A security adviser for Infoworld by the name of Wayne Rash, has joined the growing chorus of security people and companies that are recommending people stop using Internet Explorer for their general web browsing.

Wayne has a slightly different take on it. He says that you’ll change to Mozilla because of security, and stay with it because it’s faster and better then Internet Explorer. That’s something I’ve been saying for some time now, but its nice to hear others in the industry coming to the same conclusion.

One thing that has always amazed me, is that if the number of PC’s I have fixed that have been crammed with spyware like Hotbar and other such apps are any indication, people are willing to load nearly any flashy looking app onto their computers, be they trusted apps or not. And yet it requires nearly every security expert on the planet to advise finding an alternative to IE before people start considering it.

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Ok, Hell is a frozen wasteland, and a swarm of pigs just flew past. I’ve just found myself sympathising with Microsoft.

Microsoft and Apple have just been sued for patent infringement by a company called BTG Plc who apparently are classed as an “intellectual-property company” (which if they are like others, means they have no actual business as such, and make their money by patenting vague ideas and then suing companies for $$$.)

The main patent in question is this one, and the summary of it is ” Method and system for distributing updates by presenting directory of software available for user installation that is not already installed on user station “.

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Up until recently, I never really thought that I had very extensive browser needs, but I’ve now loaded most of a dozen Firefox extensions into my browser. The reason is pretty simple, I didn’t know what I was missing till I tried them.

My current four favourites are BugMeNot, User agent switcher, Super Drag&Go and of course Adblock. All of which are available at the official extension site and all are totally free.

I’m not going to get into this in too much detail, you can browse the links if you are that interested, but I’ll do a tiny pitch on each one to give you an idea.

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J.K.Rowling Official Site – Harry Potter is now up and running. I read all the Potter books for some light entertainment when my kids had them around. They are entertaining, although they get repetitive about now.

I am not much of a flash fan, and yet, this is a very neat site. It requires that you hunt around … but it also offers a text only version.

I am currently on dial-up, so this is one slow trip for me … if I had to hit the Hogwart’s Express, I might bounce off the brick wall before I got in!

Well, now this is an interesting one.

Microsoft claim that they get more virus’s not because they are less secure, but because they have more market share. It appears they were at least partially wrong.
(Actually, they are totally wrong, they have nowhere near the market share of web servers as does the open source Apache (67.3% Apache, 21.3% MS IIS), and yet Microsoft IIS (The MS web server software) has had many more critical security flaws than has Apache.)

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In an effort to compete on a more even footing with Yahoo and Google, Microsoft is developing their own search engine, one that relies on their own search and spidering algorithms, (rather then using the results from other engines as MSN search does now.)

You can test the results now at MSN Tech preview.
The beta search is only using a database of about one billion documents, which is much much smaller then the other major search engines, but HTMLfixIT is already in there, so I guess that’s a good sign. 🙂

If Microsoft are going to use algorithms like Google in order to create their own “pagerank” type technology, that can only be seen as a good thing as my personal experience of the current MSN search has been pretty dismal, particularly when compared to Google.

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The world has millions of sight impaired people, Australia has at least 300,000, and other countries have an order of magnitude more.

Should they be discriminated against by web designers? Most countries have laws that give an emphatic NO! In fact, there have been court cases where companies have been sued for not providing for the disabled.

So, how does an ordinary “sighted” web designer discover if their proud works are suitable for those with vision impairments?
Up till now, you just had to follow disability guidelines and hope that was enough.

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