrunch revealed that in order to alleviate some of those issues, Twitter today opened up their “XMPP firehose” - the raw data feed of all regular Twitter data. Third parties can now access this feed, filter out what they’re looking for, and present the information to their applications. This should relieve some of the pressure on the Twitter service.

It is the age of the password. We have come to rely on these ubiquitous strings of text to protect our finances, aspects of our identity, and even our virtual assets which have begun to carry individual value. As a result of the meteoric rise of the password’s importance, they have become a commodity in their own right. A type of virus known as the keylogger, expressly designed to harvest passwords, has multiplied at an alarming rate; studies conducted by (PDF) the security firm Symantec have indicated a 63% rise in prevalence between 2003 and 2005. Even empirical analysis clearly demonstrates the value of the password. Identity theft has become a 43.5 billion dollar industry and it is squarely on us to acknowledge the password’s value so we are not accomplices in the theft of our own assets.

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Techware Labs discusses the difference between real-world and synthetic benchmarks.