The Right Way

As our gateways to the Internet, web browsers are the most important application that we have on our computers. We have said a lot of good things about Firefox on this blog, and while it’s still our favorite, Google Chrome is coming in a big way. Considering that Chrome was released in late 2008 and that many features are still being implemented, Chrome has done remarkably well to capture almost 5% of the worldwide user base.

Having just stolen this title from Apple’s Safari, Chrome is now the third most popular browser. Of course the first two are Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox with just under 63% and 25% usage share respectively. The gains among newer browsers like Safari and Firefox have up until now come at the expense of Internet Explorer – which has seen its usage decline rapidly over the past few years.

But this is not the case with Chrome. Google’s browser – especially with its recent beta releases for Mac and Linux systems – is pulling users away from Firefox. Internet Explorer remains the dominant browser because many users either don’t know how to switch or wouldn’t realize any benefits from it. There are also a significant number of web applications and some websites which still work only with Explorer. But for those who do want to switch, Chrome is starting to sound like a better choice than Firefox.

The main problem with Firefox is that the code base is ancient, and so far Mozilla has not made any large-scale changes that would get their browser as fast as Chrome or Opera. Google’s browser is at least twice as fast as Firefox (depending on the test), uses less memory, and offers greater stability by using a separate process for each tab. The only thing that’s keeping Firefox in the game is its great support for browser add-ons and the many excellent ones that are available.

Even without support for add-ons, Chrome has managed to get its 5% share, but this is going to change very soon. The beta version of 4.0 includes support for browser extensions, and many of our favorite Firefox add-ons are already available as Chrome extensions. However, we did notice a lot of bugs that need to be still need to be worked out.

Once version 4.0 is released and developers have finished porting our must-have add-ons over to Chrome, it will be hard for us to find a reason to keep using Firefox. This will be a decision many people will be faced with, and unless Mozilla does something truly amazing with Firefox, Chrome is sure to overtake it within a few years.

In our previous article, we wrote about the strong demand for peer to peer file sharing, and one of the technologies which may finally reconcile legitimate supply with that demand is cloud computing (centralized content). By licensing access to media content rather than distributing the content on physical media or in data files, content providers can provide very convenient access to what they have and really cut down on distribution costs. Everybody wins, right?

Well, not quite yet. Lala.com showed (and maybe still shows) great promise as the perfect combination of social networking, digital music, and software as a service. In theory, users can host all of their music online where it’s available at any computer with internet access. Backups aren’t needed because Lala stores all of the songs on its servers, and Lala allows its users to transfer their existing music collection to their Lala account. When Lala doesn’t already have a particular song in its database, it allows users to upload the MP3 from their computer.

And while that all sounds great, Lala’s implementation and service have been lackluster at best. We know the future lies in cloud computing, and when Chrome OS and similar platforms hit the market, we expect the demand for Software as a Service (SaaS) applications like this to skyrocket. So we’ve been trying Lala – which is ostensibly the best solution yet in its category – for the past few months to give an honest evaluation. So here’s what we think…

Availability. We haven’t noticed that much downtime with the Lala website or the servers which stream the music, but even while the rest of the site and content is working fine, many of the songs which we uploaded (songs which were not in their database) are no longer playable. This is the single biggest problem we have with Lala – they have little respect for the music of an individual user, and they clearly prioritize the music that they already have in their database.

The Player. The web interface for viewing a user’s music library and playing songs is miles above any other web-based player we’ve seen. The fact that the interface is minimal and simplistic turns out to be a plus because playing music shouldn’t be complicated, and we didn’t end up missing any of the advanced features that Winamp or Rhythmbox might have offered. There is certainly room to improve though, and we would have liked better, more convenient search functionality. Editing tags for songs in our library was a breeze, and it’s much easier and faster editing “web songs” than it is for MP3s on a hard drive.

Reliability. Lala’s player uses Adobe Flash and overall works well, but it has some serious bugs. After having the browser open for a long while (maybe a day or so), the player stops playing sound. It continues to buffer songs, but it just never starts playing. Oddly enough, we saw this error happen very consistently on both Windows and Ubuntu in both Firefox and Chrome. We were only able to pinpoint the problem because Chrome allows us to unload the flash plugin in its Task Manager (a subsequent refresh would reload it and allow the player to start working).

Support. Naturally after encountering all of these problems we tried to contact support. Lala asks its users to fill out a form on their site and wait for their support staff to respond. Well, we haven’t heard anything yet – no emails, no ticket numbers, nada. This is hardly the kind of service that would inspire anyone to trust them with their entire music collection.

Price. In this area, we have nothing but great things to say about the Lala experience. Buying the right to listen to a song on Lala costs only 10 cents. The prices for downloading full MP3s are also very reasonable, but buying an entire album of web songs only costs a little more than a dollar. This is really the way music buying should be, and this is what we loved about Lala’s offering.

The Future for Lala. Overall, Lala is a great idea that just hasn’t fully materialized yet. There had previously been a lot of speculation about an iPhone app and whether the authoritarians over at Apple would approve it, but earlier this month Apple acquired Lala for $85 million (according to the WSJ). It’s still unclear how Lala will fit into the larger Apple picture, and it’s likely that Lala may be absorbed by – or at least merged with – iTunes.

The one good thing about this acquisition is that Apple must now honor the purchases made by Lala’s users. If Lala had gone under, then its users would have lost the money they invested in their online collection. And who knows, Google was rumored to have been bidding for Lala, and they may still be looking to create their own music streaming service. Unlike their multitude of other products which have nothing to do with their business model, organizing the world’s music (alongside targeted ads of course) sounds like a good fit.

Who can forget the widespread popularity of Napster in 2000? The dramatic increase in Internet usage during the 1990s created the perfect environment for peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing to emerge, and most of what was shared at the time was MP3 files. Naturally the Recording Industry (RIAA) brought a lawsuit, and the immediate effect was that Napster was shut down in July 2001. But this was only a temporary setback as there were now countless millions of people around the world who knew the benefits of P2P sharing.

So it wasn’t long before Morpheus and Kazaa took Napter’s place, and P2P sharing continued its growth. The RIAA wasn’t even close to learning its lesson, and they took StreamCast and Grokster, the companies behind Morpheus and Kazaa respectively, to court for copyright infringement. The RIAA was not immediately successful in suing these second-generation P2P firms, and in the mean time it resorted to suing thousands of individuals who had used these programs. After a protracted legal battle, A U.S. Federal court ruled against the P2P companies in September 2006.

And as P2P networks such as Kazaa began to decline due to legal pressure, the use of BitTorrent for file sharing surged. While Kazaa was a software program used with its own file sharing network, BitTorrent was simply a protocol for communications between computers. The central concept behind BitTorrent is that every user who’s downloading (leeching) is also uploading (seeding) to others. This reduces or removes the burden on a web server to provide a particular file, and it also allows users to host their own files for others to download.

Many applications (or clients) have been written for the BitTorrent protocol, and neither the clients nor the protocol can be associated with copyright-infringing uses – they are simply technologies in their own right. However, every popular P2P system has something which links its users together. In the case of torrents, websites (known as trackers) allow users to upload and download .torrent files which contain information about a particular file and the address of the server that keeps track of the clients currently leeching or seeding that file.

And as websites, trackers are not directly tied to any one individual or location and are easily renamed or relocated. One of the first trackers to gain popular recognition was SuprNova.org. From 2002 to 2004, the Slovenian website was widely regarded as the largest torrent tracker, but in December of 2004, the website’s owner was forced to take it offline due to legal threats.

However, just two months earlier in October 2004, ThePirateBay.org was launched in Sweden, and it would become the most widely recognized BitTorrent tracker in the world. The Pirate Bay still holds that title, and it’s still in operation today despite intense legal opposition. In the Fall of 2009, a Swedish court ordered The Pirate Bay’s Internet provider (ISP) to block its traffic and the site’s owners to cease operations, but the site was quickly relocated to an ex-NATO territory within the Netherlands. And even after that, The Pirate Bay is taking some steps to avoid more lawsuits and advising BitTorrent trackers and users to move to a new “trackerless” system. While the future of The Pirate Bay is uncertain, it’s clear that peer-to-peer file sharing isn’t going anywhere.

So what are people sharing that creates so much controversy? Almost all of the copyrighted works that are “pirated” through torrents and P2P networks are digital media such as movies and music. The reason so many turn to file sharing is that media companies such as Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment are clinging to outdated pricing models. People today consume an incredible amount of digital media content, and many either can’t afford to pay for it or need their media in an unrestricted digital format.

For example, Green Day’s latest album costs $13.99 on Amazon, and even if you paid that much, there’s no easy way to get the music from the CD onto a computer or MP3 player. You could also buy MP3s online for under $1 each, but that is still too expensive for most. This creates a barrier that supply and demand won’t tolerate, and as a result, file sharing is meeting that demand. It’s illegality has forced P2P technologies to evolve towards decentralized liability, and as popular as P2P sharing is today, it’s fair to say it’s been wildly successful.