Using a tried and true method to make up for lost time, Adobe is acquiring two companies, Nitobi and TypeKit, to give it more strength in a fast-moving area where it's playing catch-up.

For years Adobe advocated its Flash Player technology for advanced Web design, but now it's wholeheartedly on board with the biggest alternative, Web standards including HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Today, in conjunction with its Adobe Max developer and designer conference populated with the very people wrestling with that transition, the company announced the two acquisitions.

Overall, both acquisitions make sense strategically. Each gives Adobe a solid new starting point for aspects of new-age technology. Terms weren't disclosed, though, so it's not clear whether Adobe had to pay a premium for the companies. The TypeKit acquisition is complete, but the Nitobi buy is subject to closing conditions that should be met this month, Adobe said.

Nitobi makes PhoneGap, an open-source programming tool for creating Web apps that run on a variety of mobile phones. That aligns well with the cross-platform approach Adobe has favored with Flash: give programmers the ability to create what they want, and let the tools worry about the differences from one system to another.

Danny Winokur, Adobe's platform general manager, had this statement about Nitobi:

PhoneGap is a fantastic solution for developing a broad range of mobile apps using the lates... [Read more]

Adobe Systems, racing to match surging interest in a new generation of Web standards, is adding today a significant advance for its Edge software for Web design: interactivity.

A third public preview version of the software with the feature is set to debut today on Adobe Labs. The release is timed with Adobe Max, the company's conference for developers and designers, which begins today.

"Interactivity is the most requested functionality thus far," said Mark Anders, the Adobe fellow who leads the Edge project. With it, Edge changes from a tool that essentially spruces up a page as it loads into one that changes as people use it.

Previous versions of Edge let people create Web sites with a variety of animation effects, such as graphical elements that slid into view as a Web page loaded. With interactivity, such actions can be tied to events such as a person clicking a button on the site. Ultimately, it could be used for elaborate operations such as games.

The software is a vivid example of Adobe's attempt to grow beyond its own Flash Player technology for adding elaborate features to Web pages. Much of what Edge can do is in Flash's purview, but browser makers are racing to develop and add new features directly into the browser.

Adobe is working on some of those technologies, including CSS [Cascading Style Sheets] Regions and CSS Exclusions, which lets text flow around objects, be placed inside them, and overflow from one area... [Read more]

Google's browsers edged closer to second place in both desktop and mobile markets, a gradual trend that helps Google's profitability and its long-term plans for the Web.

On personal computers, Chrome rose from 15.5 percent of global usage in August to 16.2 percent in September, according to Net Applications, whose Web-based analytics tools monitor usage. Chrome trails Internet Explorer, which dropped from 55.3 percent to 54.4 percent, and Firefox, which dipped from 22.6 percent to 22.5 percent. Safari rose from 4.6 percent to 5.0 percent, and Opera was flat at 1.7 percent.

On smartphones and tablets, Google's unbranded Android browser rose from 15.7 percent to 16.3 percent. There, the leaders are Apple's Safari, which rose from 53.0 percent to 54.7 percent, and Opera Mini, which dropped from 20.8 percent to 18.5 percent.

In September, mobile devices accounted for 6 percent of browsing traffic, compared to 93.7 percent for personal computers, Net Applications said.

Browsers play a very important supporting role in Google's business, and the company has been investing aggressively in Chrome technology and marketing. The browser is geared to improve online services such as search, video, and Google Apps, all of which generate revenue for the company.

"Chrome is Google's most undera... [Read more]

A look at Adobe's Photoshop Touch for Android app, which will come to iOS later.

After dipping its toes in the water with some limited-scope mobile apps, Adobe Systems is taking the plunge today with six programs for Android Honeycomb tablets, including the company's flagship brand, Photoshop.

The programs, each to debut in November with a $10 introductory price, fall under the new Adobe Touch Apps brand. And they tie in with the new Adobe Creative Cloud, a service for sharing files, finding services, and transferring works from the tablet apps to Adobe's Creative Suite apps running on traditional computers.

Along with Photoshop Touch, the other apps are Collage, Debut, Ideas, Kuler, and Proto. Adobe earlier had dabbled with a touch interface to computer apps but more recently turned up the heat a bit with its Carousel app for photo editing and sharing.

It's not yet clear where professionals will put the new apps along the spectrum of essential to optional, but it is clear Adobe is showing new competitive fire in the belly after a long period of being criticized for lagging in new-era programming paradigms. <... [Read more]

Google has released a new version of Chrome after Microsoft's antivirus software flagged the browser as malware and removed it from about 3,000 people's computers on Friday.

Microsoft apologized for the problem and updated its virus definition file to correct the false-positive problem, according to a post from Ryan Naraine at ZDNet.

But not before the damage was done. Even though the problem directly affected only a relatively tiny fraction of Chrome users, Google decided to spin up and distribute updated beta and stable versions of Chrome.

"Earlier today, we learned that the Microsoft Security Essentials tool began falsely identifying Google Chrome as a piece of malware ("PWS:Win32/Zbot") and removing it from people's computers," said Mark Larson, Chrome engineering manager, in a blog post Friday. "We are releasing an update that will automatically repair Chrome for affected users over the course of the next 24 hours."

Win32/Zbot is a Trojan horse that lets attacker steal passwords and gain access to a victim's computer--not the sort of product an... [Read more]

This is the warning that will pop up if WebSense determines that a Web link is unsafe on Facebook.

Facebook is adding a Websense Web link blacklist service to its arsenal of defenses designed to protect users from clicking on links that lead to sites hosting malware.

The social-networking site will be using Websense ThreatSeeker Cloud service, which warns people when they click on a link on Facebook that could be malicious, the companies announced today. Facebook will start rolling out the service today.

The partnership follows one that Facebook announced in May with the free Web of Trust safe surfing service. Facebook also has its own blacklist. The larger the pool of blacklists the better the chances users will be protected from malware, basically.

When users click on a link, the online blacklist databases are checked to see if the link is flagged. If the link is deemed unsafe, users will see a warning and be given the option of ignoring the alert, returning to the previous page, or getting more information.

[Read more]

This screenshot shows the researcher's demo in action on a PayPal account.

Browser makers are devising ways to protect people from a security protocol weakness that could let an attacker eavesdrop on or hijack protected Internet sessions. Potential solutions include a Mozilla option to disable Java in Firefox.

The problem--considered theoretical until a demonstration by researchers Juliano Rizzo and Thai Duong at a security conference in Argentina last week--is a vulnerability in SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) and TLS (Transport Layer Security) 1.0, encryption protocols used to secure Web sites that are accessed using HTTPS (Secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol).

The researchers created software called BEAST (Browser Exploit Against SSL/TLS) that can decrypt parts of an encrypted data stream and can be used in what is known as a "man-in-the-middle" (MITM) type of attack. BEAST uses JavaScript running in the browser and can let an attacker snoop on traffic, as well as impersonate a Web surfer by compromising session cookie data used to authenticate a Web surfer with a site. More details and a video o... [Read more]