This article on Wired makes for an interesting read. One of the biggest age groups has become much more likely to read their news online rather then via magazines and newspapers.

That’s good news for web masters because the great thing about being on the net is that you don’t need to be a multi-million dollar company to get valuable content to a big audience.

Franki

For the first time in many years, Internet Explorer has dropped below 90% usage according to Onestat. The reasons for that are mostly people getting smart and converting to Firefox. Tech sites show Firefox usage to be as high as 25-30% (like HTMLfixit for example)

The official Firefox 1.0 release is only a couple of weeks old and has already been downloaded well over 5 million times.

People are getting sick of constant Microsoft security flaws, and a lack of respect from MS for users of Win98/2000. (no SP2 for you.) Speaking of IE bugs, a couple of big new critical security flaws were found and Microsoft will be patching at least one of them. So sometime soon you should start the Windows update process again.

More on the new Firefox stats here and here.

Franki

Having tried this new excellent program for a couple of weeks now I have found some super new additions and improvements. Number one for me was that you can now create easy vertical text and borders. The optimisation of images for use on the web is also improved.

It loads a lot faster than version 8 and whilst I’m still discovering more and more additions, I think this is the best version yet.

You can also get excellent add on plugins from http://www.digitalworkshop.com

I still have Windows 98SE as my operating system and you don’t get told if you have any problems that you should really update to XP. This can be really annoying if they sell it to you saying it works in Windows 98/2000/XP etc.

Its going to take me a few more weeks to even get round just some of this program, but if you have version 8 you will have no problem with 9. Give it a try.

Hazel

Flash based sites almost never rank as well in search engines as traditional HTML/XHTML sites, and the reason is pretty simple, search engine bots are simple little programs and for the most part have no idea what to make of Flash based content. That may be about to change. Some enterprising lads are creating a framework to allow the extraction of content from flash based sites. Read about it here. I think I’ll wait until I see clear evidence that it works before I’d be converting sites to Flash.

Franki

Netscape has traditionally based it’s web browser on the full Mozilla suite, but they have apparently decided that Firefox is up to snuff now that it has reached a stable 1.0 release. Read more about it here. It seems that the browser wars are in full swing again.

Franki

After saying several times that there would be no further updates to Internet Explorer except those delivered as part of Windows Longhorn, Microsoft has indicated that it is thinking about releasing extra functionality updates that build around IE’s plug-in set-up. One can only assume that this possible turnaround is at least in part due to the excellent progress that Firefox is having converting smart Internet users to their superior browser. The only people that seem to think that IE is better then Firefox are Microsoft, everyone else I’ve seen that has reviewed Firefox has become a convert. Read more here.

Franki

Steve Ballmer, CEO of Microsoft recently told a group of government officials of Asian countries that to use Linux will result in law suits over intellectual property. He declined to mention that Microsoft might be behind many of these lawsuits, but that is the conclusion drawn by at least one journalist. After trying traditional competitive tactics against Linux and failing, Microsoft now seem to have decided that legal threats of IP suits will achieve the high level of FUD they require to compete fairly.

Franki