HTML5 and Flash have been used to great effect in recreating traditional desktop apps that can be run through your web browser. Google is so confident that web apps can replace your desktop apps that it has released the ChromeOS, which is not much more than the Chrome web browser presented as a desktop operating system.

This tutorial shows how you can set up a Kubuntu 10.10 desktop that is a full-fledged replacement for a Windows desktop, i.e. that has all the software that people need to do the things they do on their Windows desktops. The advantages are clear: you get a secure system without DRM restrictions that works even on old hardware, and the best thing is: all software comes free of charge.

Early this week Gnash 0.8.8 was released. Despite the small increment in version number, which would make this seem like a minor maintenance release, the difference between version 0.8.8 and the earlier 0.8.7 is like night and day.

So the Gnash team is broke, and has been for most of a year. This has forced many, but not all of the Gnash developers to find paying work, and mostly stop working on Gnash. The few of them left focused on Gnash like to eat and pay bills.

Mozilla vice president of products Jay Sullivan says that unlike Google, the open source outfit has no intention of bundling Firefox with Adobe Flash —– or with a plug-in that runs native code inside the browser. Mozilla, Sullivan says, believes that the future of online applications lies with web standards, including HTML5.

Smokescreen is a new open-source project aimed at converting Flash to JavaScript/HTML5 to run where it previously couldn’t and better interoperate with webpages where it previously could.

Why, then, is Apple, in a letter full of talk of openness and standards, promoting this closed codec, a codec that will once again shackle the web to a proprietary technology, just as we're busy breaking free from Flash? ...
Jobs' letter talks about how it's bad for a platform if developers use cross-platform technologies... And yet, without any sense of shame, Apple ships iTunes for Windows.

Starting today, an ambitious project from the Mozilla Foundation called "Lorentz" makes its first public, experimental debut, with the release of a public beta of Firefox 3.6.4.