Web designers these days should at a minimum look at their pages in Firefox, Internet Explorer (painful though that may be), and perhaps Opera and Safari. Often, we tend to overlook the growing number of text only browsers that happen by our sites. Tonight I happened on a great tool to help you see what your page would look like in Lynx, a graphic free browser, should you choose not to load a copy yourself. This tool allows you to see your page like it would appear to a Lynx browser.

That site offers a number of other great tools as well, including:
– a header viewer — see what your server is putting out
– a http request scan — see what you are giving servers such as your browser string, referrer, etc.
– search engine simulator — think like a search engine when looking at your pages
– backwards compatibility check — see what the page looks like with some tag types removed that weren’t supported

While none of these things are “rocket science” in scope, it is still a handly little group of tools for the kit.

According to Netcraft’s latest report, the Open Source Apache web server software has continued to push down Microsoft’s web server market share. Apache now has a tiny bit less then 70% of the worlds web server market stitched up, compared to 20.45% and dropping for Microsoft’s web server offerings. Apache gained market share slightly more then what Microsoft has lost, indicating that much of Microsoft’s lost marketshare is probably going straight to Apache. The percentages don’t sound like much until you note that the survey is based on the responses of 62,286,451 sites. Also of note is that there has been an increase of 1.7 million hostnames in the last month. Microsoft doesn’t have a monopoly everywhere it seems.

It has been revealed that Google are about to up the Gmail storage to 2 gigabytes up from the previous 1 gigabyte. Not that long ago, Gmail threw the webmail world into chaos by offering a (at that time) unheard of level of free storage. After the announcement, Yahoo, Microsoft and the other big webmail providers upped their own offerings to similar high levels (though my 25MB Hotmail account seems pretty sad by comparison). Now Google will once more take the bull by the horns and increase their limit to 2 gigabytes, which would I imagine, make it the uncontested leader in online webmail storage.

In other Google news, they are currently embroiled in numerous lawsuits with companies objecting to Googles Adsense system using their trademarks as keywords for sale. And this is just after they lost a case in France against a media company that objected to their content being used on Google’s news aggregation service. I don’t understand that at all, Google news sends us a couple of thousand extra hits every month, I don’t understand why a media company wouldn’t want as many people to see their content as possible.

Two new security flaws have been found in Microsoft Internet Explorer and Outlook. The two flaws are classed as “high severity”, mostly because they are allow a remote compromise to take place, meaning that a PC can be compromised from anywhere on the Internet. A remote compromise means that the nasty sorts can then use your computer for anything they like, which can include as spam gateways, as bot machines used to attack servers or just as a means for them to get your banking passwords and such.

Once Microsoft has had a chance to investigate and respond to the flaws, Eeye will provide further details.

WordPress is a very popular Open Source PHP blog software, one which we use ourselves. It comes as a something of a shock to hear that it’s founder, Matt Mullenweg is alleged to have used the WordPress website to game the search engines by containing cloaked advertising words. He was apparently paid a flat rate by Hot Nacho Inc to hide the terms in the pages. While I strongly disagree with his decision to do this, based on the information as we know it currently, I don’t think it should reflect badly on the WordPress blog application itself which is a professional quality piece of software. Google will be removing all of the questionable pages from it’s index as a result of this apparent lapse in judgement.

Google has given Mozilla based browsers like Firefox a little present. Basically when a Firefox user does a Google search, Google will preload the most likely result for you so that if you click on the first result, you will see the page much more quickly then you otherwise would.

Not everyone is happy with the functionality, many believe that it could be a waste of bandwidth and a possible future security concern. I’m of the opinion that as long as they give you an option to turn it on, (and leave it off by default) then it’s a useful additional service to Mozilla users. My own tendency is to do searches based on lists of words, so it’s quite unusual when the first result is the one I want, the result is that this is not likely to be of that much use to me and might waste bandwidth (which is why I’d like the option to turn it on or off.) The prefetch feature isn’t available on non-Mozilla browsers like Internet Explorer as they don’t currently support it.

What I’d like to see, is a Google Firefox extension that works with Firefox and Google’s results page so that checkboxes are put next to each result, you then mark all the checkboxes next to possible positive results and then click a “Open in tabs” button and have all the check marked pages open in new tabs. That would really speed up my search experience.

MySQL have released the 5.0.3 beta of their popular relational database for UNIX, Win and OSX. The latest beta has some features that bring it more in line with commercial database offerings like views, stored procedures and triggers. The beta is due to become stable in the second quarter and you can find more information at the MySQL dev zone. The downloads page, should you wish to try the new beta yourself, can be found here.