uTorrent has long been known for providing a torrent managing client that's light on fancy features but light on your system resources, too. Today's release of uTorrent 2.2 brings out of beta an add-on gallery that the publisher BitTorrent, Inc. has been working on since the spring. The "App Studio," as the company calls it, allows users to customize features on the fly, including adding security from BitDefender, games, social networking, and enhanced content discovery for legally free entertainment.

Privacy concerns were addressed in this release. Users' real IP addresses are no longer broadcasted when connected to a UDP tracker, and proxy configuration has been streamlined. The new version also includes other improvements previously seen only in the beta. There's the improved uTP, or uTorrent Protocol, which works with traffic congestion control to ensure that one user doesn't block others. There's also better magnet link handling, and file relocation, so you can move a file from within the client. Skinning gets a refresh, too. The full changelog for uTorrent 2.2 is available here.

Mobile browser-maker Skyfire may have had a disastrous launch day of Skyfire for iPhone due to shaky bandwidth, but now that the Silicon Valley company is disclosing some numbers, there are several tidbits we can glean about the Flash video-streaming browser.

1. Skyfire grossed almost $1 million: Skyfire sold about 100,000 copies of Skyfire for iPhone during the first five hours of release last Wednesday, plus more than 200,000 more during the weekend since the company quietly reinstated the app on Friday, according to a Skyfire statement. At $2.99 each for about 300,000 sales total, that's about $1 million during the weekend, before Apple's 30 percent share.

2. iPhone users want Flash support: At least for now, iPhone users have shown a willingness to pay $3 for an app that provides a workaround to receive streaming Flash video on most Web sites you visit through Skyfire. This is significant when you consider on one hand the proliferation of 99-cent apps as a normal amount of cash to part with for an app, and on the other hand, the substantial number of free browser alternatives. In addition, Skyfire ranked No. 1 in paid, top grossing, and utility categories during the weekend, Skyfire reports. Apple CEO Steve Jobs may despise Flash, but enough Apple users are voting with their dollars.

3. This isn't the solution: At the end of the day, Skyfire presents a messy workaround to play Flash on iPhone. It's clever, and much of the time it works, but by definition of a workaround, it's far from seamless. What the Skyfire sales indicate isn't that iPhone owners clamor for Flash per se, but that being able to watch video play on the Web site of its origin is wished-for functionality. Skyfire is merely the best option for now.

Last week's Skyfire snafu sheds some more light on the challenges of serving streaming video. It takes much more bandwidth to deliver video than images and text, and maintaining server farms large enough to meet the demand costs money, especially if you're unprepared for the onslaught as Skyfire proved it wasn't.

After their servers began faltering, Skyfire pulled its own app from the App Store to avoid a crash. Since then, the company doubled its capacity and has been adding more users "in batches" that the servers can handle. In reality, Skyfire is available for purchase in the App Store unless the servers see future strain. Skyfire has not reported any interruption in performance since.

Originally posted at iPhone Atlas

One of the major components essential for the future of Firefox just landed in the beta build of the browser, and it gives the open-source browser the page-rendering speed boost that it had been lacking.

Available for Windows, Mac, and Linux, Firefox 4 beta 7 introduces JagerMonkey, Mozilla's next-generation JavaScript engine that puts the browser in the same ballpark as its high-speed competitors. The old TraceMonkey engine was slow enough to no longer be in the same league as Chrome, Opera, Safari, and the Internet Explorer 9 beta.

Mozilla describes the improvements as incorporating the JagerMonkey JIT compiler into the new SpiderMonkey engine, and says that users can expect to see significantly faster start-up times, page-load speed, and JavaScript-intensive Web tasks such as running apps and playing games. The company's internal benchmarking shows Firefox 4 is three times faster than the current Firefox 3.6.12 on both Kraken and Sunspider JavaScript benchmarks, and five times faster than Firefox 3.6.12 on the V8 benchmark. Engineer David Mandelin stated in a blog post that Firefox 4 will be "a little bit faster" by the time it's finished.

Although speed is definitely a major part of a successful modern browser, there's more that's changed in the latest Firefox 4 beta besides JavaScript rendering. Firefox was one of the first browsers to incorporate hardware acceleration, and Firefox 4 beta 7 can use your computer's graphics card to load pages faster if the card is supported. The new beta will work on Windows XP, something most other hardware accelerated browsers can't do, and it will work on Macs. The Mac version is powered by OpenGL, while DirectX fuels the Windows version.

Fonts received a boost in this beta, as Firefox 4 now supports the OpenType font format. This will allow designers to control kerning, ligatures, cap variants, and alternative characters. Graphics rendering for developers also got some attention, with the addition of support for 3D graphics rendering via WebGL. Running it currently requires an OpenGL-enabled graphics card, with support planned for other cards in the future.

There's also a nifty about:config tweak that comes in Firefox 4 beta 7. Instead of installing the Bar Tab add-on to better manage Firefox's open session memory, advanced users can go to about:config and set browser.sessionstore.max_concurrent_tabs to 0. This will prevent Firefox from holding in memory all but your most recently-used tabs. Clicking on a tab will automatically refresh it.

The Panorama feature received some small changes, too. It now comes with a "how-to" video that must be manually removed, and there's a dedicated search button that wasn't there before. There's a new button to jump you back to the site you were looking at when you jumped into Panorama, a convenience that was sorely missing from the previous beta.

The speed improvements in this beta are instantly noticeable, but the browser remains in beta and it's not expected to be ready until January 2011. The full changelog for Firefox 4 beta 7 can be read here.

It wouldn't be a mobile platform if it didn't have a dedicated Google search app, and this week the Big G ratified Windows Phone 7's competitive existence with a search app of its own--Google Search for Windows Phone 7.

Like others, Google Search uses the phone's GPS to localize searches (on the Samsung Focus, in this case). It hands out search suggestions as you type, but only if you type slowly, we found. It also keeps track of your previous searches, a boon for anyone hoping to bypass typing and repeat a search. Results appear in a browser window, which provides access to image, local, and news results as well as the Web findings.

And that's about it. While suggestions and history are nice additions, were hoping for more than a Web shortcut from the Sovereign of Search in its debut Windows Phone app.

On the other hand, Bing's more polished app enables voice search and spell check in addition to search suggestions. Bing's results look more striking as well, since they manifest in an app and not in a browser search results page--just as we expect for an integrated search incumbent. Image results and search history are missing; however, Bing's local results for "bagel" were mapped in an image and spot on.

Of course, Bing has its interesting splash screen that changes pictures daily, but we have to admit that the app is thinner on features than Bing is on other mobile platforms, like Android and iPhone's iOS. Those Bing manifestations include quick-search options for images, movies, maps, local, news, and directions from that photo-tastic search screen. While Bing offers a richer, more engaging user experience on Windows Phone than Google Search, the lack of all its mobile features is perplexing.

Google and Microsoft compete on Windows Phone 7 on two counts. Not only does the Windows Phone 7 platform take aim at Google's powerful and popular Android operating system, Windows Phones also use Bing as its default search client. For example, pressing the search button (magnifying glass icon) runs your term through Bing. Pinning the Google Search app to the Windows Phone start screen would combat that.

From a business perspective, such a move channels search revenue to Google on Microsoft phones and away from Microsoft, just as the opposite is true for Bing users on Android phones.

Just last week, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg stood before a crowd of journalists (including us) and announced an update of Facebook Places for the iPhone, and the arrival of Facebook Places for Android. Facebook Places, the social network's business listing service, has also just come to BlackBerry.

Facebook 1.9 for BlackBerry has placed Facebook Places as a selection in its navigation strip. Select it, and you're able to check in to a location--like a coffee shop or a concert hall--tag friends, and add an uncharted Place to the listings. There's the full range of management options as well, so you're able to view Places, comment, and view a listing's location on BlackBerry Maps. BlackBerry's internal GPS receiver powers the app's location element.

In addition to Places, Facebook and BlackBerry-maker RIM have also enhanced search, letting you now search for contacts and pages within the app. Software tweaks also plump up the number of items you can view in the news feed and friend list, and the app makes it easier to access your profile, Search, and Messaging from the navigation toolbar.

The new Facebook app also plays well with the Universal Search functionality baked into BlackBerry OS 6.

BlackBerry's version of Facebook has arguably been the weakest Facebook implementation for a mobile platform. The addition of Places certainly helps, as do the navigation tweaks. However, the app still trails Android and especially iPhone in features and functionality.

RIM will roll out updates over the next day, but you can also manually download Facebook for BlackBerry 1.9 free from the App World app on your BlackBerry.

When it comes to music software, there is one fact that's impossible to deny: There's no shortage of digital jukeboxes available for download. (Whether you like the choices is another matter entirely). As such, it's a special challenge for companies to get their offerings to stand out from the herd. Magix makes quite the impressive attempt with Mufin Music Player, though.

This handy music manager integrates a digital sound analyzer that aims to provide you with a list of songs similar to whichever track you select at any given moment. In other words, rather than using humans to create playlists, the jukebox uses a program that actually maps out the sound waves of the audio and charts the sound similarities between your songs. You can choose to populate lists from within your own library or from the catalog at Mufin.com, where you can purchase songs directly.

The feature seemed to work quite well in my initial testing, though I didn't have sufficient time with the app to analyze my entire library (a process that can be quite time consuming). A selection of the Modest Mouse song "Bukowski" provided songs by Heart, Korn, and Scissor Sisters, to name a few. It might seem like a strange mix, but the tracks were actually similar in sound.

While there is a paid option that offers some additional visual features, Mufin Music Player is totally free. If you're interested in trying it out for yourself, you can find it exclusively on Download.com for the next 24 hours.

The browser wars have extended to mobile devices, and that's good news for consumers.

Last week, Mozilla released a second Firefox beta for Android. Yesterday, Opera released its first Opera Mobile beta for Android. Neither is ready for prime time, much less used on more than a tiny fraction of phones, but already I see them as a step forward.

Why? Because now there's an important new front in the browser wars.

And while that means more stress for browser makers and more testing for Web developers, it holds the potential to dramatically improve browsing for the rest of us.

Today's browser market on personal computers is on fire. Programmers for all five of the major browsers--Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, Safari, and Opera in descending order of usage--are working to add major new features to benefit users. Among the biggest changes are performance and a host of new Web technologies.

I don't expect the mobile browser market to be as fluid and dynamic as the desktop browser market. But I do expect improvements from the competition.

That might even be secondary improvements. Browser companies copy good ideas liberally from one another--tabs, password and bookmark synchronization, hardware acceleration, and any number of Web technologies that grow up into standards.

That means, for example, if Google hears that enough people like the forward button in Opera and Firefox, not just the back button in the built-in Android browser, perhaps Google will add it in.

Another example: JavaScript speed tests are all the rage for desktop browsers as browser makers seek to top rivals on this crucially important Web technology. They're a relative rarity among mobile browsers, but Mozilla and Opera both pointed them out. Expect that publicity effort to be contagious.

Maybe even others will benefit.

There's plenty to like about Apple's iOS devices--responsiveness, a richly populated App Store, a slick user interface. But there's one thing iOS users have to like whether they want to or not: the browser.

That's because Apple bars other browsers from the iPhone, excepting some quasi-browsers such as Opera Mini, a relatively passive vessel for boiled-down Web pages sent from an Opera proxy server that does the heavy work of reading the Web page. Opera Mobile, by contrast, is a full-fledged browser engine on its own but makes no appearance on the iPhone.

One big drawback of having browser choice is that, at least on Android's default setup, the user is presented with a choice of browsers to complete the request every time an application presents a Web page link. Tap on the Amazon Kindle app's store link--what browser do you want to use? Follow Web address from the Twitter or Facebook apps--what browser do you want to use? You can set one to be the default browser for handling such requests, but Apple's approach enforces a cleaner process.

Another drawback is that the alternative browsers can be an awkward fit. Firefox and Opera Mobile are chiefly cross-platform products that sometimes mesh awkwardly with prevailing Android interfaces. Opera Mobile has yet to wire up the eminently useful menu button, but instead presents its own toolbar of options taking up precious screen space all the time. Using an Android trackball moves a little mouse pointer that looks decidedly alien on an Android phone, and you can't use the trackball to move from a username to a password field, like you can in other Android applications. The Opera interface will be familiar to Opera users on any number of other devices, but in the big picture it's probably better to fit in with the Android ways.

So browser choice means complications, but my preference still is to be able to pick my own browser. On top of performance and interface differences, some browsers offer services to unify your mobile and PC experience. With browser services for synchronizing passwords, including as Firefox Sync and Opera Link, passwords stored on a desktop can be remembered, for example. Some Firefox extensions work on the mobile version, too.

Computer industry executives love to profess their fondness for competition--usually when asked about how they feel about a rival's superiority in some way. I always suspected that it's often lip service: they'd rather have the more comfortable position of dominance. But as cliche as the idea is, competition really can be healthy, especially in areas such as Web browsers where it's relatively easy swap one out for another.

IBM's mainframes, Digital Equipment Corp.'s servers, Microsoft's Windows--these technologies are among those that achieved dominance over rivals that led to a dangerous complacency. Apple has been leading the mobile industry around by the nose, but it doesn't have that much dominance.

So perhaps, indirectly, browser competition on Android will even help those in the iOS world. It's hard to imagine somebody switching smartphones today just because of the browser, especially with market barriers such as two-year service contracts. But it's also hard to imagine that mobile browser makers will be immune to the competitive zeal of the desktop browsers.

Originally posted at Deep Tech