A Lose-Lose Outcome

It is easy to look at the end-users and realize why we’d all be upset. The TV Pack is nothing like it was originally anticipated it would be, and there is no official channel, support, or upgrade path for anyone other than to buy a new PC. Who wants to buy a new PC just to get a software update?

Microsoft’s partners are also losing out on this one. I personally had been waiting for DirecTV support and was ready to switch to satellite as soon as it arrived. It would have been really nice to have a more integrated fully-digital solution, but it looks like I won’t be switching now. All the issues surrounding CableCard will probably be ironed out by the time DirecTV is on Media Center, or Duke Nukem Forever comes out.

You might think that OEMs would appreciate being the only channel to get the new software bits, but how many people are going to trust Microsoft or an OEM with supporting any product they buy? It’s hardly an incentive to buy that new Windows Vista machine you’ve heard about in the ads. In my book Media Center is a complete lame duck now that will never flourish.

It’s Apple’s Move Now

This also further illustrates the commonly held view that people should just wait for Windows 7 because that is exactly what these actions are saying. While we wait for Windows 7 Microsoft is just going to leave the door gaping open for Apple to come in and steal the digital living room. Honestly, even AppleTV’s history hasn’t been as bad as Media Center’s.

Keep in mind, I actually likes Vista and Media Center. Dictating moves like this to your users is straight out of Apple’s playbook. I hate it when they do it, and I hate it when Microsoft does it too. I just can’t believe how many of the usual sources aren’t running with this story.

Overall I find the concept, and to a large extent the execution, of VMC to be awesome. Here are some the strengths of VMC:

• No DVR fees to the cable company (or Tivo)
• Comes built into Vista
• Easily share the DVR through extenders (of which there is already a huge base of Xbox 360s)
• Top notch user interface (most of the time)
• Portable recordings

I especially like that the recordings are just files that I can play on my laptop or stream over the Internet (via Orb) when I travel. You can also easily sync and automatically transcode recordings to WMP-compatible media players, Zunes, and even Windows Mobile devices. I do wish they’d develop/release a softsled (software-based extender) though.

Vista Media Center TV Pack

Microsoft are set to announce the “Vista Media Center TV Pack” formerly codenamed Fiji at next month’s CEDIA Expo. It will bring welcomed features such as proper native QAM support and heterogeneous tuner support; both of which I’ve been waiting for. While many were expecting features such as support for H.264 and DirecTV, and the ability to have widescreen thumbnails, no such features are showing up in tester’s hands. Honestly, overall it is a complete disappointment. Not just because of the software, it is the delivery too.

Epic Fail

It gets ugly when you start to look at how you can get some TV Pack goodness for yourself. First problem, you can’t upgrade to it. Apparently a fresh install is required; just what I want to do with a system that is setup how I like it. Second, it is only available through OEMs! But wait it gets worse. Third, all the OEMs have said they are only planning on supplying the TV Pack with new computers.

Let me get this straight, so because I bought and installed Vista myself, a very common scenario for most current media center users, I don’t get access to a key update to an included component of the OS? And Even if I had bought my HTPC through an OEM, they aren’t going to support the product further? Who is making these decisions and how do they sound right to them? As if I didn’t feel like my copy of Vista Ultimate wasn’t completely lacking anything Ultimate about it already.

It must be awful to be one of the developers working on Media Center at Microsoft. So much work into a great product only to have it destroyed in the marketplace due to bad business decisions. The many VMC users out there are pretty loyal but we will only take so much. It is like we are continually waiting for the next installment to really make it all right (satellite support, good digital cable support, broad codec support, softsled, built-in place shifting, etc). Microsoft is lucky my DVR options are so bad to begin with, but that won’t last forever.

BTW, I really didn’t want to post anything pro-Microsoft or anti-Apple today, but this was the news I was dealt. :)

A Palm Refugee

Basically you could say that I am a long time Palm user that is growing increasingly impatient. I like the ease of use and efficiency of the PalmOS UI, but the under-pinnings are really starting to show their age. This has been made very apparent by adding a data plan to my phone recently.

I like having the access a lot more than I would have expected; Opera Mini is a great browser but the Java VM that runs it isn’t so much (it crashes regularly). Add on the lack of native Bluetooth A2DP (which my car’s audio system does support), a so-so email client, and Palm’s tardiness with a new OS and you can see why I’m looking for something better.

Honestly I have to admit that the iPhone is probably the best device right now for what I want (strong multimedia, great web browsing, good email client, decent form factor), although it is far from perfect (the phone part isn’t amazing, no built-in search, short battery life with 3G on, no A2DP, etc). So why am I not buying it?

My Apple Epiphany

I must confess that I generally don’t like Apple, and that I think their products are over-hyped most of the time (“Apple is reinventing the home stereo with the new iPod Hi-Fi” –Steve Jobs) but they generally make some good products. The iPod, Macbook Pro, Macbook Air, or Mac Pro are all legitimate top-of-the-line competitive products that most companies’ products do worse than. I realized what my real issue with Apple is though: their business practices.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that when you go Apple your choices are mostly dictated to you by Apple (aka Steve Jobs). Why will Adobe’s CS4 suite be 64-bit only on Windows? An Apple business decision. Why is the iPhone only available on AT&T? An Apple business decision. Why couldn’t .Mac users wait until MobileMe was stable to switch their e-mail over? Again, an Apple business decision.

The problem is particularly pronounced on the iPhone as it is an insanely closed platform (without jailbreaking it). It is like the iPhone is nothing but a DRM device, because basically it is. Lock down my music, check. Lock down my videos, check. Lock down my service provider, check. Lock down my choice of applications, check. Pretty much anything you can do with it is locked down.

Open Platform != Open Source

Don’t confuse an open platform with open source. Windows, PalmOS, Symbian, and even Mac OS X are all basically open platforms (but clearly not open source). You can run any app designed for the platform whether it is specifically blessed by the developer of the platform or not. If Windows or Mac were closed platforms you couldn’t make a third-party application like Firefox because Microsoft and Apple both already have competing web browsers. Look on the iPhone though and you’ll see that Apple won’t let any developer make a competing media player. See the difference?

I have numerous third-party apps on my Treo 680: Google Maps, Opera Mini, Gmail, Pocket Tunes, Facebook, a dictionary, etc. It may seem funny, but it would really bother me to have Apple deciding what I can and cannot use. Simple things like the program I use to track my gas mileage are switching costs to me if there isn’t a viable alternative on a new platform. After Apple’s trend of pulling Apps from iTunes lately I really can’t say I trust them.

Technically there are Windows Mobile 6 phones that have all of the features I want (A2DP, Opera, 3G, wifi, real multitasking) but I just don’t think I could stomach the stodgy UI. So I guess I’m left waiting to see whether Android materializes into something good, Palm can finally bring out their new OS, or hope that Windows Mobile 7 has a new UI, because those will all happen before Apple truly opens up the iPhone.

What is up with the “blogosphere” on this one? Some of the titles would make you think that Microsoft lied about what the software could do when really the only “lie” they told was what the name of the OS is. So I don’t know how Microsoft lied to make them like it. The people in the videos obviously really liked it.  I personally like Vista, but I was genuinely surprised by how much some of these people just fawned over it. They were that impressed.

My History With Vista

I was really skeptical of Vista at first myself. I had tried out the beta versions and hated every single one. Literally the only reason for why I switched my desktop over to Vista was so I could do Media Center on my Xbox 360. My desktop is basically a file and print server for our laptops so I didn’t really care if it wasn’t that great so long as that stuff worked. However, within about a month of having Vista on my desktop I switched over my laptop, and a couple of months later my wife’s got switched too.

I should mention that I didn’t switch over until Vista had been out for about six months, so I missed out on the launch-day issues, but I never switch over to a new operating system when it comes out. No matter who makes it, new OSes always have some somewhat significant bugs or quirks. I would have probably hated Vista in January of 2007, but Vista in August 2008 is a different story. When I saw ExtremeTech defending Vista I knew the tide was turning for Microsoft.

For more of my ramblings on Windows Vista and XP check out this post.

Just look at their 1.0 product short comings that a subsequent version fixed:

• iPod: firewire only, no iTunes for Windows, no service to replace old batteries, mechanical scroll wheel
• iPhone: no 3G, no GPS, no third-party software, no contacts search, no corporate e-mail/contacts/calendar sync, 4GB model, couldn’t easily use third—party headphones, no music ringtones, etc
• iPod Touch: pretty much the same list as the iPhone but you have to pay for each update even though they are free for the iPhone and new iPod Touches
• AppleTV: couldn’t purchase or download content on the AppleTV, measly 40GB hard drive, no support for Dolby Digital 5.1, had to be connected to a computer to do anything, apparently people are still unhappy with the state of AppleTV
• Mac OS X: launch version had almost zero software, ran very slowly, no DVD playback, no CD burning, no Windows/Samba file-sharing, no built-in search
• MacBook: palm rest discoloration, cracking plastic, low quality 6-bit LCD panels, you could only order it with 512MB of RAM, had draft-N wireless support but you had to pay $5 to use it, excessive heat made Apple label it a notebook instead of a laptop (because it is too hot for your lap apparently)
• And now MobileMe: “1%” of users couldn’t access their mail for weeks (as of this writing I’ve seen reports that some still can’t), Apple’s idea of PUSH technology isn’t actually a PUSH at all, exchange contact and calendars don’t sync, and now they are adding MobileMe software onto non-MobileMe users’ PC via iTunes without asking or even telling them

Basically, within a year or two of each product coming out a new revision/version comes out that fixes the glaring bugs and notably missing features, and sometimes even costs less. If you ask me, it really does seem like 1.0 is more of a paid public beta test for Apple. The thing that amazes me is how they can get their users to forget about all of this. That is some amazing marketing…

autoHideStatusbar: Quite simply AHS hides the status bar unless you hover over a link or move your cursor to the bottom of the browser window. It is great for maximizing vertical space within the browser window. I don’t know about you, but most of the time I don’t need the status bar but sometimes I do.

Image Zoom: This is another simple extension that can be really useful. It adds a context menu item for zooming in and out on an individual image on a page. It makes it a lot easier to see details in smaller images when you can easily enlarge it by 200%. I would like to see a bit more friendly UI for this one however. The context menu approach works, but some sort of hover over pop-up may be more intuitive.

Speed Dial: I’m sure all of the Opera users out there recognize this one; it is a blatant copy of the speed dial built into Opera. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery right? When you open a new window or tab this extension will populate it with a three-by-three (although you can adjust the row and column count) set of tiles of sites you selected. I have mine set for five columns with three rows so that the most common fifteen sites I visit are easily accessible. I know I could (and do) have them in my bookmarks, but this is really just quicker and easier. The tiles also refresh regularly so for certain sites I can tell if there has been an update just from the tile.

Personal Menu: This is a must have extension for me, but I may just be crazy about maximizing my screen space. This extension will remove the regular menu bar and make it a drop down menu from an icon. That way I can eliminate an additional toolbar and save myself some vertical space. Something like this, or perhaps even the method IE uses of pressing the Alt key to bring up the menu would be a welcome addition.

Update Notifier: This extension is one that I can’t believe wasn’t added to Firefox years ago. When an update for Firefox (it works in Thunderbird too), an extension, or a theme is available the icon will turn blue and pop-up a small notification window listing the available updates. You can then install all of the updates right from the drop down menu.

I first thought up this concept about four years ago, before the term “cloud computing” was en vogue. Basically I was thinking how great it would be to be able to pool and leverage the CPU resources of the three computers (two laptops and a desktop) I had within my house. In particular I wanted to be able to use the desktop’s faster CPU to complete workloads for my laptop in a relatively ad hoc manner.

Some video applications I had used could render their output on more than one machine using their own clustering software, but why should it be limited to niche programs like that? I already share disk space, printers, or even TV tuners (via Orb or Media Center Extender), why not my CPU? You can push your computing out on the Internet cloud all you want but a lot of people have a micro cloud of resources already within their home, or workgroup.

At the time it seemed like something that might be esoteric enough to be implemented in Linux so I tried to find out how feasible it was in some Linux developer forums. In my mind I thought it could be implemented as a virtual CPU that the scheduler would only send jobs to if the physical CPU was at 100% for more than ten seconds or so. It would also have to be aware of the bandwidth and latencies of the connection between machines. Obviously network accessed CPU resources wouldn’t be incredibly efficient but any additional processing cycles gained would help.

As the number of cores continues to increase (particularly on the desktop) and devices like netbooks with limited resources become popular this could have been a huge boon. Unfortunately nobody took me seriously. After all, my kernel-level C programming is severely lacking. :)

If the documents SDTimes has received are accurate it would seem that Midori is all about cloud computing. Or put more accurately, heavily abstracting away hardware from software to enable remote or local resources to be used for any given task. It isn’t just for the CPU either. Imagine being able to easily pool the disk storage available on the various nodes of your network into one huge fault-tolerant distributed storage volume. All I can say is that on paper this all sounds incredible.

Microsoft is obviously pretty quiet on the purpose of Midori. The PR people have admitted its existence but they it is just an incubation project; only time will tell. Hopefully it will see the light of day before I die or Duke Nukem Forever comes out, which ever comes first.

*Update: Must be a pretty big story if even the BBC is running it.

The State Of Updates

Right now almost every program on my computer has its own update mechanism of some sort. They primarily fall into three categories.

• Notify me of an available update
  • Pidgin
  • WinSCP
  • VMware Server
• Udate themselves from within the program
  • Firefox
  • Thunderbird
  • Quicken
  • Opera
  • Photoshop
• Special updating program that runs at startup and constantly uses memory
  • Java
  • Quicktime/iTunes
  • Google Pack (Picasa, Desktop Search, etc)
  • Thinkpad utilities

With every program doing its own thing, keeping your software up-to-date is a bit of a hassle and certainly not something the “average” user does.

Windows/Microsoft Update

Microsoft has their own updating software of course: Windows Update. It can already be extended to update other Microsoft products through Microsoft Update. They also serve up drivers for various WHQL’d hardware through it.

Why not open this up for any program on your system? This could be another feature to help differentiate Windows Vista or Windows 7 from the competition (OS X or Windows XP). This would also address one of the pain-points to “boxed” software that web applications don’t have.

Updates ala YUM, APT, or Xbox Live

I’m not saying that Microsoft should host files and provide bandwidth for every Windows application on the planet. They could create a secure way for third-party applications to be updated from the developer’s site through Windows Update.

YUM or APT on Linux is similar to this concept but it only works reliably if you only install software from repositories. Xbox Live also manages updates for every piece of software that runs on an Xbox 360 and it rectifies one of the main reasons for why I don’t PC game: it is such a pain to keep games up-to-date.

Ultimately Microsoft is a platform company, and this would make the Windows platform more attractive to users and developers. Having a unified method and interface would greatly simplify keeping software up-to-date, particularly for less savvy users. It could also have the effect of improving system security by making it easier for people to have the latest version of programs (Quicktime, Reader, Flash) that have been recently targeted through web browsers by hackers as well.

I would think that developers would appreciate not having to maintain software just to help…maintain software too. It really is kind of silly that everyone has to reinvent-the-wheel each time for updating their applications. Certainly there are some details for Microsoft to work out on how to implement this, but that is their problem. I’m just the idea man. :)

*Before anyone sends me an e-mail about this, yes I do know that there are programs such as RadarSync that claim to keep all of your applications up-to-date. I have yet to try one that is easy to use and actually works however.

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard mostly false statements like this, but I expected more from The Economist. This isn’t going to be a post about why you should or should not upgrade to Vista though, it is about the truth surrounding XP’s adoption. The facts after the jump.

Name That Windows Upgrade

If I told you that I had been reading about the “slow, tortoiselike” adoption of a Windows OS, where people were complaining about a slow UI, how some really old peripheral or software wouldn’t work, and where businesses felt the required investment in upgraded hardware “could be cost-prohibitive“, which version would you guess it was? Vista? Well I have news for you, I was reading about Windows XP; Vista’s now (apparently) beloved predecessor.

I have to admit it is a pet peeve of mine when people act like Windows XP was a blockbuster from the get-go because the fact of the matter is it wasn’t. About the news that Intel isn’t switching to Vista yet, guess what? They were really slow to switch to XP too, and it really shouldn’t have been news back then either.

The Speed of Corporate IT

Anyone who has worked in any sort of large scale IT environment knows that businesses do not rush to change the latest version. In 2005 I was working in an IT environment where all 2,000 PCs we had were finally switching over to Windows XP from Windows 2000 after XP had been out for four years. Windows XP’s adoption was a lot like Vista’s is now, primarily people buying new machines, with businesses slowly embracing the upgrade.

When XP launched in 2001 Gartner said that Windows 2000 Pro would “continue to be the leading business version until 2003.” In 2005 AssetMatrix did a study that concluded “that Windows 2000 is installed on 48 percent of all corporate PCs as of the first quarter of this year, only falling four percent since the last quarter of 2003.” In fact, at that time 10% of companies were still running Windows 95 for some reason.

Even once Windows XP had significantly started to penetrate corporate IT, they were really slow on implementing Service Pack 2. In fact E-commerce Times said that “a substantial number of companies have yet to decide whether to accept or embargo Windows XP SP2.” (emphasis added) Seriously people thought about skipping SP2 somehow?

This is how corporate IT works. If it ain’t broke don’t fix it. Nobody wants to lose their job over a hasty upgrade. Windows XP did have a ton of bugs when if first came out. In fact I personally had a lot more issues (hardware, software, compatibility, stability, etc) with the first version of XP than I did with pre-SP1 Vista.

My Two Cents

Honestly, Vista is a better upgrade from XP, than XP was from 2000. I held out on Windows 2000 for quite a few years, but Vista got me to upgrade within 6 months. I am not about to say that Vista doesn’t have its warts, but on decent hardware it runs really well and I can’t imagine going back to XP.

Vista’s Explorer UI is way better (breadcrumb navigation, extra large thumbnails for photos, preview pane, etc), the integrated search is literally the only one I’ve ever liked (and I’ve used F-spot, Beagle, Spotlight, Google Desktop Search, Windows Desktop Search, etc), it is more secure, Media Center is awesome, the network location management is great for laptops, I’m a fan of the application specific audio mixing (ala BeOS), even just simple stuff like how clicking on the time brings up a calendar and multiple clocks is nice.

When XP came out it had very few benefits over Windows 2000. It supported USB better (but that was added into Windows 2000 by a service-pack), it had a slightly different (but not better) UI, it had a worthless broken firewall, and it had fast user switching. It was a lot more stable than Windows 98, but so is a three legged dog, so is that really saying anything?

Ultimately, I think a lot of people don’t like change. People don’t want to learn a new way to do something even if it is way better. It is just really hard to push this much change. By the time Windows 7 comes out everyone will be used to Vista and XP will be long forgotten. My prediction is that Windows 7 will be to Vista what Windows 98 Second Edition was to Windows 98, and it will be very popular.

In my humble opinion I think it is foolish to disregard the effects of piracy with the argument that the people who share copy pirate (argh me maties!) wouldn’t pay anyway. This argument isn’t just used for Microsoft software either, it is a common argument used with pirated music and PC gaming as well.

Copyright

In each example it really boils down to copyright though. The dictionary defines copyright as “A grant of an exclusive right to produce or sell a book, motion picture, work of art, musical composition, software, or similar product during a specified period of time.” (emphasis added)

It is the copyright holder’s exclusive right to choose how their work is distributed. For some reason, whether it is Microsoft or Metallica there are people who think that these exclusive rights are somehow irrelevant because they already made their money. Copyright holders really shouldn’t have to prove that the piracy of their works (whether proprietary or open-source/GPL/etc) could have been turned into actual sales; that is beside the point.

A Different Kind of MSN

Without taking away from what I have already said, I don’t know why Microsoft chooses (it is their choice after all) to be so aggressive on their licensing enforcement and policies. For me, it all points towards Metcalf’s law on network effects. The value of the Microsoft “network” or ecosystem of software is arguably highest when everyone (paying customers and pirates) uses it.

There is a segment of users, especially in certain regions, who will never pay much or anything for their software; and not because they care about open-source or libre software. There could be many reasons why they don’t care to pay, but the reasons don’t really matter. As Microsoft really pushes their pricing and licensing enforcement, they will push these users toward free OSes like Ubuntu (or other Linux distros).

Ultimately this will diminish the value of the Microsoft “network” and increase the value of the alternatives. Indeed a big part of the reason why Linux (or even Mac to a lesser extent) isn’t more popular (i.e. valuable) on the desktop is that the network is too small.

Microsoft’s time and money could be better spent exploring reduced pricing in various regions; and no, a gimped “starter edition” doesn’t count. Yes, this would open up gray-market issues, but I’d rather deal with some people not paying the right price than some people not paying at all, or even worse, some not even using the software.

Note: I am not in any way condoning or justifying piracy.

Remember XYZ OS? It Was Great

I’ve heard statements like this about every new operating system or office suite for many years now. Oddly enough some people are particularly fond of DOS, Windows 3.11, or especially Windows 95. In their mind’s eye the software didn’t have viruses, didn’t crash (well, DOS usually didn’t), wasn’t “bloated”, and ran on a measly 33MHz CPU with 4MB of RAM just fine. Sounds pretty great right? Wrong.

The software also didn’t do very much (relatively speaking). There was little or no multi-tasking (I upgraded to OS/2 from Windows 3.11 solely to download from BBS’s in the background). Then there was that arcane 640KB memory limit in DOS you had to deal with.

There was also no Internet (at least what we consider the Internet today); so no WWW, email, blogs, instant messaging, VoIP, or online gaming. Computers also couldn’t do all of the multimedia (music, video, photo editing, record TV, etc) we take for granted today. Here is the real kicker though, they also cost more in nominal and real terms. I remember my first hard drive cost $300-400 and it was only 20MB! I just bought a 750GB drive for ~$100 or so.

Trust Me, It Wasn’t As Good As You Remember It

Here is how I know it wasn’t better back then, if it was, we would all be downgrading back to a 286 running Windows 3.11. A lot of the problems people have with computers today have more to do with the Internet than their OS. If you really want to be as safe from viruses/malware as you were then, don’t connect your computer to the Internet, ever. That will take care of about 99.9999% of your computers problems…and about 90% of its functionality too.

I do have my favorite programs/OSes from back in the day, but they were really only great relative to their contemporaries. That is why I run Vista instead of BeOS or OS/2 (arguably my two favorite OSes of all time). Sure BeOS could boot in 5 seconds on a Pentium 200MHz, but once it was up what would I do with it?

Standards behind the “free and open Web”

This isn’t the first time I’ve heard this statement, but using a term like “free and open” is such utopian propaganda. After all how could you be against “free and open” right? A brief look at the web standards groups might illustrate the real root of the problem though.

The W3C (World-Wide-Web Consortium) is the main standards body for the web. To say that they have a reputation for being slow is an understatement; their last XHTML/HTML recommendation (XHTML 1.1) was in 2001. That was seven years ago, or almost eternity in Internet or dog years.

Eventually it got so bad that some people from Apple, Mozilla, and Opera forked off into their own group called WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group) in 2004. They started, and are still working on, the draft of HTML 5 which has finally been adopted as the starting point for the W3C’s new HTML working group. Unfortunately, according to the WHATWG editor for HTML it doesn’t look like HTML 5 will be done until 2012; eight years after the WHATWG was formed, and eleven years after XHTML 1.1. That sounds like a rapid pace of innovation to me.

The real culprit

This may seem like a forgone conclusion to many of you after seeing the W3C’s development timetables, but the real reason Flash and Silverlight exist is because the “open web” people dropped the ball. HTML simply can handle what Flash and Silverlight can do. It has become increasingly stale for modern web development needs.

Here is some perspective, HTML5 has finally added a tag for handling video. Flash 6 came out with video support in 2002! Where is the HTML version of Line Rider? It is in Flash and Silverlight now. If you want to see something really interesting check out Hard Rock Cafe’s memorabilia page (Silverlight 2 required) and tell me if you’ve ever seen something like that with HTML. (Here are some other interesting examples)

I actually hate Flash, but I’m not going to blame Adobe for the fact that so many people and companies have decided to use it. It isn’t like Adobe is paying people on MySpace or bloggers to use Flash widgets. Youtube could have really only happened using Flash too.

AJAX to the rescue?

What about AJAX and all of those Web 2.0 sites though? They seem pretty sophisticated right? In short AJAX is a kludge of various technologies that were never intended to work together in this manner. It can work, but AJAX development is a pain. It gets even more complicated when you start to mix in other aspects of the “free and open” Web like SVG or CSS. It is anything but a cohesive set of technologies.

The real weak spot is in the development tools for “free and open” technologies. There are no AJAX development environments that can compare to the tools available for Flash and Silverlight, and the latter has only been out for one year. It is so bad that people made a big deal over a framework to make AJAX development a little easier.

Honey and Vinegar

I’m not against the idea of a “free and open” web, but obviously there is an increasing demand for a richer experience than that offered by the W3C’s dated technologies. After all there isn’t just one, but two major competitors to them.

If the web is going to steer clear of these proprietary environments the proponents of the standards will need to create the technologies that enable innovative new online experiences instead of just copying implementing features that have already been done before elsewhere. Complaining about the proprietary web won’t do anything, after all you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar.

The browser wars have been heating up lately with the recent releases of Firefox 3 and Opera 9.5. As a long-time Phoenix Firebird Firefox user, and recent convert to Opera Mini (which is excellent btw) on my Treo, I thought I’d run these two through their paces to see what they are made of. The hits and misses after the jump.

Opera 9.5

Opera 9.5 actually came out about a week or so before Firefox 3 so it was the one I tried out first. Opera takes a kind of “kitchen sink” approach, and is arguably the most feature packed browser out there. For the most part this approach works really well. Most browsers couldn’t duplicate the functionality of Opera, and it would take dozens of extensions (which often don’t work when new versions of Firefox come out) to try to pull off the same effect in Firefox.

Here are some of the notable features built-in to Opera:

• Built-in browser sync (even to Opera Mini on my Treo!, try that with Weave)
• An excellent download manager
• Built-in ad content-blocker
• Session management
• Wand (auto-form filler on steroids)
• Web development tool
• A unique trash can approach for recently closed tabs
• A novel speed dial start page

The best, and most notable, “feature” of Opera is its speed however. It really is incredibly fast. It starts almost instantly; actually everything happens pretty much instantly. It is easily the fastest full service (i.e. not K-melon) browser I’ve ever used. Opera also has a pretty good security track record and is even more obscure than Firefox (smaller target for hackers).

While I really appreciate that I don’t have to basically roll my own browser (I’m looking at you and your extensions Firefox), Opera may suffer from a few too many features. Does a modern web browser really need an IRC or email client? Both clients are just average implementations, and the really odd part is how they show up as tabs in the browser right next to web pages. That said, you don’t have to use or enable them if you don’t want to.

The biggest problem I have is with the rendering in Opera 9.5. While most (>95%) of the sites I visited rendered fine, quite a few blogs and Netflix didn’t look right. Even though most of the blogs probably suffer from poor HTML coding and lack of compliance to web standards, it is still something that was a bother. Firefox has always rendered quirky sites well.

Firefox 3

Now onto the reigning “alternative” browser champ, Firefox; here is the quick take on its latest installment. The good: all of the features of Firefox 2. The bad: not really anything new since Firefox 2. The speed has improved a bit and it hasn’t crashed on me yet (should that really be a feature?), but I really have to ask myself what else Mozilla has been doing during the almost two years between Firefox 2 and 3.

Here are the only features I’ve found notable in Firefox 3:

• Scales/zooms images using a higher quality bilinear (or maybe bicubic, see image to the right) method instead of using a low quality “nearest neighbor” approach (finally someone did it!)
• Download manager back-end has really been improved (resume actually works now), it is too bad they ruined the front-end UI for it however

There really aren’t many other new features but most of them fall under the “different, but not necessarily better” category for me. Yeah, yeah, the bookmarks use a database now, but I’m still trying to figure out how that benefits me or why I should care, the “AwesomeBar” is a bit short on awesomeness, and the one-click bookmarking is only easier if you never organize your bookmarks.

The Verdict

The verdict? I’m still using Firefox. The page rendering problems and something about the Opera UI just doesn’t suit me well. Other than that though it is clearly the better browser; I will definitely be following its development. I am probably just too used to Firefox really; especially the keyboard shortcuts for tabs. If I was already an Opera user I could not think of a single reason why I would switch to Firefox though. If you aren’t happy with your current browser you should definitely check Opera out.

…one more thing about Firefox

Back in the day one of my favorite web browsers didn’t really improve much for a long time, remember it? It was Netscape 4 and they weren’t even the underdog. If Mozilla wants to maintain their momentum they need to bring their A-game, there is some stiff competition these days (Opera, IE, Safari) who are all actually innovating.