This past year was not the best for new software developments. There were no surprising game-changers like Google Chrome in 2008, and no watershed moments. However, that doesn't mean there weren't some cool releases. I suspect that much of the best software of 2009 winds up becoming the foundation for innovations in 2010.
Obviously, the continuing development of Google Chrome was a major story, especially since it skyrocketed in market share based on its zippy engine and smooth JavaScript handling. If you're not using Chrome, you owe it to yourself to try it out. But it's not new. What is new, and is owed in no small part to Chrome, is that software development cycles have been significantly accelerated. We can see this in Chrome's competitor, Firefox, with five beta versions released for a minor-point upgrade. Users are demanding more frequent updates, and situations where popular software such as Adobe Reader suffers for months from the same major security hole will soon be untenable.
Microsoft Security Essentials
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Speaking of, Windows security is never far from the top of any list. It's somewhat ironic that this year first gifted to us the mutating Conficker virus--which exploited a security hole in unpatched and bootlegged versions of Windows XP--would end well for the security field. But Microsoft Security Essentials and Panda Cloud Antivirus are two programs that prove that not only can free security programs be effective, but they can also be lightweight and work well on those processor-light, horribly-named "Netbooks."
Although it wasn't brand-new, Symantec's Norton refresh earns a mention for its surprising turn-around from their horrible mid-decade products. The overhaul started in the 2009 version, and the 2010 editions that came out in September were impressively fast and lightweight, overall, as well as being effective at detection and removal. Yes, just to reiterate: this is the same Norton that's been included as bloatware on new computers for years. Who knew?
While security was exploring the clouds, social networking came down to earth and your desktop. Desktop-based social networking coagulators TweetDeck and Seesmic serve up multiple protocols in a convenient, unified interface. They give users an expanded tool set for managing their social networking streams, including multiple Twitter accounts, Facebook news feeds, and most recently Twitter lists. Both offer mobile support, with TweetDeck on the iPhone and Seesmic on Android, Blackberry, and through a Web-based interface.
BumpTop
(Credit: Screenshot by Rafe Needleman/CNET)Staying social for a moment, Trillian Astra is another noteworthy resurrection of an already-existing program. The first major multiprotocol chat client, Trillian hadn't seen a refresh in three years and the previous version was a slow resource-hog that was also feature-deficient. Astra isn't exactly light, but it's not the RAM monster that version 3 was. There's also better support for newer networks such as Google Chat and Facebook, and it works with Twitter.
Bumptop finally debuted in 2009, three years after a YouTube demo enthralled viewers. BumpTop is a freeware replacement desktop that makes the items on your computer's desktop more manageable, or at least differently manageable. Its strong suit is that it's intuitive: You can drag or fling folders and icons, and they have weight, which is related to the icon's size. The size is related to its importance to you, which is determined by how often you use them or if you customize them. Files and folders can be stacked, flipped as if they were pages in a book, spread out arbitrarily, or arranged in static grids. BumpTop may not set the software world on fire, but it's an interesting alternative and could take off as touch screens become more affordable and widespread.
Postbox is a heavily remixed Mozilla Thunderbird e-mail client with an emphasis on social networking tools: think Gmail thrown in a blender with Twitter, Facebook, and Flickr, and then served hot over a serving of Thunderbird. Postbox would have retained more of its buzz from the spring and summer if it hadn't gone behind a pay wall, even though it's a flexible wall--under the right circumstances; you can get an official copy for 50 percent off. The trial version is still impressive, with deep hooks between your contacts, messages, attachments, and photo and video uploading. $15 is still cheaper than Outlook, but it's $15 more than Thunderbird 3, which can do many of the things that Postbox does.
Postbox (pictured in beta) is now available as a stable release.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Ninite is another interesting piece of software, and indicates how Web tools and desktop tools are merging. Go to the Ninite Web site and you'll see a vast list of mostly-freeware programs. Check off the ones you want, and then go get a cup of coffee as it downloads and installs them. It's an excellent tool for those with new computers and a preference for publisher-default settings. Fortunately, Ninite ditches all the installation bloat like toolbars, and keeps your installation clean.
Looking ahead to 2010, some developments will be easy to predict. The Google Chrome OS will be big, even if it eventually fails. The browser wars will continue, as Opera showed that it can remain competitive by significantly boosting its speed with the Opera 10.50 prealpha release. One improvement I'm hoping for is for friendlier installations, where users will not have to opt-out of bloatware toolbars and search engine changes that they don't want. OpenCandy is doing some interesting work in this area.
Do you like this list? Do you think I've missed something major? Tell me about it in the comments.
Disclosure: CNET's TechTracker product uses OpenCandy in its installation.
The latest Opera browser preview version may not be entirely stable, but it's definitely got its jetpack strapped on. Opera 10.5 pre-alpha, for Windows and Mac, is the first browser that's not powered by Webkit to approach JavaScript rendering speeds previously reached only by Chrome and Safari.
Opera 10.5 pre-alpha introduces Windows 7 support and a slight redesign, along with a rocketing new JavaScript engine.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)In empirical testing done on an HP desktop running an Intel Core 2 Q6600 at 2.66GHz with 4GB of RAM and Windows 7 32-bit, the pre-alpha scored 435.6 milliseconds in the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark. By contrast, Google Chrome 4.0.266.0, the most recent development build, notched 510.4 ms. The current stable build of Opera was more than 7.5 times slower, at 3284.4 ms.
Opera attributes this dramatic improvement to the new Carakan JavaScript engine, which they have designed from scratch to replace the Futhark engine in the stable build. Opera 10.5 also includes improvements to the Presto layout engine, and a new graphics library called Vega.
Other improvements noticeable in the pre-alpha include changing the URL address bar to include the same style of predictive smart search that Firefox and Chrome have, and the search and address bars now both remember searches, support deleting specific items, and have redesigned layouts.
The main browser interface has been redone, too. The tabs are now on top, the menu bar has been minimized behind a drop-down on the left nav, and the browser has better integration with Windows 7 and Snow Leopard. On Windows 7 there's Aero Peek and Jump List support to access Speed Dial and tabs from the Taskbar. For Macs, there's a unified toolbar, native buttons and scrollbars, multitouch gestures, and Growl support. Dialog boxes are now non-modal, which you means you can now switch tabs without a pop-up commanding your browser's focus, for example. This will affect verification and authentication pop-ups, and JavaScript alerts.
There are some known problems, including a lack of printer support in the Mac version and noticeably high memory usage. Users can expect these to get addressed before the stable build of Opera 10.50 is released. The Opera 10.50 official announcement and changes can be read here, while the current stable version of Opera 10.10 is for Windows, Mac, and Linux.
Even without extensions, Google Chrome's market share grew phenomenally during its first year. Now that the No. 1 most-requested feature comes baked into the Windows (beta and development) and Linux (beta and development) versions, it's time to look at some of the best extensions available for the upstart browser.
Google Chrome's extension manager.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The No. 1 extension on my list is the No. 2 most-requested feature for Chrome: RSS support. The RSS Subscription Extension allows Chrome to automatically detect RSS and Atom feeds on a page. It's not entirely clear why this isn't a default feature since it's part of every other browser, but at least now there's a way to add it.
There are a host of Google-service related extensions, all based on letting you know at a glance if there's an update for you to check in on. The Google Alerter covers Gmail, Wave, and Google Reader, although there's also individual support for them as the Gmail Checker, Google Wave Checker, and Google Reader Checker. There's a Google Calendar Checker, too.
The Google Translate extension adds a slick pop-up toolbar.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The Google Tasks extension hides your tasks behind a button that opens a list of them when clicked. The most useful Google-related extension is for Google Translate, which will offer on-the-fly translation of a site that doesn't appear in your default system language.
Expect security to be as big a subcategory of extensions for Chrome as it is for Firefox. Popular and effective secure personal password storehouse LastPass provides a safe and near-universal way to manage your passwords, making them easily accessible without compromising their integrity. LastPass also supports Firefox and Internet Explorer on Windows, making it an excellent one-stop solution. When Chrome's extensions get activated on the Mac version, the reasons for using LastPass will become even more compelling.
LastPass options in Chrome.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Also cross-browser, Web of Trust evaluates Web sites based on consensus. It may sound counter-intuitive to some, but it's proven in the past year to be an especially effective tool for determining whether you can trust that sketchy link you're thinking of clicking on.
UnShorten.com is one way to see what that shortened URL is hiding, but ChromeMUSE is another. This useful extension not only can shorten URLs via several different shortening services, it can also expand embedded short URLs automatically.
FlashBlock is a good way to kill Flash and Silverlight-based content. It leaves a blank spot where the ad or embedded video would've been, which you can then selectively load by clicking on it.
Despite the name, AdBlock+ should be avoided. It's not made by the same publishers who manage AdBlock Plus, the popular and effective ad-blocker for Firefox. This is actually a fairly serious problem with Chrome's extensions, where unknown entities are appropriating identical or similar names to well-known and trusted Firefox add-ons for what amount to nefarious purposes. So far, the ad-blocking extension that most users seem to be trusting in Chrome is AdBlock, but don't be surprised if it causes more problems than it solves until there's more consensus on these name-squatters.
AniWeather offers an animated weather pop-up.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)On that note, there are some excellent Firefox add-ons that have been ported successfully to Chrome. Bookmark synchronizer Xmarks has a beta version for Chrome, as does IE Tab for viewing rendering sites with Internet Explorer's engine within Chrome, and the resource-heavy but still-fun way to view visual media Cooliris.
Facebook for Chrome simplifies Facebook access, putting news feed and status updating in your toolbar. YouTube Downloader grabs Flash video embeds and saves them to your hard drive but interestingly doesn't come from Google itself. AniWeather is another, providing those without windows an excellent way to see what meteorological events are going on outdoors. iMacros will run Greasemonkey scripts and allows users to create their own solutions for repetitive data entry and tasks. The one I can't live without is another name-squatter, AutoCopy. It will copy any text to your clipboard when you highlight it. Unlike the Firefox version, it doesn't open any options when you finish highlighting, so it's a bit hard to tell if it's working as it should.
TooManyTabs cleverly secrets away tabs you want to keep handy but out of your active memory.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)TooManyTabs isn't TabMixPlus for Chrome, but it does something that TabMixPlus can't because Firefox doesn't yet support it. TooManyTabs manipulates Chrome's tab process isolation in a useful way, so you can move tabs to a holding dock where they're no longer eating memory, but they're still easily accessible. Click on the toolbar button and it opens up a window that displays your active tabs. Arrows next to each one let you move it to the nonfunctional area. A helpful indicator on the toolbar button tells you how many active tabs you've got. Conspicuously missing is drag-and-drop, so hopefully that's coming.
Aviary Screen Capture is another extension that offers Chrome-only features. It lets you take a screenshot of any Web site you're looking at and then automatically opens it in Aviary's image-editing Web suite to streamline your work flow.
The lack of a status bar in Chrome means that the management icons for extensions, if they have them, get added to the navigation bar, something that may annoy users who prefer Firefox's greater level of extension-placement customization. However, it's definitely a more visible placement, and may encourage users to keep their installed extensions to a utilitarian minimum.
More extensions can be downloaded from Google's site or Download.com.
Currently, extension support hasn't been activated in the Chrome for Mac, but that's expected no later than January 2010. There's also some notable popular Firefox extensions that aren't in Chrome yet, such as FoxyTunes. If I've skipped a favorite Chrome extension of yours, or if there's one for Firefox that you're dying to get in Chrome, tell me about it in the comments below.
Thunderbird 3 is finally here for Windows, Mac, and Linux, after a gestation period measured in years. Take an introductory tour in this First Look video of the latest improvements, including robust integrated search, tabbed e-mail reading, and a slick new account wizard.
For an even deeper look at Firefox's sibling, read this hands-on report of what's good and what's lacking in Thunderbird 3.
It's not fully baked yet, but Google Chrome for Mac reaches a major milestone with the release of an official beta version. More stable than the development version, this Chrome beta brings rocket-powered browsing to Apple's computers--but it still lacks some key features.
And just how does it compare with Safari? Watch and find out, and also check out our hands-on review of Google's next move forward for Macs.
Mozilla Messaging pushed the stable release of Thunderbird 3 out of the nest on Tuesday, and there's a lot to like in case you haven't been following the beta development of this Outlook alternative. The long-overdue Thunderbird 3 is available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, and it introduces several hefty new features and some long-needed improvements, including an overhauled search and message indexing, tab support, and a revamped setup wizard that's designed to make new account setup quick and painless.
One feature that isn't included is the calendaring add-on, Lightning. Originally, Mozilla had planned to bake the extension into the program, but decided back in February 2009 to change course and leave it up to users to download. Although Thunderbird natively comes with Microsoft Exchange support, there's no calendar and therefore no meeting support in the default Thunderbird installation. Along with Lightning, there's an essential Google Calendar add-on for Lightning that gives Google users calendar support in Lightning. Currently, the only version of Lightning that works in Thunderbird 3 is the nightly build, available here.
Even without Lightning, Thunderbird makes for an excellent desktop-based e-mail client. Beyond Outlook replacement, it also makes a savvy offline or local-storage tool for the various Web mail providers. Gmail integration has existed in Thunderbird for a while, but improvements in version 3 include better recognition and integration of Gmail's special folders. These include Sent and Trash, and the non-English versions of Gmail. The All Mail option in Gmail defaults in Thunderbird to the Archives folder.
Thunderbird 3's new search results pane.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Undeniably, the killer feature in Thunderbird 3 is the search. The most obvious competitor, Microsoft Outlook, doesn't offer anything that comes close to the level of granular control that Mozilla has given Thunderbird users. The new search bar is dominant at the top of the interface, and is set by default to search all messages. When you search, a new tab will open with your results organized as shown in the screenshot above. Filters based on e-mail addresses, folders, and tags appear on the left, while the majority of the window is given over to displaying summaries of the e-mails that meet your criteria. There's also a timeline bar graph at the top of the results. Click it, and then mouse over any of the subcategories to see how they occurred over time.
You can change the search box to one of several filters, including Subject, From, Recipient, To, CC, and Message Body. Frustratingly, you can't filter by Tag. You can also save any of these filtered searches as a virtual folder. Editors' note: The previous two paragraphs have been rewritten for clarity.
The new search bar drops down with options, but also can do predictive on-the-fly queries similar to the URL bar in Firefox 3.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)There is one drawback to the search: the first time it indexes your messages, you're potentially in for a long, long wait. In testing, this depended entirely on the number of messages in your folders. High volume accounts, whether locally archived or all on a server, should probably set their indexing to run overnight. After the first indexing, each new e-mail is added as it comes in.
E-mails open by default into new tabs, making the e-mail reading experience far more similar to the Web-browsing one. This can be toggled under the Advanced section of the Options, under the Reading and Display tab. The hot keys for the e-mail tabs have been mapped the same as in Firefox, so middle-click an e-mail to open it in a new tab but retain your focus on the current tab. The CTRL+Tab hot key combo will cycle through your tabs, and there's an open tab button on the right side of the tab bar to help manage your tabs.
There's a new activity manager that records all interactions between your e-mail provider and Thunderbird, making it easier to track down errors when you send or receive mail. There's also an entirely new system for archiving messages based on Gmail's "archive and forget it" method. The new version offers the traditional multiple-folder-based solution, as well as the new dumping-ground style, which can be activated via the "A" hot key. Thunderbird 3 supports Firefox personas, too, further reinforcing their shared architecture.
Thunderbird 3 beta 4 introduces tighter folder integration for Gmail users.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Other changes include major code improvements. The setup wizard now looks to mozillamessaging.com for additional information on how to configure the account. This changes how new Web mail accounts are created. Mozilla has said that only the domain name from your e-mail address gets sent to Mozilla's servers, and that the entire process falls under the Mozilla's privacy policy. Nevertheless, it's a move that's likely to cause some concern among privacy advocates.
The compact header mode has been deleted, which is sure to annoy those who like using Thunderbird on smaller-form computers like Netbooks. Windows users should see Thunderbird results appearing in federated searches in Windows Vista and Windows 7, while Mac users will find Growl notification support for new e-mails, integration with Spotlight and the Mac OS X address book, and support for Mail.app. The full changelog for Thunderbird 3 can be read here.
Thunderbird 3 rates as a top-notch e-mail client, and it's definitely the best freeware one around. It will require some fidgeting to get it to be usable in a corporate environment, but it's far more scalable to user needs than anything else currently available.
Google released the first beta build of its Chrome browser for Mac and Linux earlier today, and it's hard not to be impressed when putting the Mac version through its paces. Chrome for Mac still lacks some of the key features that are currently available in the Windows beta, but this is a browser that most people should feel comfortable using.
As expected, Chrome on the Mac is still far superior to Firefox and even its WebKit cousin Safari when it comes to JavaScript rendering. Using the SunSpider JavaScript benchmark, Chrome came in 1.8 times faster than Firefox by scoring 738.8 milliseconds. Safari notched 1,155.8 ms, while Firefox 3.6 beta 4 completed it in 1,330 ms. This is semicasual testing, but it does provide a ballpark from which we can see the gross differences between the browser's JavaScript rendering capability.
Chrome for Mac also starts up fast, by which I mean the point from clicking the browser icon on the dock to when Google's search page has finished loading. On Chrome it took less than 2 seconds, while Firefox took slightly more than 2 seconds, and Safari was just less than 3 seconds.
Google Chrome beta on the Mac won't look new if you've been using the dev build.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Although Chrome's first non-beta for Macs is expected within the month, currently the beta doesn't have all the features of its Windows-based sibling. Most notably missing is extension support, which had been in the developer's build but was recently disabled. The timing of this is somewhat unfortunate, considering that Google just officially launched the Chrome extensions gallery. It also lacks bookmark syncing, the bookmark manager, and the cookie manager.
When firing up a site, Chrome will occasionally show nothing but white space until the page is finished loading. In several hours of hands-on use, this was the only experiential flaw encountered--although the beta could easily be hiding more.
Even with these drawbacks, Google Chrome beta makes for an excellent quick-use browser on the Mac, and can be more or less used with confidence on a regular basis, if not as a go-to browser.
You wouldn't necessarily expect it, but Avast and Google Chrome might be the next peanut butter-and-jelly combo in the software world. Google's nascent browser has paired with one of the most popular free security programs in the world so that when users run the Avast installer on a computer that has neither Chrome nor Avast, they'll be offered a chance to install Chrome simultaneously. This is the first such bundling for Avast in its 21-year existence.
The Chrome installation window in the Avast installer is cleverly polite.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)The Chrome option in the Avast installer does two things differently from the more familiar opt-out user experience that many programs provide in an installer in exchange for financial sponsorship. For one thing, the Chrome window only turns up if you don't already have it installed, but more importantly, it forces users to actively choose installation. Neither the "yes, install" nor the "no, don't install" radio buttons are checked by default. Of course, users are forced to check off "no" if they don't want it, but this should dramatically cut down on the incidence of accidental installations that tend to plague otherwise-similar piggybacking installs.
The Avast/Chrome combo may strike some as an odd couple, or at least more beneficial for Avast than for Chrome, but keep in mind that Avast has more than double the users that Chrome does. Google's Vice President of Product Management Sundar Pichai said Chrome had more than 40 million users at the Chrome OS press conference at the end of October, and the end of November saw NetApplications peg Chrome at 3.93 percent of the browser market, a 0.35 percentage point increase. Meanwhile, on Avast's Web site, the Czech Republic-based security vendor is preparing to fly its 100 millionth user to Prague on an expenses-paid trip.
A Google spokesman indicated that other deals might be in the works. "Users' response to Google Chrome has been outstanding, and we're continuing to explore ways to make Chrome accessible to even more people. This could potentially include distribution via a number of channels, such as the distribution we are currently doing with Avast."
CNET News staff writer Stephen Shankland contributed to this report.
An Avast virus definition file update late Wednesday accidentally marked hundreds of legitimate files as threats. The Czech Republic-based publisher Alwil responded quickly, issuing a fix less than six hours later, but some users are still dealing with the aftermath.
Restoring files improperly flagged as threats worked fine on my work computer, but not at home.
(Credit: Screenshot by Seth Rosenblatt/CNET)Going through Avast's forums, the Avast-written guide for rescuing files falsely marked as threats should be quite simple. Force an Avast update, then from the main interface go to Menu, then Virus Chest. Right-click on the file in the chest you want to resuscitate, choose Scan to double-check that it's not a threat, then right-click on it again and choose Restore. Avast cautions that if that fails, you can choose Extract to put the file back where it came from.
For some instances of the Avast 5 beta and Avast 4.8, this doesn't work. The best solution I've found is the most annoying: run the installation file again. This certainly takes longer, but right now I've been unable to find any other solution that can be applied across the board. The one saving grace about reinstalling is that, at least for the files on my home computer that were affected, I didn't need to reconfigure any of the settings. The KMPlayer, IOBit Smart Defrag, and Find and Run Robot all retained their previous DLLs and other settings.
Keep in mind that this isn't the first over-eager definition file update. Two of the more recent ones include an incident from July that saw an update from Computer Associates flag a Windows XP system file as a virus, and last year AVG falsely identified a file from security provider ZoneAlarm as a virus.
If you're continuing to have problems from the Avast update, let us know in the comments below.
Mozilla updated its nearly-baked Thunderbird 3 Tuesday night, fixing one critical error and addressing three others. The critical bug fix affects the Windows, Mac, and Linux versions of Thunderbird 3 Release Candidate 2. It had caused the previous version to hang on shutdown, consume too much memory, and close all IMAP connections.
The other fixes in this version enable downloading new messages automatically by default for POP3 accounts, label the default theme as version 2.0, and fixes the "download more dictionaries" option, which had been failing to open properly.
Already a year off from its original release schedule, Thunderbird 3 has also missed its most recent revised deadline, which had been planned for the end of November 2009. However, I've been using the beta and release candidate builds and have found them to be as stable as Thunderbird 2, but with far less memory hogging.
