With Firefox stealing another percent or two of market share every month, Microsoft appears to be starting to get a little worried about it. This article at Eweek indicates that even though Microsoft claimed there would be no updates to IE until the next Windows ships in 2006, they are considering service packs for Windows for the purpose of adding new features to IE.

Folks, you can thank Firefox for that, Microsoft would not spend money on IE unless they were worried that by the time Windows Longhorn is released (except for security patches of course) IE might not be the dominant browser any more. After all, they haven’t added any features to IE since about 2001.
The other thing you can expect them to do, is to continue trying to convince customers to use ActiveX and their other proprietary “extras” in an effort to make sure that people and customers have to use IE to use their corporate Intranets. Since ActiveX has been the cause of dozens of security flaws, viruses and compromises, that argument should be a lot less convincing now days. Lastly they are planning to blur the lines between local applications and Internet served applications. Considering their abysmal security record, I hope I’m not the only one worried about the implications of that.

After many many months of tinkering, the new Beta ADVX statistical counter is up and running. You can see the beta admin console here.

Changes are as follows:
– Improved display characteristics.
– Added counting of non JavaScript browsers.
– Added counting of search engine bots. (Googlebot, MSN, Inktomi etc)
– Added Next/Previous links to make big displays more managable.
– Improved calculation of averages.
– A ton of improvements under the hood to improve efficiency, appearance and better enable the counter to handle high traffic sites.
– Referrer and search engine statistics are now colour coded and linked to the term or referrer they display.

Check it out for yourself, the login is here.

Wish I knew Flash because this would be a very good gig at ESPN. Other problem is I don’t want to live on the East Coast … just a bit pricey. Good luck to you if you know Flash.

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Many people use free email accounts, especially when they want to be annonymous. Often they use them if they want to avoid spam. This article deep in the GoDaddy site, designed of course to sell you a GoDaddy email account, explains some of the downsides to useing free email services. You should never use a free email account for something important because it can generally be terminated at any time and you may miss critical information.

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Google likes Firefox so much that they created a special Firefox Start Page! Or is it that Firefox likes Google so much that they decided to make the page found at: http://www.google.com/firefox the default home page for Firefox Browser when you install it? In any event, they have now improved the page by offering a tip about Mozilla products including Firefox and Thunderbird just below the search box.

Examples are:

– Know your shortcuts. Ctrl-T to open a new tab, Ctrl-B to open Bookmarks, Ctrl-H to view History, and Ctrl-K to access the search bar.
– Over 100 search engines can be installed into the Firefox search bar for quick access to your favorite search engines.
– Enjoy using Firefox? Get involved. Spread the word, make a donation, or volunteer.
– Live Bookmarks is a way you can view RSS feeds from your favorite news site or weblog.
– There are over 100 themes and extensions available at update.mozilla.org to make Firefox even better.

Now that Yahoo is building a search bar for Firefox, it will be interesting to see if that affects the default home page for new installs. If you want to get Firefox, use the Spread Firefox button at the top of our page.

Microsoft and Pfizer are after the Viagara Spammers — as yet unknown — according to Security Focus. Microsoft is upset because the target of many of the mails are hotmail accounts, costing unnecessary bandwidth and creating a nuisance for the users. Pfizer on the other hand is concerned because the Viagara isn’t it’s Viagara, and they are losing money. Nothing seems to indicate that it isn’t the real stuff, but would you want medicines from just anywhere? Well if you respond to the spam that is what you are getting.

In other news in the same article, Earthlink is after spammers as well. As an Earthlink account holder, I hope they succeed, because I get many times the spam on my Earthlink accounts that I get elsewhere, even though those addresses have never been published on the web. The addresses I have published on the web do get spam, but nothing like what I get on Earthlink. It makes you wonder how those addresses have gotten around.

Much has happened worthy of a mention today, firstly is the long running law suit between IBM and SCO over Linux, Federal Judge Kimball denied IBM’s motion for a summary judgement, but did so in a manner that shows that he seriously doubts the merits of SCO’s case.

“Despite the vast disparity between SCO’s public accusations and its actual evidence–or complete lack thereof–and the resulting temptation to grant IBM’s motion, the court has determined that it would be premature to grant summary judgement,” Kimball wrote. “Viewed against the backdrop of SCO’s plethora of public statements concerning IBM’s and others’ infringement of SCO’s purported copyrights to the Unix software, it is astonishing that SCO has not offered any competent evidence to create a disputed fact regarding whether IBM has infringed SCO’s alleged copyrights through IBM’s Linux activities.”

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