Week in review: Google gigabit going to Kansas
Ars System Guide: March 2011 Edition: The latest installment of the Ars Technica System Guide brings Intel's new Sandy Bridge processor to our recommendations for the first time. The Budget Box, Hot Rod, and God Box all get updates, but only one gets the Sandy Bridge treatment—read on to find out which one.Amazon on Cloud Player: we don't need no stinkin' licenses: Amazon has apparently launched Cloud Drive and Cloud Player without securing streaming licenses from the music industry. But does it need to? Amazon says "No." The music industry? "Yes."
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Web browser market share: Modern browser edition
March was a big month for Web browsers, with major new versions of both Internet Explorer and Firefox. Both browsers have been suffering in the browser wars; Internet Explorer has steadily declined from its near-total monopolization of the browser market, and Firefox's growth has faltered, most likely due to strong competition from Google's Chrome.With Internet Explorer 9 out for just two and a half weeks, and Firefox 4 available for only nine days, however, not much has changed so far. Microsoft's browser continues to shed market share, dropping 0.85 points to 55.92 percent. Firefox is essentially unchanged, at 21.80 percent. These new browsers may yet be influential in encouraging people to switch—but at the moment, it looks like the only people adopting them are users of older versions.
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AppleSeed gives regular joes prerelease access to Mac OS X Lion
Apple is using a program called AppleSeed to give non-developers access to pre-release versions of Mac OS X Lion. The program aims to collect "feedback on the quality and usability" of Mac OS X "in environments that cannot be replicated by Apple." So far it appears to be quite limited and available only by direct invitation from Apple.Apple has long released early builds of new Mac OS X versions to developers, both to get feedback about bugs and other issues as well as to give developers lead time to test software or experiment with adding new features. Developers used to pay quite handsomely for an Apple Developer Connection membership to gain access to early builds, though Apple's current Mac Developer Program now costs just $99 per year.
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WebKit best option for Camino as Mozilla drops Gecko embedding
Camino—the Gecko-based browser with a native Cocoa user interface—is considering switching its underlying rendering engine to WebKit. Developer Stuart Morgan announced the proposed change this week after Mozilla effectively put an end to the project that supported embedding Gecko into other software. While the team is still putting the finishing touches on a long overdue 2.1 update, which would finally bring rendering parity with Firefox 3.6, the small group is looking to recruit help to make the transition happen.Camino is built by embedding the Gecko rendering engine—the same engine that powers Firefox—into a native Cocoa UI. In its heyday, many users preferred the speed and tighter Mac OS X integration that Camino offered over Firefox's XUL-based interface. As alternatives such as Safari, and later Chrome, became available, Camino's popularity fell. And, as improvements were made to the Gecko engine, the changes often broke embedding compatibility. Mozilla formed a team in 2008 to try and create a consistent embedding API that could alleviate these issues, but the team leader behind this effort announced on Monday that the embedding support would no longer be maintained. In particular, adapting Gecko to work in separate sandboxed processes made supporting the current embedding schemes impossible.
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Feature: Photoessay: Images from first planetary orbits
This week, NASA released the first images that its Messenger probe sent back after it went into orbit around the solar system's innermost planet, Mercury. These weren't the first images taken of Mercury from a spacecraft, nor even the first images of Mercury taken by Messenger, which had passed by the planet several times as it maneuvered into orbit. So why is entering orbit a big deal? In some ways, going into orbit means we're there to learn instead of simply discover. We picked up remarkable things as the Voyagers shot past the outer planets in our solar system, but the rapid flybys tended to provide a limited, static image of the planets they visited. When we returned with later orbiters, we got to track things like changing seasons on the planets and their moons, the evolution of their rings, and changes in their atmospheres. If one pass yields something interesting, it's possible to go back around and have another look.
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