Upon seeing ie7.com I instantly recalled the fate of Mike Rowe Soft.

Originally registered March 8, 1999 according to WHOIS. Maybe it was a premonition, Warner?

One of my favorite apps is Screen Calipers, but I noticed recently when downloading the new trial that the price went up over 30% (now $29.90) and they crippled the trial app further so you couldn’t make vertical pixel measurements. I guess this means there weren’t enough paid registrations? Here’s an alternative to measure pixel space using a Firefox extension for those who would like to have similar functionality for free: measure it.

Once the extension is installed it sits in the lower left of your Firefox status bar and can be invoked by clicking on the graph. Then draw with the sights a box around what you want to measure on screen. A box with the height and width in pixels will appear (shown in green above).

There is a big test approaching for Microsoft in 2007: can they earn back the trust of users? During Gnomedex Todd Bishop from the Seattle PI interviewed Blake Ross who co-created Firefox with Dave Hyatt. As you might expect, Ross provided some juicy Internet Explorer-related quotes. One of which is where he blames Microsoft’s Internet Explorer for being as the headline above says: ‘very directly responsible for adware and spyware.’

Lest we forget that Microsoft intentionally left the most popular brower in the world Internet Explorer gather dust, which later they would regret, apologize and are still trying to repair. Ross said he has seen IE7 and actually liked it but felt it would be a step or two behind Firefox 2.0.

2007 will be the most significant year in Microsoft’s recent history. They have Xbox 360 with a legitimate chance to become the #1 console gaming system — Sony is just letting this happen by being arrogant and not pricing their games or console affordably — not to mention Microsoft’s threatening micropayment strategy (Live Marketplace) if they would ever deploy that widespread. Then there is AdCenter with an opportunity to be either also ran or make a serious dent in the Google Adwords/Adsense territory, a completely revamped web strategy (under the ‘Live’ brand) and the launch of their next generation, but scaled back from original expectation Operating System: Vista.

GOOGle stock had a nice bump today (disclaimer: I’m a shareholder) up 3.86% / +$14.96, no doubt helped by the Adobe bundling deal. This sounds similar to the recent deal with Dell which would bundle-in the Google Toolbar on Dell computers. So the next time we go to download Acrobat Reader we can probably expect to see Google Toolbar helpfully checked for us. Gee thanks, Google [heavy sarcasm]. Check out how Google plays this one on their blog:

We’re excited to partner with Adobe to make these features available to their users, and look forward to finding other ways to work together.

“Available” to users as an option for those who actually want the Google toolbar? These bundling deals are like visiting the drive-up window when you ordered a burger and having a burrito shoved in the bag too. Adobe’s press release has more details:

The Google Toolbar will now be offered as part of the Shockwave Player installation process for Internet Explorer on Windows. Under the terms of the agreement, the Google Toolbar will also be offered as part of other Adobe product installations in the future.

Listen Google, if we want your toolbar, we’ll seek that badboy out and download. Of course the toolbar will get more downloads this way so you can artificially inflate the number of users who “wanted” to download the toolbar. This reminds me of the crap that newspapers and magazines do to pump up their numbers.

Stop Google, please. Advertising the toolbar all over your once sacred hompage space was bad enough. This just looks desperate. If people like it they will download without you having to cut these lucrative bundling deals.

I won’t use their toolbar until they stop doing this. If somebody wants my eyeballs this badly, it just drives me away. Go ahead and tell me all the cool stuff I’m missing. The best Google is going to get with this overanxious toolbar marketing is me testing their toolbar and then uninstalling. I’m sure they really don’t care what a single user (moi) thinks but I don’t care for any company, including those I invest in, engaging in anti-user behavior. I think very, very few bundling deals actually benefit users. If we want shockwave, how dare you think we want your toolbar too!

Am I wrong? Do you like to get extra software bundled when you visit to download something specific? Yeah, it’s no big deal unchecking a box, I get that, but at least tell us the truth: “Most users don’t care for this, but we can make more money doing this and get more people to download who don’t read more carefully, so we are.” Disagree? Go ahead and tell me what you think below.

Click Per Action (CPA) network?
And here some might have thought by the headline I was talking about Certified Public Accountants (that’s a joke), no, I’m much more interested in the second tidbit of news, coming via David Jackson:

Let’s not mince words. This is Google’s ValueClick (VCLK) killer. Google has greater resources than ValueClick, a larger advertiser base, and the advantage of being able to offer publishers a full range of ads based on page views [CPM], clicks [CPC] and now actual purchases or leads [CPA]. Google can translate the performance of all these ads into “effective CPMs”, allowing publishers to compare and optimize for whichever type of ad produces maximum revenue.

I’d like to see a Valueclick/CJ killer from Google. I haven’t receive an invite to see this rumored CPA system and probably won’t very soon with comments like the ones I made in the first part of this post but will be on the lookout. Come to think of it, I’m still waiting for Adsense to open up RSS for Wordpress users.

Update 6:27pm PST: Doh! Had CPA marked as “Cost Per Acquisition” My bad. Fixed.

Third party search enhancements are on the rise. One of the features I found interesting on the recent ask.com upgrade was the hover over search results and seeing the post. The problem was it only showed the most recent post and was fairly limited. When searching through Google you can get a fully browsable window preview by using a free browser plugin/extension called Cooliris.

There are Cooliris versions with different capabilities for Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari. Ironically the most crippled version of Cooliris is for the browser I currently use most, according to the Cooliris FAQ (emphasis mine):

With the Cooliris Previewer for Internet Explorer, you can preview most websites, including search engine results, job listings, blogs, webmail, discussion forums, and most other webpages and links. With our Firefox version, you can preview only Google search engine results, Google Images, Craigslist, and Ebay, a few others, but we are working hard to expand their capabilities. Cooliris cannot preview webpages hosted on a secure server (i.e., https://).

No Opera version.

Why is hovering over things so quirky?
I found that moving my mouse around the search results in Google was a hit and miss experience. I didn’t like how it popped up sometimes and was delayed on results I did want to see by a second or so. It’s like Cooliris had a mind (eye?) of its own even though I should have been controlling the hover. There is an orange-yellow checkbox you can click in the status bar to toggle on/off Cooliris.

No navigation on popup Cooliris window
Once the Cooliris browser window pops up you can reposition the window and navigate the site just like it opened in a new tab. The only thing is there are no forward, back or refresh browsing buttons. Would be useful to see those added.

Uninstalled
The Cooliris experience got better the longer I used it so the awkwardness of the popup experience will probably vary from user to user. Unfortunately, until it gets a few more features and works on more sites with the Firefox extension, it’s not something I’d use enough to warrant keeping it installed in Firefox. I only use IE on my Tablet regularly any more and not enough to use there. Even on my Apple I don’t use Safari that much any more, mostly Firefox. So Cooliris strikes out with me. Maybe it will work for those of you who use IE more regularly.

I’d be interested in taking another look when/if the Firefox extension has more site functionality and the Cooliris window gets more browser features. If someone from Cooliris is reading this, please feel free to let us know in the comments when a new version that adds more Firefox functionality is available. Grade: C-

I’ve been an Opera browser vacation for the last couple months, but after experiencing some Firefox problems, I downloaded Opera 9 beta 2 and am going to try using that regularly again. Not saying I’ll be making Opera my primary browser (FF extensions perhaps too useful to discard), but who knows?

I really like the speed and sessions in Opera. Also you can do some useful things in Opera out of the box that require Firefox extensions to emulate. For example, dragging the current URL to your personal bar and then you can have the favicon only showing by editing the properties. Built-in Opera sessions support you can define different startup configurations is also useful. Oh, and hover over the favicon in the tabs and it will show you a preview of the website — handy.

The Opera non-supported list
Downsides of Opera, however, is that it isn’t supported like FF across some websites/sites/services I’ve been checking out lately:

- Google Calendar
- Google Spreadsheets
- blogcharm (posting is fubarred)
- Tablet PC inking inside the browser
- Adify

Developing Opera widgets
Their widget framework [see Opera widget developer tutorial] looks straightforward: HTML, CSS, Javascript and XML.

What the flock?
In other browser news Flock has received more VC funding and is now officially beta 1, whatever that means these days. I was one of few who wrote positively about Flock in October of last year. Most reviewers of the early developer version felt Firefox with extensions was a better solution, so it will be interesting to see how it is received this time around. Mike from TechCrunch says the new beta 1 is currently his “browser of choice.” Make up your own mind by downloading and trying. I still prefer the concept of blogging functionality being baked into the browser vs. using extensions. Logic would suggest that the lower level implementation should be more memory-friendly. Oh, and yes Flock has extensions too.

As I write this, the Google investors conference call is wrapping up. They talked about the Dell deal and “the comprehensiveness” specifically: Google desktop search, toolbar and “other things over time.”

Please keep your cliched Do No Evil handbook close by, Google. Yahoo has practically destroyed their software brand at least in our household by too many software installation shenanigans.

Now, I’ll make a mental not not to buy another Dell computer. I despise when hardware vendors cut these lucrative deals preloading with so much crap that it wastes hours of our time gutting Windows to put the programs we actually want, need and use. These efforts are always done as an alleged ‘convenience’ to us, but how often is this really so? What a load of garbage. Both on our shiny new machines and that they are trying to pitch us along with the computer.

Would I pay $50 more for a computer without the crap? Yes. $100 more? Probably not for desktops, so I guess that’s my price threshold in exchange for enduring the preloaded garbage. Considering one can just ghost over an image of the way I want it to be (desktop systems), $50 more seems to be a fair price to offer desktop consumers as an exchange to getting this stuff preinstalled. For laptops I would be willing to pay $100. My time is worth that much not to bother getting rid of the crap every time we need to go back to “factory [spammed] condition.”

Here’s a list of programs removed from a Compaq machine we bought back in September. Compaq Organize, now there’s a shiny turd. Are you using any third party non-standard programs regularly that came preinstalled with your computer? I can count the ones I’m using and have ever used: goose egg, bumpkis, nadda, zilch, zero.

I can see why Google wants to work over this market because default installs and configurations are a great place to be — for them. Just look at how they’ve worked several deals to make them the default search. Pot, kettle black on them calling out Microsoft for allegedly making IE7 “too hard” to change.

Hardware and software vendors please stop making up my mind for me. I can choose my own damn programs and defaults.

Office 2007 beta is now available for download, sort of. Servers are most definitely getting pounded and all I’m seeing so far are browser error messages. Will keep at it.

The full suite is over 2GB, ouch, don’t want to pay their download bill this week. And speaking of bandwidth, I learned that they burned more than 60 TB on Xbox Live during E3. Yowsa!

Please let me know if/when you get in and what you think.

Update 1:01pm PST: Was able to get through the first screen and fill out a brief online questionaire and then ended up at errors.

Then got further to a spot to actually check boxes to choose the software to download. And then errors. Will keep at it while doing other work.

Update 7:31pm PST: Downloaded and installed. Going through it all now.

Google Notebook is now live borrowing from and/or heavily inspired (your choice) from other snip, clip and collect tools like Clipmarks formerly known as Amplify, Shadows, del.icio.us, furl, spurl, Squidoo, OneNote and the list goes on. You can share created Google notebooks publically or keep them private via a Firefox extension or IE add-in. Unlike many similar collecting tools, there is no way to multiple tag the notes, but you can add a single category. Also, the search across public notebooks isn’t activated yet.

The function to actually see the page to download the extension was buggy for me, not prompting when I first visited and logged into the Google Notebook page. So I logged out and in again and this time saw the following page:

From there, choose to install, then restart Firefox and an “open notebook” link appears in the status bar at the bottom of Firefox. Click on that and a small blue window hovers with your current notebook. You can choose to go to full page, pictured at the top of this post, from the actions menu.

The idea is to surf pages and collect things that interest you, which I’m doing while reading the morning’s RSS feeds and will continue to add to the notes below as updates. I created a new notebook called dailyRSS to use for this test and as I read an interesting quote, see an interesting picture or link I’m clipping and dragging within the dailyRSS notebook.

Notes on using Google Notebook
- drag and drop images from other webpages at the insertion point in your notebook
- how to create bulleted lists?

Traffic and monetization
My early opinion on all these clip, snip and collect tools is about the same: I can only use one of them. The challenge will be choosing which one to use on other machines than my tablet pc. Sorry Google, no way are you replacing OneNote on the Tablet with this bare bones, no ink offering.

And the biggest selling point about OneNote over all these tools, including Google, is I can snip this stuff and keep it locally without an internet connection and do not have to worry about it becoming a monetization option for somebody else. For those without a tablet pc, however, OneNote isn’t as compelling. It’s really one of those tools you need to use ink to appreciate.

The converse is that by sharing notebooks with targeted, relevant data, more people might search that and come to your website. The traffic side of Google remains their not so secret weapon over all competitors.

I still am holding out for a OneNote Live offering by Microsoft. If they could just deliver more traffic back to websites then they could become a worthy adversary for Google on offerings like Google Notebook. I’m not completely sure Microsoft wants to share their traffic like Google does, however, although making the Vista and IE default page live.com is a good, albeit too far away, start. Get webmasters more traffic, gain more mindshare, it’s really not that hard a concept.

Webmaster don’t want toys, they want traffic.

If I worked at Microsoft or Yahoo right now I’d be banging this drum as loudly and clearly as possible: traffic, traffic, traffic. How do we push more traffic to websites/webmasters? Especially now that both Yahoo and Microsoft are in the ad business — help your clients make more money and they’ll make you more money.

There are a number of helpful Firefox extensions that you can use while browsing other websites to prevent or recover from bad things happening. Here’s a few with brief explanation:

noscript - will block javascript and java by default. You must specifically authorize sites as you visit them (one time only authorization, or always authorize — NOTE: for new/unknown sites I’d use the “temporary authorize” .. you can always permanently authorize later). It can automatically approve any of your bookmarked sites. Get this extension and use it. Can also show you what sites are using a lot of javascript.

jsview - Think of this as view source for external javascript files. Handy if you want to inspect foreign javascript code (perhaps alerted by the extension above) you can use this extension without having to separately download and open the JS file.

siteadvisor - this will proactively measure sites by color in your FF status bar: green = good, red = bad, yellow = be careful, gray = unknown (also, be careful)

show ip - while this doesn’t offer you any sort of protection, it does display the IP in the statusbar of all sites you are visiting, which could be handy if/when you do find a questionable site.

Session Saver - in case something causes Firefox to freeze, this extension could be a lifesaver: returning your session, including tabs and whatever you were typing on the next load.

Greasemonkey - this extension allows changes on websites. For some things like removing background autoload audio, this can be helpful. You can find thousands of Greasemonkey scripts including contributing your own at userscripts.org.

Have a related protection-oriented extension to share? Feel free to add to this list below.