Off topic about web browsers.

I can't stand these websites which are not conforming to standards. Yes, most of them are designing their websites for the crappy Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.0 browser. If you're using that browser, you've probably have viruses/worms/trojans which you don't know about.

I've been a long time supporter of non Microsoft browsers. I started off with Mosaic in the early 90's then that morphed into Netscape browser then Netscape developed Communicator which was a great leap into being able to see the native HTML and WYSWYG (What you see is what you get) . That's when I started to understand the underlying HTML. Unfortunately, companies started adopting Internet Explorer because Microsoft started bundling their web browser with the operating system and giving it away for free. Netscape finally decided to give their browser away for free, however it was too late as "Corporate America" started developing applications internally with Microsoft's easy to use FrontPage application (that product actually was a decent product by Microsoft) . Unfortunately, because of the built in functionality of Active Server Pages (Microsoft's proprietary format of Java Servlets) within FrontPage and the fact that companies were building websites off of the non-scaleable and insecure IIS (Internet Information Server, IE became a standard for companies, thus pushing out the open standards base of development of websites. Netscape's browsers no longer worked with many of the websites because of their customizations to support ASP. Down goes Netscape. At the same time other browsers were appearing, however each one had the same issues as Netscape. Netscape's browser was finally was sold off to AOL who basically neglected to continue solid development for it. IE was King. That's when the hackers/virus developers started to take advantage of all of the IE vulnerabilities. All though out my time with browsers, I've always looked for a substitute for IE. IE was my standard browser too, but I continued to test out the other browsers like open-source ones like Mozilla, which became Firefox, Konquerer for Linux, Opera, Safari and the ones for the Palm OS. In 2002, I was 95% converted to Opera as that was the fastest browser developed. IE was dog slow, Firefox was close behind, however had issues on what direction it would take. I stuck with Opera for years however when java scripting became much more prevalent and now Web2.0 (Javascripting/CSS/XML) , many sites didn't work properly because of their affinity to support only two browsers: IE6 and Firefox. Yea! for Firefox. Bad for Opera because many sites started doing browser detection, thus when Opera was detected it either sent the browser to a page not supported by your browser and upgrade to IE or Firefox. In the case of Yahoo, they did the same, however Opera designed a work around but it still doesn't work well because of the constant code changes Yahoo performs. There's a customization inside their application which is programed for a Firefox bug and that wreaks havoc with Opera. Well, I now use 3 browsers, Firefox, Opera and IE7. I use Firefox 2.x for 95% of my web browsing as it works, Opera when I want to test out the speed of their new beta releases (I really want to go back, however because of the Yahoo issue I'm forced not to) There are lots of new features they have released go here to download a beta copy and read more about their development. I use IE7 when it's the last resort. (many sites don't work properly with IE7 because they IE7 is a bit more standards based and many web sites don't detect IE7 yet. I'd definitely recommend that you upgrade to IE7 if you have IE6 still. IE7 is much faster and more secure. Anyway that's my rant for the day. The more people who move away from IE the better. Support Firefox or Opera. Opera Mini is now also becoming the standard for cell phones. Until Microsoft develops a fast, secure and open standards compliant browser, it will be my last choice. The same goes for Microsoft's new OS... Vista.. I'm not upgrading! Windows XP pro works for me and Vista doesn't give me much more, plus it's full of bloat. Microsoft's next OS after Vista is supposed to be much more efficient without all of the bloat. Maybe I'll convert to Ubuntu Linux soon.... I've tried it and it works easily for someone who is a bit technical, thought for the general public, it still has some ways to go till it's stupid proof.

Thanks for listening.