TechWeb have an interesting article about the growth of Firefox and how the growth that was initially thought to be a temporary has in fact turned out to be quite consistent. Worth a read.

The recently disclosed Firefox flaws had many thinking that perhaps the browser security issue isn’t as clear cut as initially thought. One thing is clear though. In less then a week after the flaws were disclosed, the Mozilla foundation have already patched the flaws and released version 1.0.4 that addresses the newly disclosed flaws. This should put to rest the argument that Open Source applications like Firefox are not patched as quickly as their proprietary versions.

Don’t get me wrong, I am not a Firefox zealot who holds all other browsers in disdain, I actually don’t mind Opera, and Safari seems very nice also. My main reasons for focusing on Firefox is that it is an open community who makes a standards compliant browser with the best security features they know how to add. I don’t believe that you should need a specific companies browser (and thereby their Operating System) to consistently browse the web. I also believe that there should be a good cross platform browser at no cost. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a place for the likes of Opera, but you should not have to pay for basic web browsing. If you buy Opera, you should do so because you like one of the features it has that the others don’t. Internet Explorer is a good example of one companies efforts to make the Internet reliant on the products of that one company. Luckily the tactic backfired and they are being forced to re-address the issue. It was a close thing though. If Firefox hadn’t came out and taken a large chunk of IE’s market share, we may have seen less W3C standards compliance in IE7 rather than more. So the Internet remains (for now at least) a free and open set of standards that do not rely on any one company to prosper. Just as it should be.

I have a pet peeve. When a big company jumps on a technology bandwagon, I expect their software to work at least as well as the little guys. In this instance I’m talking about RSS feeds. Once the friend of bloggers everywhere, now it’s being picked up by all manner of news sites. Badly much of the time I might add. In this case I’m talking about the ABCnews tech feed and the Reuters tech feed, though they are by no means the only offenders. I have around 60 feeds I read on a daily basis to stay up to date with the latest tech news and many of the feeds are from blogs or small news sites. I find it ironic that the little guys got it right and the big guys feeds seem to insist that you download all the top stories each time your reader checks for updates. The result is that my feed folders for those sites are full of multiple entries for the same headlines. Come on guys, RSS isn’t rocket science, it’s XML and fairly simple XML at that. If your tech guys can’t get that right they shouldn’t be writing about tech issues. Getting your RSS feeds working correctly is to your own benefit. If your readers are only download new additions, then you’re saving bandwidth, if your feeds cause them to download the whole lot every time they check for updates, you’ll not only increase users annoyance, you’ll also be increasing the bandwidth drain on your site. Remember, conditional GET is a good thing folks.

For the first time, a couple of “critical” security flaws were found in the Firefox browser. The main flaw is related to the way Firefox installs updates and helper applications. Mozilla has modified their update and add-on sites, so the flaw is only a problem to those that have added non standard sites to their install white lists. The second flaw is a bug in the iframe implementation where the source of the iframe is not protected from URL’s in the javascript history. Mozilla have promised to work on the problem around the clock and a fix should be available shortly. There is exploit code available, but since Mozilla have blocked the exploit from working on their own “authorized” sites, the flaw has an extremely limited target group and is therefore probably not worth the effort to malicious parties. Still, the speed with which the flaws are fixed could possibly put to rest the argument from some proprietary software providers that Open Source programs are not patched as quickly as proprietary applications. Mozilla already have an excellent record for speedy fixes, but if they manage to release a fix for this in a couple of days it will reflect very well on the OSS community.

As a long time user of OpenOffice.org back to the days when it was called StarOffice 5.2, I watched the development process with great interest over the years. As soon as the beta for 2.0 became available I grabbed it eagerly. Since then I’ve downloaded several updates and kept more or less up to date with the latest releases. Here are my findings.

The Good.
The new OpenOffice.org office suite looks far more modern then it’s 1.x predecessor, in fact you’re hard pressed to tell it apart from MS Office 2003 in some respects. The updated Icons and menu’s look great and everything is more or less where you’d expect it to be. It also integrates much better with the Operating System on which it is running. I only tested it in Windows XP and Linux (KDE) but in both cases it integrated with the parent OS much better then previous versions. In short, it looks great.

There are more improvements under the hood. For the first time ever I’ve been able to remove the MS Excel viewer from my machines and still read my PC hardware wholesaler price lists. Most of the price lists are full of simple macros, and are password protected and with OpenOffice 1.x I was never able to either open the file at all or use it properly if it did open. OpenOffice 2.0 changed all that and although the spreadsheets were not exactly the same (appearance wise) as they were in Excel, they are close enough to not be a problem.

Not being an Office power user, I can’t testify to advanced features, but since the majority of possible users are in the same boat as myself, I can tell you that if you can use MS Office, you can use OpenOffice.org, be it for the word processor (OOo Writer), the spreadsheet (OOo Calc) or the presentation software (OOo Impress). The new database application (OOo Base) is a bit unwieldy, but I always hated MS Access for the same reason so it’s not that big a deal. The fact that you can use it to open all manner of different data formats like LDAP, JDBC, MySQL and Outlook and Mozilla address books is a definite benefit. OOo Base also has some handy wizards to help with table creation and other such tasks.

As with previous versions, the ability to save documents in PDF formats is a fantastic feature and has become my standard format for sending out electronic invoices and quotes. Since it’s unlikely that Microsoft will ever go out of their way to support OpenOffice.orgs native file formats, using PDF’s ensures that my documents can be viewed by anybody on any OS, and that I don’t need to use closed proprietary data formats to do so.

The Bad.
Speed. In short, it’s slow to load, really slow. I tested OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta on a variety of machines, ranging from a PII233 with 128MB of ram to an AMD 64 3700+ laptop with 1024MB ram and an 80gig 8mb cache 7200 SATA hard drive, and in all cases the applications loaded much slower then I’d hoped. Even with the preloader application running in the background it still took considerably longer to load then MS Office or even OOo 1.x. However, once you’ve started one of the OpenOffice applications, the others tend to load much faster. Still, this is a area that could definitely use improvement. There is some talk that this is mostly because there is much more Java code in OOo 2.0 then there was in previous versions, and Java simply cannot compare to native C or C++ for speed. The upside of using Java is that it is easier to port the office suite to run on different platforms. Having said that, if the performance doesn’t improve somewhat, it is likely to limit the number of people willing to convert from MS Office. However being a beta version, it’s likely I’m running debug code that won’t be in final versions and it’s possible that the final 2.0 release will be considerably faster. Time will tell.
Stability. A couple of Powerpoint presentations I was sent caused OOo Impress to lock-up and often even when it didn’t lock-up, it sometimes didn’t provide the experience the author had intended. For ordinary non interactive slideshows, Impress worked great, but for macro based interactive presentations there were often problems. Since most of those were jokes or games sent to me by clients I don’t consider it much of a loss.

Conclusion.
In nearly every respect OOo 2.0 is a drastic improvement over previous efforts. It looks better, has more features, better integration and MS Office compatibility and is more pleasant to use then ever before. For the first time it’s a real challenger to Microsoft Office for moderate tasks. There is still room for improvements in loading speed and memory usage. I opened a 1MB XLS spreadsheet and OpenOffice used 70MB of ram to display it in Calc. (66MB was used just to open a blank spreadsheet). But with the rapid increases in hardware performance, speed and memory usage are less important then they once were. Still, I miss the days when Office 95 came on about a dozen floppy disks and performed most of the same tasks.

OpenOffice.org also lacks an E-mail/Groupware equivalent to MS Outlook. This can be supplemented in Linux via Evolution, and in Windows when the porting of Evolution to Win32 is complete. In the mean time, Thunderbird makes a reasonable cross platform choice for E-mail although it lacks the calendering features of Outlook. (many of which you can get by installing Sunbird.)

The only way to tell if OpenOffice.org is a possibility for you, is to try it and see. Since it’s a free download, it isn’t such a big deal and you have nothing to lose by trying. If it does everything you need, then you stand to save a great deal of money that would otherwise end up in Microsoft’s pocket for MS Office licenses. I give the current OpenOffice.org 2.0 beta a 7 out of 10 and I expect to add a point to that for the final version if the expected improvements are in place. It also gets a 10/10 for value for money, which puts it considerably ahead of the opposition in the value stakes. It has become my default office suite and I’ve started recommending it to clients with simple needs who would otherwise have purchased Microsoft Office. My USB key has a copy stored away and I’ve installed that copy onto about a dozen client’s PCs for evaluation. More then half of them have decided they don’t need anything else.

If you have a niche blog or site, and you use Google’s Adsense advertising to pay the bills, you may find the new rules can hurt your advertising revenue. The new feature is called “Negative site feature” and in short it allows advertisers to block their ads from displaying in specific sites. What this could result in, is huge blocks of the Internet being blocked because the advertiser is hoping to have his/her ad shown on huge portal sites rather then special interest blogs. It would be stupid to do this, because people that frequent special interest blogs and small focused websites are more likely to click a related ad then the generic audience that visits big portal sites. But stupidity is often conducive to people jumping to incorrect conclusions, so let’s hope this doesn’t hurt the small guys.

In other Google news, they are apparently trying to patent the technology behind news.google.com where articles are chosen based on “quality”. I’m against software patents myself, but I guess if the evil companies (you know who you are) are jumping all over them, the good guys should get a few as well for defence purposes if nothing else.

Lastly the Google web accelerator is generating allot of bad press due to privacy concerns and functionality issues. The privacy issues are related to the fact that when you use the accelerator, everything goes though Google’s system. The functionality issues seem to be mostly related to session management and remembered users/passwords. Personally I don’t really see the benefit of the web accelerator, and I worry about how it will affect online statistics generation.

My suggestion to Google is that if they want to produce a really useful, potentially profitable product, they should set-up a sort of “live cache” together with a DNS or linking system whereby webmasters that choose to, can arrange to have the Google live cache return their sites content in situations where a site has been “Slashdotted” (meaning hit by so many users that it can’t respond to them all and the site goes down.) They could do something like this in exchange for the display of some Adsense ads and the benefit to the webmaster is that no matter how much traffic they get, and how small their bandwidth pipe is, their content would always be available. To me that is a worthwhile service. I suspect many others would agree with me particularly since the Linux revolution is resulting in many users setting up their own websites on their own machines. After having been slashdotted recently by news.google.com and Yahoo together, I can really see the benefit of a system like that. It would be difficult to set up such a system, but the benefits of doing so would be worth it.

While doing my monthly review of the search terms that led people to our sites, I came to the same conclusion I’ve come to since the MSN search came out. People using MSN search are mostly newbie’s with little idea of how to search effectively. For example our most popular search term from MSN last month was “registry fixit” which sent us about 500 users looking to fix their windows registry (I assume). And every one of the top ten MSN search terms contained the words “fixit” like “Dell fixit”, “dell support fixit”, the word “fixit” itself and so on. As a result we’ve recently been inundated by people asking support questions about Windows and Dell PC’s, all because we have the word Fixit in our domain name, (which says something about the effectiveness of MSN’s search algorithm).

This all got me thinking. If the search terms we get are any indication of the majority of MSN users, then we can safely assume that most of them are not experienced searchers and that leads you to think perhaps they are using MSN because it was the default home page of the default web browser for Windows, (Internet Explorer). Considering the overall search statistics that put Google with a pretty decent lead over Yahoo which has a similar lead over MSN in third place, it seems self evident that as people become more experienced in search, they are switching to Google or Yahoo instead of sticking with MSN. So what can we conclude from all this? As it stands now, MSN search’s market share is directly tied into Internet Explorers. Firefox now has a conservative 8.6% of the worldwide browser market share, and growing month over month and Firefox uses a custom Google page as it’s home page. It will be interesting to see what the search engine statistics are when Firefox has 20-30% of the browser market. Fortune have just released an article describing the search battle from MSN’s perspective and it makes for fascinating reading. The only part I think is not underscored enough, is that Microsoft are not an innovator as much as they are a mass marketer and copier. Remember that Gates didn’t think the Internet would go anywhere either. Microsoft’s power is to make “good enough” software, and then integrate it with all their other “good enough” software and market the hell out if it with huge PR campaigns. To the best of my knowledge, they have yet to introduce any world changing innovation in their 20 plus years of existence. The GUI (Graphical User Interface) wasn’t their invention, neither were the spreadsheet, word processor, multitasking/multi-user operating systems, network infrastructure, the web, e-mail and so on. Microsoft are where they are because they can usually recognise when somebody else has innovated something and they jump on the bandwagon with much better marketing and usually take the best part of the market as a result. Search is something else they didn’t see the power of until it was already in someone else’s hand.

Oh, and for any MSN users looking for REGISTRY FIXIT, take a look near the bottom of the right hand menu. For people looking for help with Dell computers, you would be better off asking your question at the Dell community forum.

The Sober.P (AKA Sober.N) worm has taken the Internet by storm showing that after all this time people will still click on unknown attachments in email if they look interesting enough. The worm has been spotted in 40 countries and currently accounts for just under 80 % of all Virus traffic or about 5% of all e-mail traffic. Our own mail server has blocked hundreds of them since the start of the week and we are by no means alone in this. All the major anti-virus companies have updated their pattern files to recognise Sober.p so if you have it, it isn’t too hard to find out. You might not consider being infected that seriously, but consider that you may be infecting your friends and possibly clients as well and they might not look at it in such a trivial light. If you use Windows, and you have e-mail, update your anti-virus application and run a full scan.

To help with removing the worm once you have found it, Symantec have provided a free tool specifically for cleaning up damage caused by the Sober worms and you can find it here. As always Apple Macintosh and Linux users are not affected.