Do you object to the use of Local Shared Objects (LSO)? Feel sort of like they are a bad LSD trip? How do you get rid of these LSOs once they are on your computer? Good news, fellow developer, Greg Yardley, decided to do something to make it easier for users to delete LSOs, which are the relatively new Flash version of cookies. Greg got busy and wrote a Firefox extension to allow end users to easily delete LSOs from within the Privacy tab:

Objection 0.1 - a Firefox extension for deleting Local Shared Objects.

Greg defines Objection’s current development status as being in a “super beta ‘use at your own risk’ state” but this is a Firefox extension to at least bookmark and keep an eye on. Nice work, Greg!

tags: local+shared+objects, firefox, extension, objection

Just added the ability to easily search the PHP manual via the official MakeYouGoHmm toolbar. Just enter in function or keywords and hit the search in the dropdown and you will search the official PHP website/manual. If you haven’t yet downloaded the free MakeYouGoHmm toolbar for Internet Explorer only (sorry Firefox users), then why not give it a try. I’m trying to make this toolbar the swiss army knife of search tools so that I don’t have to have a bunch of different toolbars installed and running in the browser. It will allow searching all the major search engines including: Google, Yahoo, A9, Alta Vista, Ask Jeeves, etc.

Now if only I could search the .NET functions and classes library similarly as I can do through the PHP website. Anybody know if this is possible? Links, please?

Went to download the Macromedia Flash player and found that the Yahoo! Toolbar was set (default checked, BTW) to “also install.” Interesting marketing there.

The rumour mill is ticking, the leaks are leaking and /. is in a Microsoft frenzy over the coming soon IE 7 beta story from Mary Jo Foley, which originally broke on March 3 in the Ziff Davis private $99/month Microsoft Watch newsletter and now an edited version is available publically. The article details information about IE 7.0 reportedly gathered from “Microsoft Key Partners” like:

…. we can expect 32 bit PNG support, native IDN support, new functionality that will simplify printing from inside IE and, of course, tabbed browsing. The new browser also will likely include a built-in news aggregator.

But is there anything new or unexpected here? Not really. They have to support png. Tabbed browsing is hot on Firefox so they need to add that to be competitive on that front. What about the RSS aggregator? No surprise there either. Still, they don’t seem to be talking about dropping ActiveX (which won’t happen any time soon) or better CSS support, which are the major inadequacies that miffs many /. commenters. The IE7 blog, through Chris Wilson, has addressed the CSS issue in some detail:

Additionally, with every subsequent major release of IE, we have expanded and improved our implementation of web standards, particularly CSS and HTML. When we shipped IE 6.0, we finally fully supported CSS 1, and had some pieces of CSS2 implemented as well … We know we have a lot more work to do in addressing our consistency issues with CSS and furthering our coverage of these standards. Expect to see more detail on our plans in IE7 in the future.

This tells me that there are definitely plans to update and upgrade the CSS support. Will it be to the extent that webmasters and developers hope for? Doubtful. From a webmaster/developer perspective, we don’t really care what the browsers do outside the playing field — the active browsing window — as long as it’s not too gaudy, stealing too much screen real estate, and allows at least some form of customization; we just want our sites to look the same or at least closed to the same in the major browsers without a ton of coding gymnastics. If Microsoft just focuses on these goals with whatever enhanced support for CSS they offer, then the majority of people will be happy, except for the M$ haters who will never be happy, even if Microsoft ships IE7.0 with free money attached.

I’m looking forward to the first IE 7 public beta which is expected to be out in a couple months. The bottom line is 75% of the traffic to our sites are still using IE 7 so 75% of my browser effort and interest from a webmaster standpoint is in learning the most I can about IE. Personally, I still continue using IE about 65% of the time, Firefox 30% and 5% to other browsers. All criticism and personal bias aside, when people ask what’s my favorite browser is my response is: whatever the most people are using that visit my website. That’s at least one thing that I would bet won’t be changing any time soon.

Over 41 million stumbles from netizens all over the world. StumbleUpon is one of my personal favorite toolbars (SU) — the only toolbar, in fact, that I’ve donated money to — and this morning I noticed the terrible black and white message pictured above coming from their server. All default bad server / DB messages are in black and white, it seems. Hope they get this sorted out and it’s only a momentary bump in the database road. SU really could use some sort of blog or news update to let their users know what’s going on. I looked around the SU website and didn’t see any mention of this database failure. Did I miss the note on the cork board?

Update: SU is back online.

Some would say that it’s not news when Dave Winer is banging a drum over some cause, because writing software (or “scripting”) doesn’t seem to be what what he’s about any more, but he is worth listening to on the miserable experiment that is the Google AutoLink. Why Dan Gilmor finds any redeeming value in AutoLink (except if you are Google, of course) is beyond me, and Dave gets an Amen with his take:

A question for Dan, suppose Google had the power to put ads on every page of yours, but didn’t offer to pay you for it, and further it was hard to tell what was advertising and what was editorial. What happened to your ability to communicate with people who read your site? Never mind right and wrong, for a minute, or whether Google is good or evil, how do you communicate with any kind of integrity in that environment?

Yes, it is optional to install the Google toolbar, for those making that battle cry, but I had a conversation with someone the other day who asked me if I had an older version of the Google toolbar that they could use instead! Better option would be to go use the Firefox SearchStatus extension that shows both Google PR and Alexa rating. An upgrade causing downgrade thoughts, imagine that?

Then there’s always the AutoLink kill code for those not interested in supporting AutoLink on their websites. C’mon Google, excorcise this demon. Now.

Let’s take a look at one blogger, Jeremy Wright, weighing the options about which browser — IE or Firefox – to use. For this study, I examined his past blog posts chronologically by doing a simple keyword blog search. This isn’t completely scientific, of course, as there is a gap between September 2004 and February 2005 where Jeremy doesn’t really mention what his status is with Firefox usage (although he seems to keep updated on Firefox usage from readers visiting his blog). My comments are outside the quotes, and of course Jeremy’s blog comments are quoted:

• June 17, 2004 [Firefox 0.9]: “Now to wander around to all the sites that used to crash FireFox and see if they actually fixed the bloody rendering engine :)” 
• June 18, 2004 [Firefox 0.9]: “By and large, I was happy with FireFox 0.8. Not enough to use it at home, but certainly enough for here at work. My biggest problems were that it crashed quite regularly (yes, I tried nightly builds, yes I reported errors to the team, no it doesn’t happen in other browsers; even Mozilla ones) … So, overall I think this is a better experience, but since IE doesn’t crash and FireFox does, I’ll likely be switching back. I’ll definitely give FireFox a try again at 1.0 though.”
• September 15, 2004 [Firefox ships]: “I haven’t made the switch (officially) yet, but I make heavy use of your browser.”
• Feb 22, 2005 [No, I Don’t Use Firefox]: “I say this, knowing that in about 2 weeks, I am going to give FireFox another week of my time. Maybe this time will be different.”

I briefly met Jeremy at Northern Voice but he was entrenched in another conversation so I didn’t hang around and talk to him at any length. Seemed like a personable guy for all of the 60 seconds I met him. He mentioned not seeing me at the geek dinner they had on Thursday night in Seattle but unfortunately I had other plans and could not attend. Raincheck.

At this juncture, I would say to Jeremy and other users who might feel compelled to choose one browser over another and tell the world (blog) about their choice: why not use multiple browsers? I still use IE 65% of the time and Firefox around 30-35% of the time. On our one and only local Linux box Konqueror is running and on the Mac I use Safari exclusively (just haven’t tried any other browsers there yet). Also mixed in are browsers like iRider which I really like as a niche player for its ability to thumbnail and advance load pages (a feature not found in many other browsers), and admittedly it’s the only browser I’ve ever paid money for (I’ve bought several iRider licenses in fact). Still, I don’t use iRider as much as IE, Firefox and even Safari.

With all that said, if a more useful, productive browser came out tomorrow I’d start using that instead. Browsers are just tools and IMO, the browser as we know and love it today is going to be a less and less an important tool in the years to come as different and much more comprehensive view screens become mainstream. When holographic or true 3D space becomes an affordable reality, nobody will fondly remember 2D browsing anyway. It will be like the days we were on BBS and everything was text-based. Emulators will run the computers of today like they run the computers of yesterday (like the Vic-20, my first computing experience). Also, I find my RSS aggregator sharing time and valuable screen space (ticking away RSS news headlines, weather, CPU, server stats, etc), so the browser, though still the dominant tool in my online work environment, is sharing the stage.

Sure we’ve been here before with Microsoft Smart Tags and though that idea sucked, at least we could remove them by putting in a special tag in the source of the document. Google, who should be able to Google the internet past better than anybody else and thus know better, stupidly seems to think this concept was a good idea. Steve Rubel points out that Google got away with something Microsoft couldn’t — but it’s far from over, Steve:

Google today launched a new version of its toolbar that employs a new feature called Autolink that turns non-linked content on Web sites into hotlinks back to Google properties and other sites.

Time is not going to change a bad idea. If I don’t want something on the content of my website as a web publisher than no software should be allowing this. I have a problem with ad blockers that remove banner ads from web pages too … this is how publishers pay for the content! Also, the new toolbar doesn’t seem to recognize anything but major websites, so what’s the savings in dropping the .com from sites like eBay, Microsoft, etc? Google_evil++

Scratch off one of the 34 predictions for 2005 (admittedly, an easier one), as the news is in from Gates himself: there will be an Internet Explorer 7 this year! More news via the IE Blog:

Today at RSA, Bill Gates talked about Internet Explorer 7. As the guy responsible for IE, I wanted to say a couple of things about it. First, some basics: we’re committing to deliver a new version of Internet Explorer for Windows XP customers. Betas of IE7 will be available this summer. This new release will build on the work we did in Windows XP SP2 and (among other things) go further to defend users from phishing as well as deceptive or malicious software.

This is a wise move and one that simply could note be ignored. Depending on the quality of IE 7 of course, this could really put a screwdriver in the Firefox spokes. Full press release here.

Though I don’t pay anywhere close to the same level of attention that Ms. Foley does, I pontificated on this same thing last week and it was even one of my 34 predictions for 2005 on New Year’s day:

Firefox will still not be the dominant browser of choice, despite every logical reason why they should be, because Microsoft will release at least one significant Internet Explorer update (despite saying they wouldn’t do so)

One doesn’t even have to be Miss Cleo to know that the camp in Redmond isn’t just going to stand by and watch their browser become #2 again. I’m sure the memory of Netscape, though it’s been years, is still fresh.