ReadWriteWeb

Catching up to Chrome is just part of the Firefox roadmap for 2012. Mozilla's Asa Dotzler has updated the strategy and roadmap for desktop Firefox in 2012. While the Mozilla folks have several original ideas and goals, there's a lot in the first half of the 2012 roadmap that looks very familiar to Chrome users as well. The really interesting features come in the second half of 2012, and relate to user privacy and account management. Third party cookie management and tracking could be a killer feature for Firefox later this year.

If you have a look at the desktop feature roadmap, you'll see that Q1 and Q2 have quite a few features that are either already in Google Chrome. For example, there's sync for add-ons, assuming add-ons work across releases, silent update and a redesigned new tab page.

Google updated the YouTube app for Google TV yesterday, bringing YouTube's channel-based redesign to the living room. It also adds a "Discover" tab for browsing new channels and videos to watch. The update also adds performance and navigation improvements.

Yesterday, Google TV's Facebook page seeded that a big announcement was coming. When Peter Kafka revealed that this YouTube app was it, he concluded that it was no big deal. But as far as Google TV goes, the YouTube app is big. YouTube is the new television. It's smart TV's killer app. But YouTube is not exclusive to Google TV. If Google TV wants to be relevant, it has to offer the best YouTube experience around.

Google+ is putting its volume slider on the What's Hot feature. What on Earth does that mean? It means that Google+ is giving its users fine-grained control over what appears in their main streams.

The volume slider came out in December to let users adjust the prominence of posts from individual circles in their overall streams. It's now available for the What's Hot feed as well, which is where Google+ shows users popular posts from across the network.

Facebook's social graph of you isn't you. It's an approximation and an extrapolation based on little clues you've left lying around the Web. Using your Facebook or Google identity gives those services more data points about what you do, but that doesn't mean it substitutes for whom you are.

The central thing wrong with the social Web is that users don't own their identities. Users share themselves with identity services - like Facebook and Google - that then act as representatives of the people using them. Facebook and Google allow other sites to rent those identities. But when you log in to a new service using Facebook Connect, you are actually constraining your identity to the Facebook version of it, though you're expanding Facebook itself. Do you want to be the same version of yourself everywhere else as you are on Facebook? Or Google?

The term "reasonable and non-discriminatory licensing" or "RAND" (which may or may not include the "F" for "fair," depending on one's whim) was evidently coined long before any group of people came to a mutual decision upon what constituted "reasonable." At any rate, the debate over what's reasonable and what's "F" has now gone full-throttle, with Google's revelation Wednesday that it perceives prospective partner Motorola Mobility's (MMI) definition as reasonable enough, and that it's 2.25% of retail sale price minus subsidies.

That might not sound like much, but if you compound all the essential patents for which a manufacturer may need to obtain a license just to produce an ordinary smartphone, the sum total may become quite a chunk. That's the argument Apple made to European telecom regulators last November, in a letter revealed only last Tuesday. With Apple and Google now on the record, Microsoft could not afford to be left out of the discussion.

When RWW webmaster Jared Smith sent me screenshots of yet another change to Google's top navigation bar, I thought it was a bug. Then I got it, too. It's a weird hybrid of the old, black nav bar with plain, gray text and the new, light one with the icons and Google search box. Sure enough, just now, Google announced the change, so it will be rolling out to all users soon.

The black bar, sometimes called the "sandbar," only appeared in the middle of last year as Google began to redesign its interfaces, and the gray Google Bar was launched in November. Some users still have the sandbar, and others have the gray one. Now there's a strange hybrid appearing, and it's sort of the worst of both worlds.

The next version of Chrome will help older computers catch up with rapidly accelerating Web-based graphics. The upcoming Chrome release will improve the performance of hardware-accelerated 2D animations using Canvas, which include many Web-based games and other graphically-intensive sites.

It will also let systems with older GPUs use SwiftShader for 3D graphics instead of WebGL, which older GPUs can't handle. It won't look quite as good, but users with older systems will still get more 3D content than they currently can. The new Chrome beta with these features is available today.

The Wall Street Journal has revived rumors about Google launching a cloud storage service called Drive. The comparison everybody wants to make is to Dropbox. The thinking is that Google will challenge everyone's favorite start-up by releasing a native desktop and mobile Drive app with the same syncing features Dropbox users know and love.

Google Drive rumors have been around for many years, and they've always conformed to the understanding of "The Cloud" that has prevailed at the time. If it's not like Apple's iCloud, which is integrated into Apple's devices, then it must be like Dropbox, which lives on the Web but syncs through a client. But think outside the box for a minute. Google has new and unique cloud services that Dropbox and Apple don't. There's room for a third, stand-out option here.

If all goes according to plan, the same company which last year asserted that patents were essentially legal weapons in an unfair war against the Android operating system, will find itself the owner of one of the largest technology portfolios anywhere in the world. Today, Google took steps to assure many of Motorola Mobility's (MMI) existing licensees that it would adhere to that company's existing reasonable and non-discriminatory (RAND) licensing practices for mobile technologies.

This after Apple sent a letter to a European Telecommunications Standards Institute last November 11 - as first reported by Dow Jones this morning - complaining that Google had not been forthcoming about what constitutes "reasonable" with respect to royalties.

Google just launched a page for Google+ developers. It will post news updates and info about events, conferences and hackathons. host weekly video hangouts to share updates, tips and tricks about the platform. Office hours are on Wednesdays between 11:30 a.m. and 12:15 p.m. Pacific. Hopefully, this is a sign of upcoming API releases, so Google+ developers can start, you know, developing.

The Google+ Platform Blog has been pretty quiet. Google SVP Vic Gundotra said in October that Google+ doesn't "want to make the same mistakes of others," - referring to Twitter - by opening the API too quickly to developers and then having to clamp down later. He said to look ahead to Google I/0 (since rescheduled for June 27-29) for major platform announcements.