Adobe Systems pushed out updates Wednesday to both its Photoshop Express online photo tool and photo-editing app for Android devices that bring some noteworthy improvements.

The biggest change, besides an increase in overall speed on the Web version of Photoshop Express, is that the site no longer requires users to register in order to use it. Unregistered users can now upload their photo, make edits, then download it without any administrative barriers. Adobe has also separated each tool into its own unit, similar to what it does with the library and develop modules of its Photoshop Lightroom software.

As part of the re-organization, Adobe has given its slideshow tool a dramatic facelift, with the inclusion of customizable themes. By default, users get only one, called "midnight," which is a simple one-color background for your photos to sit atop. There are 40 other themes available for subscriber's of Adobe's Plus subscription plans. Besides these, Plus subscribers get a few other extras like dedicated storage space and extra photo editing effects.

Other tweaks to the site include a more thorough look at a photo's EXIF metadata, a way to post your photos to Facebook and Twitter, the inclusion of user ratings and comments that users can see within the photo organizer, and a simpler way to find the company's tutorials.

On the mobile side, Adobe has updated the Android version of its Photo Express application to include support for user videos. If a user has uploaded videos to their Photoshop Express library--either from their phone, or back on their computer--they can now be played and shared from within the app. Adobe also says it has tweaked how efficient the app is at uploading photos to Facebook.

Though not a part of Wednesday's news, Adobe has been broadening its mobile application coverage, as well as pushing out cross-platform updates in closer succession. When the company first released its Photoshop app for the iPhone, it was about a month before an Android version was made available, though even then it was missing a handful of features. With this latest version, the Android and iPhone updates were just a little more than a week apart and at parity. Not to mention, in the case of the iPhone update, Adobe made its app universal, so that iPad users could partake.

Adobe continues to compete with a handful of other online photo editors, including Picnik, which was acquired by Google earlier this year, Fotoflexer, and Aviary. Behind the scenes, all of these sites make use of Adobe's Flash technology, though few have ventured into the mobile space as well.

Related: 15 online photo editors compared

Originally posted at Web Crawler

The latest beta from Firefox introduces Panorama, a new tab-grouping feature that makes it much easier to manage tabs. See how to use it in this video.

Want to try it out for yourself? You can download Firefox 4 beta 4 for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

The current version of Firefox will likely be the end of the road for people using PowerPC Macs.

A final decision will be based on usage data that's better than what Mozilla possesses right now, but technical difficulties raised by Firefox 4 improvements mean at a minimum that it's a strong possibility only Intel-based Macs will be able to run the new browser.

"I am gathering data on the number of PPC users we have, but the likely outcome is that we will not be supporting PPC [PowerPC] for Firefox 4," said Mike Beltzner, Mozilla's director of Firefox, in a mailing list posting on Tuesday.

Major changes are a fact of life in the computing industry, but it's never easy to decide when users of older technology should no longer be supported. Keeping new software compatible with old hardware--and conversely, making sure new hardware can run old software--can be an expensive proposition when there are few users of the older technology left.

But Mozilla's Firefox now is used by hundreds of millions of people, and even a small fraction of them can be a large number in absolute terms. It's a plight of widely used software; for comparison, Microsoft has extended the lifespan of Windows XP several times beyond its original plans.

Dropping support for older machines, of course, can make those with the machines angry. Mozilla faced disgruntlement when it decided to cut off Firefox support for Mac OS X 10.4 after version 3.6. Using an old browser also exposes people to security risks, though Mozilla maintains older Firefox incarnations for a time after new versions supplant them.

The writing has been on the wall for PowerPC Macs for more than five years. Apple announced in June 2005 it would move to Intel processors instead of the PowerPC models built by IBM and Motorola. The two processor families use different instruction sets, so programs written for one don't run on the other without significant work.

Why phase out support?
Beltzner pointed to two new features that make Firefox 4 on PowerPC difficult. First is out-of-process plug-ins, which moves software such as Adobe Systems' Flash Player to a separate memory region to protect the main browser from crashes. This feature arrived in Firefox 3.6 for Windows, but for Macs is coming with Firefox 4.

Second is the just-in-time compiler for Web-based JavaScript programs. Faster JavaScript is a key area in the browser market competition right now, since it speeds up many complex Web sites and helps Web developers build more complicated user interfaces. Firefox is pulling in technology used in Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari, rival browsers based on the WebKit browser project, to help speed JavaScript.

"I believe that Firefox 4 should be relatively faster and superior to previous versions--so to be better than Firefox 3.6. Two of the significant mechanisms for performance improvement will not be available for PPC based computers, and so we are not planning on extending Firefox 4 support to those architectures," Beltzner said in another mailing list message.

It's possible a version of Firefox for PowerPC could be built without those features, he added--but it probably wouldn't be called "Firefox." "I suspect that we won't brand any of those builds as 'Firefox' though, but that would be a discussion with whomever wishes to publish those builds, as usual," he said. "Our goal is to deliver a consistent Firefox experience across platforms."

Beta schedule slip
Plans are changing for building the next test versions of Firefox.

Mozilla released Firefox 4 beta 4 Tuesday and had hoped to "freeze" the code base for beta 5 this Friday, a step that locks most development out as a new version of the software is built. This fifth beta had been planned as a significant milestone: the first test version to have all the Firefox 4 features built in, if not fully tested.

However, Mozilla is having trouble meeting that goal.

In meeting notes published Tuesday, Belzner proposed making the sixth beta the last to get new features. The target date for the beta 6 code freeze is September 10.

Mozilla is assessing the priorities for that release. Priorities include performance, a better user interface that could help attract people to upgrade, and the new Jetpack extensions framework that could make it easier to upgrade Firefox without forcing add-on programmers to rebuild their software.

And one important Web technology development looks like it won't be ready in time for Firefox 4: IndexedDB, which builds database abilities into the browser so that Web applications can work offline, among other things. "IndexedDB unlikely to be included (spec is changing rapidly, security implications to be resolved," Mozilla said in notes for a weekly meeting.

Another development, the WebSocket interface, is "likely to be included, but only as...experimental," the planning notes said. The WebSocket interface opens up a communication channel between the browser and a server, making it easier to build a Web site or application that's continuously updated.

Originally posted at Deep Tech

Thanks to Microsoft's Russian subsidiary, the world now has a pretty good idea of what Internet Explorer 9 will look like.

The Russian folks were kind enough to briefly post an image and some details that had yet to be shared about the browser. And although they pulled it down, ZDNet blogger Mary Jo Foley captured the information and screenshot.

More than anything else, the screenshot shows a browser that attempts to offer a minimalistic user interface and leave as much room as possible for the Web sites. When combined with the browser's hardware acceleration, the hope is to pave the way for Web sites that are as application-like as possible.

Microsoft declined to confirm the details Wednesday of what had been posted to its Russian site.

However, the look is consistent with what IE team member Ryan Gavin told CNET earlier this month about the planned appearance of IE9.

"The browser is the theater," Gavin said in the interview. "We're not the play."

The browser appears to go as far as to allow people to pin certain sites to the desktop and open them in their own windows without any clear indication that they are using IE at all. According to Foley's Bing translation of the Russian site, there will be certain sites that are "recognized" or "protected" and can be pinned to the taskbar and launched with their own icons.

Microsoft plans to release a beta of the browser at a September 15 event in San Francisco, although this latest leak clearly steals some of the thunder. Up to now, Microsoft had offered several technical previews of the underlying engine, but had yet to show or talk in detail about how the browser would look.

The invitations for the event do mention "the beauty of the Web" and "unlocking the native Web."

Until now, though, the focus had been on several key features of the browser's engine, including the hardware acceleration capabilities, improved JavaScript engine, and broader support for HTML5 and other standards. Microsoft first showed those features at the Mix10 event in March in Las Vegas, though it had talked about hardware acceleration as far back as last November's Professional Developer Conference.

The details on the Russian site reveal a browser that borrows much from Windows 7, including the ability to tear off browser tabs and have them "snap" to a particular part of the screen, similar to the way documents and applications already do in the latest version of Windows.

There is also a unified search and address bar, something already seen in Google's Chrome. However, having learned from criticism of Google--as well as its own considerable issues with regulators--I'm hearing that Microsoft will make the choice of whether to let the bar suggest sites as you type a completely opt-in affair.

Originally posted at Beyond Binary