Posts by Mark C Casey

Meaningless version numbering

It used to be that you'd change the major version number to indicate significant changes or a major improvement over the old version. It seems more and more these days Google and others are doing it purely for marketing.

Google's marketing department;

"We've decided to implement some changes in how we increase our major version numbering. We will increase the version number if any of these conditions are met:

* The sun has risen this morning

* Is it a full moon tonight? If so major version change! If not... major version change!

* Are we still behind MSIE in version numbering? Increase the version number!

* Did any of the other browser makers release a nightly, beta, release candidate or a new release? Major version change!

* Is our marketing department full of morons? Major version change!"

And on and on.. Chrome still isn't attractive as a browser (to me at least) its addon system is pretty crappy and the bookmarks system is woeful. Never mind numerous little things like googleupdater etc.

And so..

And so begins Yahoo's march towards mediocrity and irrelevance.

That said, I suppose there's a valid argument they've been mediocre and irrelevant for years. I think the only time I use anything even related tangentially to Yahoo is the iPhone weather app which gets its data from yahoo. Since the beeb revamped their mobile website I tend to use that more (for weather results over the native iphone app) as it usually has better, more accurate and more detailed info.

It's getting better all the time...

@SilverWare

See http://arewefastyet.com/

That website was created by the Mozilla Javascript team, essentially it's their way of publicly acknowledging that they aren't as fast yet as Chrome/Safari whilst also setting themselves a target of beating Chrome/Safari in JS performance.

I've been using the Firefox betas and nightlies and I can attest that the JS performance has been gradually getting better.

Also, enabling Direct2D and DirectWrite significantly improves drawing performance.

For example (in one of the IE9 tests): http://i.imgur.com/Xlzaa.jpg

And the same test in IE9: http://i.imgur.com/IBaF6.jpg (even if you reduce the window size it still doesn't achieve 60fps)

But..

Adobe: “condemns the practice of using Local Storage to back up browser cookies for the purpose of restoring them later without user knowledge and express consent.”... "But it makes us money, so we'll give lip service to privacy but really not care because we don't want to take away a potential money source of people buying flash tools."

The best tool around to get rid of them is the Firefox addon BetterPrivacy, got it configured to automatically delete all flash cookies after I close Firefox. Apple Safari, Google Chrome etc can hark on all they like about speed but Firefox has the best overall browsing experience with all the best addons.

Allow me be the first to say...

Meh.

Kinect looks to be the most impractical gaming device since the virtualboy. Hate to say this but Sony seems to have gotten theirs bang on, no having to stand up and flail around pointlessly in the hope that image recognition will be able to analyse what you're doing accurately and quickly. (accuracy, speed in processing response time and price.. pick two)

WebM

"IE9 will also run Google's open sourced WebM video codec plus the closed and proprietary H.264 from Microsoft, Apple, and others."

Woah there horsey, only if you install the WebM codec downloaded from Google.

You know the saying

If you can't innovate, litigate.

(Surely it's time to update some of the reg pics? We need a pic of Ballmer throwing a chair or something since Gates isn't in charge of MS any more)

Opt Out

Just a heads up that you can opt out of this stuff on your iAds.. I mean IOS device by visiting http://oo.apple.com.

What happened to 3.6.5?

Just a tad bit odd, are they taking pages out of Microsoft and Googles playbooks?

That's what you get...

When you set the barbarians setting too high.

Well..

Good thing I own a Foxsat box, since the only (good quality) method of accessing iPlayer on my tv has been via XBMC which the BBC broke on purpose. (which ironically didn't stop the pirates at all)

Think I'll give it a go tonight, I hope the higher quality streams are available and not the crappy low quality ones you get on the PS3.

Oh...

I only tested it a little bit with XBMC, apparently it'll work for a while but then it'll fail.

I haven't watched any programs this week on iplayer.

@ Tyrunn

So, what you're saying with the well known popularity of the Zune over the iPod that MS are set to win with stores too?

Simple fact is MS has about as much "this is cool, lets buy this" cred as a very smelly wet fish.

Apple has one hell of a lot of credibility with customers/consumers right now. Whenever I hear about any normal (read: non-geek) person buying a music player it's always iPod and never any other brand.

People don't just buy iPod's because of some stupid "oh shiny", they buy them because a. they're actually very good (there's nothing else out there that comes close to an ipod touch) b. they're popular. (see a)

About time

It's about time, Vista has been available how long now? And only just now have they started to take into consideration of making Firefox actually look good under Vista. Up to this point when I've been using Firefox under Vista i've been using the glasser, stylish and personal menu extensions to make it look good rather than the backside of a donkey.

Hell, even Safari which lets face it sucks under Windows has managed to make itself look near native under Vista. Which considering it's an Apple application on Windows is a tad bit surprising.

Not here

I'm in Leeds here and it has been flaky all day. Unable to connect in to works VPN on the iphone to check my work email. (I have to use wifi to do that at the moment)

Plus I got a text message from work complaining that they can't connect in to the vpn because all the sales guys use iphones and the vpn to check their email etc.

O2's data network has been pretty flaky the last few months.