If you search for Firefox using Google you’ll see this ad towards the top:
Look over to the right side and you’ll see this:
Here’s a larger complete screenshot for anyone interested.
Interesting eh? They aren’t threatened though. Here’s another tidbit. A search for “Safari” brings up a Microsoft ad as well. A search for “Opera” or “Opera Browser” does not. A search for “Browser” will. A search for “linux” will bring up a few Microsoft ads as well as a Firefox ad.
Looking at this map, it’s clear November 9, 2004 was D-Day for the open source movement. We can’t stop until Steve Balmer is in a hiding in a bunker under Redmond Washington.
Map by Steven Hilton copied per license in image to ensure availability.
On Monday, I decided to see if Ubuntu’s Live CD was good enough to work for the week. I put the CD in, rebooted, and said “no Windows until Friday”. Surprisingly, it recognized all the hardware in my Thinkpad T43 (at least all that I cared enough about to notice), and actually did a good job. With 1.5GB of RAM in this monster, it was rather smooth once it loaded. My only gripe is that it didn’t have an easy way to save the session to a USB flash device on shutdown, and allow it to re-init based on that session next restart. If the Live CD was smart enough to do that, it would have been truly perfect.
OpenOffice did the trick, as did Firefox. Really had no issues at all. Printing worked, so did networking.
Live CD’s are definitely useful. Find a computer that doesn’t work in a lab? Just put in the CD, and you can use it without problems.
Really says a lot for Linux. Ubuntu is definitely a great distro, the best I’ve seen so far. Now if I had a bigger hard drive, I’d have a partition for it. Eventually I will… I hope.
BrassRing Enterprise 8, which is used by many companies to allow applicants to apply for a job online is going to be adding Firefox support in version 8 (due out December) to address incompatibility with Mac users (I presume Linux users are also affected). This is great news of course, and may mean that they are close enough to standards compliance that you can use your browser of choice (although it sounds like Firefox will be the only non-IE browser supported).
American Express also uses BrassRing Enterprise according to the article. This is a separate issue from the #1 reported issue I discussed the other day.
That’s another win for alternative browsers. I’m hoping American Express and others follow.
[Hat tip CNET News]
Macworld notes that the W3C objects to the Copyright Office Browser Compatibility plan (I mentioned this a few weeks ago). There are two particular quotes I wanted to share:
While stressing that the W3C is not criticizing Internet Explorer, the W3C officials said the office would be placing limitations on users of the Mac OS, Linux and Unix, who may have incompatible browsers. Cell phone and PDA users, and persons with disabilities also may be affected, Berners-Lee said.
So well said of Berners-Lee. What about Linux users? Where do they download the latest Internet Explorer? The Mac version is the same as the PC version in name only.
The W3C also stressed that the Web “was born and achieved widespread use only because of a commitment to open, vendor-neutral standards.”
I think that sums things up rather well. Not just about the problem with this proposal, but the problem facing the Internet in general. It applies to some patents, and to some monopolies.
You can find the complete W3C letter here.
Well, I finally did it. I burnt Fedora Core 2 Install CD’s, and put it on my 2nd HD of my Thinkpad. Had trouble booting at first, but found a hidden option in my BIOS to select the drive as my boot drive. It’s zippy! Very, very, very fast. My big problem so far is I’ve been unable to get my wireless card going, and downloading anything, means booting into windows, and copying to a floppy disk…. a real drag.
But it is fast. Looks like I got a new toy to play with!
Also on th agenda is a boot loader. I tried just using the Windows one, but that wasn’t working for me, so perhaps I’ll just use grub on the alternate drive, to boot windows. If anyone has some good directions, or reading material on this topic, please shoot me an email, or leave a comment, I’d really appreciate it.
Other than that, all is good. It’s been a very busy week, so some geeky fun was in order.
Finally got around to updating my Knoppix CD. What a neat little setup. One CD with a TON of software. Interesting note on the page:
Closed because of “Software-Patents”
In the next few days, the European Parliament will decide about the legalisation and adoption of so-called “software patents” in Europe, which are already used by large companies in other countries to put competitors out of business. This can lead to the termination of many software projects such as KNOPPIX, at least within Europe, because the holders of the over 30,000 already granted “software patents” (currently without a legal foundation) can claim exclusive rights and collect license fees for trivial things like “progress bars”, “mouseclicks on online order forms”, “scrolling within a window” and similar. That way, software developers will have to pay the “software-patentholders” for using these features, even in their own, completely self-developed applications, which can completely stall the development of innovative software for small and medium companies. Apart from this, the expense for patent inquiries and legal assistence is high, for even trying to find out if the self-developed software is possibly violating “software-patents”, if you want to continue to market your software. Contrary to real patents, “software-patents” are, in the current draft, monopolization of business ideas and methods, even without any tangible technical implementation.
More about the current major problem at http://swpat.ffii.org/index.en.html
You can still download the software… but hope it sticks around. It’s super cool. Even when the computers in the lab aren’t working right, just pop in the CD, and I’m up and running. No issues, not glitches. Just smooth sailing.