I see with the release of Firefox 1.5, the address has changed. Firefox and Thunderbird have moved from Mozilla.org to Mozilla.com. Mozilla continues to be my favorite web browser. It has only gotten better with each successive release. With the installation of Firefox version 1.5, I found that the installation/updating of extensions was really slick.

The Google Logo Today (click here to see) announces it’s seventh year. They are a very impressive company and the owners are now on the richest people on the planet lists as a result of their phenomenal growth. They supposedly are very down to earth and very modest in their consumption of goods despite their incredible success. Best wishes to them.

Opera has finally removed the banner advertisements and license fee for it’s popular web browser, presumably to become more competitive with Firefox. Yippee, it is free.

Time to get a copy and compare to see which of the several free browsers you like best. At under 4 megabytes, the Opera Browser is a lean mean browsing machine — that is very standards compliant.

Ironically, you must use Microsoft Internet Explorer to obtain updates for other Microsoft products such as your operating system. If you visit, for example, using Mozilla Firefox, you are greeted with the following:

Thank you for your interest in obtaining updates from our site.
To use this site, you must be running Microsoft Internet Explorer 5 or later.
To upgrade to the latest version of the browser, go to the Internet Explorer Downloads website.

Problems with Internet Explorer are regular and pervasive. It is time to force Microsoft to permit you to update your operating system without requiring you to use it’s own faulty browser. For example, what if you have been the target of a browser hi-jacking? Should you not be able to install updates to your operating system without having to use the hi-jacked browser?

Yikes, the United States Copyright Office requested comments on whether requiring users to utilize Microsoft Internet Explorer to pre-register commercial copyrighted material would pose any problems. Well duh — of course it would because it would mandate that individuals and companies boot up a security hazard.

This is what the request for comments said:

The Copyright Office is supplementing its Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on preregistration of copyright claims, issued July 22, 2005. That notice proposed procedures to preregister any unpublished work being prepared for commercial distribution that is in a class of works determined by the Register of Copyrights to have had a history of pre-release infringement. Today’s notice seeks information as to whether persons filing the electronic-only preregistration form prescribed by the Copyright Office will experience difficulties if it is necessary to use Microsoft’s Internet Explorer web browser in order to preregister a work.

Fortunately Tim Berners-Lee, Director of the World Wide Web Consortium, is once again advocating for open source – vendor neutral standards, especially from the United States Government. He filed a comment that is posted at W3C and was filed with the Copyright Office before the August 22nd deadline.

Perhaps the ultimate irony is that the United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team (CERT), part of the United States Department of Homeland Security, established in 2003 to protect the nation’s Internet infrastructure, has itself recommended against the use of Internet Explorer as recently as June of 2004. Indeed just this month, CERT published yet another security alert regarding Microsoft Internet Explorer security holes.

Come-on Copyright Office, get a clue!

PC Pro News has published an article suggesting that “Over 90 per cent of Internet users have changed their online behaviour due to concerns about spyware”. The article quotes a study on US Internet users, finding that a large percentage are now aware and cautious when it comes to opening suspicious e-mail attachments, steering clear of Internet Explorer due to security threats, and “visiting particular websites due to the fear they might deposit unwanted programs”. There has also been a reduction in the volume of multimedia downloaded via p2p programs due to risks of unwittingly installing spyware.

What makes the article a good read, is that it provides some validation that Internet users are heeding the plethora of warnings about spyware, viruses, and other security threats. Certainly in my experience I have found you can warn people about these things until you’re blue in the face, but seeing changed behaviours can be another thing altogether. The massive uptake of Firefox over Internet Explorer has shown us that people are concerned about their online security, but it is nice to see that people are thinking beyond that to other equally-serious threats too.

In a story yesterday we reported that the right click features in MSN were not working right in current versions of Firefox. A programmer at MSN immediately provided us information suggesting that the problem was really an issue in Firefox. To it’s credit, the MSN team immediately implemented a work-around so that right clicks are back.

The method used by them is very interesting. They essentially create an equalized version of Firefox and IE by adding an attachEvent method to every DOM element in Firefox. By doing this, they can later — site wide — avoid the typical browser detection and the corresponding repeat of scripts that say,
see if this is IE and if so, then this, but if it is FF, then do something else, or if Opera, then do the other, etc.
It avoids duplicative coding, and avoids the necessity of changing each of those scripts should there be a bug like arose here. Equally important, they don’t need to train each developer regarding the differences in API between browsers.