I tried out this new Flock browser this morning, however, it appears that it unfortunately does not support running bloxor. I’m downloading their source code now….

Update: this was my bad, I was attempting to gain XPConnect privileges into Flock, but it doesn’t observe my Firefox user_prefs.js.

Update2: It still doesn’t run JavaScript code that was signed with a dummy certificate.

This month, the Firefox browser requested a whopping 28% of all page views for involution.com. Internet Explorer is down to 59% which includes 11 people who were using the new IE7 beta.

I added a subject field into my rss feed at one point, but it didn’t work with the dtd for rss 1.0. So, I commented it out with a #, apparently that is bad xml foo or something, and it wasn’t parsing with Firefox Deer Park Alpha 1 (it did parse under Firefox 1.0x). It’s working now. Nothing to see here. Move along now, move along.

I’ve tried news aggregators like the Sage plugin for Firefox, but I didn’t really care for how it displayed the feeds. So, I just pootled along using my Firefox Live Bookmarks as my “aggregator”. However, after Yahoo! started allowing custom RSS feeds to be added , I setup an awesome page of feeds from my Live Bookmark collection. Now, mind you Yahoo! does have advertisements, but if you use the AdBlock Firefox-plugin with Proximitron, their detriment is rather marginal. The only thing I’m kind of wanting now is for the page to sort the feeds in the order of whose been updated last.

My statistics show that IE has dropped to 66% of all page requests for involution.com for the month of November.

I have been an Microsoft Internet Explorer hold-out for a long time now. I tried various forms of Mozilla browsers, but the Netscape source code that it was based on was fairly wonky from the start of the whole Mozilla effort. I tried Phoenix, Firebird, and then Firefox on Linux and Windows in most of their iterations, however, it wasn’t until Firefox PR-1 that I started using it regularly. I switched not because of improved percieved security, but because of the features. I really like Tabbed Browsing, Active Bookmarking, and more general control over what happens when I view a web page.

As for security, I don’t suppose for one millisecond the Firefox is _actually_ more secure than MSIE, but it most likely effectively more secure. I think hackers are way less likely to turn all the door knobs on Firefox/Mozilla because people who run it are savvy enough to know about it, and less people use it overall. Also, there’s probably less prestige involved in finding a Firefox bug than an MSIE one because of the typical crowd. I can see security becoming an increasing concern for people using MSIE though. This month alone, I have spent over 8 hours fixing various problems caused by vulnerabilities in MSIE.

The newest
JPEG-vulnerability has just been exploited and released, and MS has just announced that they will stop supporting IE patches on Windows 2000. So, I think this will likely prompt business customers (and savvy home users who don’t run XP) to switch over to something that _is_ “supported” ™.

Is this the beginning of the Browser Wars v2.0? I don’t know, but my log files have been increasingly going towards the “Not-IE” column. I have seen MSIE go from 80% in 2002 to 70% in 2002 and now down to 66% of requests for all page hits this month. MSIE is still “faster” in most respects than Firefox, but probably only because all of its composite libraries are loaded when the OS boots, and other unknown special advantages.

Oh, and by the way, I still run Proximitron
even with firefox. It gets rid of 99.99999% of all nasty html and java that has the potential to exploit your browser. I highly recommend it, but it does require a nontrivial amount of configuration to work with your typically visited sites. It by default distrusts all web sites, you have to add sites that you trust to the list. I think Proximitron needs to be compiled into firefox personally, but who am I to complain?

I made it so Firefox PR1 can add my RSS feed into their swanky “live bookmark” engine. This allows you to see all the current headlines for my rss feed in your bookmarks menu. Also, when you view my page with Firefox PR1, a little orange RSS box appears in the bottom right-hand corner of the window that allows you to automagically add it to your bookmarks with one easy click.

I also validated my RSS feed at
http://www.feedvalidator.org