Sony Reader Taps Google's Public Domain Books

Sony Corp is making available public domain books from Google to users of its electronic book reader, Sony said on Wednesday, vastly increasing the amount of available content on the device.

In the latest round of a budding digital book battle with Amazon.com Inc, Sony said that more than a half a million classic titles will be free to users of the Reader, which allows consumers to read books and newspapers on a hand-held device. That will boost the available titles in Sony’s eBook Store to more than 600,000, Sony said.
Sony sells two versions of its Reader, which competes directly with Amazon’s Kindle. Kindle users can access over 245,000 titles plus newspapers, magazines and blogs. Whereas Amazon touts its relationship with publishers and access to a wide range of best-selling titles – which generally cost $9.99 – as a selling-point for the Kindle, Google has sought to make its collection of public domain books widely available. Public domain books, whether Jane Austin’s "Persuasion" or Leo Tolstoy’s "War and Peace", are no longer protected by copyright. Last month, Google announced it was making the collection easily accessible to mobile devices such as the iPhone, and Amazon has said a similar move was afoot at the company. Sony Reader users will be able to read the Google books on their devices, or download a PDF file to read on a computer. The books are already accessible over the Internet at http://www.books.google.com.

Google Updates Chrome to Boost Speeds

Google released a new version of its Chrome Web browser on Tuesday, as the search giant continues its efforts to get a foothold in a market dominated by Microsoft Corp.
The new Chrome represents the first major update of the software aimed at the general public since Google entered the browser business six months ago. It offers Web surfers faster performance and a handful of new features, such as auto-filling of personal information on online forms and a new way for users to drag around tabs of different Web pages within the browser window.
Google was a distant No. 4 in the browser market, with 1.2 percent share of the worldwide market in February, according to market research firm Net Applications. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer dominates the market, with a 67. 4 percent market share in February, while the Mozilla foundation’s Firefox browser had a roughly 22 percent share. Apple’s Safari browser had an 8 percent share. Last month, Google officially joined the European Union’s antitrust case against Microsoft, describing the browser market as "largely uncompetitive." The EU has charged Microsoft with abusing its dominant market position by bundling its Internet Explorer Web browser with its Windows personal computer operating system.
According to a post on Google’s blog on Tuesday, the new Chrome beta loads certain types of Web pages 25 percent to 35 percent faster than the current version of the browser. The new features were previously available to programmers using the "developer" version of Chrome, but Google has now packaged all the updates together into a more reliable beta test version that is available for download. Google also has a more polished, so-called stable version of Chrome, based on the older beta version.

Access Gmail Offline

The folks at Gmail Labs have been busy and they’re now dishing out offline access to Gmail.

On enabling offline access, Gmail will load in your browser even if you don’t have an Internet connection. You can read messages, star, label and archive them, compose new mail and messages ready to be sent will wait in your Outbox until you’re online again.
It’s built on the Gears platform, which has already been used to offline-enable Google Docs, Google Reader, and other third-party web applications.
To get started with offline Gmail –
- Sign in to Gmail and click ‘Settings’.
- Click the ‘Labs’ tab and select ‘Enable’ next to ‘Offline Gmail’.
- Click ‘Save Changes.’
- In the upper righthand corner of your account, next to your username, there will be a new ‘Offline’ link. Click this link to start the offline synchronization process.
Standard Edition users can follow these instructions immediately, while Premier and Education Edition users will first need their domain admins to enable Gmail Labs from the Google Apps admin control panel.

How Secure Is Google Chrome?

Google Chrome was built from the ground up to be a more secure Web browser, and Google and its Chromium developers should be applauded for the attention they have brought to browser security. Google deserves much credit for the wealth of security information posted on the Internet and on the Google Chrome blog, and for making Chrome’s source code available for anyone to examine.

The security model Chrome follows is excellent. Chrome separates the main browser program, called the browser kernel, from the rendering processes, which are based upon the open source WebKit engine, also used by Apple’s Safari. The browser kernel starts with all privileges removed, the null SID (a security identifier in Windows Vista that denotes the user as untrusted), and multiple "restrict" and "deny" SIDs enabled. On Windows Vista, Chrome runs as a medium-integrity process.

[Tomorrow: "How secure is Mozilla Firefox?" For more on browser security and protection against Web-borne threats, see Security Adviser and " Test Center: Browser security tools versus the evil Web." ]

Every Web site is given its own separate rendering process, memory space, global data structures, access token, tab, URL bar, desktop, and so forth. Currently, Chrome will open as many as 20 separate processes, one for each Web site, and start sharing processes between Web sites after that. Rendering processes are highly restricted as to what they can and can’t do. On Windows Vista, Chrome’s rendering processes run with low integrity, much like Internet Explorer in Protected Mode. But Chrome actually uses Vista’s mandatory integrity controls more securely than Microsoft does. For one, Chrome attempts to prevent low-integrity browser processes from reading high-integrity resources, which is not normally prevented. (By default, Vista prevents lower to higher modifications, but not reads.)

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What Firefox user missing in Chrome

Call me fickle, but I switched my default browser back to Firefox for the time being. In doing so, I discovered the features I really miss about Chrome.

Why did I switch back so soon after lavishing praise on Google’s open-source Web browser? Well, when Google added the option to use a cutting-edge "developer preview" version, I signed up, and guess what–it’s not as stable. Specifically, both 2.0.156.1 and the newer 2.0.157.2 that I now have installed inexplicably become unresponsive for long periods of time–at least 10 seconds, which is about 9.5 seconds longer than my tolerance limit.

But I like some of Chrome’s new features, so I didn’t want to downgrade to better-tested stable or beta versions. Instead, I thought perhaps I’d see what my second-favorite browser felt like again while waiting for the newer Chrome features to settle down.

I was a little surprised. What got me to switch to Chrome two months ago was performance, but what I missed most upon heading back to Firefox was Chrome’s user interface.

More than once, I found that even after a few weeks of Chrome, my muscle memory had been reprogrammed to expect different behavior. Switching back to Firefox wasn’t just different, though–I wanted the old features. Here’s a list of what I didn’t even know that I’d come to like.

The location of new tabs
When you open a link in a new tab with Chrome (I often middle-click to do so), the new page shows up in tab immediately to the right of the current tab. This naturally groups related tabs, and for me at least, eases the process of switching among many.

When you open a new tab in Firefox, it appears to the far right of the list, and it’s harder to get to it. It takes just that little extra bit of time to locate and navigate to the tab.

Good news, though: Mozilla evangelist Chris Blizzard pointed me to a blog post by programmer Mike Beltzner, which says the same behavior is coming to Firefox:

• tabs that are opened from links will open to the immediate right of the current tab
• new tabs created by the New Tab button or keyboard shortcut will open at the end of the tab strip
• if multiple tabs are opened (in the background) from links, they will open sequentially to the right of each other; as soon as focus changes, this sequential opening behavior will stop, and tabs will go back to opening immediately to the right or at the end of the tab strip as per the above

Searching from the address bar
I think Firefox’s awesome bar does a better job digging previously visited links out of my history, but searching directly from Google’s Omnibox, which adds online search into the mix, is more useful. I search dozens of times a day, and now I have to remember either to visit a search page or head over to Firefox’s special search box (to do the latter faster, I hit Ctrl-L, then Tab).

Some folks are concerned about sending lots of juicy personal data to Google’s servers, which monitors what you type so it can supply suggested search results. But except for typing in Web sites, it’s the same stuff I’d type into a search page anyway.

One less keystroke
When typing addresses into the address bar, both Chrome and Firefox offer a list of suggestions in a drop-down box. But Chrome highlights its top pick, while Firefox puts it one entry below the box.

That means if the pick is right, I just have to hit Enter with Chrome, but the down arrow, then Enter with Firefox. It’s a tiny thing, but I do this hundreds of times a day. (full Story)