Mozilla Labs has introduced its concept of a desktop replacement called Webian Shell. The Webian Shell basically consists of a browser which will replace the traditional desktop, and where the web applications are given more importance than the native applications. Right now, the prototype of the Webian Shell is nothing more than a full screen browser with a dock which holds the tabs and the clock.

The Webian Shell is developed using another Mozilla Labs project – Mozilla Chromeless. Mozilla Chromeless is a project which is looking to replace the traditional user interface of the browser with a more flexible platform based on HTML, CSS and JavaScript. The Webian Shell is just a shell that will run on top on an existing operating system – Windows, Linux or Mac OS X.
Webian Shell vs Chrome OS

It might not be wrong to say that Webian Shell could have been inspired by Google’s Chrome OS. However, the two are quite different right now.

Yes, there are similarities between the two in that both gives more priorities to the web by having a web browser for a desktop. But while Chrome OS is a complete operating system, Webian Shell is not. The Webian Shell runs on top of an existing operating system. Webian Shell cannot even control the hardware right now – it cannot control the system volume, network connections, show the battery indicator etc. Although hardware control is planned for a future release of Webian Shell, there is no plan of it becoming a full-blown operating system right now.

Google Apps to Cut Off Support to Older BrowsersWhile the elimination of support for Firefox 3.5 and earlier and Safari 3 and earlier won’t affect many users, the latest figures from NetMarketShare show that IE7 is still pulling 7 percent of the browser market. Beyond that, IE6, which Google dropped support for last year, is still claiming a healthy 10.36 percent, second only to IE8. All told, Google is eliminating support to 17.4 percent of the browser market merely by cutting off IE7 and below.

It’d be tempting to view this as a move by Google to slap at its rival Microsoft, but the announcement makes no pitch for users to switch to Google’s Chrome browser. Rather, it asks users to “get the latest version of [their] favorite browser.”

Instead, the announcement emphasizes the importance of the security and compatibility fixes offered in newer browsers, and for that, Google deserves some kudos. As the use of Web apps continues to grow, so too do the security and compatibility issues that Web apps bring, and using old browser versions exacerbates those vulnerabilities. It may be frustrating for some users to have to upgrade, but it’s a good thing for Web app providers to force a browser upgrade now and then, if only to keep users from suffering a security breach and to be able to leverage the best new technologies.

Surely profiting from a giant TV audience and some Lionel Messi brilliance, the ‘Dear Hollie’ ad is a reworking of the US’ ‘Dear Sophie’ marketing campaign. It captures real-life footage of a father tracking his daughter’s development from birth onwards, by using Gmail, You Tube and Google Maps to map milestones in her life. The American version has already pulled in nearly 1.2m views on You Tube in only three weeks.

It’s a sentimental 90-second offering, that will get even the hardest techie wiping a tear from their eye, and sees the Big G following Apple’s emotive style of advertising, most recently seen in the FaceTime ads.

Over the pond, Google have already used Lady Gaga to advertise their Chrome browser and it has also run ads during the SuperBowl, one of the most expensive advertising slots of the year.

It represents a new tack from Google in the UK, which has regularly advertised on print and billboard platforms, but has not tried to so obviously tap into the mainstream audience. This marketing push seems to be working as its Google’s Chrome Browser is steadily making up ground on Microsoft’s Internet Explorer, pushing 11% of the market, only three years from launch.

This early version of Firefox 6 introduces a Data Management Window as an experimental feature that provides control over the access that specific websites have to your browsing data, including cookies, passwords, and location information. In the Aurora build, you access this feature by typing “about:permissions” (no quotes) in the Awesome Bar.

There’s also a revamped Add-ons Manager with Plugin Check to quickly verify compatibility of installed plugins, and if you use Panorama to group tabs, Firefox 6 purportedly offers faster startup times by “allowing power Panorama uses to load saved tab groups only when using Panorama.”

Firefox 6 in Aurora form also boasts improved support for HTML5, DOM level 3, server sent events, networking technologies, and other tools designed to make a developer’s like easy when building advanced web apps.

You can download Firefox 6 from here.

Apparently so, as Context, a British security consultancy, released a security bulletin this week warning that the Web Graphics Library (WebGL) is vulnerable to denial of service (DoS) attacks and cross-domain image theft.

WebGL is a specification that allows Web browsers to use OpenGL–a 3-D, hardware-accelerated graphics API–with HTML5. WebGL is built into Firefox 4 and Chrome, and included with–but not enabled by default–in Safari. Many people see WebGL as a potential open source replacement for Flash, with some added benefits. Notably, WebGL is based on markup language, which means that unlike Flash, WebGL content can be indexed by search engines.

But WebGL can be compromised–causing graphics cards to lock up or execute arbitrary code–if it’s fed overly complex shading or rendering requests, or infinite-loop requests, according to Context. “It is easy to trivialize client denial of service attacks when the only affected component is the browser process–there are numerous ways of doing this already–however in this case the attack can completely prevent a user being able to access their computer, making it considerably more serious,” Context said.

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Results of a denial of service attack against WebGL include everything from making a computer unavailable to actually exploiting the machine. Context, however, declined to release related attack code.

Interestingly, the WebGL documentation itself contains a warning that the specification is subject to denial of service attacks: “It is possible to create, either intentionally or unintentionally, combinations of shaders and geometry that take an undesirably long time to render,” in effect shutting down the graphics card.

Likewise, the specification suggests a number of ways in which such attacks might be blocked, but punts solving the problem until later. “The supporting infrastructure at the OS and graphics API layer is expected to improve over time, which is why the exact nature of these safeguards is not specified,” it reads.

In response to Context’s security warning, the Khronos Group, which is the open standards consortium in charge of maintaining the WebGL specification, said that it’s already developed a WebGL extension called GL_ARB_robustness, “specifically designed to prevent denial of service and out-of-range memory access attacks from WebGL content.”

Khronos also is considering further measures, such as securing cross-domain images. “The ability to incorporate cross-domain images into WebGL scenes provides great utility to developers, but the WebGL working group is considering requiring cross-origin resource sharing (CORS) opt-in or other mechanisms to prevent abuse of this capability,” it said.

According to Context, the GL_ARB_robustness extension, which would be included by a graphics hardware manufacturer on their chips, “seems that it would at least mitigate the direct DoS condition where the whole machine becomes unresponsive or crashes.” But the extension would also require manufacturers to detect when machines lock up, and then react. That means that a graphics card could still lock up or at least interrupt users.

As a result, “we do not believe it addresses the wider issue,” according to a blog post from Context. “The resetting of the graphics card and driver should be seen as a crutch to OS stability when exceptional conditions occur and not as a mechanism to protect users from malicious code.”

Accordingly, Context recommends disabling WebGL until there’s a fix. The SANS Storm Center offers instructions for deactivating WebGL in both Firefox and Chrome.