Internet Archive

Mozilla's Firefox web browser has made dramatic gains on Microsoft's Internet Explorer throughout Europe in the past year with a marked upturn in FF use compared to IE over the past four months, according to French web monitoring service XiTiMonitor. A study of nearly 96,000 websites carried out during the week of July 2 to July 8 found that FF had 27.8% market share across Eastern and Western Europe, IE had 66.5%, with other browsers including Safari and Opera making up the remaining 5.7%. The July market share represents a massive 3.7% rise since a similar survey in March.

"Apple’s Safari is making its way to the Windows platform with the serious intention of making a dent in the market. As brilliant as the people are at Apple, I can’t help but laugh at their, to put it politely, delusion. Before I ramble on too much, here are my five reasons why Safari will fail on the Windows platform." My take: Safari on Windows isn't here to take over the Windows browsing market. It's here for the iPhone.

For companies like Microsoft and Mozilla, Safari coming to Windows means that one more competitor will be thrown into the Windows browser battlefield. While neither company has expressed dismay with Apple's decision to put Safari on Windows, on Monday executives from both Microsoft and Mozilla expressed a lack of concern for their new (Windows) foe.

"Tired of all the ads on AIM? Want access to more services than just Yahoo!? There are lots of IM client choices besides the big three - AIM, Yahoo! Messenger, and Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN Messenger). The software we examine here lets you hook into any of these three services, and usually more besides, like Jabber. Not all of these applications will offer all of the features you'll find on the big guys - video and voice chat come to mind - but most of them do a good job of unobtrusively keeping you in contact with your comrades."

Most of my readers know that I love cellphones, PDAs and gadgets. Many of these gadgets do not have WiFi in them, but they do support the PAN-client Bluetooth profile which allows them to get wireless internet connectivity (e.g. the Palm Treo). To achieve this, you need to have a PAN-server. And this what Anycom's EDR-AP Bluetooth Access Point is all about.

Red Hat is actively talking to Microsoft to improve Linux/Windows interoperability, but says it will only sign an interoperability agreement with Microsoft if it is based entirely on open standards.

The Shiira Project has announced the release of latest version of their Mac OS X Web browser, Shiira 2.0. Shiira is a web browser based on Web Kit and written in Cocoa. The goal of the Shiira Project is to create a browser that is better and more useful than Safari. All source code used in this software is publicly available. One of the features of Shiira is Tab Expose. Tab Expose shows all open tabs the same way that Expose shows all open windows (similar to IE7). Shiira 2.0 requires Mac OS X 10.4.

The browser wars are over, and now Microsoft, Mozilla and other vendors plan to focus on positioning the browser as a development platform. That was the consensus of a panel of representatives at the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo who help develop Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera and the Google Reader.

Gaim, the ubiquitous open source instant messaging program, in order to settle a lawsuit with America Online, was renamed "Pidgin" last week. The derivative projects, libgaim and gaim-text will be renamed libpurple and Finch respectively. The new website is at pigdin.im, but it's currently pointing to the Gaim sourceforge site. Pidgin 2.0.0, in development for well over a year, is expected this week.

World wide web father Tim Berners-Lee told politicians on Thursday that it's critical to shield his seminal innovation from control by a single company or country. A top priority for policymakers going forward must be "making sure the web itself is the blank sheet, the blank canvas, something that does not constrain the innovation that's around the corner," the knighted engineer told a US House of Representatives panel that writes internet and telecommunications laws.

"This tutorial shows how to implement SPF in a Postfix 2.x installation. The Sender Policy Framework is an open standard specifying a technical method to prevent sender address forgery. There are lots of SPF extensions and patches available for Postfix, but most require that you recompile Postfix. Therefore we will install the postfix-policyd-spf-perl package from openspf.org which is a Perl package and can be implemented in existing Postfix installations (no Postfix compilation required)."

OpenSSH is an important tool that keeps the communication and transfer of information between machines secure. Not only does it provide a secure alternative to common tools like Telnet, FTP, and RCP, it can also act as a transport protocol for other services like Subversion, X Windows System, and rsync. This article shows you how to get the best out of the main tools provided by OpenSSH.

"Do you have trouble accessing data exported from multiple file servers? If so, try using open source implementations of autofs and Lightweight Directory Access Protocol, with Network File System Version 3, to access data under the same global mount point. In this article, study and compare five different methods to create a uniform namespace using autofs. A handy table with a comparative evaluation is available to help you choose the best technique for your scenario."

"In the February 2007 survey we received responses from 108810358 sites, an increase of 1.93 million from last month. Apache has a decline of 442K sites this month, and sees its share of the web server market slip by 1.47 percent to 58.7 percent. This is the first time Apache's market share has been below 60 percent since September 2002. Microsoft-IIS gain 935K sites, continuing an advance that has seen Microsoft steadily chip away at what once seemed an insurmountable lead for Apache. In our Feb. 2006 survey, Apache held 68% market share, giving it lead of 47.5% over Windows (20.5% share). In this month's survey, Microsoft's share has improved to 31.0%, narrowing Apache's advantage to 27.7%."