A lot of people would say the only thing Internet Explorer is good for is downloading something else to surf the web with. Truth be told, I’d tend to agree. My current browser of choice is Firefox and it has been for a long time now. That’s not just because I spend most of time using a Mac either. Even when I use a Windows machine I still look for the the FF icon to do my web browsing. I only use IE when I have no other option, like if I am using an ASP based app which does seem to need IE to run properly. Judging from the ever growing market share of other browsers against IE. Its a fair assumption that more and more people I coming to realise that they don’t have to be stuck with what comes installed on their machine.

[See the full chart]

Microsoft have decided to hit back at all the negative press that IE 8 receives by pushing out some interesting propaganda. A comparison chart for the IE 8 against Chrome and Firefox. They seem to have used some unusual features to compare against and claim that IE 8 is better than all the rest. In all honesty considering the track record of Microsoft I think I’d rather have a third party do the comparisons for me, some one who doesn’t have an axe to grind either way thank you. The sad part about this is that some people will actually take this as gospel, they will believe that this chart us the truth because it is by Microsoft.

In another lame attempt to curry favour, there is also the offer of $10,000 (aus) by Microsoft Australia to people who follow an Internet treasure hunt, but only if they are using IE 8. I’m cyncially but again there are people who will fall for this and get lured back into using IE.

What do you think of Mircosofts attempts to gain popularity for IE 8?

The tables show that even though most of the scammers are only getting a 2% conversion rate (i.e. only 2% of people who install the software pay for it) due to the shear number of people installing the software the totals involved can be mind numbing. It’s a sad thing that people are so willing to fleece their fellow man. Hopefully someone will decide to do it back to them.

A dot co.uk domain is free for two years and a dot com is free for a year. The only down side is you need to register with a credit card (but then thats normal really) but you are shown a bill stating the discount and it’s microsoft so should be trust worthy on that front.

The domains are shown as Office Live Busness accounts but don’t let that stop you from using it for personal use. See here to register

Lately the war has become more widescale, larger competitors have come along that are not being shrugged off as easily as some of the early challengers. The most obvious ones being Firefox and Safari, however recently Google released their own web browser that goes by the name of Chrome.

Mircosoft seems to have blocked Chrome from accessing their Hotmail web application (personally I think thats a blessing but there you go )Now whether this is an attempt by Microsoft to deter people from using Chrome is unclear but it seems it makes little difference as Chrome has a way around this. When checking what browser you are using a web site checks the user agent, each browser basically have it’s own user agent means you can filter for certain browsers. However as Chrome’s user agent isn’t allowed to access Hotmail, Chrome spoofs it’s user agent to appear to be the Apple browser Safari. It’s a neat little work around.

Previously mentioned google utility Gears has added a new string to it’s bow recently. It’s been a while since Gears aquired the ability to store your Google Calendar offline, well now the Google Lab has released the Gmail version of this.

This steps blurrs the line between online and offline even further. Now instead of linking your Gmail account to a mail client on your local system you can install the Gears appliaction and have your web browser store them for you. This means that even when you have no internet connect you can still access your inbox for emails you’ve already received.

Using Gears also means that you can now compose an email when you are offline (working on the train maybe?), this email is automatically stored in your outbox and sent when you are next online. Thats pretty neat really. It also get around the other problem of online email, what happens when the you internet keeps dropping in and out? Gears bridges this gap by stepping in the store information when you suddenly lose connection to the gmail server. No more annoying this page can not be displayed when you click sent for instance . Thats got to be a good thing.

The Gmail feature of Gears is still in the process of been rolled out to UK and USA gmail accounts so if you don’t see it under the Labs tab in your gmail settings, keep checking and it will be there soon!

Allowing other to interact with your code though can also be a source of the problem. Once in a while out of all these creative and helpful people who will interact with your project and better it, you would encounter someone with less than honourable intentions. This article on IT World points out how bad things could be when one of these people turn your project to their use. In this particular case it was only an experiement but it illustrates the point quite well.

Basically a research team created a bogus Facebook app called Photo of the Day. This app appears to puts up a new National Geographic photo each day, however what the users of this app don’t see is that everytime one of the photos is clicked on a 600 KB http request for images is sent to a victim website for images the user never sees. A 600 KB request might not seem to bad at first, but as the article points out, this app got to around 1,000 users pretty quickly without any advertising.

With the app uploaded to Facebook the developers monitored traffice on a web site they set up for it to point to. What they found is rather startling:

If those traffic figures were applied to Facebook applications that have a million or more users, they estimated a victim’s Web site could be bombarded by as much as 23 M bits per second of traffic, or 248 G bytes of unwanted data per day.

Essentially an application could be used to flood a victims web site with enough data request to produce a denial of service attack. Of course, thats not the only way this bogus app (facebot) could be used. It could easily be altered to scan for open ports on a certain host or grab someones personal details since Facebook apps usualy have access to the user’s personal information.

While the thought might be rather worrying, its not time to batten down the hatches and ditch Facebook just yet! As the article points out misuse such as this could easily be prevented by limiting the apps are allowed to intereact with the established project. The API’s should be created with the intention not to allow too much interaction with the rest of the internet. Hopefully people will follow the advice.

Stumble Audio

Like many people I’ve been addicted to Stumble Upon for a while, I’ve found it useful for bringing many sites and services to my attention that I would have other wise missed. There are plenty of web masters out there that have found the increase in traffic that Stumble Upon can bring if one blog post gets a “Thumbs Up”, there are plenty of rather long blog post out there that discuss the virtues of SU verses other sites such as Digg and twitter.

Stumble Audio is a new take on the Stumble Upon theory, just like Stumble Upon Video allows you to stumble through the various videos currently doing the rounds, Stumble Audio allows a user to select a channel and stumble through random bands/songs on this channel and listen to their track free of charge.

It has no links to SU or eBay however. Its a good idea in theory and a good way for new bands to get exposure to an audience they wouldn’t normally reach. Each time a track is played the artist receives payment, and at the side are links to various on line stores where the music can be downloaded. Songs can be rated just like in SU.

Certainly worth a look if you are bored of shuffle on your iTunes!

Over the last few years google have slowly but surely been trying to work there way into the various markets that wouldn’t be considered traditional for a Search Engine. Areas that are normally dominated by Microsoft.

• Gmail – Massive 5GB’s of online storage for emails, no longer did you need to down load all your emails from a tiny 20mb pop account. Using Gmail each and every message you sent/receive can be kept (unless you are an excessive user!)

• Google Docs – Online rival for the Microsoft Office collection of applications. Edit spreadsheets and Word docs on an machine with out installing any software. Upload existing documents, download created ones even save to pdf

• Google Calendar – Possibly my favourite of the Google apps, web based calendar where you can view and control multiple calendars online.  Great for a group of people who need to be able to book appointements in for each other and see where they might be at any given time

• Google Gears – An attempt to blur the line between desktop apps and web based apps. Gears gives you the ability to run online apps offline. Run Google Docs with out an internet connecting using Gears and a contained SQL database.

Well now they’ve gone a step further with the addition of their own web browser. Google Chrome was released today, I guess you could call it Google’s attempt to overthrow the last of Microsoft’s strangle holds, Internet Explorer.

Borrowing heavily from a lot of the other browsers already out there, but with quite a clean and minimalist appearance (just like the Google Search home page really. Would you expect anything else?). Rather than a traditional homepage it loads a tab with you most commonly visited sites on it, something taken from Opera.  An Incognito (or Porn Surfing) Mode, a setting that leaves you browse the web with out leaving behind any traces of the sites you have visited. A Smart Address Bar and Quick bookmarking just like Firefox 3. All useful tools, from a quick first run through I think I will stick with FF3 for the moment but it’s certainly a decent entry into the web browser market for Google

One thing Chrome does have that isnt part of any other web browser by deault, the ability to short cut web apps. These short cuts can be opened to give a streamlined window that gives you as much room as possible to use the application. It kinda reminds me of the previously mentioned Mozilla Prism
. No a surprise when you consider rumour had it that Google developers where working quite closely with some of the Mozilla guys on Prism

Why not give it a try yourself and let me know what you think

I’ve been on Facebook for nearly a year now. I’m no hater, in fact I have found it useful for keeping/getting in touch with people. Especially one’s that I haven’t spoken to for a long time. At the same time though, I am aware that it has also put me back in touch with some people I hoped were lost forever (not mentioning any names because some of them might be reading). Sometimes people add me and I wonder at first who they are, usually they are someone I went to high school with. At lot of the people I went to high school don’t provoke fond memories in my mind. Growing up I was something of a geek (nothings changed there then) and as most any geek will tell you, high school is not a fun time when you are more interested in maths/science than football.

This video really hits the spot when it goes through the blokes initial confusion, “It’s me, tom from school. We sat next to each other in maths. We didn’t get on”. And yet, years later this same person now wants to be my friend, most likely he is just on a quest to show his psuedo* popularity by getting as many friends as he can.

* Doesn’t that posh word just look so out of place in my usual ramblings!

http://www.speedy-b.com/open source movement is that for all the excellent solutions out there, the majority of mainstream IT is still done using paid for software. Be that the OS (Windows) or the other things (Microsoft Office)

A theory presented over at Speedy B Network outs forth a very interesting idea as to why your average computer user will choose Windows over Linux 90% of the time. It seems to defy logic as to why Linux struggles while Windows flourishes when for the average joe both options as equally as good.

• In this day an age most people know how to get hold of a copy of Windows for “free” i.e. pirated.

• Linux is always free

• Average joe looks at his options, Windows – costs in the region of £170 for XP at the moment from Amazon. But Fred can get me a “free” copy. Linux – Linux doesn’t cost anything

• People love a bargain, perception says “Windows is worth £170 normally, its got to be much better than the one they give away for nothing”

And that could be why Linux struggles to get a stronger market share, to a none technical user a pirated copy of Windows looks a better option than a given away copy of Linux. Surely it cant be that good if they are giving it away can it?

Sadly I can actually think of some people who think like this. It makes me want to find a solid wall and beat their heads against it, or my own. These people need their perceptions broken, they need to be taught that just because Linux is being “given away free” doesn’t mean it is crap.