My, we've come a long way in browser choices since 2005, haven't we? It's been a very heady time for programmers who dabble in the lingua franca of the World Wide Web: HTML, JavaScript, Cascading Style Sheets, the Document Object Model, and XML/XSLT. Together, this collection of scripting tools, boosted by a technique with the letter-soup name "XMLHttpRequest," became known as "Ajax." Ajax spawned an avalanche of cool, useful, and powerful new web applications that are today beginning to successfully challenge traditional computer-desktop software like Microsoft Word and Excel. As good as vanguard products like Goodle's Maps, Gmail, Documents, and Calendar apps are, one only has to peek at what Apple has accomplished with its new MobileMe web apps to see how much like desktop applications web software can be in 2008.

That this overwhelming trend toward advanced, desktop-like applications has happened at all is the result of the efforts of determined developers from the Mozilla project, which rose from the ashes of Netscape's demise to create the small, light, powerful and popular Firefox browser. The activity of the Mozilla group spurred innovation from other browser makers and eventually forced a trend towards open standards that made the emergence of Ajax possible.

This article starts with a brief history of web browsers and then jumps into a look at the feature set of the four primary "modern" web browsers in 2008. The comparison of browser features begins by listing the core features that all these browsers have in common. The bulk of the article lists in detail "special features" of each browser and each browser's good and bad points, as they relate to the core browser characteristics. Following that, I present some recent data on the comparative performance of these browsers. The article concludes with recommendations I would make to organizations interested in making the switch from IE6 in 2008.

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With Leopard's forthcoming "Quick Look" feature in the Finder, Apple is leaping ahead of the file-previewing game by providing a separate, translucent preview window of amazing flexibility and beauty. Quick Look can preview movies at full size or even full screen. It can preview text, HTML, and PDF documents and even let you navigate them. If you select multiple files, Leopard provides an "expose"-like view that lets you navigate among them. Or, if the files are images, you can quickly go into slideshow mode. There's much more... but ain't that enough for now?

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A lively discussion and exchange of information occurred recently on Hawk Wings, the blog site mostly devoted to news and resources for users of Apple’s terrific Mail program. A colleague at work sent me a message on Tuesday, excited when word on Hawk Wings started circulating about a “vacuum” process available for SQLite databases that appeared to dramatically speed up Apple Mail. He had tried the recommended vacuuming and definitely noticed peppier Mail performance. One thing led to another, and before I knew it, I’d become engrossed in developing and polishing up an AppleScript utility to automate a periodic vacuuming of my Mail, which I’m of course dubbing VacuumMail.

As the Hawk Wings discussion unfolded, we learned that Mail maintains an SQLite database called “Envelope Index” in your ~/Library/Mail folder, which gradually grows as the number of emails in your mailbox does. Natively, Mail performs no optimizations on this critical database, which contains pointers to all of your mail that become fragmented and somewhat disorganized over time. At the office, my Envelope Index file was over 100mb, and at home it’s about 30mb. SQLite offers a “vacuum” command that rewrites the Envelope Index, optimizing and reorganizing it for faster access. It sounds a bit like what happens when Mac OS X defragments your hard drive periodically.

At first, news of this function took the form of a shell command you can run in Terminal. It was quite interesting and exciting to see how the Mac users reading of this learned more about it as information was shared, and the command itself became more concise and precise as the day went on. Other users discovered that SQLite offers an “autovacuum” process that can do vacuuming without prompting, and I’m sure that’s a great thing as well. However, we also learned that vacuuming is a more robust and thorough optimizing of the file, since it actually analyzes and rewrites the whole thing, whereas autovacuuming acts only on a certain recent portion of mail pointers. The basic Terminal command turns out to be:

sqlite3 ~/Library/Mail/Envelope\ Index vacuum;

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In our modern, interconnected, always-on age, knowing one’s IP address comes in real handy at times. Knowing your IP address isn’t quite as important as knowing what time it is, but it helps to have an IP clock handy when you need it.

I’ve dabbled with quite a few solutions to this problem over the last few years, and there are a large number of decent IP clocks available… most of them for free. In my IP ramblings, I’ve ruled out solutions that work only in the Dock and ones that put an IP address right in your menubar. I don’t use the Dock that much anymore (between Quicksilver, ClawMenu, Dashboard, and menubar widgets, I don’t need it), except in its application switcher form. And IP addresses printed directly in the menubar take up too much valuable space and are invariably ugly.

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I didn’t intend to write this article today… In fact, I’m right in the middle of three others that I want to finish. However, it just leaped at me from the front page of today’s Washington Post Business page, and I couldn’t resist. In an article called Access Denied, the writer bemoans the many passwords and PINs and such that the modern, web-connected human must juggle in daily life. People today have so many passwords to remember, they simply can’t, and this undermines the very security the passwords are set up to ensure, since companies will typically allow a shortcut to someone who claims to have forgotten a password—for a bank account, for example.

When I forget a password, I launch Keychain Access, which is a surprisingly sophisticated application that I use in a very simple way. Namely, I enter a search term in the search field, which invokes a live search on the Keychain database and displays matching results below. Each result shows the username associated with the website or application, so it’s easy to find which Key I’m looking for. Double-clicking on the Key brings up a dialog panel that gives me some management capability on the particular key. I’m sure this is cool and significant, but I go straight for the “Show password” checkbox.

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As a self proclaimed Software Addict, I have a real problem. Well, many real problems, actually. Downloading software not only consumes hard disk space, but it also bloats my Preferences folder over time as I launch each software package to try it out. If that weren’t bad enough, many applications leave pieces of themselves in the “Application Support” folder, the “PreferencePanes” folder, the “Contextual Menu Items” folder, the “Services” folder, and sometimes in the “Plugins” and “Input Managers” folders. Then, of course, there are the Unsanity “haxies,” which put themselves in the “Application Enhancers” folder.

The worst problem, of course, is the amount of time my addiction consumes… But I don’t want to talk about that, thanks.

When my addiction was just beginning, I forgot that if I told an installer I wanted the software available “for all users” on my Mac, it would put the pieces in the top-level Library, rather than in my home Library. So, as my Mac has aged and gone through, now, four different versions of Mac OS X, I’ve felt a great need for doing spring cleaning to tidy up a bit. Earlier this year, I bought AppZapper, which I really like. It helped to clean out a ton of preferences, application support, and other files for software I had long ago decided I didn’t want. But that was, unfortunately, just scratching the surface of my depraved software addiction.

When the preview build of Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5) came along recently, I decided to do a completely fresh installation and start over. At first, I assumed Leopard would be too unstable to form a base for this new start—after all, it’s still in an Alpha stage. However, so far I’ve been quite impressed with its degree of stability. With only a few exceptions—mostly in some of the newer functionality—Leopard has proven very reliable indeed. Some of the new features are so compelling for me—particularly the enhancements to Safari, Preview, Mail, and Automator, and the wonderful new DashCode tool—that I decided to try to move as much of my current production environment to the Leopard “fresh slate” as I could.

Having decided this, it seemed logical to turn my housecleaning project into a baseline configuration project. In other words, I would start with nothing but Mac OS X and the Apple apps, and I would move to Leopard all of the software I need for the various projects I’m engaged in, as the need arises. I would document each change to the baseline configuration and note what kind of software or configuration change I was making. This way, I’d end up with a complete software inventory, including all of the various bits that make up my rich Mac OS X environment. In the process, I’d clean out software I don’t really need, which can only be a good thing.

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Ah, computer security training. Don’t you just love it? Doesn’t it make you feel secure to know that your alert IT department is on patrol against the evil malware that slinks in and takes the network down every now and then, giving you a free afternoon off? Look at all the resources those wise caretakers have activated to keep you safe!

• Virulent antivirus software, which wakes up and takes over your PC several times a day (always, it seems, just at the moment when you actually needed to type something important).
• Very expensive, enterprise-class desktop-management software that happily recommends to management when you need more RAM, when you’ve downloaded peer-to-peer software contrary to company rules, and when you replaced the antivirus software the company provides with a brand that’s a little easier on your CPU.
• Silent, deadly, expensive, and nosy mail server software that reads your mail and removes files with suspicious-looking extensions, or with suspicious-looking subject lines like “I Love You“, while letting creepy-looking email with subject lines like “You didnt answer deniable antecedent” or “in beef gunk” get through.
• Expensive new security personnel, who get to hire even more expensive security contractors, who go on intrusion-detection rampages once or twice a year, spend lots of money, gum up the network, and make recommendations for the company to spend even more money on security the next year.
• Field trips to Redmond, Washington, to hear what Microsoft has to say for itself, returning with expensive new licenses for Groove and SharePoint Portal Server (why both? why either?), and other security-related software.
• New daily meetings that let everyone involved in protecting the network sit and wring their hands while listening to news about the latest computing vulnerabilities that have been discovered.
• And let’s not forget security training! My favorite! By all means, we need to educate the staff on the proper “code of conduct” for handling company information technology gear. Later in the article, I’ll tell you all about the interesting things I learned this year, which earned me an anonymous certificate for passing a new security test. Yay!

In fact, this article started out as a simple expose on the somewhat insulting online training I just took. But one thought led to another, and soon I was ruminating on the Information Technology organization as a whole, and about the effectiveness and rationality of its response to the troublesome invasion of micro-cyberorganisms of the last 6 or 7 years.

Protecting the network

Who makes decisions about computer security for your organization? Chances are, it’s the same guys who set up your network and desktop computer to begin with. When the plague of computer viruses, worms, and other malware began in earnest, the first instinct of these security Tzars was understandable: Protect!
          Protect the investment…
                    Protect the users…
                              Protect the network!

And the plague itself, which still ravages our computer systems… was this an event that our wise IT leaders had foreseen? Had they been warning employees about the danger of email, the sanctity of passwords, and the evil of internet downloads prior to the first big virus that struck? If your company’s IT staff is anything like mine, I seriously doubt it. Like everyone else, the IT folks in charge of our computing systems at the office only started paying attention after a high-profile disaster or two. Prior to that, it was business as usual for the IT operations types: “Ignore it until you can’t do so anymore.” A vulgar translation of this “code of conduct” is often used instead: “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.”

Unfortunately, the IT Powers-That-Be never moved beyond their initial defensive response. They never actually tried to investigate and treat the underlying cause of the plague. No, after they had finished setting up a shield around the perimeter, investing in enterprise antivirus and spam software, and other easy measures, it’s doubtful that your IT department ever stepped back to ask one simple question: How much of the plague has to do with our reliance on Microsoft Windows? Would we be better off by switching to another platform?

It’s doubtful that the question ever crossed their minds, but even if someone did raise it, someone else was ready with an easy put-down or three:

1. It’s only because Windows is on 95% of the world’s desktops.
2. It’s only because there are so many more hackers now.
3. And all the hackers attack Windows because it’s the biggest target.

At about this time in the Computer Virus Wars, the rallying cry of the typical IT shop transitioned from “Protect the network… users… etc.” to simply:
            Protect Windows!

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With growing interest and amazement, I read the back-and-forth argument between two long-time, highly respected Mac nerds yesterday on the subject of Mark Pilgrim’s decision to abandon Mac OS X for Ubuntu Linux. John Gruber is simply one of the best Mac writers there is, and regardless of what he has to say on a particular subject, you have to admire the elegance, precision, and logic of his writing. So when Gruber raised questions about the wisdom of Pilgrim’s move in a recent blog post, his large readership weighed in, and Pilgrim responded, you can be sure that a great many Mac users like me paid attention.

As usual, I agreed with nearly everything Gruber had to say, and the couple of niggles I have are not worth mentioning here since they would distract from the purpose of this article. And what is that purpose, you are wondering? Before I get to that, let me briefly summarize (if I dare) the exchange so far between Gruber and Pilgrim.

1. Pilgrim has become fed up with Apple’s “closed”-edness. After 22 years as a sophisticated, high-end user, he’s decided Apple’s “closed” ecosystem of software and hardware is too closed for him. His primary concern is that the integrity of the data he stores in that ecosystem is at risk, because Apple doesn’t always document its data formats and doesn’t respect for long the proprietary formats it develops for storage. Pilgrim feels jerked around from one closed format to another and is tired of the data conversions and consequent data loss they inevitably entail.
2. Gruber is surprised and a bit incredulous that Pilgrim would have suddenly been bitten by this bug. He agrees that closed formats aren’t good for long-term archival purposes, but questions whether losing his iTunes metadata and other format problems is worth chucking his expertise with the Mac operating system for something completely different. He points out that a good backup strategy is part of the solution to preserving precious content. He also devotes a large part of his response to criticizing the Mac blog writers who had knee-jerk reactions against Pilgrim’s decision, and who cited old “Mac is better than Windows because…” arguments without realizing the advances Windows has made since Windows XP (or 95, or whatever). Gruber argues against black-and-white thinking in general and for the very reasonable position of respecting other people’s choices even if you don’t agree with them.
3. Pilgrim replies that Gruber missed his point and reemphasizes that his feeling “closed in” by proprietary formats has been coming on for a long time. Apple’s decision to abandon the widely used and understood mbox format for Mail was just the last straw. He feels betrayed that Apple switched formats in Tiger without informing its users, without providing them a way to back out, and without documenting the new format.

So why do I want to wander into this disagreement between two Macintosh heavyweights I don’t know, but greatly admire and respect? As I read their separate articles, I saw something with my Martian eyes that may not be clear to them. What I saw wasn’t an OS switch story, but rather a love story.

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3. Use Real Productivity Applications To Get Work Done Faster, Easier

As inventors of new tools have done throughout human history, the visionaries who designed and built the first personal computers saw them as tools that would provide an immense boost to human productivity. And they weren’t just thinking about business productivity, folks. They were also thinking of personal productivity: Getting more things done faster so we’d have more leisure time.

Today, in our Microsoft-Windows dominated world, we use the term “productivity application” to refer to Microsoft Office, and we think of the personal computer as a business tool. (Quick: Do a Google search for that term–”productivity application”–and see what you get.) But has Microsoft Office provided us with more leisure time? Of course not. Microsoft Office is a business tool that replaced prior, non-electronic tools like the typewriter and pencil. If it has enhanced productivity at all (and that is arguable), the productivity gain has come in the form of more output per worker… not more leisure time for the individual. In any case, whatever productivity impact Microsoft Office and its ilk had on the business world was completed many years ago. Yet even for businesses, productivity didn’t stop with improving our ability to prepare reports and memos, or compile numbers in spreadsheets, or do overlays for a presentation in PowerPoint.

Productivity goes up whenever you can suddenly do a task in less time than before, either at home or at work. Since its beginnings with the original Apple computer, Apple has appeared to be pursuing a vision that steadily expands the personal computer’s potential to save you time… to do complicated things simpler. Apple’s operating system recognizes that this kind of productivity gain begins with the simplest interface to the computer: Finding things, opening applications, printing, opening documents, organizing information, and the like. As a result of this vision, Mac OS X has two built-in features that are simply lacking in Windows, and they enable “productivity” applications that are truly the envy of the Windows world:

Applescript and Application Services.

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PC Mag’s Michael Miller has written what I’m sure he believes is a reasonable comparison of the state of things with Mac OS X versus Windows. What he doesn’t realize is that he’s full of B***hit, ensnared in a system he thinks he understands but is really merely apologizing for. In doing so, he adheres to old Mac myths that he’ll probably believe till he steps over that final cliff.

Miller tries once again to make the case that Macs are more expensive than PC’s and that they don’t have enough software. If I weren’t so irritated by this, I’d simply yawn. In one case, he writes of visiting the Dell store and buying an E1505 notebook for only about $1,300, while the entry-level MacBook Pro with roughly the same specs is $1,999.

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Good grief. Who the heck is in charge of strategic thinking at those movie studios? Movielink, a consortium of 5 Hollywood studios, launched a new movie-…

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This can’t really be called “news”, since I clipped this PC Magazine review in late December, 2005. But a Martian never forgets! Besides, PC Magazine still brazenly displays this information on its website as if it were fact, not fiction. After reading through the info I’ve gathered in the last half hour, you be the judge of the facts in this case.

The serious error here is that PC Magazine lists the Apple Power Mac G5 Quad as costing… guess! You’ll never guess how much they say it costs. Honestly.

OK, I gotta spill the beans at some point. PC Magazine says a Quad costs $7,023 to $9,522!

That struck me as very odd, since I had just bought a new Quad for myself in December, and I didn’t pay anywhere near $7,000-$9,500 for it. The unit I bought was hardly the base model, either: I had upgraded to the $350 Nvidia GeForce 7800 graphics card when it became available and also added Bluetooth and Airport wireless cards for $99. And I got all this for only $3,448! How is this possible, you ask? Read on.

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It was another very sad, almost heartbreaking story about all the lost technophobes out there who made the mistake of buying Windows computers for their homes. In today’s Washington Post, a story called The Computer Geeks Who Saved Christmas chronicles how the geeky or even slightly geeky family member nowadays gets waylaid by his relatives every time he (or she) visits at Christmastime, dragged to their sick Windows computer and made to try to clean up the virus and adware mess that has built up since his last visit.

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2. A Freakin’ Awesome Dictionary

I’ll bet those of you who read my first article in this series last spring are either Windows fans who have been chuckling, “See, he could only think of one thing!” Or you’re Mac fans who are disappointed that I started in strong to give the other side “what for,” but then left the match just when it was getting interesting.

Although you’d both be wrong, you have to understand that here on Mars, time moves at a somewhat slower pace than it does on Earth. You see, here it’s only been a month since I wrote that first installment, and I thought I was doing pretty good to be getting a second one in already. Then I realized how it might look from down here, and, well… I’ll try to get the third article done in a time frame that will make more sense to you folks.

Now, you ask, “Exactly how could something as mundane as a dictionary possibly induce envy in a Windows user?” Ah, I see you’re one of those who still hasn’t fully appreciated the awesome Dictionary.app built into Tiger (Mac OS X 10.4). It’s already been highlighted in all the Mac news magazines, glorified in all the Mac blogs, and praised endlessly in the Mac discussion forums. Yet I still encounter good, hardworking Mac users who don’t know about it yet. How could that be?

Well, the Tiger Dictionary ain’t exactly a flashy product, for one thing. It doesn’t sit in your Dock, so it’s easy to not realize it’s there. I don’t think Steve included it in any of his Tiger demos. And, well, it’s just a Dictionary, after all.

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Following up on my gushing article about the new iMacs and iPods from yesterday, I sat down to do the math on price/features between Dell and Apple. I once again revisited the “High End Consumer Desktop” specs and pricing to see what impact Apple’s new line has on that shootout. You can read the details, but very briefly, the gap has widened dramatically in Apple’s favor, both in price and in features.

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Apple’s latest surprise announcements were so over-the-top that I wanted to write a few paragraphs about them. Once again, a highly anticipated product (this month, a video-capable iPod; last month, an iTunes-capable cell phone) is upstaged by a product no one anticipated. Last month, the iPod nano took everyone by surprise in its sheer audacity and beauty. This month, the new “media center” iMac is an even bigger surprise, and in some ways even more audacious.

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The first instance I knew of this was the new Grants.gov website that OMB commissioned last year as one of the Federal Government’s well meaning e-Gov initiatives. A good idea in theory, the site would consolidate all grants throughout the Federal Government into a single portal, letting citizens do one-stop shopping and use one standard form whenever they wanted to apply for a Federal grant. In practice, though, the Feds were in a hurry to complete the work and were able to be convinced by the IT contractor in charge to make a system that could only be used with Windows systems….

OK, I thought… surely this will be an isolated incident…

In August came news that the U.S. Copyright Office of the Library of Congress was planning to change their system for online submissions to restrict use to Windows users only, and even worse, to only those using Internet Explorer…

Just today I learned that FEMA (The Federal Emergency Management Agency)–in the midst of its greatest crisis ever with Hurricane Katrina–somehow built a public-facing web system that can only be used by citizens using Windows and IE.

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It’s hard for me to see choosing Apple over Microsoft as striking some great blow for populism just because Apple is a smaller company… In my mind, choosing Apple is substituting one greedy corporation for another.

It’s a sad commentary on my peers when I hear them voice opinions like this. What it means is that they think Microsoft’s behavior is the norm, and that all companies would behave like Microsoft if they could. This is the same cynical view that destroyed our faith in politicians after Richard Nixon’s crimes. For some reason, rather than understanding that Nixon was a political outlier, we adopted the view that all politicians would behave like Nixon if they could. And many people appear to be making the same mistake with Microsoft.

Good grief, to a man from Mars this looks like mass insanity. Microsoft is no more the norm than Richard Nixon was. But what they have in common is substantial:

• A total disregard for the truth
• A willingness to engage in dirty tricks against enemies
• Corrupt management from the top down
• A paranoia about–and intolerance of–deviations from any standards they have set for the world.

If you’re a Microsoft fan who’s just wandered into this article, you’ll no doubt think this is pure hyperbole. And though nothing I can say is likely to convince you otherwise, I do intend to try.

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Apple recently refreshed both the PowerMac and iMac desktop lines. The PowerMac upgrade was nice, but nothing spectacular.

Today’s iMac upgrade, however, was a doozy! Very much worth taking notice of, so I did.

I’ve revisited the “High End Consumer Desktop” specs and pricing to see what impact Apple’s new line has on that shootout. You can read the details, but very briefly, the gap widened a little in Apple’s favor, though not as spectacularly as the new specs would suggest, thanks to a couple of key “free upgrades” at the Dell store.

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A number of readers took me to task yesterday for picking on Dell without considering the other PC vendors. I explained that I chose Dell because that company is by far the largest supplier of Windows-based PC’s, and that it would be beyond the scope of my limited resources to cover all of the possible vendors. That said, I picked up the newspaper today, and here’s a full-page ad in the Washington Post from IBM for a $999 ThinkPad. So I thought, OK, let’s see if this is really a better deal than an iBook. I just paid a quick visit to IBM’s online store, and here’s what I found.

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