Firefox 3.0 wins memory battle, says tester

Mozilla Corp.'s Firefox 3.0 browser uses memory much more efficiently than its rivals, according to an independent tester who wrote a memory-monitoring utility to track usage by Firefox, Internet Explorer (IE), Flock, Opera and Safari.

In a lengthy post to his Web site, .Net developer Sam Allen spelled out the data he collected from the "Memory Watcher" application he wrote specifically to track Web browser memory use.

Although Allen acknowledged that the testing was unscientific -- he ran each browser between 2.69 hours and 2.91 hours, for instance, and didn't claim to have visited the exact same pages with each -- he claimed that the trend lines drawn by Memory Watcher were valid. The results, he said, "Are not a direct comparison in any way, but they offer a visualization of trending in the memory behavior of the layout engines and interfaces."

Firefox 3.0 was the clear winner, not only because it used the least amount of memory of any of the tested browsers, but its memory use didn't noticeably grow over time. "This browser exhibits memory usage that is by far lower than the others," Allen said of Firefox 3.0. "It releases memory to the system and the trend line is nearly flat."

The poorest marks went to Apple Inc.'s Safari 3.1 for Windows -- Allen tested only the Windows versions of each browser -- which consistently consumed more memory the longer it was used. "Safari on Windows shows extremely poor memory management," he said.

Other browsers, including Microsoft Corp.'s IE 8 Beta 1, Flock Inc.'s Flock 2.0 and Opera Software ASA's Opera 9.5, were in the middle, memory management-wise, he argued. While their memory use crept up over time, the increase was much more gradual than Safari's. "IE did well ... although a worrying trend in the data could indicate that it[s memory usage] would keep escalating," Allen said.

Browsers are regularly dinged for "memory leaks," the term used to describe the increase in memory use the longer an application is used. In some cases, the memory load becomes big enough to degrade the overall performance of some computers.

Older versions of Firefox, including Firefox 2.0, for example, were assailed for rampant memory leaks, criticism that drove Mozilla to reduce the browser's memory footprint in the just-released Firefox 3.0.

Allen did not immediately reply to an e-mail Friday asking for further comment on his memory tests.

Apple nears Chinese iPhone deal, say reports

Talks between Apple Inc. and China's largest mobile provider are back on track according to reports Friday, putting the American company closer to selling the iPhone in the world's biggest market.

According to the Reuters and AFP wire services, officials with China Mobile Communications Corp. said that the on-again, off-again negotiations moved forward after Apple gave up on its demand for a share of subscriber revenues.

"Apple is no longer insisting on a revenue-sharing policy, so the biggest hurdle for China Mobile to bring in the iPhone has been cleared, but there are practical issues still to be resolved," China Mobile spokeswoman Rainie Lei told Reuters on Friday.

Two months ago, Wang Jianzhou, China Mobile's CEO, blamed Apple's insistence on revenue sharing for the stand-off in discussions.

However, Wang's comments were made before Apple and other mobile operators began announcing non-exclusive deals to sell the iPhone, and weeks before Apple acknowledged that it had abandoned the revenue-sharing model that it had debuted, and demanded, when it unveiled the smart phone in 2007.

Rather than share revenues, wireless carriers will take the traditional tack of subsidizing the phone's purchase price. In the U.S., for example, AT&T Inc., which remains the exclusive network operator for the iPhone, will sell the new 3G-enabled 8GB model for $199, half as much as the $399 for the first-generation 8GB iPhone.

Earlier this month, Jobs told the CNBC cable news network that Apple would have the iPhone in China before the end of the year. "We just didn't have a chance to get [deals] closed with Russia and China," Jobs said in an interview. "Later this year, you'll see some announcements."

Apple will launch the iPhone 3G on July 11 in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Hong Kong, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S. The company has also said it would make the new phone available in some 70 countries by the end of 2008.

17 Greasemonkey scripts to turbocharge your browser

The Internet offers a wealth of excellent tools, information and entertainment — and it asks very little from us in return. So don't get upset when a poorly designed online tool or site gets on your nerves; instead, use Greasemonkey, a free Firefox add-on that harnesses the power of JavaScript to right usability wrongs and improve the functionality of specific Web sites and the Internet at large.

Greasemonkey can improve just about anything it touches — whether by adding must-have features to Gmail, streamlining your social life in Facebook or speeding up your blog posts. The best part? Thousands of Greasemonkey scripts are free to download, and installing them is as simple as clicking a single link.

In my day job as senior editor of Lifehacker, I regularly use Greasemonkey scripts to streamline my online workload, stay organized and speed through the Web.

Even though Greasemonkey scripts are written primarily for use in Firefox with the Greasemonkey extension, many of them also work with Internet Explorer (via IE7Pro or Trixie), Safari (try GreaseKit or Creammonkey), and Opera (which includes built-in support for the scripts). After installing the appropriate add-on for your browser, you're ready to improve your Web experience.

Multimedia tools

Pump up your favorite online music, video and photo sites with these smart scripts.

1. Inline Google MP3 Player
When you stumble upon a link to a music file on a Web page, the dance is generally the same: You download the file and listen to it with your desktop music player, or you click on the link and listen to it in your browser with its default player plug-in. Either way, it disrupts the flow of your browsing experience.

But the Inline Google MP3 Player script gets you back in the flow, automatically detecting linked MP3s and embedding Google's Flash player on the page so you can play the file inline and hassle-free.

2. Videoembed
Since video sites like YouTube don't offer much useful content beyond the actual video (that's right, I'm disparaging YouTube comments en masse), there's no point in going to YouTube to watch a video when you could embed it directly in the page you're looking at.

That's the idea behind Videoembed, a script that automatically embeds videos from sites like YouTube, Google Video and Metacafe whenever a site links to a video without embedding it. Now instead of clicking through to YouTube, you can watch the video directly on the site that linked to it.

3. Greased Lightbox
You know the drill: You're doing a Google Image search, but rather than give you direct access to the pictures you want to see, Google makes you click through a couple of links to get to the full-size image.

The Greased Lightbox script turns your Google Image search results — along with gallery pages on sites like Flickr, Facebook, and MySpace — into inline, AJAX-driven galleries that you can navigate from your keyboard. Not only is it faster, but it has a more attractive interface than do most other photo galleries on the Web.

4. Flickr Camera Images
If you spend much time surfing the popular and addictive photo-sharing site Flickr, you're bound to catch the shutter bug. You may also find yourself wondering, "What camera took that photo?"

To read about the camera used, click the "More properties" link; and if you install the Flickr Camera Images Greasemonkey script, you'll also see a photo of the camera in question. If you decide that a particular camera's output is so great that you simply have to have it, click the image to jump directly to the camera's listing on Amazon.

Online timesavers

These handy Greasemonkey scripts help keep online time sinks under control.

5. NoDelay
Anyone who has downloaded files from sharing services like RapidShare or Megaupload has run into download landing pages that require visitors to wait for up to two minutes before they can download the file they came for. The NoDelay Greasemonkey script takes you straight to your download, with no unnecessary pauses or other tiresome hoop-jumping required.

Microsoft repairs PCs crippled by XP SP3 update

Nearly three weeks after security vendor Symantec Corp. released a free tool to clean up PCs crippled by the Windows XP Service Pack 3 (SP3) update, Microsoft Corp. issued a fix that should reestablish lost Internet and wireless connections.

Earlier this week, Microsoft posted a hot fix for a problem users first reported in mid-May. Users of Symantec's consumer security software said that after updating their PCs to XP SP3, a bug emptied Windows' Device Driver and deleted network connections.

Although Symantec initially blamed Microsoft for the snafu, it later accepted some responsibility. In late May, Symantec acknowledged that Microsoft's updating process and a security feature in its own Norton-branded software combined to swamp the Windows registry with hundreds, sometimes thousands, of bogus and corrupted keys. That security feature, dubbed "SymProtect" by Symantec, was designed to protect the company's security software from attack by guarding against unauthorized changes to the registry.

Although Microsoft had previously declined to comment on the episode, the support document that accompanied the hot fix fingered Symantec's software. "This problem occurs when the Fixccs.exe process is called during the Windows XP SP3 installation," said Microsoft. "This process creates some intermediate registry subkeys, and it later deletes these subkeys. In some cases, some antivirus applications may not let the Fixccs.exe process delete these intermediate registry subkeys."

The hot fix replaces the Fixccs.exe file with an updated version, but it can only be applied if the user has booted into Windows' Safe Mode, according to the support document.

Symantec has contended that other security software with registry-change monitoring defenses also caused similar problems for users updating to Windows XP SP3, but there have been few reports logged to Microsoft's support forums. Microsoft, however, intimated that Symantec might not be alone when it used the generic, and plural, "some antivirus applications" in its explanatory document.

Users can download the hot fix from the Microsoft site.

Microsoft has not yet begun serving up Windows XP SP3 via Windows Update's Automatic Updates feature, and conceivably could prevent machines that have specific security programs installed from receiving the update. It's already done exactly that by blocking other systems, notably those running AMD processors, from getting XP SP3 to sidestep an endless reboot bug.

Google's App Engine Breaks Down

Google's application-hosting service suffered an outage on Tuesday, highlighting one of the downsides of the new cloud computing services.

Between 9 a.m. and 11:30 a.m. West Coast time and again later in the day, a significant percentage of users trying to access the service were unable to do so, according to a post on the Google App Engine forum.

"This outage was the result of a bug in our datastore servers and was triggered by a particular class of queries," wrote a member of the App Engine Team who called himself "Pete."

At around 1:40 p.m. Google was able to isolate the problem and restore the service, he wrote. Google is still working on a fix for the bug, however.

App Engine is a service that lets developers host their Web applications for free for up to 5 million monthly page views, and includes up to 500M bytes of persistent storage. It is aimed largely at developers rather than companies looking to host commercial services, so the outage may have had less impact than similar recent outages at Amazon's hosted services, said Phil Shih, an analyst with Tier 1 Research.

Google's App Engine "is very much a service targeted at developers who are kind of experimenting with new projects," he said. "It's a very limited and unique audience with a specific set of needs who may be able to arguably tolerate a little more unreliability."

Google only launched App Engine earlier this year, and Shih suspects that the company may have quickly pulled together the offering in hopes of catching up with the momentum around cloud computing. "Google is far, far behind Amazon," he said.

Still, even Amazon, which has been offering its Web Services since 2002, has its share of problems. Amazon has had outages on both its hosted computing and hosted storage services this year.

The troubles both companies are having reflects how new these types of offerings are, said Shih, who emphasizes his advice that companies shouldn't host any mission-critical applications on these services. "This is not something you can trust for anything that you depend on having online all the time," he said.

Mozilla Logs 8 Million-plus Firefox 3 Downloads in a Day

After a rocky start to its Firefox 3 "Download Day," Mozilla logged more than 8 million downloads of the latest version of its Web browser in 24 hours, the company said Wednesday.

Firefox 3 was downloaded 8,349,074 times between 2:16 p.m. ET Tuesday and 2:16 p.m. ET Wednesday -- more Firefox downloads than the company has ever had in one day, according to a Mozilla Web site tracking the browser's first-day download process.

Mozilla said on May 28 that it would attempt to establish a Guinness World Record for the largest number of software downloads in a 24-hour period with Firefox 3's release.

As part of the plan, Mozilla deemed Tuesday Download Day and hosted a download party at its Mountain View, California, office.

In comparison, Firefox 2 was downloaded 1.6 million times in its first 24 hours of release; to date, it has been downloaded more than half a billion times, according to Mozilla. There was no Download Day fanfare surrounding Firefox 2's release, however.

Mozilla is now awaiting review by the Guinness judges to see if its goal was accomplished, according to the Download Day Web site. There is currently no record for the number of software downloads in 24 hours; Mozilla's would be the first.

Despite its eventual success, Firefox 3 Download Day didn't go off without a hitch. Interest in the endeavor crippled Mozilla's servers on Tuesday, so the U.S. part of the download process started around 3 p.m. ET -- two hours later than originally planned -- when Mozilla's site wouldn't work properly.

The European leg of the effort began a little more than an hour later than planned and marked the start of the download-logging process. There were no more problems reported once the U.S. site was back up and running.

Yahoo to Add New Domains to Webmail Service

Yahoo is adding two new domains to its webmail service in order to make millions of new addresses available to current and future account holders.

Yahoo Mail, launched in 1997, has about 260 million users worldwide, so when creating a new account, people have to get very creative to hit upon an available address, often ending up with one that is convoluted and hard to remember.

"We have a lot of e-mail addresses out there, and we want to make available more attractive ones," said John Kremer, Yahoo Mail vice president.

Thus, starting Thursday and for the first time, the service will offer addresses in two other domains besides yahoo.com: ymail.com and rocketmail.com.

If they find an address they like better, users with existing accounts in Yahoo Mail or other webmail service will be able to migrate their messages and contacts to accounts in the new domains, he said.

Accounts in the two new domains will work in exactly the same way as yahoo.com addresses. Yahoo expects to activate sign-ups globally for the two new domains at around midday Thursday.

As with yahoo.com, people will be able to sign up for addresses with country-specific extensions of the two new domains.

In conjunction with eBay Giving Works and Auction Cause, Yahoo will auction some desirable e-mail addresses it has reserved and donate the proceeds to the following charity organizations: The Breast Cancer Research Foundation, Ocean Conservancy, The Point Foundation, Right to Play and World Wildlife Fund. The auction will begin on Thursday.

Ymail.com is a domain Yahoo has never used, while rocketmail.com belonged to the e-mail provider Yahoo acquired in 1997 and re-launched later as Yahoo Mail.

Microsoft Extends Life of MSN Music Tunes

People who bought songs from Microsoft's now-defunct MSN Music service will get three more years to move the music to new devices and operating systems after a change of course by the company.

Microsoft said it will now support authenticating those tracks, as required by the DRM (digital rights management) technology encoded into the music, through at least the end of 2011. Microsoft will then decide based on demand whether to continue.

Songs purchased on the service, offered only in the U.S., used Microsoft's "PlaysForSure" DRM, which required that the songs gain a license key from Microsoft's servers if a user transferred the music to a new PC or device.

But MSN Music, one of several online music store efforts by Microsoft, was shut down in November 2006 when the company launched a new one centered around its Zune digital music player.

Then Microsoft said in April that it would only support authenticating songs from MSN Music through Aug. 31. The decision meant that users could no longer migrate their music to a new PC if they upgraded their hardware.

If a person's PC died, the music would be gone unless it has been backed up on a CD or to another hard drive. Even if a user merely upgraded their operating system, for example from Windows XP to Vista, authentication is still required.

Microsoft's decision drew fire from users and organizations such as the Electronic Frontier Foundation, which said consumers should be entitled to refunds.

PlaysForSure DRM, which Microsoft has renamed "Certified for Windows Vista" has a set of Byzantine rules for how content can be burned to CDs and shared with other devices.

The Zune Marketplace sells songs using Windows Media DRM 10.

Some content is available in unprotected MP3 format as music industry warms to the idea of selling music without DRM after backlash from consumers.

Apple, whose iTunes Music Store remains the most popular place to buy music online, is selling some tracks minus its version of DRM, called FairPlay, after new agreements were reached with music labels. Amazon.com also sells songs from Warner Music Group without DRM in the MP3 format.

Mozilla premieres final Firefox 3.0

As promised, Mozilla Corp. today launched Firefox 3.0, a major update to the open-source browser that adds a new search tool, anti-hacking protection and revamped bookmarking.

The first major revision of Firefox since late 2006, Firefox 3.0 was posted to Mozilla's servers at 1 p.m. Eastern time.

As it has done before, Mozilla tried to ward off downloaders who had jumped the gun earlier Tuesday by grabbing the final code from the company's public FTP servers. "Downloading them directly can harm our ability to distribute Firefox efficiently," said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's product lead, in a brief message posted to the company's developer center. Those public FTP servers were inaccessible throughout the morning, apparently overloaded.

Mozilla is promoting Firefox 3.0's availability with an attempt to set a world record for downloads. As part of the promotion, the company has set up with a Web page where users have pledged to retrieve the browser today.

Firefox 3.0 first entered public testing with an Alpha 1 release in December 2006. The first of several beta versions was released in November 2007. The browser moved to release candidate stage last month. The third and final release candidate hit Mozilla's servers less than a week ago.

At one point, Mozilla had set a goal of launching Firefox 3.0 by late 2007.

The updated browser features a redesigned address bar -- dubbed the "Awesome Bar" by some -- that can be used to search for previously-visited pages using keywords or characters in either the URL or the page title. It also has a Google-powered anti-malware blocker that warns users before they reach a site hosting malicious code, as well as an enhanced tool for handling bookmarks and keeping track of the user's browsing history.

The browser's performance has also been improved, and its memory footprinthas been reduced -- Firefox has long been drubbed for memory leaks.

"Firefox 3.0 is evolutionary, not revolutionary," said Ray Valdes, a Gartner Inc. browser analyst. "It's definitely improved, but it doesn't seal the deal. It's not a game-changer."

What would have made Firefox 3.0 a game-changer, added Valdes, was if it had addressed enterprise concerns, including manageability and deployment issues. The strength of Microsoft Corp.'s Internet Explorer in businesses, Valdes said, means that Firefox won't be unseat IE as the world's most popular browser.

According to the most recent data from Net Applications Inc., Firefox accounted for 18.4% of all browsers used in May, ranking it second behind IE (73.8%) and ahead of Apple Inc.'s Safari (6.3%).

"Firefox has gotten the low-hanging fruit," said Valdes, who predicted that Mozilla's browser will have a harder time picking up additional market share than it had reaching its current No. 1 spot.

Firefox 3.0 can be downloaded from Mozilla's site, or the special today-only record-setting site. (See "Mozilla servers overwhelmed by rush for Firefox 3.0".)

Parallels releases first Intel Mac server virtualization software

Parallels Inc. on Tuesday released what appears to be the first application to enable Intel Mac servers to virtualize the Mac OS X operating system.

In development for more than a year, Parallels Server for Mac will let users of Apple Inc.'s Xserve and Mac Pro hardware to create virtual machines of Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard Server, in conjunction with Windows and Linux virtual machines (VM).

The software, which costs $999 per server and allows for an unlimited number of CPU cores (maintenance is extra), could encourage businesses seeking the efficiency and reliability provided by virtualization to take a second look at previously overlooked Mac servers.

Last November, Apple relaxed its server licensing rules so that its Mac OS X Server 10.5 Leopard operating system could run in a VM, provided that each VM is matched with a discrete license and the server hardware it runs on is made by Apple.

VMware Inc. said last week that Mac OS X server virtualization will be available in the next beta release of its Mac virtualization software, VMware Fusion 2.0.

Apple still forbids desktop and laptop versions of Mac OS X to be virtualized or run on non-Apple hardware.

However, Intel Mac users can run Windows VMs on top of Mac OS X using other software from Parallels (formerly known as SWsoft Inc.), VMware or Apple.

Parallels' Mac client virtualization software, called Parallels Desktop for the Mac, has the early lead over VMware Fusion, due to strong reviews and its faster time to market.

Microsoft Turns to Europe for Help in Cracking Search Market

Microsoft is pinning its hopes on European researchers to help it shake up the search and advertising marketplace. It plans to open a search technology center somewhere in Europe by the middle of next year.

The company is looking for new ways to disrupt Google's dominance of the search and online advertising markets and hopes European researchers can come up with ideas to rival its Live Search cashback feature, which offers online buyers rebates on products bought as a result of using Microsoft's search engine.

The cashback idea did not originate with Microsoft researchers, though, but with Jellyfish.com, a Wisconsin company that Microsoft acquired for an undisclosed sum last October.

It was also through acquisition that Microsoft moved into the enterprise search market, paying US$1.2 billion for Norwegian company Fast Search and Transfer in January.

Success in Europe is paramount to Microsoft's search strategy, it said Tuesday.

One way it hopes to achieve that is by adapting search tools to local markets, as users have different expectations according to where they live.

Microsoft opened its first research center dedicated to search in 2005, in Beijing. The company is not saying yet where it will locate its European center, hinting only that some engineers could be based in satellite offices in the U.K., France or Germany.

France and Germany already have their own government-funded search research programs. France's Quaero project is focusing on tools to simplify searching for audio and video, while Germany's Theseus program is investigating semantic search, or ways to search by meaning.

Yahoo Moves Deeper Into Mobile Ads, Search in Asia

Yahoo pushed to solidify its position in mobile advertising and search Tuesday with a series of new deals in eight Asian countries and territories.

The company's oneSearch will become the featured search technology on the mobile Internet search pages of service providers MTNL in India; CSL in Hong Kong; Smart and Sun Cellular in the Philippines; and Vibo in Taiwan.

Yahoo is also offering localized versions of its Go 3.0 voice search technology in India, Southeast Asia and Australia, with localization features including a Bahasa Indonesia version for that country, and one designed to recognize various regional English accents.

The company also signed two mobile advertising deals, with Maxis of Malaysia and Idea Cellular in India. Both will carry mobile display advertising, which will be sold and served by Yahoo. Financial terms of these and the other deals were not disclosed.

Asia is home to the world's largest number of mobile users with over 1.16 billion GSM (Global Standard for Mobile communications) connections alone, according to the GSM Association's report for the fourth quarter of 2007. China and India combine for almost 800 million, with Japan, Indonesia, and Pakistan adding about another 250 million.

The announcements came on the first day of CommunicAsia in Singapore, one of the region's most important telecommunications shows. CommunicAsia runs through Friday.

China Quake Site Hacker Caught

A 19-year old Chinese man is in police custody after allegedly hacking into a provincial seismological bureau's Web site to place a false earthquake warning, Chinese state media reported Monday.

The teenager, identified only by his surname Chen, altered the Web site of the Guangxi Seismological Bureau to warn residents in southwestern China to prepare for an impending earthquake expected to measure 9.0 on the Richter scale, according to a report on China Central Television's Web site.

Such a posting could have caused a panic. On May 12 an earthquake measuring 7.8 struck China's Sichuan province, killing over 70,000 people and leaving millions homeless. Following the quake, many people have fallen prey to rumors that earthquakes can now be predicted in a manner similar to weather forecasts, although there was no warning of the Sichuan quake.

Authorities did not say what impact the hacker's posting had.

An earthquake measuring approximately 9.0 was the cause of the 2004 Asian tsunami, which killed about 250,000 around the Indian Ocean.

Chen was arrested in the Guangxi province city of Taicang on June 4, and was being held in the provincial capital of Nanning. The report did not indicate what the exact charges would be, nor when Chen might face trial or what type of punishment was possible if he is convicted.

Chen had confessed and said that he altered the Web site to demonstrate his technical skills, according to the report.

Other young people have been involved in untoward online events since the earthquake. In late May, Liaoning province resident Gao Qianhui caused an uproar when a webcam recording she made expressing apathy towards the quake's victims reached viewers of online video sites. Gao was later arrested on unspecified charges.

Last week, a young woman known only as "Xiaoyun" or "Little Cloud" and claiming to be a native of Sichuan posted lurid photos of herself online. "I am posting some photos to encourage contributions" to quake relief efforts, she claimed. The authenticity of the photos and claims remain unknown, but the pictures have been circulated widely on blogs and bulletin boards in China.

Yahoo opposed Google deal before Microsoft bid

Yahoo Inc executives dismissed a search-advertising deal with Google due to antitrust concerns, one day before Microsoft Corp made its takeover offer earlier this year, according to court documents made public on Monday.
The position came to light in a complaint filed by attorneys representing two Michigan pension funds in a shareholder lawsuit that aims to revoke Yahoo takeover defenses and press the company to renew merger talks with Microsoft.
"We are focused on long-term value creation rather than short-term gains," said a Yahoo document prepared for Yahoo executives ahead of an "all hands" internal meeting on January 30 -- the day before Microsoft made its merger offer.
Bracing for employee questions over whether Yahoo should outsource its search-ad sales to Google, executives were prepared to argue that any short-term gains would derail Yahoo's long-term push to become a "must buy" for advertisers.
"Short-term analysis of the revenue potential of outsourcing monetization may not take into account the longer term impact on the competitive market if search becomes an effective monopoly," an excerpt from the company document said. Monetization refers to sales of search-related ads.
These comments appear to contrast with Yahoo's subsequent position when it announced on April 9 that it was conducting a test with rival Google, the market leader in Web search and related advertising, to rely on Google to sell its search ads.
TURNABOUT
The turnabout was part of a strategy by Yahoo management to seek alternatives for its business instead of settling for Microsoft's cash-and-stock offer at $31 per share, which the company's board had rejected as undervaluing Yahoo's assets.
Microsoft challenged the possible Google-Yahoo tie-up as anti-competitive, citing Google's growing dominance of the Web search business and its even larger share of ad sales tied to Web search results. Government regulators also rushed to say they would investigate any Google-Yahoo partnership.
Web search is increasingly strategic as most people find information on the Internet via such systems. Search-based advertising, because of its high degree of targeting, has become a great money spinner for Google.
Yahoo has acknowledged that a gap exists between what it makes running its own advertising alongside its search results and the improved payback it could see by using Google's ad-sales systems in conjunction with Yahoo's search operation.
"We, in fact, have some understanding of what they (Google) could do for us and what we could do for them," Yahoo Chief Executive Jerry Yang told a conference last week.
A Delaware Chancery Court judge ruled on Monday that excerpts from confidential Yahoo company documents could be made public in the investor suit after initially sealing some of the information in a filing made last month.
A Yahoo statement said the company was disappointed at the judge's ruling to unseal Yahoo internal documents but said it would have little bearing on the outcome of the case. A company spokeswoman would not comment on papers revealed in the case.

U.S. Internet will shrink to 2 strong players: report

An Internet analyst for a major Wall Street firm argues in a new report that Google Inc and Amazon.com Inc will be long-term winners, while Yahoo and IAC InterActiveCorp fall by the wayside and eBay Inc becomes a merger target. Sanford C. Bernstein analyst Jeffrey Lindsay argues in a 310-page report entitled "U.S. Internet: The End of the Beginning" to be published on Tuesday that Google and Amazon are best placed to withstand the current economic downturn.
"We expect two players to continue to perform strongly, Google and Amazon," Lindsay writes. "Both Google and Amazon.com are still racking up annual growth rates in the 30-40 percent range, with only a relatively modest slowdown in sight."
Lindsay reiterates his previous positions that Yahoo eventually will be sold to Microsoft Corp and that Barry Diller's IAC e-commerce conglomerate will go ahead in August with its five-way split-up, as planned.
"Arguably the weakest players have strayed furthest from their original competences and have been operating largely as conglomerates," the Bernstein analyst says of Yahoo and IAC.
In the short-run, however, Lindsay believes Yahoo will see gains if it reaches a deal to turn over some part of its search advertising sales to Google to run or if Microsoft resumes acquisition negotiations.
He argues that eBay "could potentially attract a Microsoft-like suitor in the future," especially if growth in its core auctions business fails to resume and because eBay could spin off its PayPal or Skype units to make a deal work.
Even the strongest companies have weakness, Lindsay argues. Google has yet to articulate a compelling strategy to achieve the same level of strength on the emerging mobile Internet that it has on the computer-based Web.
Amazon and eBay are likely to be forced eventually to pay state sales taxes. Ironically, he notes, this may work to their advantage as large companies, because they have more resources than smaller e-commerce players to collect such taxes.

Digital media growing fast, study says

As readership and revenues shift onto the Internet, experts said on Tuesday that top news media executives must seek new digital opportunities without neglecting their traditional print publications by rushing headlong into cyberspace.The second annual World Digital Media Trends report, released at a meeting of the World Association of Newspapers, said the digital platforms of newspapers are growing at a double-digit rate worldwide, as the world increasingly goes on line. The report, compiled with the help of 71 research groups, said digital and mobile advertising revenues are expected to increase 12-fold from 2002 to 2011, to about $150 billion worldwide.
The report said the number of wireless device subscriptions is expected to increase threefold to 3.4 billion from 2002 to 2011, the number of homes with broadband is likely to rise 10-fold in the same period, and the mobile telephone customer base has increased from 945 million in 2001 to 2.6 billion in 2006.
The report said one study says that in some countries "the Internet will become the primary news and information source within five years, while newspapers will lose the dominating position they have held for more than a century." Newspapers cannot count on their print editions alone to keep them solvent, the report said.
However, association President Gavin O'Reilly warned that newspapers should not rush unprepared into new mobile and Internet markets and said about 60 percent of the new revenues goes to two companies, the search engine giants Google and Yahoo.
"The Net is a wonderful place if you know what you are looking for," he said at a panel debate about digital media's impact on newspaper revenues. "But we run the risk that running headlong into digital will turn our dollars into pennies."
Newspaper companies must also continue to invest in the medium they know best — printed editions — since there are few accurate overviews of the impact of Internet revenues on newspapers, he said.
But O'Reilly dismissed the notion that newspapers would soon be a relic of the past because they "are not up for the challenge — or indeed, the many opportunities — that the digital world offers."
"All of us in the industry know the big strategic issues and challenges at play in the fast evolving digital world; and, the really successful publishers are those who recognize and capitalize on the newspapers' relative position in the busy media matrix. Happily, that is the majority of publishers today," he said.
At a separate panel debate for newspaper editors, Jim Roberts, editor for digital news at the New York Times, said "I expect our print edition to be around for a long time."
Even after newspapers generate enthusiasm among their traditional print staff for new media, they still have to find and provide the resources and qualified personnel for doing both, he said at the three-day meeting 1,800 publishers, editors and other senior newspapers, which started Monday.

Spiralfrog.com to offer downloads from EMI artists

SpiralFrog Inc., which operates an ad-supported, free music and video download Web site, said Monday it will soon begin offering content from Coldplay, Keith Urban and other recording artists as part of a new licensing deal with EMI Music.
Terms of the deal between the New York-based company and Britain-based EMI Music, a unit of EMI Group PLC, were not disclosed.
The EMI deal gives SpiralFrog users access to content from two of the four major recording companies. SpiralFrog inked a licensing deal with Universal Music Group prior to launching last September.
"You're going to see that users on our site are going to see a lot more content, so there's going to be far fewer searches where they won't find music they're looking for," said Joe Mohen, SpiralFrog's chairman and founder.
The ad-supported service lets users in the U.S. and Canada download audio tracks and music videos for free. It pays labels and other rights holders with ad revenue.
Visitors must register and log on to the site at least once every couple of months. Otherwise, the content locks up and can't be played.
SpiralFrog downloads also are not compatible with Apple Inc.'s line of iPods. Tracks can be downloaded onto certain devices running Microsoft Corp.'s Windows software.
Mohen said the company is pursuing content licensing deals with other labels but declined to say whether talks are being held with the two remaining major recording companies — Warner Music Group Corp. and Sony BMG Music Entertainment.
SpiralFrog is seeking to grow its audience so it can lure more advertisers and revenue. Growing its catalog of music is key.
Universal Music accounted for about 31.2 percent of all U.S. album sales this year through May 25, according to Nielsen SoundScan. EMI accounted for about 8.7 percent.
Sony BMG and Warner Music together accounted for nearly 46 percent.
Independent labels, some of which already license content to SpiralFrog, accounted for about 14.1 percent of U.S. album sales, the firm said.
SpiralFrog says it will make more than 1.1 million tracks and 4,000 music videos, not including EMI's content, available to users within a few weeks.
"We will clearly have most major label content on our Web site by the end of the year," Mohen said.
Mohen said the company was still about a year away from turning a profit.