• The next version of Windows will be called simply Windows 7, Microsoft's Mike Nash explains how they came up with that particular number. Interestingly, Windows XP isn't counted as a major release, just a 5.1 release, with Windows 2000 being 5.0. Windows Vista is 6.0, and Windows 7 is actually version 6.1!
  Tags: Windows 7
• Kongregate, the online Flash games site, where the boys are, according to Rafe Needleman, has put up a tutorial series aimed at beginning Flash game developers. The tutorials show how to build a basic space shooting game using Adobe Flash CS3 and ActionScript 2.0, and there is an accompanying developer competition.
  Tags: Flash, online games
• Experienced, but mainstream, Yahoo users don't get OpenID, shows a usability study released by Yahoo Developer Network. If you own a domain you can run your own OpenId server using phpMyID, as I do on the emented.com domain.
  Tags: OpenID
• If you want to use IIS on a Windows server, instead of Apache, to run popular open source PHP applications like Drupal, phpBB, and Wordpress, you're in luck, as Microsoft just has released a Web Platform Installer tool, which simplifies the deployment process to almost a click of a button.
  Tags: PHP, Windows
• Opera released some Web statistics obtained by their "Metadata Analysis and Mining Application", MAMA: 
  

  MAMA is a structural Web-page search engine—it trawls Web pages and returns results detailing page structures, including what HTML, CSS, and script is used on it, as well as whether the HTML validates.

  It's a vast resource for Web nerds, with results ranging from the least and most popular HTML elements to Flash and AJAX usage per country. Some key findings: Apache is used by 68% of web servers, IIS by 26%. The ratio of HTML to XHTML usage is about 2 to 1. The "table" element is more popular than "div", 8th vs. 14th place, respectively. 33% of web pages use Flash. Only 4% of URLs pass the W3C markup validation test. When testing my site, 38 errors were reported, so nobody is perfect. I guess Wordpress is to blame for a lot of those errors.
  Tags: statistics, web standards

• Yahoo continues the roll-out of their Open Strategy, dubbed Y!OS. The latest release is a new universal profile page.
  Tags: Yahoo
• Ars reports on benchmarking results for the new Flash 10 player compared to Flash 9. On Mac and Linux platforms there are substantial performance improvements up to a factor of 4. The Flash performance on those platforms are still far behind the performance on Windows though. Sporting the same hardware, Flash 10 on Vista outperformed Flash on Mac by a factor of nearly two.
  Tags: Flash
• Nonconformist blogger Ted Dziuba has relaunched his rebellious Web 2.0 blog Uncov, after recently leaving his startup Pressflip. It's mostly fun reading, as he tries to be a thorn in the side of the Web 2.0 aristocracy. Additionally, the accompanying pics of Fail and other misfortunes makes it a worthwhile read. On a somewhat related note, Christopher Beam writes here about the popularity of the word Fail.
  Tags: blogs

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• Stack Overflow launches, a Q&A site for programmers, who can ask questions and get answers from other programmers. The site is community driven, good answers get voted up and rise in the list of answers to a question. As a result, any discussions among the answers are discouraged, as these will be scrambled, explains Joel Spolsky, one of the founders. Community members can build a reputation by earning points and badges in response to good answers and other activity. Marshall Kirkpatrick liked Stack Overflow in his review, and I think it could be a useful service. Marshall requested subscribable feeds for answers to a question. I found a link to an Atom feed for each question, not sure if it is optimal though. There are also feeds for a users top answers and questions, and the top 30 questions for a specific tag. A chronological feed with all questions belonging to a tag would perhaps be more useful.
  Tags: programming, web development
• Webmonkey has an article about HTML 5, the next specification in works for the HTML language. The latest specification 4.01 was completed in 1999, and we probably will have to wait at least another 10 years for a completed version 5. In the meantime some browser vendors have implemented parts of the HTML 5 draft, e.g. the canvas element, and more recently the video element, as I wrote about last week. Browser extensions like Gears, and plugins like Silverlight and Flash also find a niche, where the current standard is lagging behind.
  Tags: HTML5, web standards
• Scott Hanselman writes about the use of multiple processes in the Chrome browser and in IE8. Separate processes create a greater degree of isolation between tabs: If one process/tab crashes, the other processes/tabs stay unaffected. The potential overhead of processes vs. threads, and the inter-communication between processes, are really no problem nowadays considering the rapid development of computer hardware.
  Tags: Chrome, IE8
• A new tool dubbed CookieMonster will soon be released to the public. It is able to get hold of user credentials submitted to secured sites via a man-in-the-middle attack. Several banks are identified as insecure. The tool utilizes a programming flaw, where the website developer has failed to designate the authentication cookie as secure.
  Tags: security
• Atmosphir, a 3D platform game creation tool, is currently in private beta but expects to open to the public at the end of the year. Atmosphir got one of the five jury selection prices at this years TechChrunch50. Hopefully it is fun for creative kids.
  
  Tags: gaming

• There was some discussion this week about which products and technologies are really threatened by Google Chrome. I agree with those who argue that other rich Internet application frameworks (RIAs) are the technologies at greatest risk. These include the proprietary Microsoft Silverlight and Adobe Air (with Flash). The great promise of the Chrome browser is that it pushes for the open technologies JavaScript and HTML. Chrome comes with a fast JavaScript engine, and with improvements in the JavaScript language itself, as envisioned by the recent ECMAScript Harmony agreement, JavaScript could become a real challenge to the programming languages used in Silverlight (C#) and Flash (ActionScript). ActionScript and JavaScript have the same roots in ECMAScript, but ActionsScript requires a proprietary runtime component (Air or Flash player) to run in the browser, whereas support for JavaScript is built-in into most browsers. Silverlight also requires a proprietary runtime component.

  JavaScript can not alone pose a threat to Silverlight or Flash, an enhanced HTML is required, with elements from the emerging HTML 5 standard, such as the canvas element, for drawing to the screen, and the video element, for displaying video. The canvas element is currently supported by WebKit, the HTML rendering component used in Chrome, and by Gecko, the one used in Firefox, but not natively in IE, though there are workarounds. The latest Firefox 3.1 alpha 2 release includes support for the video element.

  Another advantage with Chrome is that it comes included with the browser extension Gears, which is a JavaScript framework that equips the browser with additional capabilities like offline access for supported sites.
  Tags: Chrome, JavaScript

• Last week I posed a question regarding the relative performance of Chrome's JavaScript engine V8 compared to the latest Firefox engine TraceMonkey. Now John Resig has given a balanced answer, and it turns out that V8 and TraceMonkey are quite comparable. V8 is faster in some tests, in particular those involving recursion, while TraceMonkey is faster in some other tests. For tests including both JavaScript and DOM manipulation, WebKit based browsers like Safari and Chrome are somewhat ahead of TraceMonkey and Firefox 3.0.1. IE is generally lagging behind.
  Tags: Chrome, Firefox
• A proof that Chrome is relatively compliant with emerging Web standards is that it performs well on the Acid3 test, with a score of about 78 out of 100.
  Tags: Chrome, web standards
• Finally, Ted Dziuba challenges my comparison of Chrome to an operating system last week, though he probably didn't read my article, instead he mainly goes after a post by Michael Arrington who labels Chrome "a full on desktop operating system that will compete head on with Windows." Though that expression might be somewhat over the top, I enjoy the vision in the post that eventually the need for a stand-alone desktop operating system will disappear, and that basic OS features might as well be integrated into the browser. A possible solution could be based on a stripped-down version of the Linux OS combined with Google Chrome.
  Tags: Chrome, vision