Browser Bits and Bobs for Septembers 16, 2008

I didn’t see a compelling reason to switch to Opera when I tried it, so in the interest of fair and balanced coverage, here are 10 reasons why you should use the Opera browser, according to one commentator. Interview with Aza Raskin (Mozilla’s head of user experience) about the future of Ubiquity. Intriguing commentary on [...]

Why Did Google Make Chrome?

Yep, it’s Chrome week and I’m just going to blather on about it through Friday. Today we have a piece by the one-and-only Robert X. Cringely speculating on why Google decided to make Chrome in the first place. (Actually the post is four days old, but I’m perennially behind in my feeds. Sue me.) What [...]

Browser Trends: Business Models

Commercial web applications must overcome a vexing business dilemma: how to make money in the face of so much free competition. This is a symptom of the VC-fueled internet economy that has prevailed since the dot com days. Venture capital firms provide companies with money based on some woolly half-baked business model but with the [...]

Browser Bits and Bobs for May 7, 2008

Microsoft ships XP Service Pack 3 with continued support for Internet Explorer 6. Firefox wins favorite browser in the LinuxJournal Readers’ Choice Awards with 86% of votes cast. John Resig implements a complete HTML parser entirely in JavaScript. Multiple interfaces are provided including SAX and a DOM builder. Amazing. Flock wins a Webby award in [...]

Memo to Microsoft: Buy Adobe, Not Yahoo

If nothing else, Microsoft’s prolonged attempt to acquire Yahoo has added some zest to the tech news echo chamber. The ongoing saga has provided seemingly endless fodder for mainstream news outlets and blogs to speculate about the financial merits of the deal, the strategic implications for Microsoft and Yahoo’s allergic reaction (a barometer for Silicon [...]

Deconstructing Rich Internet Applications

A post by my Prism partner in crime Mark Finkle sent me spiraling back in time along an interlocking blogathon of attempts to nail down the term Rich Internet Application. Intense speed-reading of so many mammoth posts can scar the psyche, so let me paraphrase them and save you the trouble. James Ward, What is [...]

I'm Not Sure Microsoft Gets This Open Thing

I went to download a whitepaper about one of Microsoft’s new web browser extensions and was presented with the following message: To download the file you must agree to the following license: Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL) This license governs use of the accompanying software. If you use the software, you accept this license. If you [...]

Microsoft, Good Standards Citizen

In response to widespread outrage at their decision to make the Internet Explorer 8 handle web pages by default in the same broken way as IE7, Microsoft has now announced that they have seen the light: Our initial thinking for IE8 involved showing pages requesting “Standards” mode in an IE7’s “Standards” mode, and requiring developers [...]

Do We Really Want the European Commission to Regulate the Web?

Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie continues to promote and defend his company’s legal action against Microsoft for anti-competitive practices with a guest editorial in The Register. One thing seems incontrovertible: Microsoft should not be allowed to tie Internet Explorer to Windows and strong-arm hardware manufacturers into refusing bundling deals with other browser vendors. Assuming this [...]

Why Doesn't Dell Bundle Firefox?

A tad less than a year ago Dell launched a forward-thinking customer feedback website called IdeaStorm, modeled on social news sites like Digg. The site appears to be a thunderous success (as its name would suggest), and one of the most popular requests, shipping machines with Linux preinstalled, has already been implemented. Similarly, many users [...]