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• The Web browser is essential, and to a growing number of users even more important than the operating system itself. As more tasks commonly associated with locally-installed applications are being accomplished using online services, the Web browser will only become more critical in the future. If Firefox seems like the de facto browser for Linux, that's because it is. However, Windows users will remember late last year when Internet Explorer security holes drove them en masse to Firefox, only to later discover similar exploits in Firefox. This incident drove home the need to have multiple browsers installed, if only for emergency backup use. To put these browsers through a quick (and admittedly unscientific) test, I utilized some of the Internet's most popular Web sites. For starters, I performed a few random searches on Google to gauge page-load speed. Next, I simply navigated to the Yahoo homepage. Believe it or not, that site doesn't support very many browsers. I navigated to my house using the maps at Microsoft's new Bing.com (why not test in unfriendly territory?). And finally, I played the current feature video on Hulu, and the same on YouTube. Mozilla Firefox (v. 3.0.11) Mozilla's Firefox is the undisputed king of Web browsers on the Linux platform. No matter what any given distribution has installed by default, the vast majority of Linux users rely on Firefox as their primary window into the World Wide Web. It's popularity is due in large part to the unparalleled number of custom add-ons and plug-ins available. If a feature exists on any browser, there's probably an add-on to enable it in Firefox. This browser is more stable and secure than Internet Explorer, while still performing similarly on Web site compatibility. With all this going for it, it's no wonder that Firefox holds almost one quarter of the entire Web browser market share. That means about twenty percent of current Windows users prefer it. If you don't already use this browser, regardless of your OS, you should. Opera (v. 9.64) For many years, Opera has been the third wheel at the browser party. Today, it's more like the fifth. Opera has had a long history of innovation, often including cutting-edge features before the competition. By including a thumbnailed bookmarks page, thumbnailed tab previews, and split-screen browsing (not as optional add-ons, but integrated into the default installation), the latest version of Opera is still ahead of it's time. One of the simple features that I especially like is the ability to have a separate entry in the search bar for each tab. For example, if you search for "fried chicken recipes" in one tab, and open a second tab to search for "cornbread recipes," the search bar in the second tab will not have "fried chicken recipes," but will be blank for a new search. If nothing else, Opera is a solid backup or secondary browser and is available for just about every operating system you can think of. BeOS stalwarts rejoice! SeaMonkey (v. 1.1.15) The first thing that you're sure to notice about SeaMonkey Navigator is the Netscape Navigator theme. Of all the browsers in this article, SeaMonkey was the biggest surprise. It is hands-down the best non-mainstream offering on the list, no question. This browser had no problem handling YouTube, Hulu, Yahoo, or even Microsoft Bing Maps. Apart from the theme, being an actual descendant of Netscape makes SeaMonkey very approachable to ex-users of Navigator. When you perform a search using the search bar, a pane appears on the left side of the screen displaying search results. This feature can come in handy if you have the screen real estate to spare on a wide-screen monitor. I really did not expect to find anything decent besides Firefox and Opera, but SeaMonkey is truly a great app; something that will remain installed on my machine long after this article is finished.

• Nvidia’s headliner in the CUDA space is Badaboom, the idiot-proof tool from Elemental Technologies that served to counter AMD’s hullabaloo with the ATI Avivo Video Converter. In a nutshell, you can import just about any input video type you could ask (even .m2ts from Blu-ray rips), pick your target device (from YouTube to the BlackBerry Bold), and out comes an optimized .mp4 file. It’s about as streamlined and simple as you could possibly make a transcoder, although that doesn’t mean dumbed down. Props go to Elemental and Nvidia for enabling multi-GPU functionality. You can’t span CUDA acceleration for one job across multiple GPUs, but you can run one instance of Badaboom 1.1 for each CUDA-enabled GPU in the system—handy stuff if you have to bang out a bunch of files in a hurry before skipping town. If all you care about is transcoding and couldn’t give a rip about editing, then Badaboom remains our favorite pick of the day. Many other reviews have looked at the comparative quality of Badaboom’s transcoded visuals, and this isn’t the place to rehash such material. Suffice it to say that the end results look great, and Badaboom puts far less strain than most transcoders on the CPU. After all, most of us don’t have dedicated video systems, especially in our budget-conscious context here. In general, the higher the quality of the transcode, the more Badaboom seems to stress the GPU and leave the CPU to itself. So beyond the world of benchmark testing, this says a lot about the application as a real world solution. Odds are good that you’re going to want to transcode while doing other things, and you don’t want one task crippling all of the others.

• One of the very prominent examples of basic MSR research comes from its assistant director, Luca Cardelli. Dr. Cardelli sees the globe as a single computing environment, within which there are billions of mobile elements which play distinct roles. In the same way John Stewart Bell divided the physical universe into contexts of existence, Cardelli sees mobile computers as components with their own local contexts, but connected on another level with a larger universe of computation. To that end, he creates a concept called ambient calculus, within which mobile components tear off little sections of the universe all to themselves, which he calls mobile administrative domains. Any globally connected computing environment, Cardelli argues - if that's indeed what the Internet is evolving into - should take ambience into account, all those parameters and circumstances and conditions which can be presumed as global, before breaking down the computing world into domains. What has been compelling about Cardelli's research is that his domains are not analogous to our concept of classes in object-oriented computing. Just as in Bell's universe, physical principles are dependent upon the place or context in which they reside, Cardelli's objects are all given local identity through their domains. But objects in his universe don't inherit by design; when an object or a concept transcends domains, there are entrance and exit principles that must come into play, taking account of what changes. When we asked developers outside of the Research division a few years back, to evaluate whether Cardelli's research has any bearing on their work, the response we got was that Cardelli assumes that Microsoft Corp. was ready to upend everything it had accomplished thus far with the Component Object Model. Luca's a nice fellow, we were told, but COM is here to stay. Since that time, the beginning of the upheaval of COM has already begun, with the move toward an XML-based platform where software components use SOAP to communicate with one another, and share XML-encoded data. On the surface, it would appear Microsoft may have missed an opportunity to make good use of the technology concepts it already invested in. But as Kevin Schofield told us, Dr. Cardelli's team at MSR Cambridge did make use of the technology transfer program, just in ways that might not be very perceptible. For instance, Schofield said, the Cardelli concept of ambients was the inspiration for a project to add generics to C# and other Microsoft .NET languages. In developers' vernacular, generics are classes of objects whose parameters may differ at run time, though which can apply behaviors that apply generally to any and all types of parameters they may encounter. This way, you can type an object whose behavior may apply to a string of characters or a cluster of data from a database; rather than having one explicit behavior for the string and another for the cluster, a generic class can typify behavior that the runtime interpreter can extend to either parameter as the program is being executed. Cardelli and his partners introduced this concept in 1985, six years before MSR was founded; and Sun Microsystems has been just as interested in applying his principles to the Java Runtime as Microsoft has to .NET's Common Language Runtime (CLR). "The CLR team at Visual Studio," said Schofield, "has been super-appreciative of all the work that Luca's team has been doing. Luca's team has also been helping them with security models around - not only the programming part of this, but also the network protocol part as well, as we define XML-based protocols for passing information back and forth, and make sure there aren't opportunities for security holes." Many of the projects devised by its most brilliant researchers and engineers since 1991 would require developers and engineers to make massive infrastructural and mindset shifts in order for them to be implemented. Indeed, a few of MSR's most sweeping propositions presume a very different world where certain evolutionary events - including some which Microsoft itself precipitated, such as the continuation of Secure Sockets Layer - never occurred. After all, some researchers may assume, if anyone can make the world change, it's Microsoft. The solution Schofield sees, and which he believes Live Labs can help bring about, involves building a kind of hybrid activity between basic research and engineering, which he calls applied research. Its basic tenet, he explained to us, is to be able to say, "You know what, you should take some risks, try some goofy things, but let's try it in the context of a particular product." One working example of this, Schofield offered, may have a familiar ring to it by now. "Two years ago, [MSN] decided they were going to make a fundamental strategy change, and invest very deeply in running and owning our own Internet-scale search engine. Twelve months later, after great partnership with Microsoft Research, where we helped design and architect a server farm and a crawling farm, indexing algorithms, distributed architecture for this thing, they had one up and running, because we were ready, and because we've been working for eleven, twelve years at that point on search and indexing technologies." So a prime example of how applied research could benefit Microsoft as a whole, now follows a familiar theme. "A great example I like to talk about it in the context of Live Labs is multimedia search," said Schofield, not unexpectedly. "We have lots of great technologies in Microsoft Research around speech recognition and vision technology." He explained an aspect of one project involving speech recognition in providing audio cues for a proposed multimedia search engine. The level of granularity required to implement speech recognition for that application, such as calling, "Start" and "Stop," he explained, might not necessarily need to go to the same lengths as for dictation in Microsoft Word or Excel. But just how exact should a search algorithm be? "If we were to launch an Internet-scale multimedia search engine," he asked hypothetically, "what's 'good enough?'" The scaling down of parameters and granularities to make projects fit the mold of server-based software, as opposed to client-based software, is one more reason MSR makes such a good fit with Live Labs, Schofield explained. "If you look across the sets of products that Microsoft builds, they're on different schedules," he told us. "If you look at something like MSN, where it's mostly server-based code, the simple logistics of releasing [revisions] every six months, or every three months, or opportunistically, is much easier than with a client-based product. So it's easier to grease the skids, and say, 'We can do applied research and be nimble and quick, and if we can come up with something cool, it can ship six months from now.' It's really harder to do that with Office." Office Live, which is partly server-based, may be easier to implement within Live Labs, Schofield added. But an applied research project with Office Live might not happen for another few years, and perhaps as long as four years. A lot depends, apparently, on how well Live Labs revolutionizes that other singular aspect of our work. Maybe Microsoft Research's initiatives aren't timed in concert with product developments, and perhaps never should be. But without some sense of synchronization - for instance, without Dr. Cardelli's window opening up before .NET's window closes - it could never happen anyway. Which is why Ray Ozzie's and Gary Flake's creation of Live Labs could be the greatest thing ever to happen to Microsoft Research. It could, at the very least, enable MSR never to have to find itself again in the position of defending its mission, its effectiveness, and its contribution to the affairs of humankind, by pointing to a great spelling checker or speech synthesizer. But before we get that far along, to the point where Live Labs encompasses all of Microsoft Research's vast domain, it must succeed at job one. "We hope [Live Labs] is something that will allow us to do more applied research, to be more nimble, more responsive," hoped MSR's Kevin Schofield, "and be able to take great cutting-edge technologies, and get them into our search products, and our other Live products, faster."