The Download Blog

When we hear "update" and "Google Earth" in the same sentence, we're used to groundbreaking additions to Google's high-powered, interactive, and ever-expanding desktop globe. In Google Earth 5, that's meant tools to explore the oceans, sky, and Earth's ruddy neighboring planet.

But Google Earth 5.1 for Windows and Mac is a mere tremor. In fact, if you've been playing around with Google Earth 5.1 beta, only Mac users should notice a change--that the Google Earth browser plug-in comes bundled in the download.

Still, the minor update should still be noticeable for those making the switch from Google Earth 5. Google has made some changes under the hood to improve speed and performance. Using compression technology to make images load faster, and improving the other ways that the app handles graphics, Google claims that Earth now loads 25 percent faster and soars the globe in smoother motions.

In addition, both Mac and Windows versions of Google Earth 5.1 pack in the browser plug-in, so you can explore Google Earth from the browser--Firefox and Safari for Mac users; Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Internet Explorer for Windows. Before, you needed to install the plug-ins separately. The move to drop the beta from Google Earth 5.1 comes just two days after Google released Google Earth for iPhone 2.0.

Internet Explorer 8, Firefox 3, Google Chrome 4, Apple's Safari 4, and Opera 10 include features that block sites known to host malware and malicious downloads. All but Opera also let you browse without leaving any tracks. But just as important as these protections is ensuring that whichever browser you use is thoroughly patched.

Filtering out bad sites
Firefox's built-in antiphishing tool claims to update its bad-site database 48 times a day, according to Mozilla's Firefox security page. Firefox 3 uses Google's Safe Browsing service to automatically block sites that are known to host malware. The Google Code site describes how Safe Browsing works in Firefox.

To verify that attack-site blocking is enabled in Firefox, click Tools > Options > Security and make sure "Block reported attack sites" is checked.

Firefox will prevent known-bad sites from opening when "Block reported attack sites" is checked.

(Credit: Mozilla Foundation)

The same feature is built into Google's own Chrome browser. You can ensure that malware-site filtering is on in Chrome by clicking the wrench icon in the top-right corner, choosing Options, and selecting Under the Hood. "Enable phishing and malware filtering" should be checked. The Google Chrome Help site describes the feature. (Hint: This page looks very similar to the description on the Google Code site.)

Google's Chrome browser blocks known-bad sites when "Enable phishing and malware protection" is checked.

(Credit: Google)

The SmartScreen technology in version 8 of Internet Explorer blocks known-malicious downloads as well as bad URLs. Other new security features in IE 8 include automatic blocking of click-jacking and cross-site scripting attacks, automatic crash recovery, and highlighting of the actual domain name in the address bar. The Microsoft Security site describes the SmartScreen Filter and includes links to a SmartScreen FAQ and information for site managers.

Apple's Safari browser added phishing and malware blocking in version 3.2, which was released in late 2008; read about this and other security features in Safari 4 on the Apple Safari site. Likewise, Opera's Fraud Protection predates the phishing and malware filters in IE and Firefox and is enhanced in the latest version 10. But attack-site blocking is only one of Opera's many security features, which you can read about on the Opera site.

Browsing in private
To activate private browsing in Firefox 3, click Tools > Start Private Browsing, or simply press Ctrl-Shift-P. You can set Firefox to start in private-browsing mode by clicking Tools > Options > Privacy and check "Automatically start Firefox in a private browsing session." The Mozilla support site provides more information about this feature. Likewise, put IE 8 in private-browsing mode by clicking Safety > InPrivate Browsing, or by pressing Ctrl-Shift-P. You can also open a new tab and click either Browse with InPrivate or Open an InPrivate Window.

IE 8 also lets you control the information about your browsing habits that's shared with Web tracking services. To activate this feature, click Tools > InPrivate Filtering Settings and choose "Let me choose which providers receive my information." This opens the InPrivate Filtering settings dialog, where you can turn filtering off, choose which services to block from tracking you, or automatically block all trackers.

Internet Explorer 8's InPrivate Filtering lets you block some or all Web tracking services.

(Credit: Microsoft)

You can open an incognito window in Google Chrome by clicking the wrench icon in the top-right corner and choosing "New incognito window," or simply press Ctrl-Shift-N. The incognito icon (a shadow figure in a fedora and glasses) appears in the top-left corner of the browser window. The Chrome support site offers a more detailed description of this feature.

Opera lacks an equivalent private-browsing capability but does offer private searching and other identity-blocking features, as described on the Opera site. To activate private browsing in Safari, simply click Safari Settings Menu > Private Browsing.

Automatic and not-so-automatic browser updates
Patching is a way of life with nearly all software, but especially with browsers and the media players associated with them: Adobe Reader, the Flash Player, Apple's QuickTime, and Sun's Java, among others. All of a browser's security features can be rendered useless by a piece of malware that takes advantage of an unpatched hole in the program.

Firefox 3 alerts users to the presence of an update and now also notifies you when your Flash Player is out-of-date. Internet Explorer 8 updates via the Windows Update/Microsoft Update services. Google Chrome made a splash by being the first browser to update itself in the background without requiring any prompting from users. Safari updates automatically via Apple's update service, which also serves up patches automatically for QuickTime, iTunes, and other Apple software. Opera also notifies you automatically when a new version is available.

But updating is too important to leave to others. Back in April, I described Secunia's Online Software Inspector and downloadable Personal Software Inspector, which identify out-of-date programs on your PC. The programs mentioned in that post have all been updated since, but Secunia's services should point you to the most recent versions.

(Note that Secunia sometimes reports a program as being out-of-date when in fact you have the latest version. On my PC, it continually reports my up-to-date Flash Player as being in need of an update, for example. But the free service Secunia provides is worth putting up with this and similar minor annoyances.)

The developer preview version of Chrome now promotes an as-yet unworking link to an extensions gallery.

(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)

Google is on the verge of launching a Web site to showcase its extensions to customize what its browser can do.

The company's latest developer preview edition, Chrome 4.0.249.0, promotes the feature on its opening screen and its new-tab page. "New! Google Chrome now has extensions and bookmark sync," the page reads, offering a link to a site that's not public yet, https://chrome.google.com/extensions. (Bookmark sync is already available.)

Extensions and support for Mac OS X and Linux are the headline features of Chrome 4.0. It's available as a beta for Windows, with Mac OS X and Linux beta availability expected in early December. According to the Chromium development calendar, the beta is planned for December 8 release and the stable release of Chrome 4.0 is due January 12.

A number of third-party galleries for Chrome extensions already are available, but programmers for the project have said on mailing lists that a Google site is planned. Earlier this year, Google shipped a version of Chrome that pointed to a collection of visual themes before the Chrome themes gallery was actually live to the public.

Extensions are a key asset of one Chrome competitor, Mozilla's Firefox; extensions permit people to customize the browser and add new features without burdening the overall project. Firefox is getting a new extensions framework, Jetpack, starting with version 3.7 due in the first half of 2010, and Mozilla has just launched its own Jetpack gallery.

This is a map I saved online from my desktop.

(Credit: Screenshot by Jessica Dolcourt/CNET)

Google Earth made a splash when it spun onto the iPhone last October, giving users the capability to explore the virtual globe for free from virtually anywhere with an Internet connection. But without some practical mapping features, like turn-by-turn navigation and street maps, Google Earth was largely a discovery tool that didn't have much real-world impact.

This week, Google Earth 2.0 for iPhone gets more useful by pulling those Google maps you saved in the My Maps section of the Google Maps Web site into the app's mobile orbit. In Google Earth, you'll tap the settings icon (the "i") and sign in to your Google Account. Just below the login field, there's any entry for My Maps. Tap it to view your saved maps, and tap again to select the map you'd like to zoom to. While you can view a saved location or route in Google Earth, the app doesn't replace Google Map's directions-dispending feature.

Google Earth for iPhone still spins its digital globe each time you switch locations, so if your maps are halfway around the world, expect a delay. It's also still slow to load each time, and the 2.0 model only makes the app larger, growing about 3MB in size since the first edition. But it has also gained other subtle features in version 2.0, including support for thirteen additional languages (listed below) and icons that glow as confirmation that you've tapped them.

Google Earth 2.0 for iPhone is available in 31 languages and dialects: English (U.S), English (UK), French (France), German, Traditional Chinese, Simplified Chinese, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese (Brazil), Portuguese (Portugal), Danish, Swedish, Finnish, Norwegian, Korean, Japanese, Russian, Polish, Turkish, Ukrainian, Arabic, Thai, Czech, Greek, Hebrew, Indonesian, Malaysian, Romanian, Slovak, and Croatian.

Download: Google Earth for Windows|Mac.

Google has updated the stable build of its Chrome browser with two fixes. Google Chrome 3.0.195.33 plugs a security hole that could have allowed a malicious Web site to set custom HTTP headers on cross-origin options requests. A second bug fixed in version 3.0.195.33 removes a dependency on a Windows library file that was not actually required by Chrome. Earlier versions of Chrome would fail silently if that DLL file was missing or rights-restricted.

The Google Chrome developer's channel also updated Friday. Kiosk mode has been activated on all platforms, although the status bar-hiding feature that also sets the full-screen mode as the default doesn't work yet for Macs. However, numerous other fixes were implemented for the Mac version. These include a "bookmark all tabs" feature, keyboard hot key fixes, and a fix that stops PDF files from being opened by QuickTime.

The developer's build of Google Chrome is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux. The changelog for the stable build is available here, and the changelog for the developer's build is here.

Google has a new VOIP client to help improve Google Voice.

(Credit: Gizmo5)

Google confirmed its intention to acquire Gizmo5, an Internet telephony company, with plans to merge the group into the Google Voice team.

The pending acquisition had been reported earlier in the week by Techcrunch but was overshadowed by the announcement of Google's third-largest acquisition to date--the $750 million AdMob deal--on the same day. Late Thursday Google confirmed that it had acquired the company, although financial terms of this deal were not disclosed.

Gizmo5 is a Web-based VoIP client that lets you make phone calls over the Internet, similar to programs like Skype. It's based, however, on an open standard called SIP that fits a little better into Google's worldview, rather than Skype's internally-developed system.

Gizmo5 works on both PCs and mobile phones, and the technology will likely be used in some way to enhance Google Voice. Google Voice isn't a VoIP client; it lets you use a single number to ring multiple phones and get voice mails transcribed into e-mail, but it does that over existing phone networks.

As Google figures out exactly what it wants to do with Gizmo5, it is suspending new sign-ups for the service, but current users will still be able use it.

Google, ever eager to renovate the computing industry for the benefit of the Web and its own business, is working to link two nascent but potentially significant projects, its experimental Go programming language and its Chrome Web browser.

Gordon, Go's gopher mascot

Specifically, the company is building a foundation to let programs written in Go run directly within a Web browser endowed with Google's Native Client software. Native Client is designed to let browser-based programs run faster than is possible with today's widely used JavaScript; though it's still in its early stages, it's built into Chrome and available as a plug-in for other browsers.

A little poking around the Go source code reveals a reference to NaCl, the abbreviated name for Native Client. And Native Client is indeed on the Go agenda, said Rob Pike, one of the five core members of the Go team, in a Wednesday interview.

"We have an embryonic implementation of the NaCl support for Go using 8g," a compiler that produces code for x86 chips such as Intel's Core line, Pike said. "It's restricted by a couple of details of NaCl's implementation, but we hope to see changes to NaCl one day that will make Go a full-fledged language in that environment."

The Native Client compiler--the tool that converts what people write into software a computer can run--is specially modified to screen out a variety of software instructions that could expose a computer to an attack from a Native Client module downloaded off the Web. And the Native Client software itself checks such modules before they run. The result, if the security approach stands up to security scrutiny, is browser-based software that runs close to the speed of ordinary software that runs natively on a PC.

Rob Pike discusses the Go programming language at a Google Talk

(Credit: Google)

Native Client has been maturing, the most recent stage being inclusion of NaCl within Google's Chrome browser, though disabled by default for now. Google is using Chrome as a vehicle to distribute other Web technology, too, including Gears, which can let people use Gmail while offline, and WebGL, which gives hardware acceleration to 3D graphics in the browser.

Go is only experimental at this stage, but Google hopes to use it to produce some of the software running on its vast array of servers. Google's scale makes even academic projects potentially commercially relevant, which is enviable to many companies who've tried to get projects off the ground.

Indeed, an episode earlier in the Go team's history is illustrative. Pike, Unix co-inventor Ken Thompson, and Russ Cox all worked on the Plan 9 operating system project that, like Unix, began at Bell Labs. (Yes, Plan 9 is named after Ed Wood's famously bad movie, "Plan 9 from Outer Space.")

Unlike Unix, Plan 9 didn't have much commercial success, although Vita Nuova does sell a version called Inferno. Getting a mainstream operating system off the ground is hard: you must convince programmers, software companies, and hardware makers to embrace it; you must convince people to use it in the real world; and you must keep pace with the evolution of entrenched operating systems.

A bit of Plan 9 lives on inside the Go project, with various Plan 9 tidbits appearing in the Go source code. Pike, though, says there's not much.

Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny mascot, looks similar to Gordon, Go's gopher mascot. Both were drawn by Rob Pike's wife, illustrator Renee French.

(Credit: Bell Labs)

"The 6g/8g/5g compilers are almost completely new but are tied to the open-source Plan 9 compiler suite's C compilers and linker," Pike said. "That's really about it except for the obvious historical connection for some of the protagonists: Ken, Russ, and myself."

Programming languages face similar challenges as operating systems in getting off the ground: A lot of interdependent elements in the ecosystem must all be built simultaneously. It's what's known in the trade as the chicken-and-egg problem: you can't make a chicken without an egg or vice versa.

But Google makes things different for Go. It's devoting real resources to the project and believes it could be useful on its own servers to run software such as the Gmail service Web browsers tap into. It's got the chicken and the egg under its own roof.

And with the money Google could save by increasing the performance or efficiency of its servers even just a fraction of a percent, it has abundant financial incentive to make things work.

Marrying Go to browsers is just another aspect of the same issue.

Assuming Go and Native Client mature enough to be useful, Google can't mandate that Web developers embrace them; indeed, they generally haven't embraced Gears even though it can help with some Web site matters. But again, Google has a browser and some awfully big Web sites it can use to get the ball rolling.

Google plans to release a Mac beta of Chrome in early December, judging by some chatter on a mailing list for the browser.

Chrome 4.0 is available today as a beta version for Windows but only as a rougher developer-preview version on Linux and Mac OS X. The standout feature of the new version is customization through extensions, a technology that long has been a core asset of another open-source browser, Firefox.

Google has been moving to a new extensions presentation technology called Browser Actions that let people interact with extensions through a small button toward the upper right of the browser window. "We've noticed that many of you have updated your extensions to take advantage of the new UI. We'd like to encourage the rest of you to do so as well," said Nick Baum, a Google Chrome product manager, in a mailing list posting.

But here's the hitch: Browser Actions only work on Windows and Linux right now. That means those building extensions will leave Mac Chrome users behind for a time. But in telling those developers they won't have long to wait, Baum mentioned the deadline for the beta version.

"The earlier you switch, the more time you will have to polish your experience for our Beta launch in early December," he said.

And Google is on the case for adding Browser Actions to the Mac version of Chrome.

"We realize this means dropping Mac support for a couple of weeks, but we already have people working on that," Baum said. "If you prioritize the Windows and Linux versions, we'll bring you cross-platform parity as soon as we can!"

Google has cut the price to store photos at its Picasa Web Albums site by a factor of eight.

The photo-sharing site offers 1GB of photo and video storage for free, but now going beyond that limit costs less. The options now range from $5 a year for 20GB to $4,096 a year for a whopping 16 terabytes.

"Today we're dramatically lowering our prices to make extra storage even more affordable. You can now buy 20GB for only $5 a year--that's twice as much storage for a quarter of the old price, and enough space for more than 10,000 full resolution pictures taken with a five megapixel camera. Since most people have less than 10GB of photos, chances are you can now save all your memories online for a year for the cost of a triple mocha," programmer Elvin Lee said in a blog post Tuesday.

A lot of us have well over 5 megapixels per shot to contend with, but it's still interesting. When Google introduced the option to pay for extra storage in 2007, it cost $20 a year for 6GB.

The move is the latest to indicate that Picasa, although not a high-priority Google project like Chrome or search, does have a pulse. Last year, it added face recognition to the Web site and followed suit this year with the free Picasa photo editing software the company offers. And in March, Google started adding advertisements to the Picasa site.

Picasa is gradually getting more sophisticated, but as far as I can tell it has yet to dethrone Yahoo's Flickr as a preferred hub of at the center of a lot of photography activity on the Web. Picasa is fine for sharing snapshots with the family, but it's not really the place to join groups, chat on forums, and discover what the photography world is up to.

Picasa's more modest scope isn't a problem--plenty of people just want to share some photos, after all, and Google generally tries to offer services with broad rather than specific appeal--but Flickr has more vitality in this more social era of photography--at least among its "pro" subscribers who pay $25 a year.

Another interesting comparison is Facebook, with an extraordinary 2 billion photos uploads each month and a well-used system to identify who's in a photo that Flickr only just began offering. While Facebook has a strong social angle, though, it cuts down photos to a lower resolution and really is more a place for sharing snapshots than for digging into the world of photography.

Picasa's price cut raises an interesting prospect for photography enthusiasts, though. If it's going to set its prices to try to match some portion of the dropping prices of hard drives--not just this week, but regularly--it'll gradually become a more appealing place to back up photos in the cloud. Of course, like Flickr, it's chiefly for JPEG files, not the larger and more awkward raw files serious photographers often use. But even a JPEG backup is useful, especially with synchronization tools built into the Picasa software.

Paying Google $256 per year for 1TB of Picasa storage space is getting in the vicinity of the $100 price or so a 1TB external hard drive costs. Of course you only have to pay once for the hard drive, and even a slow USB hard drive is faster to access than photos on the Net, but Google's price includes backup and some assurance that you'll still have your photos if someone steals your laptop or your hard drive fails. Plus, of course, you get to share your photos.

A big gap here is support for raw files, something that SmugMug offers in its Amazon Web Services-based SmugVault. But that costs 22 cents per gigabyte per month, a price that rapidly gets steep when you consider how fast a modern SLR can fill up a 4GB flash memory card. SmugMug, a subscription-only site, caters to the serious set, though.