Apple has announced that they are releasing a version of the Safari web browser for Windows. Apple say that Safari for Windows is twice as fast as Internet Explorer (is that saying much?) and that a beta release is available for XP and Vista.

It will be interesting to see if the Windows and Mac versions render the same (unlike MS IE on Windows and Mac). Also interesting is the fact that Safari’s rendering engine is in part based on KHTML the Linux/*nix GUI, which will hopefully help raise the status of Open Source code even more.

Many people (myself included) were not terribly impressed with the layout of Windows Itunes, hopefully Safari will be a more intuitive experience. If we (as web developers) are really lucky, Safari will end up with 25% market share (who knows, perhaps the Iphone will drive that since it comes with Safari.) and the rest is divided between Firefox, IE and Opera. That way it will be impossible for any one browser to drive developers away from W3C standards ever again.

See Apple/Safari for more details.

This article discusses the ethics of blogging for medical professionals. What should the rules be? If you purport to be anonymous?

So folks, Windows Vista is out, and the word is apparently good and bad. Firstly, in most tasks, it is significantly slower than XP. Secondly it doesn’t support OpenGL natively as XP does. (because OpenGL is an open standard and makes it easier for game makers to port to other non Microsoft platforms I suspect). Thirdly, Windows Defender apparently failed to catch 84% of known spyware in a recent test. Worse, Microsoft OneCare had the worst results in testing with active viruses.

The security testing group found that Live OneCare missed far more active viruses than any other program tested.

Live OneCare caught 99.91% of the known active viruses it was tested against. This left it vulnerable to 37 separate malicious programs.

On the upside, it does have lots of eye candy.

Internet Explorer 7 has been available for download for about a fortnight, but it wasn’t until today that I received my first task-bar prompt to update from IE6 to IE7 via Microsoft Update / Windows Update. As Don mentioned in an earlier post folks who develop and test web pages would be wise to run both IE6 and IE7 (on different PCs) until IE6 usage drops away, and this High Priority Update is the first step towards that goal.

In the interests of dumping the dud that is IE6, my guess is that this High Priority Update will see most personal Windows users migrate over the next few weeks via Microsoft Update. This would leave corporate and small business users at the mercy of system administrators to update SOEs in their own sweet time. And with IE7 only able to run on Windows XP (or higher) and many businesses still running Windows 2000, this will be “a journey” for many. Point in case is my employer, who only recently rolled out XP nearly 5 years after I first started running it on my home PCs. The other group of users, unable to update from IE6 at all, will be those people running an ancient version of Windows or one that fails the “genuine Microsoft product” test.

After all of this, the next round of IE7 converts will probably come from people buying new PCs or otherwise upgrading to Windows Vista from early 2007.

As a fan of Firefox and Opera I only run Internet Explorer (6 & 7 now) as a tool to check web pages as I develop them. But I’m certainly looking forward to the day when IE6 usage statistics reflect those of IE5 and earlier versions, and then I can trash it forever!

News.com.au reports “a Perth-based company and its director has been fined $5.5 million for sending spam emails.”

The fine levied against Clarity1 Pty Ltd and its director is pretty significant, not only because of the price tag on the fine but because it is the first time an Australian company has been fined under the Spam Act since it became an Australian federal law in 2003. Looks like this law has some teeth after all!

If my maths is correct, a $5,500,000 fine for sending 280,000,000 unsolicited e-mails works out to nearly two cents per message. I’m not confident that sales income from spam sent would have covered this operating expense, but still my in-box expands……

Stealing a little thunder from Microsoft’s IE7 release is Mozilla’s update: Firefox 2.0. This version had been in beta for a while, but now available as a full version release.

The user interface has improved (improved tabs, spell check, session restore, search suggestions, live bookmarks, and so on), security has been up-ed further, and and the number of extensions has grown to over 1,000. This update really does see a great browser become even better.

I particularly like the anti-spyware measures described on the Firefox site “Firefox will not allow a Web site to download, install, or run programs on your computer without your explicit agreement. Period. You will be notified whenever downloading or installing software, and Firefox will always tell you what’s happening so that you can stay in control of your computer.”

Of course unlike IE7, Firefox 2.0 is avaliable for Windows, Mac, and Linux.

CNet has published an extensive review which says it all far better than I could have. I was interested to see the critical comparisons to the new IE7; only a week old but apparently miles behind the Firefox offering. User reviews are also interesting.

Of course there’s only one way to be sure, and that’s to Get Firefox 2.0 and Internet Explorer 7 and compare for yourself!

While Australians almost never use the stereotypical Crocodile Dundee flavour of Australian English, It seems Microsoft have seen a pressing need to adopt “dinky-di ‘Strine” (translation: native-born Australian spoken English) in the Australian version of Office 2007.

According to News.com.au “Words such as g’day, sickie, jackaroo, dag, dinky-di, ute, sanga, wuss and cooee were among the list of words selected by a panel of Australian experts, who considered them to be most relevant to everyday Aussies, Microsoft said.”

A panel of Australian experts??? Who on Earth were they? Paul Hogan and Steve Irwin? Was Microsoft paying by the hour? Is Microsoft satisfied with the manufactured outcome that it sanctioned?

As an Australian resident for most of my years (I migrated from the US at age 2), I can reliably attest to Microsoft being waaaaaay off base on this one. While “g’day” is a common form of the greeting “good day” and a “ute” is simply a “utility vehicle” (pick-up truck), most of the other words are not spoken by Australians in every day life. Or “any-day life” for that matter! It makes us cringe to hear words like “bonza, ridgy-didge, dob, galah, cockie, onya, and motza”, but fortunately we only hear them in media targeted at US and UK audiences.

Microsoft you’ve gotten it wrong again, and now you’re embarrassing yourselves as well as the “fair-dinkum Aussies” that you want to sell your product to. Crikey!