ReadWriteEnterprise

Remember in 2003, when the CAN SPAM Act was signed into law, how spam just stopped overnight? Yeah, me neither. Just as CAN SPAM did little to curb spam, having Google and Microsoft sign on to Do Not Track (DNT) still leaves a lot to be desired.

Google and others signing up for DNT support aren't even promising not to track users, they're just agreeing "not to use data from consumers who don't want to be tracked to customize ads or to use the data for certain purposes such as employment, health care or insurance."

Over the last three years, an average of 85% of the Mozilla Foundation's revenue has come from search engine partnerships, most importantly from deals that enable the Firefox browser to use its search bar to use Google by default. Though Mozilla's relationship with Microsoft's Bing has grown strangely closer over those years, Google - the maker of the competing Chrome browser, which was created using much of Firefox's braintrust - has remained the principal search tool for Firefox. That tool alone, one analyst said last year, may be responsible for just over 9% of all Google searches.

The last partnership extension between Google and Mozilla - a three-year deal renewed in August 2008 - was apparently allowed to expire last month. This led journalists including my friend and colleague at ZDNet, Ed Bott, to wonder whether Mozilla had any kind of Plan B. Today, we're being told that something resembling a Plan B (or C or D) may be in the works.

We all notice when a web app is acting a big sluggish. What is causing it to be so slow?Why is it not responding as fast as it should?

These are the kinds of issues that keep developers up at night.

To help solve this problem, Google is launching Speed Tracer, a new tool for the Google Web Toolkit.