Apple’s adoption of KHTML/JKS over Mozilla’s Gecko has created a disturbance in the force of the Mozilla community. Here’s how Don Melton, who helped launch Mozilla in 1988 and is now the engineering manager for Safari, explained Apple’s choice:

The number one goal for developing Safari was to create the fastest web browser on Mac OS X. When we were evaluating technologies over a year ago, KHTML and KJS stood out. Not only were they the basis of an excellent modern and standards compliant web browser, they were also less than 140,000 lines of code. The size of your code and ease of development within that code made it a better choice for us than other open source projects. Your clean design was also a plus. And the small size of your code is a significant reason for our winning startup performance.

Here’s how Mozilla founder and former evangelist Jamie Zawinski interprets this in his weblog:

Even though some of us used to work on Mozilla, we have to admit that the Mozilla code is a gigantic, bloated mess, not to mention slow, and with an internal API so flamboyantly baroque that frankly we can’t even comprehend where to begin. Also did we mention big and slow and incomprehensible?

Mike Shaver, a Mozilla staff member, did everything but say, “yeah, it’s probably best that Apple didn’t go with Gecko” in his weblog:

I guess I’m supposed to be mortally offended–or at least embarrassed–that they went with KHTML instead of our Gecko engine, but I’m having trouble working up the indignation. We’ve all known forever that Gecko missed its ‘small-and-lean’ target by an area code, and we’ve been slogging back towards the goal, dragging our profilers and benchmarks behind us, for years. If I had to write a new browser, and I was going to have to touch the layout code in a serious way, I would think about Mozilla alternatives. I really, really hope that Mozilla will learn from Safari/KHTML, because they’ve done a lot of great work in about a tenth of the code.

FWIW, I think Gecko is wonderful even though Mozilla and Netscape (two browsers that use Gecko) are craptacular. I was not a believer until I used Chimera, a lightweight but full-featured browser that uses a version of Gecko optimized for Mac OS X. Similarly, Windows users have Phoenix, which I haven’t tried but understand is also pretty great. | News.com story

A week ago I posted an analysis of Apple’s Macworld keynote, and when I described the new PowerBooks I noted that “The only out-and-out I/O mistake on these new machines is the lack of USB 2.0″.

FireWire is great, and has enjoyed incredible popularity on external hard drives and DV cameras. But in a sign that USB 2.0 might edge out FireWire in a world that really doesn’t need or want two high-speed serial interface standards, Sony has introduced a new line of three digital video cameras — the DCR-DVD100, DCR-DVD200 and DCR-DVD300 — with USB 2.0, but not FireWire.

Sony claims that the USB 2.0 interface is faster and, as the camcorder burns video directly to the rewriteable DVD disc, FireWire isn’t needed.

The cameras can store up to 60 minutes of video on those 3-inch rewritable DVDs (DVD-R and DVD-RW), which implies that they record in MPEG-2 rather than DV format. The cameras will be available this summer, and the entry-level DCR-DVD100 will be priced at just under $1,000. | PC World story

Xerox sued Palm in 1997, alleging that Graffiti infringed on Xerox’s patented “Unistrokes” input method. The case was dismissed in 2000, but that decision was reversed in 2001, and Palm has apparently tired of the sword hanging over their head.

The solution? Cleverly, Palm is adopting the same “Jot” input method used on Pocket PC — now if anybody goes after Palm, they have to go through Microsoft. Goodbye Graffiti, hello Graffiti 2! [via Slashdot] | Brighthand story | InternetNews.com story | News.com story | CIC PR

Microsoft’s Trident, Mozilla’s Gecko, Apple’s WebCore/JavaScript Core. If you’re a web developer, these are the only web content (HTML/XHTML/CSS/JavaScript) rendering engines that you’re going to need to check your pages in by the end of this year. Here they are in order of importance:

(1) Microsoft’s Trident is used in Internet Explorer for Windows. It’s important because it dominates general web browsing, and because nearly all Windows applications use it to render web content. (What about the excellent Tasman, used in IE/Mac? I’d put it in fourth place, and consider it optional.)

(2) Apple’s WebCore and JavaScriptCore — the guts of Safari — are Konqueror’s KHTML and KJS, respectively. It’s important because it will dominate Macintosh web browsing, and because nearly all applications that render web content on Macintosh will be using WebCore/JavaScriptCore — to render web content. Plus, by using Safari you’ll get a very good idea of what your content will behave in KDE’s Konqueror web browser.

(3) Gecko is used in AOL’s Netscape web browser. It’s important because Gecko is the second most popular rendering engine for general web browsing (albeit far, far behind Trident), and will be the most popular browser for AOL users.

The fallout is already starting. Omni Group, a small company that makes beautiful software, has effectively (and thankfully) announced that they’ll be abandoning OmniWeb’s poor rendering engine for KHTML via Apple’s WebCore and JavaScript Core. [via Daring Fireball] Expect iCab and Opera (which almost nobody outside of our industry have even heard of) to be completely lost of the shuffle by 2004.

FCC Chairman Michael Powell, risking the wrath of the entertainment cartel, said this during a CES Q&A:

My favorite product that I got for Christmas is TiVo. TiVo is God’s machine.

Oh yeah, baby — he gets it, and let’s hope Michael will be a positive force for digital fair use. Gary Shapiro, the head of the Consumer Electronics Association, expressed his hope that Michael’s colleagues in Congress would buy a TiVo as well — Ernest Miller at LawMeme followed up by suggesting a fund to buy a PVR for every member of Congress, but shouldn’t PVR makers be doing this?

In related news, TiVo no longer wants to be lead your home network — it just wants to be an upstanding member of it. As part of their announcements, TiVo senior VP Brodie Keast admitted:

What we found in our market research was that consumers found it awkward to have to manage digital content in two places. The PC has won as the center of digital content.

In other words, our customers see their PC as their content server, and their TiVo as the brains of their television. Interesting.

Supporting their efforts to make TiVo a good home network citizen, TiVo also announced $99 software (TiVo Series2 only) that will allow its PVRs to share content with your PC, and announced that they’ll be supporting Apple’s Rendezvous technology in order to make it easy to discover and connect to TiVos on your network.

Finally, TiVo will be supporting HDTV by the end of this year. If I throw a couple hard drives and a WiFi card into my current TiVo, I should be just fine through 2003, then… Associated Press: FCC’s Powell declares TiVo ‘God’s machine’ | News.com: TiVo wants to join the home network | TiVo PR: Home Media Option| TiVo PR: Standalone HDTV PVRs | TiVo PR: DirecTV HDTV PVRs

Apparently desperate for news, a staff writer for News.com took a couple comments by the CEO of iVast, put it together with Microsoft’s new licensing terms for Windows Media, and somehow turned it into a “protest” by “MPEG-4 backers” against the new license. Apparently desperate for editors and/or fact-checkers, News.com ran it.

News.com’s story is just irresponsible journalism. The idea of a protest is ridiculous, as anybody having anything to do with MPEG-4 has always known that Microsoft wasn’t just going to cede the non-Windows device market — the only question has been when Microsoft was going to license Windows Media for non-Windows platforms and how much they would charge, and now we know.

Dangerously, other news sites are spreading the News.com story as fact. Slashdot posted a reference to the story, upgrading the “protest” to a “war” while they were at it. Insanely Great Mac also swallowed the News.com story hook/line/sinker and, in a fit of anti-competitive hysteria, started whining about “predatory pricing” just because (surprise!) Microsoft’s licensing terms are a little more reasonable than MPEG-4′s. Sheesh! | News.com story | Insanely Great Mac story | Slashdot story

A little company called SearchKing, whose business is built on artificially inflating their customers’ Google PageRank ratings, sued Google in October after a change in Google’s PageRank algorithms broke SearchKing’s PageRank hacks. Google has now responded to SearchKing’s complaint and filed a motion to dismiss, and LawMeme has a great summary. [via Doc Searls Weblog] | LawMeme: Google replies to SearchKing lawsuit

If you consider QuickTime 6.1 a bug-fix release, you’ll be very happy — it’s solid a includes lots of small improvements, one of the most significant being a better selection of datarates for AAC encoding. You should upgrade ASAP.

If you were hoping for a new-features release, you may be disappointed. Most seriously, Apple’s claims of MPEG-4 Video quality improvements in its QuickTime 6.1 update appear to be specious. Ben Waggoner, an encoding expert who did the MPEG-4 encoding for the NerdTV challenge I reported on last month, says that the quality of the MPEG-4 Video codec proved “not much better” in preliminary testing.

(As QuickTime 6′s MPEG-4 Video encoder came in dead last in the NerdTV tests compared to other Simple Profile encoders, avoid it for professional work. Instead, use the soon-to-be-relased Sorenson Squeeze for MPEG-4, which is available for both Windows and Macintosh and won a “best of show” award at this week’s Macworld.)

Also, although Apple had promised 3GPP-compliant MPEG-4 support before the end of 2002 and demonstrated content (presumably encoded with QuickTime) playing on a 3GPP-compliant phone at Macworld, I’ve confirmed that QuickTime 6.1 does not support playing or encoding 3GPP-compliant MPEG-4. An Apple representative told Ben that they were forced to delay 3GPP support because their AMR (Adaptive Multi-Rate) speech codec wasn’t ready yet.

Having enjoyed success with their Digidesign division’s Pro Tools Free (downloaded more than 1.4 million times, according to Avid), Avid will be releasing Free DV — a free lite version of Avid Xpress DV for Windows and Mac OS X — in Q2 2003.

Free DV could be appealing to people who need capabilities beyond those of iMovie andWindows Movie Maker. However, Xpress DV is $1,700, which puts it out of reach of anybody who doesn’t do non-linear editing professionally. Without having an “Xpress DV Enthusiast” that’s competitively-priced with Final Cut Express ($299) and Premiere ($550), Free DV’s release is a strategic mistake. | Avid PR | Sign up to notifed when Free DV is available | Download Pro Tools Free

QuickTime 6.1 is now available. Mac users, use Software Update. Windows users, open the QuickTime control panel, choose the Update Check panel, and click Update.

In their recent DoCoMo announcements Apple had promised that this release was going to be able to play and encode 3GPP-compatible MPEG-4 files. However, 3GPP support is nowhere to be found. (3GPP is collection of mobile communications standards, including ones that precisely specify what is and isn’t allowable in 3GPP-compliant MPEG-4 files.)

QuickTime 6.1 provides higher quality (Apple says, jury’s still out) and more accurate bitrate controls when encoding MPEG-4 Video, offers more controls and bitrate options for for encoding AAC audio, improves DV decoding and encoding speed, and features better performance and more keyboard shortcuts when playing full-screen video. | Download QuickTime