Browser Update

Well I did the FireFox 2.0 yesterday as well. To be fair I also did IE7 and the latest Opera.
FF installed perfectly as well as all extension updates. Total install about 4 mins.
Installed and updated:
Imagezoom
Greasemonkey
Adblock
FireFTP

not compatible
TabMixPlus
ColorfulTabs

IE failed its first install probably because of ZoneAlarm asking but me not allowing a home page change. Second time I allowed and it went. About 10 min total install time.

Opera installed in about 3 min.

This is a fast machine AMD Athalon 64 4000+ 1gig. All browsers seem fast with all three running. FF 2 seems a little slower than FF 1.5. IE7 seems reasonably fast until you get more than about 6 tabs open. Opera still seems the fastest.

IE7 did one total lockup on me when I purposely tried to push about 10 tabs open fast. I couldn't seem to force it to end either. When I brought up task manager there were 2 instances of IE running and killing them both finally did it.

The toolbars in IE7 hit me as odd but probably just different.
IE7 seems okay but nothing compelling. FF 2 now has built in spelling check which is just great. If a word shows up with a red line while filling in a form like this one, just right click on it and a list of replacements shows up.

I still like Opera too but with FF extensibility and spell check I'll stick with it.

Tags: FireFox 2.0, IE7, Opera

Quote Of the Day

"The Iranian government just announced that they are going to slow down Internet access speed because they don't want Iranians to have good Internet service. Apparently, the government is so serious about this they are making all Iranians subscribe to AOL." --Conan O'Brien

We Own Your System

Microsoft in an effort to continue to boost their dying OS franchise is planning to disable systems it thinks may be pirated.

http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20061004-7898.html

Windows Vista will ship with anti-piracy technology that will lock down the OS if it has not been activated within 30 days of first use, Microsoft announced today. If the OS is not activated, Windows will switch to a reduced functionality mode that will cripple the OS. This is but one of many planned features of Microsoft's new Software Protection Platform (SPP), shared by both Windows Vista and the forthcoming Longhorn Server, due sometime late next year (at the earliest).

Considering there have been many known failures of the WGA this is outrageous. They keep siting some BSA bogus figure of $35 billion lost to piracy. Oh come on, that's how they accumulated all that money they now have. The only ones really punished by this absurd action will be legitimate users whose systems fail to pass WGA.