According to a report, Microsoft isn’t just looking at the next version of Windows (no, not Mojave)
for future OS possibilities, but is looking beyond the Windows
architecture altogether with a project known as Midori. The new OS is
still in the “incubation” phase (which puts it slightly closer to
market than R&D projects), but Microsoft has admitted to its
existence, and the Software Daily Times says at least one team in
Redmond is actively working on the new architecture.
The basis
for the platform centers around research related to Microsoft’s
Singularity project, and envisions a distributed environment where
applications, documents, and connectivity are blurred in a
cloud-computing phantasmagoria which can be run natively or hosted
across multiple systems. The researchers are working to create a
concurrent / parallel distribution of resources, as well as a method of
handling applications across separate machines — religiously-dubbed
the Asynchronous Promise Architecture — which will set the stage for a
backwards-compatible operating system built from the ground up, with
networks of varying size in mind. Says the SD Times, “The Midori
documents foresee applications running across a multitude of
topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to
peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those
topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at
separate places.” Like it technical? Hit the read link for an in-depth
look at the possible shape of Microsoft’s future.
Firefox 3.0 is barely out of the gate, but already Mozilla is moving toward the future with the first alpha release of Firefox 3.1. The final release of 3.1 is scheduled for the end of 2008 with the usual series of alpha and beta releases in the coming months.
The first 3.1 alpha (code-named Shiretoko) already packs some impressive new features like the new visual tab switcher,
which offers previews of pages, and changes the sorting order based on
which tab was most recently open. In essence it mimics the behavior of
cmd-tab application switchers on most OSes. The visual eye candy is
quite nice, but the real benefit is the dynamic ordering, which makes
it much easier to quickly jump between recently viewed tabs.
Also new in alpha 1 is the wildcard searching capabilities we mentioned earlier.
Firefox 3.1 will allow you to quickly restrict your “awesome bar”
searches using customizable wildcard characters. For instance typing an
asterisk limits results to your bookmarks and typing a pound sign
limits results to page titles (rather than titles and URLs).
The Gecko rendering engine, which powers Firefox under the hood,
also has support for some new CSS options like text-shadow, box-shadow,
border images and the HTML5 Canvas text API. The first three are
already available in some other browsers like Safari, but with Firefox
on-board as well, web designers will no doubt feel more comfortable
using those elements in their designs.
The HTML 5 canvas support is a bit more experimental (the W3C spec
is still in the draft stages), but Mozilla has rolled it in anyway. If
you want get really bleeding edge, the latest Firefox nightly builds
also include support for audio and video tags.
Like the Canvas element, the and
HTML 5 elements are still in the draft stages, but the idea is to
easily embed media without proprietary plugins (like Quicktime, Windows
Media, etc). Technically both tags are codec-neutral, but Mozilla has
bundled the Ogg Theora and Vorbis codecs giving you the option to
deliver audio and video in an open format.
Keep in mind though that the and aren’t part of alpha 1. For those elements you’ll need to go to the nightly builds.
So far, Firefox 3.1 is looking like it will be a very impressive
release, building on and refining many of the best features in 3.0, as
well as adding some important new ones. If you’d like to test it out,
head over to the download page, but bear in mind that, as this is an alpha, the usual warnings apply and most of your extensions will probably be disabled.
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