That's the sense I got reading through Redmonk analyst Stephen O'Grady's billet-doux to Chromium, the open-source project behind the Google Chrome browser. O'Grady has long been friendly to Mozilla and a dedicated user of Firefox. When his head is turned by another browser, it's time for concern.

Yes, Firefox continues to grow its market share, now sitting comfortably at 22.47 percent, while Chrome is far behind at 2.59 percent. But O'Grady is an influencer (even if he has yet to persuade me to adopt the Linux "desktop"), and his reasons for preferring Chrome are important:

As O'Grady notes, his observations apply to the Linux versions of Chrome and Firefox, but they still should give Mozilla pause.

In this little war, however, perhaps Microsoft is taking Firefox's side, at least against Google. As The Register reports, Microsoft Office Web Apps, due out in 2010, will support Firefox and other "familiar Web browsers," which doesn't include Chrome, Safari (for Windows), or Opera. Apparently, Microsoft will only be supporting those browsers that don't have an operating system competitor attached to them.

The browser market has become hugely competitive and, as a result, more innovative and much more interesting. I'm confident the Mozilla team will respond to Chrome's apparent speed advantages, but equally confident that Google, Apple, and Microsoft will work just as hard to outflank Mozilla and the other browser competitors in other ways.

All of which is good for you and for me as we enjoy the results of the competition. Now if we could just get this level of competition in all areas of software.

Windows 7 64-bit will soon take over desktop computers.

Consumers have had the option of 64-bit Windows computing since the release of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition in May 2005, four years after the release of Windows XP 32-bit. At the end of 2006, Windows Vista 32-bit and 64-bit versions were released simultaneously. Yet chances are you're currently using a machine that runs the 32-bit version of Windows.

This is about to change. Windows 64-bit has started to gain a significant foothold in the past two years as more systems ship with 3GB or more of memory. However, with Windows 7, 64-bit computing is likely to become even more common.

What's the difference between 32-bit and 64-bit computing? In a nutshell, the numbers refer to the amount of bits a computer can process in one computation. They also translate into the amount of random access memory (RAM) a computer can address. A 32-bit Windows computer can address a maximum of 4GB of RAM, while a 64-bit Windows machine can address up to 128GB and even more (64-bit applications can address theoretically up to 16 billion gigabytes of memory). So the higher number of bit means better computing, both in terms of precision and capability.

Despite the potential, the transition to the new platform has been slow. This is because of the high price of RAM and the lack of device drivers and 64-bit software applications. (Drivers are a special type of software that make hardware components work with the operating system. Without the sound driver, for example, your computer wouldn't be able to play music.)

Back when Windows Vista was released, 2GB of RAM, which is the recommended amount to make Vista run properly, could easily cost a couple hundred dollars. (This is one of the reasons Vista failed so badly as a new OS release.) There was virtually no 64-bit application then, either, other than a few game demos, and most hardware vendors didn't provide the 64-bit version of the drivers. Apart from this, 32-bit computers have been able to satisfy most of our daily computing needs.

It's been more than four years since then and things have changed a lot. Windows Vista, while it wasn't exactly celebrated, has helped make 64-bit drivers become more readily available. The fact that Windows 7 uses the same driver architecture as Vista will make it the most 64-bit-ready OS when it's officially released come October. On top of that RAM is now about four times more affordable than it used to be back in 2005.

(Currently, if you buy a computer from Dell or HP or any other vendors and choose to have 4GB of RAM or more, the computer will come with Windows Vista 64-bit.)

I just finished testing the 64-bit version of Windows 7 for the review of the OS and can confirm that most of the critical hardware components, including networking, sound, and video, now have 64-bit drivers ready. By the time Windows 7 is officially released, you'll probably have no problem finding 64-bit drivers for most components.

That said, despite the fact there are not yet many 64-bit applications, here are the compelling reasons to move to the 64-bit platform:

Larger memory: As RAM gets cheaper, new computers come with more RAM, and the only way to make this useful is to use a 64-bit version of Windows. It's safe to say all computers equipped with 4GB of RAM or more will be pre-installed with Windows 64-bit. In short, you might just get a Windows 64-bit computer whether you are aware of that. This is probably the main reason for the 64-bit platform to take off.

(RAM, or system memory, is the place where information is being processed. This is not to be confused with hard drive, the place where information is stored. The more RAM a computer has, the faster it can get things done.)

Backward compatibility: Most, if not all, 32-bit software applications (except for drivers) can operate in Windows 64-bit the way they do in Windows 32-bit. In other words, Windows 64-bit can run all what Windows 32-bit runs plus 64-bit applications.

Nvidia is one of many hardware vendors that offer 64-bit drivers for their products.

Better experience: Together with the 64-bit Windows, Microsoft enforces the digital signature of the drivers. This means there will be less badly developed device drivers, which are one of the main causes of crashes. Also, 64-bit versions of software, especially games and graphics/multimedia programs, will offer much better overall performance.

However, there are still a couple of reasons to expect some hiccups during this transition. First off, drivers are still issues, as many legacy peripheral devices, such as printers or scanners, will never work with 64-bit Windows. Secondly, 16-bit software applications, those designed for Windows 3.1 or DOS, will not be supported anymore. Lastly, I personally have found out that codecs for many types of compressed video formats, such as MKV or DiVx, for now, are not working well with Windows 64-bit, especially with the Media Center application.

Also, we can't ignore the fact that as a 32-bit application can run on both platforms, developers are now still more enticed to make them than the 64-bit versions.

Nonetheless, together with Windows 7, the 64-bit platform will definitely be taking over desktops and high-performance laptops, leaving the 32-bit primarily for Netbooks and low-power, low-performance applications.

Apple is also moving in the same direction with the upcoming release of Snow Leopard, whose accompanying applications (including Finder, Mail, Safari, iCal, iChat, and so on) will be 64-bit.

If you have been using the 64-bit version of Windows, please share your experience in the comments section below.

After leaving much of the matter of creating a new version of HTML to Apple, Google, Opera, and Mozilla, Microsoft has begun sinking its teeth into the Web standard.

The move adds clout to the effort to renovate HyperText Markup Language, the standard used to describe Web pages, which last was formally updated in 1999. In a mailing list posting on Friday, the software giant offered a host of questions and concerns with the present proposal.

"As part of our planning for future work, the IE team is reviewing the current editor's draft of the HTML5 spec and gathering our thoughts. We want to share our feedback and discuss this in the working group," said Internet Explorer Program Manager Adrian Bateman in the message. "I will post our notes as we collect them so we can iterate on our thinking more quickly. At this stage we have more questions than answers, but I believe that discussing them in public is the best way to make progress."

HTML 5 in its current draft form includes a number of significant advancements, notably several that make the Web a better foundation for applications, not just static Web pages. Among the present HTML 5 features are built-in video and audio, the ability to store data on a local computer to enable use of Web applications even when offline, Web Workers that can perform computational chores in the background without bogging down Web application responsiveness, Canvas for creating sophisticated two-dimensional graphics, and drag-and-drop for better Web application user interfaces.

The formal HTML standard is under the governance of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and Microsoft's Chris Wilson is a co-chairman of the W3C group developing HTML. But much of the course of HTML 5 has been set so far outside that by a separate effort called the Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group (WHATWG), which browser makers launched years ago when they didn't like the XHTML 2.0 direction the W3C was trying to take HTML.

Microsoft hasn't been uninvolved in HTML 5. It's the origin of technology in HTML 5 called ContentEditable, which lets elements of Web pages be edited in place by people using a browser. And Microsoft said its newest browser, Internet Explorer 8, also supports these HTML 5 components: the DOM Store, Cross Document Messaging, Cross Domain Messaging, and Ajax Navigation.

But the new message indicates Microsoft is getting serious about the effort, digging into many nitty-gritty aspects of the proposed specification. That's important because Microsoft has of late embraced a standard-centric philosophy when it comes to what technology IE supports, and IE is of course the dominant browser on the market.

Microsoft declined to comment for this story.

Google, Apple, and Mozilla have been trumpeting HTML 5 features in their latest browsers, but Microsoft takes a more cautious tone.

"The support of ratified standards (that Web developers) can use is something that we are extremely supportive of," said Amy Barzdukas, general manager for IE, in a July interview. "In some cases, it can be premature to start claiming support for standards that are not yet in fact standards."