Mozilla executives today took shots at Google for pitching its Chrome Frame plug-in as a solution to Internet Explorer’s poor performance, with one arguing that Google’s move will result in “browser soup.”

The Mozilla reaction puts the company that builds Firefox on the same side of the debate as rival Microsoft, which has also blasted Google over the plug-in.

Released last week, Chrome Frame lets Internet Explorer 6 (IE6), IE7 and IE8 utilize the Chrome browser’s WebKit rendering engine, as well as its high-performance V8 JavaScript engine. Google pitched the plug-in as a way to instantly improve the performance of the notoriously slow IE, and as a way for Web developers to support standards IE can’t handle, including HTML 5.

Specifically, said Google, it was pushing Chrome Frame because it decided it wasn’t worth trying to make its new collaboration and communications tool, Google Wave, work with IE. Google developers spent “countless hours” on tweaking Wave for IE, but gave up.

“We could continue in this fashion, but using Google Chrome Frame instead lets us invest all that engineering time in more features for all our users, without leaving Internet Explorer users behind,” argued Lars Rasmussen and Adam Schuck of Google’s Wave team last week.

Mitchell Baker, the former CEO of Mozilla and currently the chairman of the Mozilla Foundation, disagreed with Google’s tactic to slip Chrome inside IE. Strongly.

“The overall effects of Chrome Frame are undesirable,” she said in an entry to her personal blog late Monday. “I predict positive results will not be enduring and — and to the extent it is adopted — Chrome Frame will end in growing fragmentation and loss of control for most of us, including Web developers.”
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Microsoft today confirmed that it will launch its free security software suite, which has been in development for almost a year, Tuesday morning.

“Microsoft Security Essentials, the highly anticipated no-cost consumer security offering, will be released to the public tomorrow, September 29,” a company spokeswoman said in an e-mail reply to questions.

The spokeswoman added that the program will be made available Tuesday morning, Pacific time, although she did not have a specific hour for the launch.

Earlier in the day, Network World’s John Fontana had been told by Bob Muglia, the president of Microsoft’s sever and tools division, that the company would ship the free software Tuesday.

Security Essentials, which Microsoft offered to a limited number of beta testers last June, is the company’s replacement for Windows Live OneCare, a for-a-fee security suite that was retired at the end of June 2009. Microsoft has pitched the software as a basic anti-virus, anti-spyware program that consumes less memory and disk space than commercial security suites, like those from vendors such as McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro.

Those companies, however, unanimously dismissed Security Essentials — once codenamed “Morro” — as proof that Microsoft couldn’t compete in the paying market.
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The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill on Friday began notifying about 163,000 women about the potential compromise of their Social Security numbers and other personal information after a hacker breached a system containing the data.

The breached server belonged to the UNC School of Medicine and contained information that was collected as part of a federally funded mammography research project. The system contained records on a total of 236,000 women, of which about 163,000 included Social Security numbers.

Matt Mauro, chairman of the university’s Department of Radiology said the breach was first discovered in July when a researcher reported problems accessing the system. A subsequent investigation by the school’s information systems staff revealed that the system had been hacked.
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AT&T (NYSE: T) rolled out software Friday to give iPhone users the long-awaited ability to support multimedia messaging service.

The lack of MMS capabilities has long been a hole in the iPhone platform, as competitors such as BlackBerry, Windows Mobile, and even most entry-level handsets have been able to do this for years. Apple addressed this issue with the release of the 3.0 software earlier this summer, but AT&T did not support this feature out of the gate because it wanted to ensure its network could handle the traffic.
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Google hit back at Microsoft today, defending the security of its new Chrome Frame plug-in and claiming that the software actually makes Internet Explorer (IE) safer and more secure.

“Accessing sites using Google Chrome Frame brings Google Chrome’s security features to Internet Explorer users,” said a Google spokesman today. “It provides strong phishing and malware protection, absent in IE6, robust sandboxing technology [in IE6 and on Windows XP], and defenses from emerging online threats that are available in days rather than months.”

Although both IE7 and IE8 include a “sandbox” defense dubbed “Protected Mode,” the feature works only when the browsers are run in Vista (IE7 and IE8) or Windows 7 (IE8). Google’s Chrome Frame, however, prevents malicious code from escaping the browser — and worming its way into, say, the operating system — on Windows XP as well.
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Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) has been guilty of some pretty egregious marketing campaigns in the past, but a video that’s making the rounds this week has to rank as one of the most appalling, and funny. And for this reason, it’s getting more exposure than Microsoft probably anticipated.

Microsoft is inviting thousands of its employees, partners and fans around the globe to host Windows 7 launch parties from Oct.22 to Oct. 29, in return for which they’ll receive a free copy of Windows 7. The idea sounds like an interesting way to build buzz around Windows 7, but Microsoft’s video, which shows four ethnically diverse party planners going over the minutiae of how to plan and hold a party, is an hilarious study in micro-instructiveness.

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Intel (NSDQ:INTC) released the first three Core i7 mobile processors based on its Nehalem microarchitecture Wednesday, including an Extreme Edition chip for notebooks that is priced at $1,054.

The Core i7-920XM Extreme Edition is a 45-nanometer, 2.0GHz chip that includes Nehalem-class features seen in earlier desktop and server variants of Intel’s next-generation microarchitecture, such as Turbo Boost and hyperthreading for its four cores.

The initial lineup of mobile chips, formerly code-named Clarksfield, also includes the 1.73GHz Core i7-820QM, priced at $546, and the 1.60GHz Core i7-720QM, priced at $364.

Intel has made faster quad-core mobile processors — the Core 2 QX9300 Extreme is a 2.53GHz chip that costs $18 less than the new Core i7-920XM. But the Turbo Boost feature on the Santa Clara, Calif.-based chip giant’s Core i7 mobile parts allows users to switch off two or three cores and jack up the clock speed on the others. That means the Core i7-920XM easily can be taken to 3.2GHz, according to Intel.

“The Clarksfield is the best quad-core, dual-core and single-core microprocessor, all in one,” said Mooly Eden, general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, at the Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco.

“We can take the extra headroom from shutting off cores and put it on running cores,” Eden said, extolling the advantages of Turbo Boost technology for mobile processors. He said the new processors are “ready to ship” for gaming notebooks, multimedia systems and mobile workstations.
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