Mozilla previews Firefox OS with four phone makers and 18 operators onboard

The first phones will come from Alcatel One Touch, LG Electronics and ZTE

Mozilla previewed the first commercial build of its Firefox OS and announced several operator and smartphone rollout plans on Sunday at Mobile World Congress.

The OS is being pitched as a better alternative for low-end smartphones in developing markets and is built around applications written using HTML5.

The first phones using the OS are all powered by Qualcomm processors and will be offered by Alcatel One Touch, LG Electronics and ZTE starting this summer, according to Mozilla. Huawei Technologies will also come out with products later this year, it said.

ZTE will officially announce its first phone in Barcelona on Monday.

In addition to the phone makers, 18 operators are also lining up behind Firefox OS, including AmA(c)rica MA3vil, China Unicom, Deutsche Telekom, Japan's KDDI, Sprint, Telecom Italia, TelefA3nica and Telenor. The operators will first launch phones in Brazil, Colombia, Hungary, Mexico, Montenegro, Poland, Serbia, Spain and Venezuela, they said.

Mozilla expects more phone makers and more markets to added going forward. The U.S. market will have to wait until 2014, it said.

For any operating system, the availability of apps and support from developers are both very important.

Mozilla said it doesn't need to build a new ecosystem for Firefox OS because it can take advantage of all the HTML5 developers already writing software. At Mobile World Congress, it demonstrated integration with Facebook and mapping based on Nokia's Here platform. Applications for the OS will for example be available on Firefox Market.

Considerable operator support underlines the desire for an HTML5-based alternative to iOS and Android, but the depth of commitment is unclear, according to CCS Insight. Success hinges on apps, attractive devices and operator subsidies, it said.

 The real acid test for Firefox OS and its long-term prospects is the quality of the software itself and the user and developer experiences that it fosters, according to Ovum. However, it will be difficult to say whether it meets those needs sufficiently until we have seen retail devices.

"What is clear from the Firefox OS demonstration handsets that we have seen was that they are still some way from being market ready, being both slow and buggy," it said in a statement.

At Mobile World Congress, Mozilla has also joined forces with Ericsson and AT&T to show WebRTC, a framework that allows browsers to perform functions usually confined to mobile phones such as voice and video calls and messaging.

The joint demonstration builds on Mozilla's Social API and WebRTC support in Firefox, Ericsson's Web Communication Gateway and the AT&T API platform to enable the browser to sync with a user's existing phone number and provide calling services without any plugins to download.

WebRTC (real-time communications) is being standardized by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). The demonstration is taking place at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, which opens its doors on Monday.

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Internet Explorer only? IE doubt it

Fewer businesses standardizing browser use on Internet Explorer, but the practice isn't gone yet.

Just as Internet users in general have defected in huge numbers from Microsoft Internet Explorer over the past several years, the business world, as well, is becoming less dependent on the venerable browser.

Companies that used to mandate the use of IE for access to web resources are beginning to embrace a far more heterodox attitude toward web browsers. While it hasn't gone away, the experience of having to use IE 6 to access some legacy in-house web app is becoming less common.

[BROWSER BATTLE: IE vs. Chrome vs. Firefox vs. Opera]

"Things have changed a lot in the last three years, and I think a lot of it has to do with the emergence of the modern web and the popularity of mobile. They have made it very different for companies to truly standardize on a browser," says Gartner Research analyst David Mitchell Smith.

One example of the changing face of business browser use is SquareTwo Financial, a Denver-based financial services company that works primarily in distressed asset management. The firm's 280 employees handle both consumer and commercial business, buying and selling debt, and a franchise program means that there are upwards of 1,500 more people working at SquareTwo affiliates. According to CTO Chris Reigrut, the company takes in roughly $280 million in annual revenue.

"In addition to buying and selling debt, we also provide a software-as-a-service platform that our franchises (and we) use to actually negotiate and litigate the debt," he tells Network World.

Square Two hasn't needed to standardize, he says, because keeping their offerings diverse is part of the idea - the company's various online resources all have differing requirements.

"We do distribute Firefox on Windows systems - however, Safari and IE are both frequently used. Our internal wiki is only officially supported on Firefox and Safari. Our SaaS 'client' is a pre-packaged Firefox install so that it looks more like a traditional thick-client application. Most of our employees use their browser for a couple of internal systems, as well as several external services (i.e. HR, training, etc)," says Reigrut (who, like the other IT pros quoted in this story is a member of the CIO Executive Council Pathways program for leadership development).

The Microsoft faithful, however, are still out there. Many businesses have chosen to remain standardized on IE, for several reasons. SickKids, a children's research hospital in Toronto, sticks with Microsoft's browser mostly for the ease of applying updates.

"We have more than 7,000 end-point devices. Most of those devices are Windows workstations and Internet Explorer is included as part of the Microsoft Windows operating system. As such, this makes it easier and integrates well with our solution to manage and deploy upgrades, patches and hotfixes to the OS including IE," says implementations director Peter Parsan.

"Internet Explorer is more than a browser, it is the foundation for Internet functionality in Windows," he adds.

[MORE INTERNET EXPLORER: Internet Explorer flaws fixed by Microsoft Patch Tuesday updates]

The complexity of managing an ecosystem with more than 100 types of software - running the gamut from productivity applications to clinical programs - requires a heavily controlled approach, according to Parsan.

Smith agrees that IE still has its advantages for business users that want just such a strictly regimented technology infrastructure.

"If you want a managed, traditional IT environment ... really, your only option is Internet Explorer," he says, adding that both Firefox and Chrome lag behind IE in terms of effective centralized management tools.

Some companies, however, have gone a different way - standardizing not on IE, but on a competing browser.

Elliot Tally, senior director of enterprise apps for electronics manufacturer Sanmina, says his company's employees are highly dependent on browsers for business-critical activities. Everything from ERP to document control (which he notes is "big for a manufacturing company") to the supply chain is run from a web app.

Tally says Sanmina made the move to standardize on Chrome in 2009, in part because of a simultaneous switch to Gmail and Google Apps from IE and Microsoft products.

"It made sense to go with the browser created and supported by the company that created the apps we rely on. Also, Chrome installs in user space so it doesn't require admin privileges to auto-update," he says. "It also silently auto-updates, as opposed to Firefox, which requires a fresh install to update versions, or IE, which is similar. Chrome, over the last year or so, has supported web standards better than any other browser, and (until recently) has offered significantly better performance."

Plainly, broad diversity exists both in the actual browsers used by workers and the approaches businesses have taken in managing their use.

That diversity, says Smith, is the reason Gartner has been advising clients against standardization from the outset.

"Standardize on standards, not browsers," he urges. "That was a controversial position for 10 years. People really didn't agree with it, they didn't listen to it, and they paid the price."

Microsoft, as well, has had to pay a price.

"[Standardization] hurts Microsoft's reputation as an innovator; as a forward-thinker," he says. "When people's impression of using Microsoft technology - whether it's a browser, whether it's an operating system - is something that is two or three versions old, because they're dealing with it through what enterprises want."

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Internet Explorer 10 Release Preview for Windows 7 first-impressions review

When Microsoft first announced that Internet Explorer 10 would be part of Windows 8 most users assumed that this would also mean a release of the browser for the version 7 operating system. The first version of Internet Explorer 10 was released publicly with Windows 8's Developer Preview back in 2011, and then updated whenever new versions of preview builds released. Microsoft at that time was tight lipped about the future of IE10 for Windows 7

October 2012 came and brought along Windows 8's launch. It was in the week prior to the release of Windows 8 that the company shed some light on the future of IE10 for Windows 7. A blog post indicated that Microsoft had plans to release a preview version for Windows 7 in November 2012.

Internet Explorer 10 Preview for Windows 7 released today for 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the operating system, and for 64-bit editions of Windows Server 2008 R2.

System Requirements
32-bit or 64-bit edition of Windows 7 SP1 or 64-bit edition of Windows Server 2008 R2 SP1
At least 512 Megabyte of RAM
At least 70 / 120 / 200 Megabyte of hard drive space
At least 1 GHz processor

Installation and uninstallation
The installation of Internet Explorer 10 Preview will replace the current version of the browser on the system. A restart is required before the new version becomes available.

Note that it is possible to uninstall IE10 again on a system it has been installed on. To uninstall the browser do the following:

Click on the Start button.
Type Programs and Features in the search box and select it from the results.
Select View installed updates from the sidebar.
Locate Windows Internet Explorer 10 under Microsoft Windows.
Right-click the entry and select uninstall.
Select Yes when prompted if you really want to uninstall the program.
Restart the PC right then or at a later point to complete the removal.

What's New
Internet Explorer 10 is nearly identical to the version of the browser that Microsoft released for Windows 8. The core difference: is: Adobe Flash is not natively integrated into the Windows 7 / Windows Server 2012 version.

Both Internet Explorer 10 versions on Windows 8 include a built-in version of Adobe Flash, which is especially important for the Modern UI version of the browser as it does not support browser plugins. Microsoft circumvented this restriction with the direct implementation of Flash in Internet Explorer 10.

Web standards support appears to be identical in both versions of IE10. The Internet Explorer blog notes that the following improvements have been made over previous versions of the browser:

Rich Visual Effects: CSS Text Shadow, CSS 3D Transforms, CSS3 Transitions and Animations, CSS3 Gradient, SVG Filter Effects

Sophisticated Page Layouts: CSS3 for publication quality page layouts and application UI (CSS3 grid, flexbox, multi-column, positioned floats, regions, and hyphenation), HTML5 Forms, input controls, and validation

Enhanced Web Programming Model: Better offline applications through local storage with IndexedDB and the HTML5 Application Cache; Web Sockets, HTML5 History, Async scripts, HTML5 File APIs, HTML5 Drag-drop, HTML5 Sandboxing, Web workers, ES5 Strict mode support.

The browser scores 320 and 6 points in the HTML5test, an indicator of how well browsers support the HTML5 standard. That's an increase of more than 200 points over Internet Explorer 9. IE10 is still trailing behind other browsers in the test. Google Chrome 23 for instance scores 448 + 13 points in the test, and Firefox 16 372 and 10.

Internet Explorer 10 is the first browser that ships with Do Not Track enabled by default. The feature informs websites and services the browser connects to that users do not want to be tracked. The default nature of the feature in IE10 has been controversially discussed as the Do No Track specification requires users to make the decision. Yahoo as a consequence announced that it would ignore Internet Explorer 10's Do Not Track header.

IE10 on Windows 7 may run faster than comparable web browsers in select benchmarks. Microsoft claims for instance that Internet Explorer 10 is two times as fast as Google Chrome 23 and 20 percent faster than Firefox 16 in the Mandelbrot benchmark available on Microsoft's Test Drive website.

The browser does not perform as well in other benchmarks. Its score of 5134 in Google's Octane benchmark is beaten by Firefox 19's 9031, and Google Chrome 23's 12975. Mozilla's Kraken benchmark paints a similar picture. Firefox and Google Chrome need roughly the same execution time of around 2200ms, while Internet Explorer 10 three times at much with 6800ms.

IE10 performs better when running applications and demos on Microsoft's Internet Explorer Test Drive site. It is somewhat surprising that Google Chrome usually comes in last in these benchmarks, while Internet Explorer 10 and Firefox finish in close proximity to each other.

Closing Words
Microsoft released Internet Explorer 10 as a preview version and it should be handled as such. While it is possible to uninstall the browser on the system to revert to the previous version of Internet Explorer, it is not suited for production environments, even though there does not appear to be any -- visible -- difference between the preview version for Windows 7 and the final version on Windows 8.

Microsoft managed to close a large part of the performance and web standards support gap between previous versions of Internet Explorer and third-party browsers such as Chrome, Firefox or Opera with the release of IE10.

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Cisco vs. Juniper: How different are their SDN strategies?

Analysts see more convergence than divergence with recent Cisco, Juniper releases

On the surface, Cisco and Juniper's SDN strategies seem to have sharp contrasts if recent announcements are any indication. For example:
Juniper
Juniper's MX series routers will be among the first of the company's hardware platforms to include new ASICs otimized for SDNs.

• Juniper places much more emphasis on the software angle of SDN, even ushering in a new software licensing business model; Cisco's attempts to make hardware as much, and perhaps even more, relevant than software.

• Cisco is attacking five markets at once -- data center, enterprise, service provider, cloud, academia -- with its strategy, while Juniper is focusing initially on data centers.

• Juniper views SDNs as much more disruptive, potentially allowing it to significantly increase share; Cisco has thus far made no such dramatic market impact statements regarding SDNs.

• As part of its hardware focus on SDN, Cisco is funding a separate spin-in company -- Insieme Networks -- which is believed to be building big programmable switches and controller(s); Juniper has no such hardware investments, but did buy Contrail for $176 million, again emphasizing the software aspect of SDNs.

• Cisco has a timeline of 2013 deliverables; Juniper's timeline pushes a controller and SDN service "chaining" capability out into 2014, and the new software business model into 2015.

Yet analysts say there are really more similarities than differences in both strategies from the fierce rivals.

"I think there are some similarities," says Brad Casemore of IDC. "Both Juniper and Cisco are emphasizing ASICs, and therefore hardware, in their SDN strategies. Both companies also see network and security services -- Layer 4-7 -- as virtualized applications in a programmable network. They each have controllers, but they also will promote hybrid control planes -- decoupled and distributed. Juniper is positioning for a software-licensing business model, true, but it's relatively early along in that process."

"It's a different packaging strategy but both seem equally focused on the value of software in SDN," says Mike Fratto of Current Analysis. "Key points being modular, flexible, and exposing APIs for integration."

Juniper recently divulged its SDN strategy after months of silence - seven months after Cisco announced its Cisco ONE plan. Salient points of Juniper's plan include separating networking software into four planes -- Management, Services, Control and Forwarding -- to optimize each plane within the network; creating network and security service virtual machines by extracting service software from hardware and housing it on x86 servers; using a centralized controller that enables service chaining in software, or the ability to connect services across devices according to business need; and the new software-based licensing model, which allows the transfer of software licenses between Juniper devices and industry-standard x86 servers, and is designed to allow customers to scale purchases based on actual usage.

Cisco's ONE, or Open Networking Environment strategy, includes an API platform to instill programmability into its three core operating systems: IOS, IOS XR and NX-OS. It's focused on five key markets and also includes new programmable ASICs, like the UADP chip unveiled with the new Catalyst 3850 enterprise switch; and a software-based controller for data centers that runs on x86 servers. New ASICs are also expected to be front-and-center when the Cisco-funded Insieme Networks start-up unveils what's expected to be a high-performance programmable switch and controller line.

Juniper's strategy initially targets data centers, and its new software licensing model is based on enterprise practices. The company will expand its traditional carrier and service provider customers from there.

Among the first markets addressed in Cisco's ONE strategy are enterprise customers, data centers and cloud providers.

"Juniper ultimately sees SDN at all layers of the network, spanning not only the data center -- edge/access and core --, but also the WAN, campus and branch," says IDC's Casemore. "Juniper's SDN road map initially targets the SP edge and data center, but it does plan to follow SDN into other areas.

"Cisco sees data center and cloud as near-term markets, and its positioning to play across the board as SDN -- and its outcomes, network virtualization and network programmability -- extends its reach," Casemore says. "Again, there are many similarities."

In terms of market disruption, Fratto says both companies see SDN as perhaps equally disruptive even though one has been much more vocal about that impact than the other.

"I think the two companies view SDN as disruptive but they are approaching it very differently," he says. "Juniper tends to be more conservative in bringing new products to market, particularly with Junos. They have a quarterly software update cycle and they march to that drum. I think they have a strong preference for stability in the platform and based on their consistent messaging on that topic.

"I think for Cisco, the disruption is there but the recent announcements tell a lot about its direction going forward," Fratto continues. "I think it signals ... wanting to be vendor and protocol agnostic vs. promoting their own technology over others. The ONE controller, for example, is modular and will support OnePK and Openflow out of the gate, but there is no reason other than development that it can't support other protocols."

Casemore sees both companies reacting to SDN developments, rather than driving them.

"Neither has led the charge toward SDN. Both are measuring their responses, trying to find a balance between supporting their customers today while preparing for potentially disruptive shifts."

And Casemore sees both equally emphasizing hardware, despite Juniper's software-intensive strategy.

"Juniper has a lot of existing hardware, and hardware customers, that it will attempt to fold into its SDN strategy," he says. "We will see hardware and software from both Cisco and Juniper, as their common ASIC strategies suggest."

And even though the timelines for deliverables differ, they are in keeping with each company's traditions.

"That's Juniper's way, right?" Fratto says. "Produce a road map and then deliver over a longer timeline like 12 to 24 months."

Where the strategies diverge will be in partner ecosystems for SDN-enabled services, he says.

"In both cases, they will need to attract partners into their respective ecosystems. The market for services has a ton of players -- think (application delivery controllers), firewalls, WAN optimization. For those services to be chained, they have to be integrated with Juniper's stuff. Same for Cisco. That's going to be the attractor."

Casemore sees differences in initial target markets too.

"I look at Juniper's strategy as being more attuned to the SP/carrier community than the enterprise -- their service chaining concept is very close to network functions virtualization -- whereas the strategy and technologies Cisco has rolled out thus far are more enterprise oriented," he says. "That's not to say that Juniper won't develop more of an enterprise orientation or that Cisco won't push its SDN strategy into carriers -- both will happen. But that's how I see them now at this particular snapshot in time."

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Microsoft brings the Live Tile experience to SkyDrive

Windows 8's new Start screen evokes many emotions from customers, with most falling on either the love or hate side with almost no middle ground. However, one thing that can be agreed on is that the screen has no shortage of information. Users are bombarded with messages from Facebook, email, weather and countless other endlessly updating tiles. Now Microsoft has added one more to the perhaps overloaded mix.

Today the company announced it is pushing an update to the SkyDrive app for Windows 8 that will bring the live tile features to the cloud storage and sharing platform.

In an announcement earlier today Microsoft's Mike Torres outlined the new feature. "The SkyDrive app from the Windows Store will start showing you notifications on the live tile when you add new files to your SkyDrive". In other words, this should not be a constantly flickering icon that will be in your face. Torres went on to explain that "whenever you add new files to SkyDrive, the app tile shows you relevant details. If you add a document, you’ll see the document name, along with when it was added, and what folder it’s in. If you add photos, the tile gives you a nice view of those photos".

I honestly like live tiles. When I walk away from my computer I switch to the Start screen so that when I return, or even pass by, I see relevant information. Its easier than clicking on different tabs. I also realize that I very well may be part of a minority in saying that.

As for the update, it is promised to be rolling out today -- apparently on a gradual basis, so don't panic if you don't have it yet. I don't either. Hopefully soon.

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