The browser wars continue

Recently Microsoft showed off a demo of IE9 that takes advantage of Direct2D and DirectWrite (available in Windows 7 and soon to come to Vista) to display all the graphical stuff that we’ve got used to online including maps and what have you. Shortly there was an announcement that Mozilla was toying with putting the technology in Firefox as well. All of which shows that the browser’s evolution is far from over. Meanwhile, Google launched an entire OS that is not much more than a glorified version of its Chrome browser which, in its beta version, is picking up features such as extensions that would bring it on par with Firefox (to some extent) on the features front. Chrome OS was a bit of a disappointment insofar as similar quick boot OSs have been loaded on netbooks as a secondary OS for a while now (Google’s other OS, Android, has also played this role on a recent Acer netbook). These lightweight OSs that lack the capability to run applications on the host computer haven’t had much of an impact so far. Considering that even smartphones let you install apps on the device, Chrome OS isn’t going to amount to much unless it beefs up and then some.

Netbook sales continue to explode globally. To date these machines have been underpowered with the Atom processors powering them being the primary culprits. Even Web browsing tends to be a sluggish affair on a netbook and Intel’s latest Atom processors dubbed Pineview, attempt to change that by upping the integration factor and adding graphics to the chip. Better battery life is promised as well. Despite industry majors, including Intel, talking down netbooks, the form factor is thriving.

EU agency, the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), has come out with a paper on Cloud Computing security concluding that “The key conclusion of this paper is that the cloud’s economies of scale and flexibility are both a friend and a foe from a security point of view. The massive concentrations of resources and data present a more attractive target to attackers, but cloud-based defenses can be more robust, scalable and cost-effective.” It notes that, “For cloud computing to reach the full potential promised by the technology, it must offer solid information security.”

The paper found the top security risks of cloud computing to be loss of governance, lock-in and isolation failure in multi-tenancy set-ups. Other risks included compliance risks, compromises on the management interface front, data protection, insecure or incomplete data deletion and the risk of malicious insiders.

The report can be downloaded from the agency’s home page at www.enisa.europa.eu.

prashant.rao@expressindia.com