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Qubit was started a few years ago by a group of ex-Googlers, who are now taking on their former employer’s Analytics product as well as other rivals such as Chartbeat, Adobe Omniture and Mixpanel. Qubit draws in more than 100 data points for each site visit, which it combines with factors such as geography to create a behavior model – first-time visitors tend to do this, second-time visitors tend to do that, and so on.

The new version of the platform gives marketers a more fully integrated workflow, as Qubit CEO Graham Cooke explained to me:

“We can do an analysis, understand who the users are and look at the journeys they’ve taken. So, for example, [certain users] always have these issues when putting things in their basket; they don’t know if they spend another £10 [$15.30] they will get free delivery. So you can choose that segment from the analytics platform and choose to target that segment with a message, which [we] put straight into the website without needing to rewrite the website. You just need a single line of code on the site.”

Cooke said Qubit had invested heavily in in-memory processing to deal with the resulting tens of billions of data points, as technologies such as Hadoop and MapR “mean it takes five minutes to get the result back”. (It should be noted that rivals such as Chartbeat and Mixpanel are also working with in-memory technologies.)

“We have a mix of open-source technologies that we put together with our own query language, built around our own in-memory clusters to do that,” Cooke said. “Hadoop is part of our framework but not part of this solution. This is about making big data friendly and being able to build a hypothesis and write that change into your site targeting a specific user group.”

Qubit already has an impressive roster of customers, including the BBC, the Financial Times, Expedia and British retail chains such as Staples and Topshop. According to Cooke, the company’s technology leads to around a 25 percent uplift in revenue.

Internet Explorer users are valuable

To mark the launch of Qubit v2, the company has also released some in-house research about the relative “value” of users of different browsers – one of the many variables that the platform takes into account. The research took in data from around 100 million sessions across 90 different retail sites between December and January.

Interestingly, the research shows Internet Explorer (IE) customers to be the most “valuable” customers because they are the easiest to tempt into a sale, with a 3.14 percent conversion rate and an average basket total of £76.87. Safari users have a much higher average basket total of £108.44, but are harder to sell to, with a conversion rate of 1.64 percent.

Firefox users actually have the highest average basket total, at £110.99, and have a 2.18 percent conversion rate, while Chrome users average £90.36 percent for basket total and are only slightly easier to sell to than Safari users, with a 1.84 percent conversion rate. In terms of average customer value, then – balancing basket value with conversion rate – the results in descending order look like this: IE (£2.42), Firefox (£2.41), Safari (£1.78) and Chrome (£1.66).

Here’s a video promoting Qubit v2:

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Sorry, Mozilla, the Google news is bigger … for now

Depending on your point of view, this situation at its base level is either very good or very bad. On the positive side, both efforts are intended — at least partially — to create browser engines that take better advantage of multi-core chips and parallel processes to speed up the web on mobile devices. That’s great, but the biggest downside is the potential for websites to be rendered differently through different browser engines; that’s bad for users and for web developers, of course.

The Mozilla/Samsung effort is a long way off from any public final releases. And Mozilla isn’t really a force in the mobile web space these days, even though it makes a solid mobile browser. Samsung’s Android devices can obviously run Google’s Chrome browser now and Samsung has also skinned a browser for its devices; personally, I find Chrome to be a better choice, but opinions will certainly vary.

So the real story here, at least for the short- and medium-term, is Google’s effort. It has greater influence on more web users due to adoption of the Chrome browser on the hundreds of millions of desktops, laptops and mobile devices. And between Chrome and Safari, more people use the WebKit browser engine than any other. Here is worldwide browser/engine usage data from StatCounter, measured in March of 2013:

• Chrome (WebKit): 38.07%
• Internet Explorer (Trident): 29.3%
• Firefox (Gecko): 20.87%
• Safari (WebKit): 8.5%
• Opera (Presto): 1.17%

The current browser state and Google’s reason for the change

The open source WebKit rendering engine is currently used by Apple’s Safari browser — both on OS X and iOS — Chrome, BlackBerry 10 and, ironically, Samsung’s Tizen platform. As a result, it’s the most widely used browser engine. But Apple owns the trademark for the name WebKit, and that tells you part of the reason Google is forking it. The other part? Google already has its own JavaScript engine in Chrome called V8, even though it uses WebKit for rendering.

Google doesn’t want to use browser technologies that have been primarily used or built by others when it thinks it can fork or build its own code to make the web faster. And that’s a good part of the reason for the fork: speed. Not just speed the end user will see, which was partly why Chrome was built — the other part was clearly strategic — but speed of development. From the Chromium blog, emphasis mine:

“However, Chromium uses a different multi-process architecture than other WebKit-based browsers, and supporting multiple architectures over the years has led to increasing complexity for both the WebKit and Chromium projects. This has slowed down the collective pace of innovation – so today, we are introducing Blink, a new open source rendering engine based on WebKit.”

As an open source project, WebKit has many chefs in the kitchen, which is not necessarily a bad thing. But it also has different customers on varying platforms, so in order to keep it working for all, it takes a larger amount of effort in coding and testing than if it were used by a single entity. Alex Russell, a Google developer explains:

“Directness of action matters, and when you’re swimming through build files for dozens of platforms you don’t work on, that’s a step away from directness. When you’re working to fix or prevent regressions you can’t test against, that’s a step away. When compiles and checkouts take too long, that’s a step away. When landing a patch in both WebKit and Chromium stretches into a multi-day dance of flags, stub implementations, and dep-rolls, that’s many steps away. And each step hurts by a more-than-constant factor.”

As Russell works directly on Chrome for Google, it’s fair to question his motives here. It’s up to you to believe him or not. For my part, I do. I worked for years as a Software Quality Assurance tester in a Fortune 100 company and I’ve seen exactly what Russell is talking about. Projects were routinely delayed because the primary team made software changes that had negative downstream effects on other teams using the same code. Coordination was a nightmare.

The other side of the story: Web standards and bad intentions

The obvious question here is how much of Google’s effort is truly meant to improve the web versus how much of it is to take a shot at Apple? That’s a business question that can have a negative impact on web users as a whole if web standards are ignored or changed in favor of a particular browser component. Out of all the reactions I’ve read, Rob Isaac’s interpretation of the Blink news illustrates this best. He translates Google’s effort as:

We have a direct strategic interest in destroying Apple’s mobile platforms because their lack of participation in our advertising and social ecosystems does not benefit our long term goals. You should expect Chrome and Blink changes in the short term to be focused in this direction.

In the longer term, we aim to have sufficient control over the installed base of web browsers to dictate whatever conditions we consider most appropriate to our business goals at the time.

Snarky? Yes. But possibly part of Google’s rationale? Sadly, also yes. Google’s entire business is built upon the web, so exerting control over the web protects that business. In the Blink announcement Google says it will maintain transparency and use open standards, although it’s possible — likely even — that any new functions or features in Blink could be lobbied for becoming standards:

In practice, we strive to ensure that the features we ship by default have open standards. As we work on features, we track their progress in the web standards community with the Chromium Features Dashboard, which lets us be transparent about the status of each feature and about how we make decisions about which features to enable by default for the open web.

If, indeed, the Blink effort creates any new standards, it wouldn’t likely happen for a long, long time. For all the talk about HTML 5 over the past several years, the standard itself isn’t expected to be stable until 2014. But make no mistake: there’s clear potential for Google to have more direct influence over standard web browser technology as the result of Blink. And that’s something that no single company really should have.

It’s too early to say if the good outweighs the bad

For now, the situation is well worth watching over the next six to 12 months. We’ll see what Mozilla and Samsung actually produce with their collaboration, for starters. We should see a leaner and meaner Chrome as Google starts paring out code — up to 4.5 million lines and 7,000 files, says Google — from WebKit in Blink. Those are clearly good things. But we’ll also have to see what, if anything, from Blink looks like it could be pushed as a web standard. That will be the clearest warning flag that Google’s “Do no evil” theme is just a front in the new browser battle.

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For a start, the URL and search bars are now one, much as is the case in Chrome. The startup screen has also been significantly overhauled, adding a curated content discovery feature that is slightly reminiscent of Google Currents, and a history page that is easier to access than before. Private browsing is now an option, as it is in rival mobile browsers these days.

On top of that, the Opera team has decided to tweak the Speed Dial concept: Speed Dial links are a narrow selection of favorite pages that show up on new tabs, and now Opera treats them like the bookmarks they are by allowing the user to organize them in folders.

Beyond these changes, the browser still includes the features that already make Opera popular with a subset of users, such as optional server-side compression to cut down on data usage and speed up page loads, and the ability to save pages for offline reading,

This was a much-needed overhaul. Opera’s problem has always been that it looked very different – that was because the company tried to do things differently, and they did succeed in introducing new concepts that others picked up on (Speed Dial was one and, at the risk of enraging Firefox fans, tabbed browsing was arguably another). This iteration has a very native-Android look, though not so much as to appear like a me-too browser. Features such as the combined URL/search bar may be unoriginal, but they were worth copying.

The start screen, meanwhile, is in my opinion now leaps ahead of the competition, being more intuitive, more feature-rich and perhaps even more attractive than that offered by Chrome. Bearing in mind that this is the first of the new Opera browsers to come out – expect revamps across the board – it’s a good omen of things to come.

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With the Social API, users will be able to see incoming messages and notifications and quickly begin chats with friends. The idea is to be able to have a quick view into a site without having to switch back and forth between tabs. Firefox is working with Facebook first but is expected to add more sites in the future.

With Facebook Messenger inside a sidebar, users can check notifications and see updates like comments and photo tags. They can respond right in the sidebar or they can hide it when they need less distractions.

This is interesting because it shows how social can be integrated into our browsing experience. We saw some of this with the Rockmelt browser but Firefox is a more mainstream product. It will be interesting to see what other websites connect to the API and how social Firefox and other browsers can get. Right now, this is just more of a quick short cut to some social content but there are a lot more opportunities to blend in social content with our browsing experience.

The Social API doesn’t have to work with only social sites. The API could be used by financial and sports sites to maintain a ticker or email providers could use it to make it easy to check in-coming messages. And since Firefox is open source, other browser makers could implement the Social API, though no other company has announced their intention to do so.

The Social API first appeared in beta last month, but now anyone with Firefox 17 will be able to use it. Future versions of Firefox will get the ability to handle more than one provider at the same time through the Social API.

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The organization set up a temporary Berlin office a few weeks ago, and on Monday it announced it is to establish a permanent base next year in the Factory, a recently-opened tech office space that houses SoundCloud and several other up-and-coming Berlin startups. What’s more, Mozilla says it’s now hiring in the city.

“We are looking forward to playing a more active role in the vibrant Berlin internet community, building for the open web right where new web trends are created,” Mozilla CFO Jim Cook said in a statement.

Now, this isn’t a coup for Berlin in the same sense as London’s recent announcements of new Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft offices. The Berlin office will be one of what the organization calls ‘Mozilla Spaces’ – an office with some paid staff, but also where Mozilla’s many volunteer contributors can come to hack or just hang out. In Europe, there are two similar ‘spaces’ already being set up in London and Paris.

It’s also hard to nail down exactly what kind of product will come out of the Berlin establishment. Barbara Hueppe, who’s in charge of setting up the new team, told me it “will not have a special focus”, and that Mozilla hoped to “attract talent that will help us drive our diverse initiatives”.

But it is a very intriguing move, particularly given the strengths of the local startup community, and the current stage in Mozilla’s own development.

A good place to go mobile

The organization is in quite a transitional phase right now. Desktop Firefox is obviously still its marquee product, but Mozilla has pulled back from developing other legacy products such as Thunderbird and is instead working on a major mobile push. Firefox OS and Firefox for Android are the two main products to look out for there.

While it’s easy to see the mobile OS space as a two-horse, iOS vs Android race, there are a couple of notable up-and-coming alternatives. Jolla is one, with its deal with China’s largest mobile retail chain, the D.Phone Group, but carriers such as Telefonica have also expressed interest in the Firefox OS. Operators want an alternative to Android at the low end, and Mozilla has a lot to play for there.

Now look at the Berlin scene — it’s crawling with mobile-focused startups such as Amen, Readmill, EyeEm and Tweek.tv. To be fair, mobile is the big thing right now, so most hubs have an excess of such firms, but the long-established presence of Nokia’s geolocation squad in Berlin has led to a particular concentration of smartphone and tablet talent in the city.

Mozilla may not have concrete plans for working with Berlin’s startup scene just yet, but Hueppe assured me that “pure proximity will lead to many good ways of cross-pollination”.

If all goes well, that cross-pollination could mean new ideas for Mozilla and new opportunities for the local scene.

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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer

The quick admission and apology is likely to be an attempt to make that fine as small as possible.

As you may recall, Microsoft reached an agreement with the European Commission at the end of 2009 over the automatic bundling of Internet Explorer with Windows. To satisfy the regulators, it promised to make sure Windows users got a clear choice of default browsers at the point of installation — allowing people to easily avoid IE if they wished. This was done through a so-called ‘browser choice screen’, or BCS, and Microsoft also agreed to submit a compliance report to the regulators every year.

The last of those reports was submitted in December, and in it Microsoft assured the EC that every Windows user was getting the BCS when they set up the operating system, so they could easily install browsers such as Chrome and Firefox, rather than Internet Explorer.

Except, it turns out, that assurance was not true.

On Tuesday, the EC revealed that it was launching fresh proceedings against Microsoft “in order to investigate whether the company has failed to comply with its 2009 commitments” – specifically, whether it was the case that Windows 7 Service Pack 1 did not bring the BCS with it. Not long after, Microsoft apologetically fessed up:

Due to a technical error, we missed delivering the BCS software to PCs that came with the service pack 1 update to Windows 7. The BCS software has been delivered as it should have been to PCs running the original version of Windows 7, as well as the relevant versions of Windows XP and Windows Vista. However, while we believed when we filed our most recent compliance report in December 2011 that we were distributing the BCS software to all relevant PCs as required, we learned recently that we’ve missed serving the BCS software to the roughly 28 million PCs running Windows 7 SP1.”

Microsoft says it started distributing the BCS software to Windows 7 SP1 machines on 3 July, a couple of business days after “discovering the problem”. It also claims the software is now available for all new PCs bearing that OS and service pack.

The company has retained external lawyers to conduct a formal investigation into the “technical error”, and these lawyers will provide their report to the EC when it is ready. Microsoft has also promised the EC that it will extend the compliance period – the five-year period during which the company has to submit those annual reports – by 15 months.

“We understand that the Commission will review this matter and determine whether this is an appropriate step for Microsoft to take. We understand that the Commission may decide to impose other sanctions,” the software giant added in a quote that must send shivers down the spines of its shareholders.

Meanwhile, the EC – which was fully aware by today that Microsoft really had breached its agreement – used its statement to roll out an excellent impression of a ticked-off teacher.

“We take compliance with our decisions very seriously. And I trusted the company’s reports were accurate. But it seems that was not the case, so we have immediately taken action,” competition commissioner Joaquín Almunia said. “If following our investigation, the infringement is confirmed, Microsoft should expect sanctions.”

Microsoft and the European Commission have had a stormy relationship over the years, to put it mildly. The browser case was arguably the smaller of two antitrust investigations into the company, the other being the server software case that saw Microsoft hit with a $600m fine eight years ago, only to have much more added on top because it still refused to live up to its agreements.

Plus ça change…

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