2012年3月14日星期三

The Metro browser is already plugin-free

Angry rants about the demise of corporate culture aren't reserved only for ex-Goldman Sachs employees. Microsoft-turned-Google burberry ties engineer James Whittaker -- now once again a Microsoft employee -- fired off a scathing blast Tuesday on a Microsoft blog about why he left Google.

"My last three months working for Google was a whirlwind of desperation," wrote Whittaker, who headed the engineering team for social network Google+. "The Google I was passionate about was a technology company that empowered its employees to innovate. The Google I left was an advertising company with a single corporate-mandated focus."

Whittaker, who joined Google in 2009 and left last month, described a corporate culture clearly divided into two eras: "Before Google+," and "After."

"After" is pretty terrible, in his view.

Google once gave its engineers the time and resources to be creative. That experimental approach yielded several home-run hits like Chrome and Gmail. But Google fell behind in one key area: competing with Facebook.

That turned into corporate priority No. 1 when Larry Page took over as the company's CEO. "Social" became Google's battle cry, and anything that didn't support Google+ was viewed as a distraction.

"Suddenly, 20% meant half-assed," burberry handbags outlet wrote Whittaker, referring to Google's famous policy of letting employees spend a fifth of their time on projects other than their core job. "The trappings of entrepreneurship were dismantled."

Whittaker is not the first ex-Googler to express that line of criticism. Several high-level employees have left after complaining that the "start-up spirit" of Google has been replaced by a more mature but staid culture focused on the bottom line.

The interesting thing about Whittaker's take is that it was posted not on his personal blog, but on an official blog of Microsoft, Google's arch nemesis.

Spokesmen from Microsoft and Google declined to comment.

The battle between Microsoft and Google has heated up recently, as the Federal Trade Commission and the European Commission begin to investigate Google for potential antitrust violations .Microsoft, with its Bing search engine, has doubled its share of the search market since its June 2010 founding, but has been unsuccessful at taking market share away from Google.

Microsoft is increasingly willing to call out Google for what it sees as illicit behavior. A year ago, the software company released a long list of gripes about Google's monopolistic actions, and last month it said Google was violating Internet Explorer users' privacy.

Despite his misgivings about what Google burberry beige handbag cast aside to make Google+ a reality, Whittaker thinks that the social network was worth a shot. If it had worked -- if Google had dramatically changed the social Web for the better -- it would have been a heroic gamble.

But it didn't. It's too early to write Google+ off, but the site is developing a reputation as a ghost town. Google says 90 million people have signed up, but analysts and anecdotal evidence show that fairly few have turned into heavy users.

"Google was the rich kid who, after having discovered he wasn't invited to the party, built his own party in retaliation," Whittaker wrote. "The fact that no one came to Google's party became the elephant in the room."

Microsoft is continuing to show off new features coming in its Internet Explorer 10 Web browser, with a couple of posts describing its touch-friendly Metro interface and its enhanced security.

The current trend in browser design, led by Google Chrome, is to scale back the browser's interface so that it takes less and less of the screen, devoting more room to the Web content itself. Windows 8's Metro design similarly removes window chrome to put the focus on content.

Metro Internet Explorer 10 is the logical conclusion of this trend: most of the time it has no visible interface at all, burberry scarves leaving only the Web page visible. Its app bar, displayed by swiping from the top or bottom of the screen or right clicking the mouse, contains tabs, the address bar, and so on.

The Metro version of Internet Explorer feels slick and comfortable using both touch and mouse and keyboard interaction. Particular highlights are the tile-based favorites view and the tab thumbnails, both shown to good effect in Microsoft's post.

Internet Explorer 9 introduced some particularly taskbar-oriented features: support for pinning sites to the taskbar, and the ability for those pinned sites to create custom options in the Jump list. In Windows 8, sites can be pinned to the Start screen to make them instantly accessible. Sites pinned this way can even update their tile to show status notifications—much in the way that "real" apps can do. However, the Jump lists are tucked away, only available from within Internet Explorer.

One concern that this chromeless look raises is that of differentiaton; Metro-style versions of both Chrome and Firefox are being developed,burberry kids skirts cheap and it's hard to see how they might look any different.

Security-wise, Internet Explorer 10 will include a new Enhanced Protected Mode. Protected Mode is the name Microsoft gives to its sandboxing technique. The current version, introduced in Internet Explorer 7 on Windows Vista, creates a separate, low-privilege process for running JavaScript and rendering HTML. This low-privilege process has no write access to most of the file system. This means that even if there is a security flaw in the browser, the attacker cannot write malware to the hard disk.

Sandbox protection of this kind isn't perfect—there are various techniques for escaping from the sandbox and increasing privileges—but it serves as another measure attackers have to defeat if they want to exploit users.

Enhanced Protected Mode further reduces the rights that each low-privilege process has: not only do they not have write permission to the file system, they also lose read permission. This makes the sandbox even harder to escape, but it comes at a cost: it breaks virtually all current plugins.

The Metro browser is already plugin-free, but the desktop browser is not. Enhanced Protected Mode won't be the default burberry bags outlet on the desktop (though this will be an option) to ensure that plugins remain compatible. If Enhanced Protected Mode is enabled, then any attempt to use an incompatible plugin will result in a prompt to disable the mode for that tab, to allow the plugin to work.

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