As with its little brother, though, the flash was borderline useless -- washing out anything in the foreground and casting the background into almost complete darkness.

ENGADGET: Samsung Focus S review Mobile

Web Workers, for instance, is an emerging system for isolating a browser's individual tasks into separate "threads, " making it easier for a browser-based program to perform a computationally intensive task such as photo-editing in a background tab while the user is attending to something else, like e-mail, in the foreground.

FORBES: Microsoft versus the Big Three