Netcraft notes that their Web Server Survey Turns 10 years old this month, finding 70 million registered domains, nearly 3 million more than last month. Almost 70% of the live web servers run Apache with Microsoft (20.5%), Sun (2.7%) and Zeus (0.9%) hardly in the running. The devils in the details. Read them here.
Tag Archives | Microsoft
Microsoft promises to try harder with IE7
Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley posts Microsoft’s CSS Plans for IE 7 Draw Cheers, Jeers. “Although it won’t fix most of its CSS-related bugs until Beta 2, Microsoft is going public with what it expects to deliver, standards-wise, by the time Internet Explorer 7.0 ships. Acid2 test compliance isn’t on the short list.”
It’s great to hear that IE 7 will attempt closer compliance with the standards. It means that those of us who surf with Safari, Konqueror, FireFox, Opera, Camino or other browsers will have a better chance of getting web pages that look right and work right. Microsoft won’t promise 100% standards compliance; it’s unlikely there is any browser that means that lofty goal. It’s not even clear that experts agree on what 100% compliance is.
Seeing behavior from Microsoft that looks a lot like standards compliance raises hopes. Perhaps Microsoft can grow to assume the responsibilities it should shoulder as the industry leader and stop trying to monopolize markets with “Embrace-Enhance-Extend-Extinguish” tactics. Or perhaps I’m just a hopeless optimist…
Microsoft Vista Beta One: We Were Only Kidding…
OSNews posts The Whys, Whats and Whens of Vista. Head of all things Windows at Microsoft, Jim Allchin provides a heads up on the operating system formerly known as Longhorn: “Most of the stuff that we would expect that tech enthusiasts and consumers will be interested in will happen at Beta 2. Beta 1 is not what I would call deeply interesting unless you are a real bithead”.
I probably haven’t griped for 24 hours or so how wrong this is. Microsoft “ships” a product, in the sense that the reviewers (and likely anyone who cares) can evaluate it, and it’s not even out the door before Microsoft is saying that none of this is final, that the “good bits” are in Beta 2, the UI comes later, you just wait, we’ll get it right next time. They’re just throwing it against the wall, seeing who says “ooh” and “ah” and then they’ll ship another one. What’s the point of wasting your time looking at something they promise isn’t final?
Insight into the Greasemonkey issue
Following up on my response to Alex Feldstein’s post on Greasemonkey security warning, Jon Udell posts his weekly column today, “Greasemonkey in crisis:
A hole in a Firefox plug-in proves that no one, not even open source partisans, have all the answers” with several insightful comments:
This time there was no Microsoft to blame. The open source underdogs had done this to themselves.
How can sandboxed environments sufficiently empower developers while preserving meaningful isolation of risk? … There are no perfect answers to these questions.
Microsoft’s Genuine Advantage becomes mandatory
OSNews points to an eWeek article, Microsoft Lowers the Boom on Illegal Windows Copies. “Microsoft is tightening the noose for those people running illegal or pirated copies of its Windows XP/2000 software on their systems. Starting Tuesday, it will be mandatory for users of this Windows software to certify that their software is a genuine and legal copy before they will be able to receive any updates except security patches.”
This just has Bad Idea written all over it. Copy Protection (and this is just a delayed form of Copy Protection) inevitably takes out some innocent bystanders while the really serious pirates work around it. (The first PC software I bought was CopyIIPC so that I could make backup copies of the company’s Lotus 1-2-3 key disks, since the employees were always destroying disks.) Some of Microsoft’s customers will end up in a situation where the “Windows Genuine Advantage” package, in an effort to enhance their experience, stops them from doing what they legitimately need to get done. More collateral damage. We’ve all ended up in a situation where Windows demands “Office CD 2” or that you type in some product key thats back in the office a thousand miles away. From the article:
Microsoft has also made changes to streamline the process, including no longer requiring customers to enter their product key since the ActiveX control used to validate their software can now automatically determine whether they have a genuine Windows product.
Oh, that should work fine.
The Vista’s a little cloudy…
Computerworld News notes Microsoft could face trademark fight over Vista OS name. “John Wall, CEO of Vista Inc., said his company is “considering all of its options” for a potential lawsuit against Microsoft, which last week announced that the next version of its operating system would be called Windows Vista.”
Not surprising that the name was already taken. We’ll have to see if Microsoft can argue their trademark is sufficiently different.
MS Anti-Spyware built on MS Abandonware
The ever-snarky Andrew Orlowski points out in the Register that Microsoft is shipping an anti-spyware tool (they bought, not developed) based on the abandoned, unsupported and generally disrespected Visual Basic 6.0. Perhaps they should consider rewriting it in Visual FoxPro…
Yahoo! acquires Konfabulator
Dave Winer at Scripting News points to MacWorld: “Yahoo on Monday will announce the acquisition of Konfabulator, a Macintosh and Windows application that allows users to run mini files known as Widgets on their desktop — the same model used by Apple for its Dashboard application.”
Platform-agnostic applets that run on every desktop could be yet another challenge to proprietary OS vendors like Apple, Microsoft and Sun, along with web-based applications.
Hasta La Vista, Windows Longhorn
http://www.betanews.com/article/Longhorn_Gets_a_Name_Windows_Vista/1122002477
Imagine, a Windows product that has been in beta so long that they throw out its codename 17 months before it is even due to ship! Anyone taking bets that this test balloon falls over from high lead content and Microsoft Windows 2006+ (TPFKAL – The Product Formerly Known As Longhorn) gets yet another name? Besides “#$%&@!? Windows,” which is pretty much what every copy gets called, of course.
Roadmap comparison
Interesting juxtaposition here. The Open Source Development Lab, a small group located in the Northwest US, posted a roadmap titled “OSDL’s Linux Initiatives.”
Nearly simultaneously, Information Week carries a 9 page story “Microsoft Lays Out Enterprise Roadmap,” where the lead paragraph reads:
Microsoft is making big promises about Longhorn and other product development, but will it deliver? We spoke with company execs about initiatives in security, server operating systems, storage, convergence and more.
OSDL is just one small group, advancing their own agenda of tools and utilities, with an obvious focus on making the platform more reliable, appealing and robust for a variety of vendors to deploy upon. Microsoft, in contrast, strikes me as withdrawing within a fortress of their own making tying together their tools ever more tightly. The Information Week interviews a number of high-placed Microsofties and each seems to have their own agenda, plans and acronyms (and titles, too!). Don’t miss the last two pages of the Information Week piece with some surprising survey results sure to delight partisans on both sides of the debate.