7 Negatives for Windows 7

Microsoft's latest operating system Windows 7 opened to rave reviews last week. After the dismal performance of its earlier operating system Vista, Microsoft seems to be heaving a sigh of relief at the grand reception that its new OS has received.

PC makers are scrambling to offer Windows 7-based systems, including Netbooks, as they hope the operating system to spur PC sales. After skidding for six months, computer shipments have shown some improvements recently. Seems Microsoft is all set to further strengthen its grasp over computer desktops.

Not really! As many skeptics beg to differ. According to them, Vista too got high marks before its release as well, with writers praising the new visual design and glossing over quirks that later became common gripes.

Here's looking into what may dampen Microsoft's Windows 7 party.
Shifting from XP

One of the biggest complain that most analysts have is the lack of direct upgrade from XP, the operating system which still continues to run on almost 80% of the world's computers. Windows 7 fails to offer a smooth transition from XP as there is no upgrade option. Users will have to go for a fresh install.

Writes Tony Bradley of PC World, "After the issues with Windows Vista, and knowing that the vast majority of users-both consumer and enterprise-are still relying on Windows XP, it seems like a direct upgrade path is a necessity. Many users may be frustrated by the lack of upgrade path and having to do a fresh install, reinstall all of the other software and migrate user settings. Microsoft has provided tools to ease the pain, but this is still the biggest opportunity for negative PR or backlash related to Windows 7."

According to Microsoft, the upgrade option is not available in Windows 7 Setup when installing Windows 7 on a computer running Windows XP. However, users can use Windows Easy Transfer to migrate files and settings from Windows XP to Windows 7 on the same computer.

Hardware upgrade

The basic requirements of a PC to run on Windows 7 are 1 GHz processor, minimum 1GB of RAM and 16GB hard drive space. This in simple words means any hardware that worked with Vista will work for Windows 7 too.

However, one of the most crucial reasons for Vista not succeeding was that the operating system almost forced a hardware upgrade on users. Hope the almost similar requirement does not hamper the prospects of Windows 7. It's is also to be noted here that that the basic PC configuration has seen a jump since Vista days.

Hardware and Drivers support

According to Bradley, Windows Vista stumbled due to the lack of hardware and device driver support. He writes, "The vendors just weren't ready when Vista was launched and Vista never really recovered from the damaged reputation even after most of those issues were resolved."

It is not a great experience for users working on a new operating system to find out that their existing printer, wireless router, webcam, and other peripheral hardware devices don't work with the new OS. This means either they stop working on that hardware or look for new hardware that is compatible.

UAC is still there!

The most controversial and much maligned feature of Vista, UAC or User Account Control is a part of Windows 7 too. The UAC was designed to prevent unauthorised execution of code by displaying a pop-up warning every time a change is being made to the system, whether by the operating system or a third-party application.

Many Vista users complained of being bombarded with the warnings. It proved a huge annoyance for users installing new applications frequently. Windows 7 now allows you to set the level of information that a user desires.

However, writes Bradley, "... still after much debate with the security community during the Beta testing, the default setting is still set to what users experienced with Windows Vista. Frankly, UAC serves a purpose and it is better to leave it alone. But, those who dislike UAC are going to have to go into the control panel and modify the configuration to their liking or be faced with the same pop-ups that annoyed the world with Vista."

Vista's ghost

The failure of Vista continues to cast a deep shadow on the Microsoft's fresh launch, especially among the business users. Most enterprise customers skipped Windows Vista reportedly due to the numerous technical glitches that the OS had. According to reviewers, the operating system suffered from frequent hangs and crashes, and incompatibility with certain software and hardware.

A section of analysts believes that `Vista's reputation' may hamper Microsoft's efforts to convince enterprises about the Windows 7 improved features.

Ahead of the launch, Microsoft chief executive Steve Ballmer said that the company's reputation never recovered from the poor performance of Vista. Ballmer said Microsoft's reputation took a beating after the release of Vista in 2007, an operating system which caused computers to hang indefinitely, among many other technical glitches.

High pricing

Price is seen as one of biggest issue that may dampen the Windows 7 release. Microsoft is charging $199.99 for the Home Premium version of Windows 7, or $119.99 for users seeking to upgrade from older versions of the operating system. However, India pricing seems to be comparatively low.

In India, the Home Basic package will cost about Rs 5,899, while the Windows 7 Ultimate (high-end version) will be available for Rs 11,799. In the US, the high-end version costs $320 (Rs 15,000).

Microsoft Vista Home basic costs around Rs 3,500, Home Premium version is priced at Rs 4,800. Microsoft Vista Business costs around Rs 6,400 while Microsoft Vista Ultimate is priced at Rs 9,500.

PC makers HCL Infosystems, Acer and Hewlett Packard have already started shipping Windows pre-loaded PCs and notebook computers. HP India will retail Windows 7-preloaded PCs between Rs 27,990 and Rs 90,000. HP's preloaded Windows 7 notebooks will be priced at Rs 39,990 onwards.

Acer PCs with Windows 7 OS will be priced between Rs 15,000 and Rs 35,000, while the notebooks will be priced at Rs 21,000-Rs 70,000. HCL Infosystems' Executive Vice President George Paul informed that HCL will price it between Rs 16,000 and Rs 55,000, whereas the notebooks would cost Rs 22,000-Rs 80,000.

Launch timing

Microsoft’s big release coincides with one of the worst phases in the global economy. The past few months have witnessed a downfall in the spending as cost-cutting became the mantra for businesses around the world.

Though most companies see a recovery on the horizon, they still see no big jump in corporate budgets. The companies globally continue to remain cautious and are tightly guarding their purses.

Certain analysts believe that the tough economic climate may impact the sales of Windows 7. At the same time, PC makers like Lenovo are betting on the new operating system to revive the falling computer sales.

Piracy

Another big challenge for Microsoft is to deal with piracy. Even before the official release of Windows 7, authentic looking pirate copies of the OS were available in China for a mere $3.

According to Reuters, Windows 7 has been openly available in China's grey market for over a month now. Shopkeepers in Shanghai’s Xinyang market are said to be offering all versions of Windows 7, in both Chinese and English for just 20 yuan ($2.93). This compares with the list price of up to $320.

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First Cut: Google Chrome 3.0

Google Inc has rolled out a new version of its Chrome Web browser as the company aims to double its browser marketshare. The Internet search company is readying a battery of updates, along with efforts to forge new distribution partnerships it hopes will soon make Chrome a much more significant player.

Almost exactly one year into Google's high-profile entry into the browser market dominated by Microsoft Corp, the Internet search giant is a distant No. 4, with a marketshare of roughly 2.8 per cent.

Version 3.0 of Chrome for PCs brings improvements to the browser's interface, including faster performance and "themes" that allow users to customise how the browser looks.

Here's looking inside Google Chrome 3.0.

Goes blazing fast

Google Chrome 3.0 is significantly faster than its predecessor, claims the company. The updated Chrome boasts over 150% jump in Javascript performance since its very first beta, and a 25% jump from the most recent version.

The browser starts up quickly from users' desktop, and is fast to load web pages and web applications, says the company.

New Tabs

Chrome 3.0's new features include more customisable tab pages. The tab page, which opens by default when a user starts the browser, is redesigned and allows greater customisation.

Users can now rearrange thumbnails of their most-visited websites by simply clicking and dragging mouse. Additionally, they can "pin down" icons to keep them permanently in-place (otherwise, they continuously rearrange to show user's most recently visited sites).

Chrome 3.0 also allows users to view the tab page icons in a list format, if they prefer, or to hide them from the page altogether. For example, users can hide parts of the page they don't want to see, or even opt for a simple list view of their most visited websites.

Omnibox goes new

Chrome 3.0 upgrades Omnibox, the address bar at the top of the screen where a user type URLs or search terms. So far, the Omnibox offered users suggestions as they type in terms. In the new Chrome release, the suggestions are better organised with an optimised dropdown menu. The 3.0 Omnibox uses added icons bookmarks, history, common searches, or Google recommendations.

Chrome 3.0 Omnibox has added little icons to show users whether the items come from searches, bookmarks, or sites from their browsing history.

HTML 5 capabilities

Google Chrome 3.0 adds support for HTML5 capabilities, including the 'video' and `audio' tags for integrated embedding of multimedia elements.

The ‘video’ tag in HTML5 makes embedding videos in a page as simple as embedding regular images. The video tag also allows video playback without plug-ins or external utilities.

Users can give the ‘video’ tag a whirl in Google Chrome and also check out 50th Chrome Experiment, which uses HTML5 ‘audio’ and ‘canvas’ tags.

Themes

Chrome 3.0 offers users customisable themes. Just a couple of clicks, and users can get a new look for their browser and apply it immediately. Themes allow users to deck up their browser with colours, patterns and images.






Nearly 30 options are reportedly available in Chrome's Themes Gallery, and many more are likely to be added soon.
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Review: Chrome vs Firefox3 vs IE8 vs Safari4

The web browser battle is going fiercer. The recent updation to all the popular browsers has taken the battle to next frontier. From Microsoft IE to Mozilla Firefox to Google Chrome to Apple Safari, all have upped the ante adding a variety of new elements, security updates and a host of next-gen navigational features.

So here's a compare meter that evaluates the latest version of Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Apple Safari on various parameters.

1. Speed

IE8: Microsoft claims that the new browser is faster in almost every respect. It loads faster, switches pages faster, and renders complex graphics and videos faster than previous versions. The company released a report, titled Measuring Browser Performance: Understanding issues in benchmarking and performance analysis, which shows IE 8 faster than Firefox 3.05 and Google's Chrome browser. Microsoft spelled out how it tests browsers in-house, and stressed that it doesn't buy the idea that benchmarks -- such as those that score JavaScript performance -- accurately compare the players.

Firefox 3: Firefox claims that improvements to the JavaScript engine as well as profile guided optimisation have enhanced the performance of Firefox 3.0. Firefox 3.0 enables web applications like Google Mail and Zoho Office to run twice as fast compared to Firefox 2.

Safari 4: Apple claims Safari 4 to be the world's fastest Web browser. According to the company, Safari 4’s Nitro JavaScript engine makes it up to 30 times faster than Internet Explorer 7, Firefox 3, and Google Chrome.

Chrome: Google recently released the first major update to its Chrome browser aimed at the general public since Google entered the browser business six months ago. According to Google, the new Chrome beta loads certain types of Web pages 25 per cent to 35 per cent faster than the current version of the browser.

2. Security

IE8: IE8 beefs up protection against malware and known phishing scam sites. It comes with built-in technology to protect against another kind of threat, "cross-site scripting," in which hackers insert code into legitimate Web pages that compromise peoples' computers without them knowing it. IE 8 disables the bad scripts but in most cases allows others needed for a Web page to run as usual. IE 8 also prevents another kind of attack called "clickjacking," where a Web surfer might think he is clicking on a legitimate button when in fact he is activating an invisible, malicious action.

Firefox 3: This too adds several new security features. An important addition is One-click site info where the users can click the site favicon in the location bar to see who owns the site and to check if their connection is protected from eavesdropping. The identity verification is prominently displayed in the new version. The new version also has enhanced malware protection which warns users when they enter a site which can install viruses, spyware, trojans or other malware.

Safari 4: There are no new security features in Safari 4 beta. However, the browser has all the security features from the previous version, these include phishing and malware protection, anti-virus integration, cookie blocking, parental controls and option to customize offline database storage size.

Chrome: For safe browsing experience, Chrome regularly keeps on downloading a list of harmful sites. This is the Internet search giant's attempt to fight malware and phishing attacks. Google also promises that whatever will run in a tab will be filtered so that it doesn't affect user’s machine.

3. Navigation

IE8: Microsoft browser introduces Tab Groups, which makes tabbed browsing easier. When one tab is opened from another, the new tab is placed next to the originating tab and colour coded, so that users can quickly see which tabs have related content. Also, the new Address Bar of IE8 automatically recalls sites users visited based on their entry.

Firefox 3: The new version promises more organised and clutter-free experience. An information bar replaces the old password dialogue so that users can now save passwords after a successful login. The revised Download Manager makes it easier to locate downloaded files, and users can search the name of the website where the file came from. The new version makes it possible to install extensions from third-party sites in fewer clicks. Another feature that adds volume to the new version is Full page zoom.

Safari 4: The browser features a new preview for favorite websites and new tabs. Called Top Sites, the new feature lets users preview a listing of favorite websites without navigating to a new screen. It also presents 24 thumbnails on a single page for better viewing. The feature supports grid-style snap-and-place which is fully customisable. Safari 4 also offers enhanced keyboard navigation options.

Chrome: Instead of traditional tabs like those seen in Firefox or Internet Explorer, Chrome puts the tab buttons on the upper side of the window, not below the address bar. Web programmes can be launched in their own dedicated windows. The browser has an address bar `omnibox' with auto-completion features. It offers search suggestions, top pages that a user visited and pages he didn’t visit but are popular.

4. Key feature additions

IE8: IE8 packs a new feature called Accelerators which allows users to highlight text on a website and choose from a variety of functions, including search engines, language translation or map displays. Another time-saving feature of IE 8 is called Web Slices, which is designed to allow you to subscribe to frequently-updated portions, or "slices," of certain websites.

Firefox 3: The new version promises secured data protection. User's bookmarks, history, cookies, and preferences will now be stored in a secure database format which will prevent data loss even if their system crashes.

Safari 4: Apple Safari 4 debuts a new feature called "Cover Flow" which provides easy reviewing of site history and bookmarked websites. Similar to Top Sites, it presents previews on what the pages looked like when a user visited them. The Web browser is using advanced caching to display the websites exactly the way they were shown during visits. Apple has also added a new "Full History Search" for Top Sites and Cover Flow in Safari 4.

Chrome: As a default homepage, the browser offers a Seed Dial feature. This gives users a view of their most visited Web pages in 9 screenshot thumbnails. Also, the browser supports multi-tasking. Just like in a typical operating system each application is given its own memory and its own copy of global data structures. Applications will launch in their own windows so that if one should hang or crash it won’t affect the others. This will also prevent the whole browser from crashing.

5. Bookmarking

IE8: IE now offers a better place to keep track of top favorites. Users can save Favorites, RSS Feeds, and Web Slices to the Favorites bar that appears across the top of the browser, quickly navigating to the sites and content they want.

Firefox 3.0: Users can add bookmarks from the location bar with a single click. A dropdown box lets users name it, choose a folder to put it in as well as add a tag to categorise it. There is also a Smart Bookmarks Folder from where users can access recently-bookmarked and tagged pages, as well as most-frequently visited pages. Another feature called Places Organiser will help users view, organise and search through all bookmarks, tags, and browsing history with multiple views and smart folders to store frequent searches.

Safari 4: Safari has Auto-Click bookmarks feature that lets users automatically open the bookmarks inside a bookmark folder, each in a separate tab. It also provides an iTunes-style interface where users can view, create, and organise their bookmarks.

Chrome: To add a bookmark in Chrome just click the star icon at the left edge of the address bar and its done. Google Chrome also has a bookmark manager (Ctrl+Shift+B) to better organise bookmarks and folders. To create a Bookmark folder: In the folder list on the left, right-click the location where you want the new folder to reside and select Add folder. Use the search box at the top to locate a bookmark within the manager.

6. Private browsing

IE8: Microsoft has added some new privacy features, including a mode for Web browsing that doesn't remember what sites were visited nor stores small data files called cookies.

Chrome: Google's Chrome calls this Incognito mode. This mode lets users create an "incognito" window where "nothing that occurs in that window is ever logged onto your computer." This is a read-only feature with access to one's bookmarks or favorite sites.

Firefox 3: In Firefox, you can achieve something close to Incognito mode by choosing to clear private date from the Edit - Preferences - Privacy dialogue box.

Safari 4: The browser too offers Private Browsing mode. So, when you surf the web on a shared or public PC, Safari can protect your personal information. Safari doesn’t save or cache any personal information you enter or pages you visit.


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Review: Google Voice

Google Voice wants to be the center of your voice communications. The Web-based service combines a lot of things: a permanent follow-around phone number; voice mail with transcriptions; and text messaging, to name a few. What it lacks—consistently high call quality, full recording capabilities, flawless conferencing and transcription—prevents it from being truly comprehensive. But that's just for now. And it's so close as it is that it earns our Editors' Choice for a unified messaging solution

The central feature of Google Voice is the single, permanent, virtual phone number. When called, that number simultaneously rings any or all of your physical (and verified) phones. The feature is just about perfect at what it does.

Also part of the package are outbound, Internet-based calls. The service isn't PC-based like Skype, though the calls are placed via the Web interface. Enter a number in the Call dialog box, tell it which of your phones to ring, and click Connect. Answer your phone when it rings, then Google Voice calls the outgoing number for you. The dialog box ties to the anemic Google Contacts, the same contact list you have in Gmail. Start typing a name to autocomplete who you want to call. You never have to touch your phone to dial. (Right now, there's no way to port an existing phone number to Google Voice. But the rumor is that portability is coming soon.)

Buzz up!on Yahoo!

This service is free within the contiguous 48 states, but calls elsewhere will cost you. Every trial Google Voice user gets $1 in credit, which you'll need to call Hawaii (2 cents per minute) or Alaska (4 cents per minute), Canada (1 cent per minute), and Mexico (8 cents per minute). Other rates vary, but are always cheaper than through the phone company. You can replenish credit for Google Voice via a Google Checkout account.

If there's a downside to the calls, it's that they are based on voice over IP (VoIP). If you use a VoIP service like Vonage, then use Google Voice to call someone on a cell phone in a weak area, that's a lot of hops on the Internet and wireless towers—and the lag is noticeable. But I've never had a call so bad in quality I couldn't get through it.

Calling out will display your Google Voice number on the recipient's caller ID, but old-fashioned phone-to-phone calls will show your regular phone's number, not the Google Voice number you want to be ubiquitous. At least one third-party iPhone app, GV Mobile, makes outbound calls look like they come from Google Voice.

Google Voice's Web interface is very reminiscent of Gmail. The inbox lists all the messages and recorded conversations. You can star important items to find later, delete what you don't need, and even report voice mail spam. Click the history link to get a full account of every call in and out, including when it was made and its duration. Drop-down menus provide fast access to returning calls or sending texts. (The inbox is accessible on mobile phones via www.google.com/voice/m/.)

When a call comes in, you have the choice of answering directly, sending it to voice mail, ignoring it entirely, or answering and recording it. Hit the 4 key any time during a call to record. An automated voice will always alert both parties when you start recording, so you can't get away with anything. Recording doesn't work with outgoing calls. All recordings can be played back on the Web or downloaded as MP3 files. You can embed a player in a Gmail message or on a Web page (just as you would a YouTube video).

Google Voice's voice mail transcription is spotty. Simple messages, with just a name and number, are no problem. But longer or low-volume messages are a tad more difficult. It's fascinating to play back a message and watch the transcription highlight areas of text where it recognizes its own shortcomings, but you can't use that feature to improve future transcriptions. And it's disappointing that the system won't transcribe your recorded phone calls. Regardless, a full ten-digit number shows up in the transcription as a link you can click to easily call back.

Up to four people can be conferenced on a single call as long as they all call your Google Voice number and you're on a standard phone with CallerID and a flash button. This works well in perfect circumstances, when you have time to answer each call and hit the 5 key to conference everyone in. But if more than one person calls at a time you get chaos—plus a lot of voice mails asking what's going on.

It's only natural in this day of ubiquitous text messaging that a service like Google Voice should support SMS. With a drop-down dialog box similar to that used to make outgoing calls, you enter a phone number, or pick one from Google Contacts' autocomplete list. Type in your 160 characters and send out the message. The recipient will see that it came from your Google Voice number. Replies go directly to your Google Voice inbox—in fact, the inbox will hold entire SMS conversations, echoing the abilities of Gmail. Replies can be CCed to your cell phone; they'll appear to have come from a number with a 406 area code number, because Google uses a swath of unused numbers from Montana.

Despite its shortcomings, Google Voice is pretty fantastic as a personal switchboard. As it's another perpetual beta product, expect those deficiencies to eventually be addressed. If you've already given yourself over to Google for contacts, calendar, e-mail and more, this is just one more step—and you'll likely find yourself happy with the result.

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Review: Safari 4

Very Good:

Safari won't change the browser game the way the iPhone has changed mobile phones. This year's Apple Worldwide Developer Conference billed it as "the fastest and most innovative browser." While it is both fast (with the Nitro JavaScript engine) and innovative (thanks to some UI enhancements), I don't buy the superlatives. Google Chrome is still the speed leader on my tests, and Safari 4 lacks innovations, like the WebSlices and Accelerators in Internet Explorer and the extreme customizability of Firefox. Nevertheless, Safari (on both Mac and Windows) is definitely a fine performer in terms of speed and usability.

Setup and the New Look

I had no problem installing Safari 4 on my Vista system, and the browser was up and running in short order. At 27MB, the download is bulkier than that of the smallest browser, Chrome, which is a mere half megabyte. Then again, Safari offers more features. Mac users should note that the installer requires OS 10.5.6—10.5.5 won't do. When you first run Safari 4, you'll see a new animated splash screen featuring the Apple logo, complete with inspirational music.

For the final release, Safari backtracked on one of the beta's distinguishing interface features, the Chrome-like "Tabs on Top," which placed page tabs above the address bar. Another change from the beta is the return of the page-load progress bar: It's in a different form now, in the right-hand side of the address bar.
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The released version of Safari 4 does retain the most eye-catching trait of the Safari 4 beta, Top Sites, which shows your most-accessed Web pages in a glorious 3D view. In this and elsewhere, Safari 4 brings the added elegance and clever interface ideas we've come to expect from Apple. One example is the incorporation of Cover Flow in the browser's history list. Sure, it's mostly eye candy, but it's at the same time stylish and useful.

When you open a tab, you see the new Top Sites page, a curved, 3D grid of images of your most frequently visited Web sites. An Edit button lets you remove any of these thumbnails, and you can drag any mini-page to a spot of your choice and "pin" it to that spot. If a site in your Top Sites group has new content, a blue dog-ear with a star shows up in the page's top right corner. In some ways, I prefer Opera's approach, which adds only sites you specify to the speed-dial thumbnails. Still, I can see Chrome and Safari's rationale, that people are more likely to use the feature if it's automatically populated.

Unlike the bare-bones Chrome, Safari includes a handy sidebar, which you can show by clicking the book icon at the top left of the window. The sidebar has a variety of functions: You can choose from among History, Bookmarks, Bonjour networking, and a basic RSS reader. Any of these sidebar choices takes advantage of the scrolling Cover Flow view in the top half of the main center panel, while the bottom half offers a simple list of the links. You can scroll back and forth through the Cover Flow images via mouse wheel, or you can use a slider beneath the images.

Safari's bookmark management is adequate, but I was unable to import more than one IE bookmark at a time. Chrome has the same problem, whereas Firefox let me import a whole folder at once. Safari also lacks Firefox's ability to show recently bookmarked items and its tagging capability.

Also new for Version 4 is a native Windows look for the browser, in Classic, XP, and Vista flavors. This means that window borders (nonexistent in previous versions of Safari for Windows) now look like those of other apps. The Mac version, of course, maintains the border-free look. Windows users also now receive the standard Windows fonts they're used to seeing, instead of Apple's more minimalist standard fonts. And in the Windows version, you get the same two toolbar icons you get in Chrome, for page and general settings—possibly showing the browsers' similar WebKit roots.

You can customize the buttons you want on your toolbar, such as New Tab and Home, but Safari still comes nowhere near Firefox in customizability. The Mozilla browser not only avails itself of thousands of extensions that alter both appearance and function, but even offers "Fashion My Firefox" and Personas to help users with the sea of available customizations.

Safari does an excellent job of implementing tabs, though I'm a bit disappointed that its designers abandoned the beta's bold, Chrome-like design concept of moving the tabs to the very top of the application's window. Media critics lambasted the feature, so Apple retreated, and now Safari looks pretty much like any tabbed browser. The plus sign for adding a new tab is way off to the right now, and is easily missed—I prefer Opera's clearer tab addition system. I also am disappointed that Safari's tabs don't show site icons for a nice visual clue, as they do in all the other major browsers, even Chrome.

Some of the problems with Safari beta's late, lamented (by me, at least) Tabs on Top, however, have gone away too. You won't minimize (in Mac OS) by double-clicking a tab now, and the lined handle needed to move the tab around is gone. You can move the tabs back and forth on the bar, and even out onto the desktop to create a new window. A neat little thumbnail of the page represents the page, and this zooms up to full size when you release it. I could also drag a tab from one browser window into another. Hover the mouse over any tab and the "X" for closing it appears. This is better than in IE, which shows the X only for the active window—sometimes you want to kill a background tab.

Smart Address Field and Smart Search Field

Unlike Chrome, which thinks you should use the same text entry box for both Web addresses and searches—something I'm still not really comfortable with—Safari 4 keeps addresses and search entries separate. Both have been enhanced in this version, too. The address bar, officially called the Smart Address Field, adds functionality that has become de rigueur in today's browser: predictions of what page you want from the moment you start typing. This showed up first in Firefox 3 (where insiders dubbed it the "awesome bar"), and subsequent releases of Internet Explorer, Opera, and Chrome have all followed suit. It's a good addition, but Apple's really just playing catch-up, here.

Still, Safari's version of the predictive address bar is clever; it seems to offer fewer, more targeted suggestions, and its Top Pick suggestion is highlighted. What this means is that you don't have to hit the Down Arrow to navigate to the Top Pick—hitting Enter gets you there. This may seem trivial, but anything that saves you from hunting and pecking a keystroke streamlines browsing considerably over time. The predictions come not only from page titles and URLs in your history, as they do in Firefox, but also from the complete text of Web pages. So even if you remember only a topic discussed on a page, rather than the site name, you'll see it suggested.

The Smart Search Field does one of those "why didn't anyone think of this before?" things: It combines Web search and on-page search. The option for the latter appears at the bottom of the suggestion drop-down box. When you do search for text on the page, all but your found terms will be dimmed. I do wish Web search in the bar would offer more choices than just Google or Yahoo—Bing and Ask.com fans are out of luck.

Performance and Compatibility

Though Safari was considerably faster at JavaScript rendering than IE 8, Chrome is still the leader—but just barely. I tested using the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark on my 2-GHz Athlon dual-core test system with 2MB of RAM, running Vista Safari 4, which returned a score of 1,707 milliseconds—a remarkable improvement over the beta's 3,757 ms (lower numbers indicate quicker rendering times). This trounces Internet Explorer 8's awful 10,108 ms and puts Safari within spitting distance of Google Chrome's 1,656 ms. Firefox 3 holds the middle ground, taking 6,371 ms, though the soon-to-be-released version 3.5 aims to change this, with its new TraceMonkey JavaScript engine. Once distinguished for speed, Opera is now middling, at 7,884 ms.

In the real world, browsing demanding pages with Version 4 usually felt snappy. In general, I felt that Safari was about tied with Chrome, though that browser loaded the demanding Stickam.com noticeably faster. In start-up time, Safari was comparable with the current generation of browsers, taking less than 2 seconds on my test system.

Firefox is still the leader in one respect, however: memory use. When I opened the same set of ten tabs filled with media-intensive sites in each browser, Safari 4 took up 434MB of RAM, whereas Firefox 3 used up only 121MB of RAM. Chrome used 213MB, and Opera 259MB, while Internet Explorer trailed all, at 484MB. Safari is close to the bottom, here. And, unlike tabs in Chrome and Internet Explorer 8, Safari's aren't run in separate processes, a technique that can limit the severity of site crashes.

In compatibility, I didn't run across any sites displaying "Browser not supported" pages, nor did I find instances of misrendered pages. In one "official" measure of standards compliance, Safari 4 joins only Opera 10 beta in passing the Acid3 browser compatibility test. Though it's not a definitive measure of correct site rendering, Acid3 gives an indication of support for features that Web developers hope to use in the future. In this vein, Safari 4 supports HTML 5 features such as the video and audio tags, as well as has the ability to run Web applications off-line. It also can render CSS3 effects, like gradients and reflections.

Version 4 doesn't add new security and privacy features, but updates to Version 3 already added pretty much everything you'd expect in that area: private browsing, antiphishing and anti-malware tools, and support for Extended Validation (EV) Certificates. The private browsing feature, unlike that in Internet Explorer, Firefox 3.5, and Chrome, doesn't have any icon indicating you're in the mode, and on my tests it did indeed keep private browsing session URLs out of history and Smart Address bar's autosuggestions.

Safari 4 adds some welcome innovations, while catching up with the competition in some features. Its fast page rendering and stylish 3D interface features, like Cover Flow, will appeal to many. It's a bit of a memory hog, however, and fans of Firefox's extensions won't be tempted to switch, as Safari doesn't offer anywhere near that browser's level of customization. While most Mac users are likely to avail themselves of the new browser's advances, Windows users who like alternatives to Internet Explorer will probably get more out of Firefox or Chrome.

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Review: Secure Your Online Transactions(Safecentral 2.0)

Last summer Authentium released SafeCentral, a hardened browser specifically designed for secure online transactions. While its protection proved durable, the product itself had some rough edges. SafeCentral 2.0 ($39.95 per year direct) retains all the protection of the original product but in a much slicker package.

The basic operation of the product hasn't changed. Rather than try to ensure that the computer is free of malware, SafeCentral creates an isolated malware-free environment for secure browsing. No process running in the regular Windows environment can reach inside SafeCentral's environment. Malware can't meddle, and keyloggers can't log keystrokes or capture images. It even uses its own Domain Name System (DNS) lookup rather than relying on the easily fooled Windows DNS. For a full description of the program's operation, refer to the SafeCentral 1.0 review. This review will concentrate on the functional and usability improvements.

New Secure Desktop

In version 1.0 SafeBrowser opened on the regular Windows desktop but dimmed all other running applications, indicating that they can't act while the SafeBrowser is open. Version 2.0 replaces the entire desktop. When you click the SafeCentral taskbar button, a tough-looking metallic desktop slides into place with an audible clang (you can turn off the sliding animation and the clang).

Going forward Authentium plans to offer additional applications within the safe desktop, but for now SafeBrowser is alone. Well, almost. It shares the desktop with a sparse Start menu whose single menu item launches SafeBrowser.

I commented in my earlier review that the desktop clock stopped ticking with SafeBrowser active. The new safe desktop has a taskbar clock. Its taskbar also includes two indicators to show that the anti-malware and secure DNS features are working. There's no option to turn these features off, so if they're not green it means the program has been compromised somehow.

The previous edition of SafeBrowser used a SafeCentral-specific site-selection page as its home page. To select a supported site, you would either flip through a set of thumbnails with company logos or dig into a category tree. Version 2.0 completely discards this method of choosing a Web site. You simply browse wherever you please within the safe desktop. When you're using Internet Explorer or Firefox on the regular Windows desktop, SafeCentral watches for known sensitive sites. If it spots one, it pops up and offers to open that site in SafeBrowser instead—simple! And there's an option to always use SafeBrowser for that site automatically. SafeBrowser's home page is still fixed, but now it's locked to an MSN Live Search page.

Version 2.0 also offers up a series of short videos explaining how the product works and how to use it. That makes sense. The purpose of a secure browser may not be clear to everyone, so the videos spell out just what the program does and how it helps.

SafeBrowser Changes

SafeBrowser is still based on Firefox, but it now allows some familiar Firefox features that were suppressed in version 1.0. You still can't install a third-party password manager like Lastpass or RoboForm, but Firefox's built-in password manager is enabled. Additionally, the phishing protection built into Firefox is active in SafeCentral 2.0.

Probably the biggest difference is that you can now open multiple browser windows or tabs within the safe desktop. Where the previous version completely suppressed the menu, version 2.0 includes many standard Firefox menu items. You can save bookmarks within SafeBrowser (naturally they're separate from any bookmarks in your regular browser). SafeCentral still doesn't record history.

Getting into SafeCentral is also much, much faster than with the previous edition. Launching the older SafeBrowser could take as much as 20 or 30 seconds. Version 2.0 slides into place immediately. The app's developers also seem to have cured the general browsing slowdown that was evident in the earlier version.

There's some similarity between SafeBrowser and the Secure View browser found in ID Vault 4.0. The latter is a stripped-down version of Internet Explorer, while SafeBrowser is based on Firefox. Secure View limits IE's threat exposure by banning all add-ins and limiting what the user can do. However, it isn't isolated from other processes the way SafeBrowser is, and it doesn't protect against malware or keyloggers.

Keyloggers Still Stymied

I tested SafeCentral 2.0 using several of the commercial keyloggers from my anti-malware testing sample collection. I installed them and verified that all of them were able to capture both keystrokes and screen images. Then I switched to the SafeBrowser and typed some text into the Google search box. I also typed in the address bar. I left the safe desktop running for several minutes to give the keyloggers a chance to snap some screenshots. Then I switched back to the regular desktop and checked the keyloggers.

None of them captured a single keystroke typed during the SafeBrowser session. One of them saved blank white screens for its periodic screenshots while the other two didn't capture anything at all. Nor could they capture text that was copied to the clipboard during the secure session. Success!

Now for a little harsh reality. Installing SafeCentral won't let you get rid of your existing security products. You still need firewall, anti-malware, and the like. Also, SafeCentral's protection isn't truly needed unless those existing products fall down on the job. This is an extra $40 per year to further secure your online transactions. Depending on your budget that may be fine, or not.

The secure browsing offered by SafeCentral 2.0 isn't significantly different from that of the first version, but it's packaged and presented in a way that's much easier to use. Unnecessary restrictions have been lifted from the SafeBrowser, the new safe desktop opens quickly, and I didn't observe a slowdown in browsing. If you're concerned enough about the security of your online transactions to pay the price, you can rely on SafeCentral to protect them.

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Review: Chrome on Linux: Rough, fast & promising

I'd been waiting for Chrome on Linux since Chrome first showed up. Chrome, if you haven't tried it, is the speed-demon of Web browsers. I love it. But, until now, there really wasn't a version that would run natively on Linux. Starting last night, June 4th, Google released developer's versions of Chrome for Macs and Linux. They're rough, really rough, but they're also really fast. Here's what I found in my first hours of working with Chrome on Linux.

I downloaded the developer release 3.0.183.1 on two different Linux systems. One was running MEPIS 8 and the other had Ubuntu 9.04. Both are Debian-based Linux distributions, and I chose them for that since Chrome is currently only available in 32 and 64-bit versions in the DEB format. You can install DEB packages in Linux distributions that use RPM program packaging systems, but I didn't want to introduce any more variables than possible in looking at alpha software.

In the event, while Chrome installed without a hitch in both, on MEPIS, it wasn't able to connect with any network services, so I dropped looking at it on that Linux for now. On my Ubuntu 9.04 PC it was a different story. On this Gateway 503GR with a 3GHz Pentium IV CPU, 2GB of RAM, an ATI Radeon 250 graphics card, and a 300GB SATA (Serial Advanced Technology Attachment) hard drive, Chrome ran with blazing speed.

It also, I should say, ran remarkably badly. It's been years since I've seen normal CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and HTML pages render quite so horribly. Columns wouldn't line up and there were visual artifacts from the top of every page to the bottom.

But, as Google Chrome developers, Mike Smith and Karen Grunberg, said in their Chromium blog, about the Mac and Linux releases: "please DON'T DOWNLOAD THEM! Unless of course you are a developer or take great pleasure in incomplete, unpredictable, and potentially crashing software."

Well, Chrome on Ubuntu hasn't crashed on me, but it sure has done everything else wrong that it could. Except, that is, run slowly.

So, in brief, here's what doesn't work on this alpha version of Chrome: plug-ins; media-players like Flash; printing; security settings; Firefox bookmark importing, and a host of other problems. For the full, at the moment, list you can visit the Chromium issues page.

The developers are quite right. This is no browser for anyone except Chromium, Chrome's open-source project, developers or people who want to play with the fastest new toys. There is no way anyone could use Chrome on Linux as an ordinary browser.

That said, I love it. I feel like a 16-year old with a broken down car that can do 0-to-70-MPH (miles per hour) in less than 7 seconds. It may be junk, but boy, it's fast junk.

How fast? On the SunSpider JavaScript Benchmark, the Chrome alpha came in at 1227.4ms (milliseconds). On the same system, Firefox 3.0.10 came in at 5564.8ms. Need I say more?

So use Chrome on Linux now? No, forget about it. But, you can bet I'm looking forward to using it on a daily basis on my Linux systems when it goes fina--whenever that will be! Google, as usual, isn't talking. Come that day, Firefox 3.5, which was recently delayed, will be in for some real competition.

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Review: Microsoft Bing

Very Good

Sitting on a commanding 63 percent Internet search market share, Google nevertheless is being challenged all the time. Upstart Wolfram Alpha just attacked on the techie end, and now Microsoft's Bing appeals to everyday consumers. Google continues to add new capabilities, like local results and the recent Search Options sidebar; in many cases, the leader's actually playing catch-up, adding features the competition already has. Microsoft, with only 8 percent of the market, has arguably been more energetic, completely revamping its search site. Bing (previously called Live Search, and code-named Kumo for the last few months) is finally here. With Bing, Microsoft's goal is not only to finding Web pages for you, but also to help you make decisions, and to deliver useful information on the results page itself. And in many ways, it succeeds.

After using Live Search and Bing for a few months, I found that basic Web search results were comparable among all three major search engines—Google, Bing, and Yahoo. Most users won't see much difference in the search process. And lately I've been finding that a good number of searches on all three lead first to a useful result from Wikipedia. I did a ton of parallel searches to compare the engines.

In one, I searched for Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez's "vergatorio" cell phone, and the results were nearly identical. However, the second Google result was in Spanish, which was odd as I was signed in with my Google account, which knows my language and location. Searching for "online photo album" brought up similar results in Google and Bing, though in Yahoo there were so many ads that I could see only one result on the page. In a search for "Dead Sea Salinity," only Bing delivered the answer in the first result. (Incidentally, Wolfram Alpha returned an incorrect answer of 3.5 percent, when it's actually 35 percent.)
Buzz up!on Yahoo!

On the whole, however, all three of the big-name engines do a decent job on basic searches. So when results look pretty much the same, how can one engine stand out? Microsoft's answer has been to focus on improving other tasks people use Web searches for beyond simply finding Web pages. Like Ask.com, Microsoft wants people to get the answers they're looking for without having to click on one of the links turned up by the search engine. Bing has specifically concentrated its efforts in the areas of shopping, travel, and health. Travel, in particular, has been addressed with the acquisition and enhancement of Farecast, which can predict the best time to purchase an airline ticket for your itinerary.

Bing's most effective tool for bringing you info directly from the results page is its rollover page preview. Hovering the cursor to the right edge of any Web result brings up a small window containing text from the linked page. It can even find relevant deep links within that page. It's great for getting a peek at pages that are relevant, and for helping avoid clicking through to pages that aren't. When your mouse is anywhere on top of a result, a vertical rule shows up at its right edge to visually clue you that this preview is available. It's one of those features that you quickly get used to and come to expect. I now find myself missing it on Google search results pages.

Interface:

I have to say I've become a fan of the new stunning images, usually of fascinating geographical subjects, that Bing presents on its home page each day. You can also see the last week's worth of images. The images include rollovers with links to information, photos, and videos on the subject. Note that the search box functionality is loaded before the main image, so if you're on a slow connection you don't need to wait for the background to load to start searching.

Another goal of the redesign was to get away from simply presenting a list of blue links as the results. Bing groups results in categories with subheads, and left-panel choices let you limit results to a category. Bing keeps the layout consistent, with the left-hand side panel always showing options or search refinements. Some results also have horizontal "deep links"—those that lead directly to major category pages within found sites. This leaves room for more results.

Another cool feature is the ability to "search within" a large site using a search box under the result; a specialized case of this lets you enter a FedEx or UPS tracking number right on the result page. For larger, more obvious entities, such as Best Buy, where you're really just using the search engine for navigation rather than simply typing the store's URL in the address bar, Bing yields a "Best Match" to minimize confusion. Another nice large-site touch: Bingo often puts the company's customer support phone number right in the result. Note that this works only for select major sites that Microsoft has specially indexed.

Because so many searches are simply re-searches—those the user has performed before—Bing keeps your search history in the left-hand panel visible on all result pages. And when you hit Show All, the Save and Share option becomes available. As the name suggests, this lets you save past searches to a local disk folder or a SkyDrive folder (requires a Windows Live ID), or to share it via Facebook, e-mail, or Windows Live.

Travel Search

Thanks to Microsoft's acquisition of Farecast last year, Bing integrates a heavy-duty travel-planning tool. Each day, Farecast sifts through millions of itineraries from several airline information services, and Bing draws on the resulting data. You can access this information directly via Bing's Travel left-panel option. But even if you just type something like "Denver Flights" in the regular search box, you get a "Cheap tickets" result. Further, the top result has a big arrow pointing up, diagonally, or down to indicate whether the fare is expected to rise, stay the same, or go down. Choosing a result takes you to a whole Orbitz-like travel planner page. Though the page is distractingly inconsistent with the rest of the interface layout, it lets you do cool things like view a graph showing projected prices for your itinerary over the next month.

Farecast comes in especially handy when you have a time and budget for your vacation but don't know where to go. A map view shows you fares for routes from your location based on prices and trip lengths you enter on sliders. If you can spend only $200 on your flight next week, Farecast maps out all your potential destinations. Finally, a grid view tells you the cheapest dates to fly to your destination.

When you've decided when and where, you can narrow displayed fares by airline, departure times, price range, airports, duration, and "flight quality"— for example, you can exclude red-eye flights. The fare results page also includes the arrow with the tip as to whether the price is likely to rise or fall. You can even drill into this information to see how confident Farecast is in its estimation, with a graph of the price history. Once you choose a fare, you're taken to the airline's site to buy the ticket. When I tested this, however, I was disappointed to find that my route wasn't prepopulated when I got to the Singapore Airlines site. Bing did, however, pop up a small window showing my itinerary, so it was easy to enter it into the airline site.

Bing can also search multiple travel sites—Expedia, CheapTickets, CheapAir, Priceline, and BookingBuddy (but not Orbitz, my favorite), to find more fares, but that just opens new windows to those sites—you don't get all the Farecast extras. The same subsite offers hotel pricing and travel guide-style destination info, but it doesn't search package vacation deals the way Orbitz does. In all, Bing brings a lot of powerful travel tools to the party, but you'll likely need more sites to get all the details you need for your trip. Finally, typing the number of flight that's currently in the air into Bing brings up the flight's on-time status as the first result, a cool extra.

Maps

For more localized travel needs, Bing for the most part keeps the same excellent maps that were a standout feature of Live Search. These offer the nifty "Birds-eye" view, which you can tilt around the points of the compass to get views of your target address from different angles. Google's Street view is an impressive party trick, but for more practical needs like driving directions, Bing's approach is probably more useful.

Bing Maps add a one-click option to driving directions, letting you get general directions such as "from the east" and so on, and local landmarks are included in directions ("Go left past the Outback Steakhouse"), along with tips such as "If you pass Vanderbilt Av., you've gone too far." I like directions in this more conversational style a lot more than the very stripped-down, mechanical commands—"turn right, go 1.83 miles, turn left"—you get from Google and Yahoo.

All three big search engines' maps can show live traffic along the way, and Bing's "Add a stop" feature is a welcome option to customize your route. Yahoo and Google, however, have a "click and drag" option that lets you readjust your route—a real advantage.

Images and Video

Instead of using different layouts for images and videos, as Google and Yahoo do, Bing uses the same layout for each. The side panel stays on the left, keeping the pertinent categories for the search—for example, Map, History, and Government for a search on a country name—and then related search terms. But for video, side-panel options let you refine the search by resolution, video length, and source.

The video options mean, for example, that if you're searching for a full-length TV movie in high definition, you can find it faster than you could on Google. Yahoo is even worse than Google here, with the Video and Images result pages looking completely different, though filters for duration and ordering by relevance or date are available options.

Another trick up Bing's sleeve that you won't find in Google: You can actually preview videos (that is, play them) right in the thumbnail on the results page. Google displays an arrow under the link to a video result that pops up a tooltip saying "Playable on Google Video," but clicking that arrow does nothing. When you click the result link in Google, the video plays on the right-hand side of the page, rather than opening in the original location.

In addition to video search, the Bing video home page shows categories, such as TV shows, Music videos, Most watched, News, and Sports. Google Video just shows Hot, recommended, and, for some reason, Featured on AOL (maybe that has something to do with that $1 billion Google Regretting Billion Dollar AOL Investment).

For image searches, Bing offers filters by size, layout, color or B&W, style (photo or illustration), and images with people in them. This last is even tunable to images with just faces, head and shoulders, or all. The image thumbnails stand as unadorned thumbnails in the results, but when you hover the mouse over them, they helpfully enlarge and review their source URL, size, and a choice to show similar images. I like this presentation, as it lets you concentrate on the images at first, and then drill down to details after you've located one of interest. Google by contrast clutters the results with all the details from the start. In many test searches, the relevance of the photos returned were a wash between Bing and Google.

Shopping Searches

If you search for a product, such as "Canon cameras," Bing displays links to reviews, and, in some cases, star ratings from the reviews, and thumbnail images of various models in its "Shop for …" results. When you choose that link, you can filter results by best expert or user ratings and price, as well as getting side panel access to Dealers, Repair, Accessories, Lenses, Reviews, Images, and Videos. When you click on an individual camera entry, you see the same sidebar options, along with store links stating Cashback percent.

This Cashback program was one Microsoft search feature that the tech press made fun of as a desperate attempt to get users. Through the program, online stores give discounts for buying through Microsoft's search. I'm here to tell you, I've used it, and recently got $29 deposited directly to my bank account after buying a point-and-shoot camera on eBay. True, you have to wait a couple months for the money to be available, but the program is for real.

Comparing the three big engines, searching for "HD Radio Tuner" brought me only shopping results in Bing, whereas Google offered Wikipedia, and Yahoo beat that by offering the main hdradio.com site. (Bing showed hdradio.com, but after the shopping link.)

News

Google is still a bit ahead of Bing in news search, despite Google News's recent outages. I've found that news stories we publish on PCMag.com regularly appear in Google news 5 to 10 minutes after they're published, while Bing takes 15 to 20 minutes for those same articles to show up. In the news section front pages, too, you can see that on Google News linked stories are often timed in single-digit minutes ago, while on Bing, they're date-stamped in hours-long intervals. But one thing I haven't seen on Bing news pages is headlines that aren't actually news. A standout example of this was when we republished our iPhone section: It was presented on Google News as a hot breaking story, when in fact it was just a revamped static landing page.

On a news topic of broader interest, I did notice that the recent California court decision upholding Proposition 8's ban on gay marriage showed up in Google News several minutes before Bing News had it.
Health

When you type in the name of a health condition, such as asthma or diabetes, high in Bing's results will be a link to a "Bing Health Article" from a certified source, such as the Mayo Clinic. The page, hosted on Bing, provides the definition, symptoms, and—of particular importance—a "When to seek medical advice" section. A Microsoft exec told me that 45 percent of Web searchers have sought health advice via the Web, so getting reliable answers for this topic is critical. In contrast with the verified Bing Health article, a search for "asthma" in Google brought a Wikipedia result up top, and, while I'm a huge fan of Wikipedia, its user-contributed content is probably not something I want to bet my respiratory system on.

Should You Bing?

Bing brings a lot of powerful new tools to Web search, and I do think it's time for search to be more than ten blue links. Search leader Google has made some improvements in this regard. The service's recently added abilities to sort search results by date and filter them to display only reviews or forums are welcome advances, but the options aren't a default part of the interface, as they are in Bing. All too often, Google still delivers those same old ten blue links. I have to say that Bing's interface is better than Google's, and results are cleaner and better organized. I also like the extras Bing brings—the travel and shopping helpers—and its maps are just as good as the competition's.

Google still aggregates news faster, and likely indexes more of the Web more quickly. But for the vast majority of users the advantage is negligible. Bing's better-organized results displays and its many helpers that take search beyond ten blue links make it a strong contender for our Editors' Choice for Web search, pending updated reviews of the competition. It can't be denied that Google has a lot of wonderful technology that has led to its imposing lead in the search field. But I'm confident that the average Internet user will find Bing at least an equally helpful Internet assistant. Whatever happens in terms of market share, it's clear that Bing could, at the very least, provide some much-needed competition in Web search.

Reviews: Search engine WolframAlpha

When a free Web service called WolframAlpha launches in the coming days, the general public will get to try a "computational knowledg
e engine" that has had technology insiders buzzing because of its oracle-like ability to spit out answers and make calculations.

Which has a bigger gross domestic product, Spain or Canada? What was New York City's population in 1900? When did the sun rise in Los Angeles on November 15, 1973? How far is the moon right now? If I eat an apple and an orange, how much protein would I get?

WolframAlpha will tell you — without making you comb through links as a search engine would. It also will graphically illustrate answers when merited. So if you query "GDP Spain Canada" you'd see a chart indicating that Spain's economy was smaller than Canada's most of the time since 1970 and recently pulled ahead.

That's pretty clever.

Yet after testing the service for a few weeks, I think WolframAlpha is unlikely to become a household name — and not just because of the gauze-in-the-mouth logjam of two "f" sounds in the title. While WolframAlpha is brilliant at times and elegant in its display, there aren't many ways everyday Web users would benefit from using it over other resources.

In the interest of full disclosure, I'll admit that I'm troubled by the potential for WolframAlpha. I fear the implications of an information butler that is considered so smart and so widely applicable that people turn to it without question, by default, whenever they want to know something.

What's that, you say? We already have such a service?

Well, for all the fears that Google is making us stupid by making it too easy to look up information, at least Google and its rivals enable the critical thinking that comes from scoping out multiple sources.

Unlike search engines that deliver links that match keywords in your query, WolframAlpha is more of a black box. If you have it perform a calculation, it gives you an answer, along with a small link for "source information." Open that and you'll generally be told the data was "curated" — found and verified — by the company behind WolframAlpha. In other words, "trust us."

The site does suggest ways to track down similar information from other sources, including government statistics, proprietary databases, almanacs and the collaborative encyclopedia Wikipedia. To confirm WolframAlpha's data I went a suddenly old-fashioned route — through Web searches on Google and Yahoo. I didn't find any errors, but taking that step made me wonder why I didn't just use Google or Yahoo to begin with.

WolframAlpha comes from Stephen Wolfram, 49, a British-born physics prodigy who earned a Caltech PhD at age 20 and won a MacArthur Foundation "genius grant" at 21. Wolfram went on to focus on complexity theory, especially the idea that patterns in nature could emerge from simple rules, and founded Champaign, Illionis-based Wolfram Research Inc, which develops advanced math and analysis software called Mathematica.

Because Mathematica includes data "curated" by more than 100 Wolfram employees, over the years the company has built a wide knowledge base. Now WolframAlpha lets the wider world have a crack at it. While the service is free, Wolfram envisions ads alongside certain query results. He might also offer paid versions with extra features.

The amount of data in the service is impressive. It can show the odds of lottery games in any state. By tapping birth stats and mortality data it estimates there are 2.8 million people named William alive in the US today. It knows "The Big Lebowski" earned $17 million at the box office.

But often WolframAlpha can be unacceptably nerdy.

When I sought the distance from Boston to Philadelphia, the site told me 265.4 miles. And then it had to be a showoff. It also said the journey is 427.1 kilometers, 427,070 meters, 4.271 times 10 to the 7th power centimeters or 230.6 nautical miles. And that an airplane could travel that distance in 28.9 minutes, sound could do it in 20.9 minutes, light in fiber would need 2 milliseconds and light in a vacuum would need 1.42 milliseconds. That's even before I clicked on "more" to see how long the trip would be for a ship at 25 knots or a car at 55 mph.

Or consider that WolframAlpha is atrocious at sports, which is surprising given what rich sources of data they provide.

I kid you not, the query "Super Bowl scores" yielded the response "WolframAlpha does not yet support Romanian." If you seek a baseball team's pitching stats, you get a useless chart showing, among other figures, the number of batters a team faced in a season. This computing engine doesn't compute the earned run average. Obviously, it's not a golfer.

At least initally, WolframAlpha probably will appeal most to technical specialists — people who make calculations based on how many vertices are on a great rhombic triacontahedron (182) or what gene is 456 base pairs upstream of another given gene.

For most other people, WolframAlpha won't provide aha-wow moments that mark true game-changers. Once when I was editing a story about a computer display that is 6 inches by 3.5 inches, I wanted to determine the length of the screen diagonal. I asked WolframAlpha for the hypotenuse of a right triangle with sides 3.5 and 6. WolframAlpha told me to calculate it by taking the square root of the sum of 3.5 squared and 6 squared.

Before I could ask, "Isn't that your job?" I queried "hypotenuse calculator" on Google and Yahoo. Neither had any know-it-all pretensions, but no matter: They found multiple sites that calculated the answer just fine.