After several months on dial-up, we finally have broadband again.
A neat fellow named Christian climbed just over 200 feet up into one of our redwoods to mount an antenna so we could get some fast Internets from a very cool rural broadband provider called Skyline Broadband.
Joy!!
Firefox 3.5 is the most popular browser in the world. It tops IE 6, IE 7, and IE 8.
Yes, this is just one source.
Yes, all versions of IE combined still beat all versions of Firefox combined.
Yes, it's just one week.
So.
It's still AWESOME!
The European Commission has settled its longstanding case with Microsoft. Mitchell Baker, Chair of the Mozilla Foundation, has Mozilla's response.
After reading through even more comments and re-reading my most recent two posts, I've concluded that I'm not really helping anyone by continuing the discussion I started Thursday so I've removed these most recent two posts. I've left your comments in tact. If you'd like to continue the discussion, feel free to do so in the original post which won't be taken down.
I hope that you all, whether you agree or disagree with me, will consider that users and providers of Web services ought to be concerned about more than just quality products. I hope you also see how this is especially important in a context where it cannot be guaranteed that personally identifiable and personal data can be forcibly disclosed to third parties.
It's my hope that Web service providers will do even more to educate users about the privacy/service trade-offs and that the brilliant people devising and developing these services will find ways to make them just as rich and compelling with fewer rather than more privacy trade-offs.
Thanks for reading.
After reading through even more comments and re-reading my most recent two posts, I've concluded that I'm not really helping anyone by continuing the discussion I started Thursday so I've removed these most recent two posts. I've left your comments in tact. If you'd like to continue the discussion, feel free to do so in the original post which won't be taken down.
I hope that you all, whether you agree or disagree with me, will consider that users and providers of Web services ought to be concerned about more than just quality products. I hope you also see how this is especially important in a context where it cannot be guaranteed that personally identifiable and personal data can be forcibly disclosed to third parties.
It's my hope that Web service providers will do even more to educate users about the privacy/service trade-offs and that the brilliant people devising and developing these services will find ways to make them just as rich and compelling with fewer rather than more privacy trade-offs.
Thanks for reading.
I think that the thing that bothers me most about Google CEO Eric Schmidt's comment is that it makes clear that he simply doesn't understand privacy. That a company with so much user data on its servers is led by someone who just doesn't understand privacy is really scary to me and it should be scary to you as well.
"If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place"
If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place. If you really need that kind of privacy, the reality is that search engines -- including Google -- do retain this information for some time and it's important, for example, that we are all subject in the United States to the Patriot Act and it is possible that all that information could be made available to the authorities.
That was Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, telling you exactly what he thinks about your privacy. There is no ambiguity, no "out of context" here. Watch the video.
And here's how you can easily switch Firefox's search from Google to Bing. (Yes, Bing does have a better privacy policy than Google.)
IE 63.61% (-1.03)
Firefox 24.74% (+0.67)
Safari 4.36% (-0.06)
Chrome 3.92% (+0.34)
Opera 2.31% (+0.14)
IE 56.57% (-1.39)
Firefox 32.21% (+0.39)
Chrome 4.66% (+0.49)
Safari 3.67% (+0.20)
Opera 2.02% (+0.14)
According to Net Applications, IE lost about four points in the last four months. About two and a quarter went to Firefox, one and a quarter went to Chrome, and one quarter went to each of Safari and Opera.
According to StatCounter, IE lost about three and a half points in the last four months. Firefox and Chrome each picked up about equal parts of IE's loss.
The Open Web is still winning!!
update: additional joy.
