When asked if and how they plan to match Microsoft Office’s unparalleled feature set, most online office suite vendors simply switch the subject, touting the superiority of their Web-based collaboration, and low or free price.

ZoooS LLC is one of the few vendors that won’t dodge the question.

At the Office 2.0 conference in San Francisco this week, the California-European startup will preview a Web office suite that is based on the free, open-source OpenOffice.org, Microsoft Office’s main desktop competitor.

ZoooS offers Google Docs-like collaboration, such as letting users simultaneously edit the same document. And despite OpenOffice’s size — version 2 for Windows requires 440 MB of disk space when installed — ZoooS offers speedy access to 95% of the features and look-and-feel of OpenOffice.org, said ZoooS’ CEO and co-founder, Hisham El-Emam.

“It’s almost all Javascript, so it runs really fast, you don’t even need Google Chrome,” El-Emam said.

ZoooS already has a “few thousand” paying users at several medium-sized companies and its major client, the German Ministry of Education, making the 20-employee startup already profitable, El-Emam said. The basic cost is $999 for a perpetual server license for 10 users, which includes installation support and a few basic support incidents after that. The price per user decreases as the number of users increases, he said.

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Download Google Chrome Browser here

Chrome’s improved performance is partly attributable to its being based on the very fast WebKit rendering engine—the same one used by Apple’s Safari—and partly to its new JavaScript engine, V8. JavaScript performance is one of the more touted features of Chrome, and in the well-regarded SunSpider performance test, it came in with a time of 3471ms, compared with IE8’s 12,866ms and Firefox 3’s 6,701ms—a marked and impressive improvement that gives a lot of credence to Google engineers’ claims that this will pave the path to far richer JavaScript-based Web applications.

Chrome’s process isolation takes that of IE8 a couple of welcome steps farther: It not only isolates tabs, but also plug-ins such as Flash, and it offers a Task Manager for your open tabs and add-ins. I haven’t seen either of these capabilities in a browser yet. Not only does Chrome isolate simultaneous tabs, but it even isolates individual tabs sequentially; when you navigate to a different domain, the tab process is thrown out and a new one started—just in case there were memory leaks resulting from the previous site. I wondered what effect this would have on the Back button (whether it would remember the session information from the earlier site) but I didn’t run into problems, and was able to check my Webmail using the Back button even after moving to another site.

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Microsoft Corp.’s latest version of Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) requires more than double the system memory of its main rival, Mozilla Corp.’s Firefox, and spawns nearly six times the number of processor threads, a performance researcher said today.

Internet Explorer 8 (IE8) Beta 2 also consumes 52% more memory than its predecessor, IE7, and uses almost three times as many threads, said Craig Barth, chief technology officer at Devil Mountain Software Inc., a Florida-based maker of PC performance testing software.

“IE8 is epically porcine,” said Barth. “Microsoft has gone to epic levels of bloat.”

Barth tested IE8 Beta 2, IE7 and Firefox 3.0.1 in a 10-site scenario that involved media-rich domains such as boston.com, channel9.com, cnet.com, infoworld.com, nytimes.com and others. Each site was opened by each browser in a separate tab, then links on those sites were opened in new tabs. Both Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight were installed as plug-ins for each browser.

By test end, IE8 Beta 2 had grabbed 380MB of memory on the 2GB-equipped system running Windows Vista, while IE7 accounted for 250GB and Firefox 3.0.1, the most-recent version of the open-source browser, had taken 159MB. When the same tests were run under Windows XP, each browser consumed slightly less memory than in Vista; IE8 Beta 2, however, continued to lead the competition by wide margins.

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Some of us have been dreaming of the day we can finally press the delete button on Microsoft Word for good.

Nothing against Word, per se. It has served us well enough throughout the years. Maybe it is the challenge and change of view we’re looking for. The likelihood of a viable replacement grows stronger as you realize most everything you do on Word could also be done in Google Docs or Zoho …for free. However, the major hurdle of any web application is its reliance on an internet connection.

Now, with Gears recent beta release on Webkit-powered browsers, and webkit-powered Fluid for Mac which allows you to download local copies of websites to your desktop, have our dreams of keeping a desktop copy of a web app come true?

Almost.

We’re so close, we can taste it. As it stands, you can have a local copy of Google Docs which allows you to unplug from the internet and open, search, edit, tag, organize and save all of your documents.

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Google Inc is set to introduce on Tuesday a new Web browser designed to more quickly handle video-rich or other complex Web programs, posing a challenge to browsers designed originally to handle text and graphics.

officials confirmed news of long-rumored plans to offer its own Web browsing software, entitled Google Chrome, in a company blog post after it mistakenly mailed details of the plan to a Google-watching blog, called Blogoscoped.com.

The company statement calls the move “a fresh take on the browser” and said it will be introducing a public trial of the Web browser for Microsoft Corp Windows users on Tuesday. Details can be found at http://tinyurl.com/gchrome/.

The Internet search leader is also working on versions for Apple Macintosh users and for Linux devices, it said.

The launch of Chrome coincides with the recent introduction by arch-rival Microsoft of its Internet Explorer 8 last month. Internet Explorer holds roughly three-quarters of the browser market, followed by Mozilla’s Firefox and Apple Inc’s Safari browsers.

Google said its engineers have borrowed from a variety of other open-source projects, including Apple’s WebKit and the Mozilla Firefox open-source browser. As a result, Google plans to make all of Chrome software code open to other developers to enhance and expand, the company said.

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this February, Google released its Social Graph API, which allows developers to give users the option to easily find data on their social connections around the web. Google itself, however, hasn’t really implemented any of this technology yet. Starting today, however, it seems Google is starting to surface some of this information from your Social Graph in your Google Profile, which might be a first sign that Google is planning to do more with these profiles than it has done so far. Google has also started implementing the hCard microformat there. The first person to noticed this was Chris Messina.

Google’s Social Graph API harnesses this information from XFN and FOAF data that is published by Wordpress, Twitter, or any other social network or blog that wants to implement these open standards.

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