A nod to Microsoft in that they used the new version of their MSN toolbar 1.2 to finally dispense tabbed browsing in Internet Explorer. Now I’m wondering where do I fit this in the IE toolbar area when I already have Yahoo, Alexa, Netcraft, etc?

Simple solution is to start deleting but I like each of these toolbars for different reasons, so picking one over the other isn’t quite so easy (though I know each vendor would probably like me to only use their toolbar):

-Yahoo? My Web is a powerful way to manage your bookmarks using Yahoo’s server. You can share these bookmarks with others as well. For this function alone, I use the Yahoo toolbar.
- Alexa? Quick and easy way to get Alexa traffic ranking for any site and to run Amazon book queries for ISBN numbers.
- Netcraft? Anti-phishing, find out what hosting company a website is using as well as a ranking function. For whatever reason this toolbar would not co-exist with MSN toolbar version 1.2. I had to uninstall Netcraft in order to come up with memory errors every time the toolbar was loaded. When I uninstalled it left a missing spot in the context menu (see screenshot above).

More early thoughts on MSN Toolbar with tabbed browsing:

• the addition of tabbed browsing is very cool, works well for a small number of tabs and is better than nothing at all
• How do I get rid of the other MSN toolbar? I’d rather have the tabs only without the toolbar but it seems to be a package deal only … ?
• the tabs aren’t dynamically sized like Firefox does, in that when you get more it ends up adding a right/left arrow instead of resizing all tabs to fit the area (see picture below)

I’ll have more to say on this later as I use it more. I’ve been using the MSN Deskbar search on my tablet and really like it.

The Netcraft toolbar is one of my current favorites and now it’s available for Firefox:

… displays the hosting location, country, longevity, popularity, and an abstracted risk rating for each site visited. Additionally, the toolbar blocks access to phishing sites reported by other members of the Netcraft Toolbar community and validated by Netcraft.

Right on!

Back in the days when they were clearly the best browser, I used to love Netscape; it was Dorothy’s Kansas. I never thought IE would lure me away … but they sure did. I’m feeling a similar warm, fuzzy feeling these days over the sexy allure of Firefox and its myriad of cool plugins. If only Firefox was ink-enabled, I probably would be using that more than IE these days.

But what happened to Netscape?

Finally got around to downloading and checking out the new Netscape 8 browser. The RSS auto-discovery looks cool but I couldn’t figure out how to actually view the RSS feeds I’d added without hunting down this explanation in the help docs. Also, I couldn’t figure out how to adust the space on the toolbar section to make a whole row of bookmarklets like I have in IE. I learned how to add an all new toolbar, but what about adding RSS feeds or links to it? I didn’t seek out the help docs for this one.

Note to browser makers: if it’s not intuitive, people won’t use it. There’s just too much browser competition out there. The Netscape team should check out how Safari worked in RSS with Tiger. Come to think of it, I thought AOL had thrown in the Netscape towel? Ok, yeah that was nearly two years ago … time’s change. My first impression: unimpressed. Sorry.

I sure hope IE7 does a better job.

Update 5/27/2005: The IEblog is reporting a blank page issue when trying to view XML pages in IE when Netscape 8 is installed and offers step-by-step repair instructions:

1. Uninstall Netscape 8
2. START->RUN
3. Type: regedit
4. Hit ENTER
5. Navigate to the following:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\
Microsoft\Internet Explorer\Plugins\Extension
6. Highlight and right-click the node titled “xml” and select delete.
7. Restart Internet Explorer

Note: there doesn’t appear to be a fix yet which allows Netscape 8 to stay installed without this problem recurring.

Non-Mac Tiger users who would like to give dashboard widgets a try then this will be good news: Konfabulator 2 has been released and it’s less expensive $19.95 than it was before ($24.95). Konfabulator was the true innovator of widgets, which are technically little pieces of code that do things on your desktop. For example, I’m using a widget to track MLB sports scores as well as find out what’s on TV.

The neat thing about Konfabulator vs. Tiger Dashboard Widgets is that Konfabulator widgets can be visiable all the time whereas on Tiger Dashboard you need to toggle them on/off via F12.

Konfabulator is less than the $129 for Tiger (not to mention an external DVD drive if you are an eMac user without the DVD drive). Only $60 at the student price, BTW, for Tiger, but still more expensive than Konfabulator. There’s nearly 1,000 Konfabulator widgets and only a couple hundred Tiger Dashboard Widgets, though the numbers are increasing fast.

Those interested in more Mac coverage can find me blogging almost exclusively about Macs over at my Mac blog. I don’t update every day because I don’t use the Mac every day, but whenever I’m at the Mac keyboard I will usually update my Mac travels there. That tends to be more often on the weekends at home since that’s where the Mac is at.

You were fun for awhile, Google Accelerator, claiming to have saved me almost 4 hours, but at the same time I noticed you were a drag. You know, like the guy who shows up at the party that everybody sighs and moves away from? A noticeable drag on my CPU.

If you insist on consuming more memory and slowing down my system than this has to be factored into the saved time in browsing and I don’t think that is part of the current formula. Perhaps you could take a snapshot of the memory/CPU being consumed and evaluate that into the time saved column. Sorry, just can’t have system slowdown. Add/Remove -> “Remove.” Thank you for letting me beta test. Maybe I’ll have another look when/if this is more stable. I’ll miss your cool revving icon, though.

I’ve been using the Google Accelerator since the day it came out. According to their timer as of this writing I’ve saved 2.5 hours. When the Accelerator is firing and the issues aren’t there, it does seem to speed things up a bit. My original comments on the Accelerator being released were somewhat brief and not very informative. I don’t believe in commenting in too much depth about software/hardware until I’ve actually had time to work with it. Also, I will give some leeway to almost any tool that attempts to save me the one thing I value most in work: time.

Now that I’ve had more time to review and use the Accelerator, cool revving icon aside, I’m significantly less impressed.

I’ve been reading, just like many others here, I’m sure, challenges and concerns that others have been having with the Accelerator. I can only speak from firsthand experience, but what I’ve read and heard has been significantly worse than what I have personally experienced. Fortunately, I haven’t had to uninstall and reinstall applications.

And it’s not just bad things I’m hearing from people I don’t know very well either.

My friend FranciscoIV had trouble with one of his machines and had to uninstall Google Accelerator. When he went to reinstall he was greeted by a message saying Google had maxed out [he has a screenshot] their capacity of users and are working to increase the number of users they can support.

Perhaps this is one launch where it would have made since to only invite select people in a private beta (not give those select people invites to give to others, I still think that practice is flawed).

Meanwhile, Stefano Demiliani writes about real world privacy troubles with the Accelerator:

Guys on the SomethingAwful.com Forum has discovered a big security and privacy hole: when they refresh the forum page, lots of time they were logged in as a different user.

I definitely believe the Accelerator is causing some programs trouble. However, I moderate a couple different messageboards and visit and read dozens of them and haven’t experienced this caching issue firsthand even one time. I’ve been expecting this to happen after reading some of these negative reports and it hasn’t … yet.

That’s not to say I haven’t noticed any issues with Google Accelerator. On the contrary, sites I have noticed issues with include:

- pages with lots of links. This can bring the system to a crawl as the Accelerator tries to cache way too many pages. If you are someone who reviews or frequently visits sites with lots of links on a single page, you will probably want to turn off Acceleration on these pages.
- Site Meter stats. The Accelerator makes the Site Meter summary stats pages go bonkers. Sometimes it showed yesterday’s stats, last night’s stats, it was all over the map whenever I refreshed so I just disabled and all was well.

Also I have had noticeably more problems with system slowdown with the Accelerator in Internet Explorer than in Firefox. The Accelerator just seem to behave more nicely in Firefox.

So even though the Accelerator says it has saved me 2.5 hours, I don’t think it’s really been anywhere close to that. I’d say maybe it’s saved me 45 minutes and that’s after a considerable amount of usage. If I’m being extremely generous I’d say it’s saving me half the time the indicator says it has saved.

To fairly measure time savings one has to look at the time spent waiting for CPU cycles and turning off the Accelerator on sites where it doesn’t work so well. Also, the Accelerator has been responsible for at least three complete IE browser crashes. As I write this the Accelerator is #3 on the CPU consumption of the dozen plus programs running at the moment.

As I write this though and read some of the heavy criticism being lobbed at the Accelerator, I’m reminded that wait, this is beta software. Google is testing this, they aren’t saying it’s ready for primetime.

I wonder if Google hasn’t created their own beta monster? Do netizens even believe in ‘beta testing’ any more from Google? Gmail has been in beta over a year now, Google News much longer in beta. This might seem like an unfair criticism, but IMO Google deserves the heightend criticism. They need to kick out some of these long time beta properties and make a clear path as to how long something is going to be in beta before people start treating their beta products like, well, beta products.

As I write this, tagging for Google Accelerator continues to roll in and many techies are weighing in, mostly negative on the Accelerator. That same site, fantomaster, provides some htaccess code to block the Google Accelerator.

I’m noticing via the Technorati links that many bloggers weighing in don’t have a lot of sources or links to them (yet).

As for the Accelerator breaking apps? Randy, from iBLOGther4im writes:

Google should have known they’d break many Web applications. A warning would have been nice. Or maybe they didn’t realize where the Web Accelerator would lead us.

Bottom line
I haven’t uninstalled the Accelerator yet, but I’ve definitely gone to the Add/Remove programs on more than one occasion. The Accelerator is decelerating my interest fast.

tags: Google+Web+Accelerator, Google, beta

As Firefox becomes more popular, the bullseye grows. The constant boasting about its otherworldly security compared to IE makes it red meat in the pirhana infested waters of security firms wanting to find holes. Something I’ve long said would happen if there were more Mac users as well, so stop it already with saying how much more secure Macs are than Windows; if Macs had even 25% penetration (instead of the 5-6% they have now) they’d be swimming in holes and fixes. The reality is that malicious hackers are gratified by large numbers.

Four times in three months, if you are keeping count IE users, Firefox is under siege again with yet two more major security flaws, with one bug being rated as “extremely critical” by Sequoia. The temporary solution?

Firefox users are urged to disable JavaScript immediately as a temporary workaround. Additionally, Mozilla recommends that the browser’s software installation feature be disabled. This can be done by unchecking the “Allow web sites to install software” box, which can be found by selecting Options on the Tools menu and then Web Features.

Recently Firefox passed the 50 million downloads mark. According to MakeYouGoHmm Site Meter stats Firefox now accounts for 27.7% of the browser share and IE is holding onto a slim majority of just over 62%. IE 7 beta is supposed to be out in a couple months.

My usage of Firefox on Windows is still unchanged at 35%. On the Mac, so far, Safari is 100%. Linux? Konqueror 100%. What’s your current browser usage like?

As a developer especially I like the information being provided by the IE7 blog; it’s one of the better Microsoft blogs. Case in point, the IEBlog reports on the User-Agent string for IE 7:

IE7 running on Longhorn will send the following User-Agent header: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 7.0b; Windows NT 6.0)

They indicate that the “b” will be removed once it leaves beta.

Netcraft, which IMO, already had one of the best toolbars with their display of a site’s web hosting information, has added yet another feature called ‘risk rating.’ This is intended to better help separate good sites from those that could be scams, check this out:

the Netcraft Toolbar assigns a high Risk Rating because it is hosted under a newly registered doman, the site has never been seen in the Netcraft Web Server Survey, and the Chinanet Hebei Province network has hosted a number of fraud sites in the past. Hosting a web site on an unusual port number will also increase the Risk Rating, as will hosting a site from a raw IP address, as many phishing sites employ this tactic. The Risk Rating can be calculated fast enough to be performed for arbitrary sites as people visit them, and does not rely on manual categorization.

Nice to see Netcraft leveraging their data to fight the good fight against the bad guys.

Update: This toolbar is for Internet Explorer only (as is the MakeYouGoHmm toolbar). My bad for not mentioning that. I’m pretty sure they are working on a Firefox version. Thank you, Peter for bringing this to my attention and the linkage. Normally, I’d kindly request that our full-sized image be removed but that particular one clearly advertises this blog, so I won’t be stupid and complain to Peter in this specific case.

The trend of the moment seems to be saving stuff; web pages, pictures, videos, search results, etc. Last week it was Google that started remembering what we searched (for those logged in, anyway) via My Search History. Today, the Yahoo! Search blog reports that they’ve launched My Web.

My Web is based on a very simple principle - a search engine should enable you to define and use the information that’s important to you. Specifically, My Web enables you to find the information relevant to you, save it, share it, add your own notes to it, and easily find it again, whether it’s three days or three months later. The idea is a simple one – we provide a “Save” button on our search results, on the Yahoo! Toolbar (for both IE and Firefox), and, in the future, anywhere you might find useful info on the Web.

This is a smart way to get people like me to reinstall the Yahoo toolbar (pictured above) which had previously been dismissed as mostly a “me-too” type offering. Once reinstalled, I added the Search blog announcement. It easy and intuitive creating new folders.

After clicking the green + on the folder to “Save to My Web” you can then “Go to My Web” and organize into custom folders. Just check the box(es) and then choose the folder from the dropdown menu. It’s very similar to organizing web mail.

Oh, and yes, fellow developers, MyWeb API is available. Nice.

Other talking about MyWeb:
Husky Guggerbun: “This one is so close to being a good alternative to del.icio.us for private bookmarks, but has a few frustrating problems.”
Jonas Luster: “This is huge and excellent news.”
ResourceShelf.com - “We’re very happy to see that Yahoo is now allowing users the option to cache a full text copies of web pages and then allow you to search your personal cache. ”
Larry’s Log - “I like what I see. I don’t know if it’s just where I am in my life right now or if Yahoo! has managed to tweak its portal offering to finally be of use to me but I think I’m going to be using this for a while.”