1. Google Chrome does not install neatly into Program Files. Instead it installs itself into a hidden Application Data folder within your Documents and Settings folder.
2. A Google Update background process is installed and runs automatically. It periodically tries to access the Internet without your knowledge (unless your firewall notifies you, which mine did). I presume it’s looking for updates. This background process runs all the time, even when you’re not using Chrome. In fact I saw 2 GoogleUpdate.exe processes for some reason. I really hate extraneous background processes.
3. Google Chrome uses the Webkit rendering engine so it’s exactly the same as Safari. So for me, I have no reason to install it for testing purposes because as long as a page looks fine in Safari, it’s going to look fine in Chrome.
4. There’s no way I’m leaving Firefox because of the plugins. Chrome simply doesn’t offer the same level of functionality that I need on a daily basis.

So that’s why I uninstalled it immediately. I probably would’ve left it alone and not used if it didn’t run the background processes I mentioned. I consider that computer junk. It’s much more reasonable to run an update check when Chrome is launched instead of always-on background processes.

I Don’t Really Like Dealing with Beta Software

Personally, I haven’t downloaded or tested Chrome yet simply because it was just released and it’s in beta. I know Google likes to slap the Beta label on a lot of their products/services which are seemingly stable but there’s always going to be issues with newly distributed software. I’m going to wait until they work out all the bugs/glitches and security holes that people dig up. In fact, they’ve already released an update patching some security vulnerabilities.

Internet Explorer 8

It’s the same reason I haven’t touched IE8 yet. It’s at Beta 2 but I probably wont start testing it until it reaches Release Candidate (RC) stage. I haven’t been following IE8 development, but if they can fully and properly implement CSS 2.1, I’d be a very happy camper. I just hope that IE8 at least helps kill IE6 usage but that’s probably not likely for a while. That’s probably not going to happen and what’s sad is that people like me are going to have to work with 3 versions of IE. We’ll probably have to wait until IE9 before IE6 really dies.

Firefox 2 Crashing Frequently

I haven’t even updated to Firefox 3 yet but I’m going to be doing that really soon. Over the last couple of weeks, my Firefox install has been crashing very frequently and I think it may be due to some of the add-ons I have installed. I also noticed the memory usage balloons very quickly (much more than usual). At launch, firefox.exe was taking over 70 MB of memory before I even loaded a page. That is very high. I’m a heavy browser and in no time, memory usage can jump up to 300 MB and it doesn’t come down when I close the tabs. I used to be able to open 40 tabs with no problems but nowadays I’m getting frequent crashes when I open that many, especially if those sites contain more complex JavaScript.

Firefox has traditionally been very stable for me and I haven’t installed any new add-ons. I think it’s because some of my add-ons were updated for FF3 compatibility and somewhere along the way, the new code is causing issues with FF2. This is really the only reason I can think of. Actually, I’m going to backup some data and create a new profile in FF2 later and see if that fixes things.

Firebug

I was mainly waiting for the Firebug add-on to reach a stable release for FF3 before I upgrade and it looks like it has, so it’s probably time to make the jump. Firebug has become an essential tool in my work so it’s become a defacto prerequisite for updating my Firefox installation.

09/10/2008 Update: I’m on Firefox 3 now. It feels a bit faster after I started off fresh with a new profile and installed extensions from scratch.

Now Online Retailers Must Charge NY Residents Sales Tax

So the state isn’t collecting the tax revenue that it wants. Now that they’ve enacted this law, it forces online retailers to charge their customers sales tax. So for New Yorkers like myself, we’ll be paying an additional 8.375% on purchases we make at sites like Amazon and Newegg (2 sites I purchase from). Normally, since neither of those businesses have a physical presence in NY, they don’t have to charge sales tax.

But the new law says that as long as the online retailer has an affiliate in NY, they must charge sales tax. Note that an affiliate can be anyone - I’m signed up as an affiliate of both Amazon and Newegg and I’ve used affiliate links in my blog before. Hypothetically, if I’m their only affiliate, both Amazon and Newegg would now have to collect sales tax from any customer located in NY.

Obviously this isn’t desirable since not having to pay the extra tax is one of the primary reasons I purchase things online (aside from prices generally being lower online and the convenience of being able to find less common products more easily).

Amazon Files Lawsuit Against New York

Well now that this new tax law has been enacted, Amazon filed a lawsuit against New York over the law, calling it unconstitutional. I certainly don’t want to pay the tax and I’m fully on Amazon’s side. I can understand why the state wants to collect more tax revenue but I don’t think levying more taxes on citizens during a recession is that helpful to the state economy. Plus, like any normal person, I just don’t like giving up more of my hard-earned money to pay taxes.

Are They Profitable?

My point is Digg isn’t really all that. They’re a private company so I don’t know what their finances look like but I suspect they operate around break-even or maybe they’re mildly profitable. I can tell you I have NEVER clicked an ad on Digg, in fact I’m pretty ad-blind to their ads, in that I don’t even read them or really notice them on the page. Ad blindness or ignorance is particularly common among techies, which make up a large part of Digg’s audience. So I wonder how much revenue Digg is actually pulling in.

Digg’s “Algorithm”

Either way, Digg is easy to copy. There’s even a module for the open source CMS, Drupal, called Drigg, that basically lets you run your own Digg clone. Maybe the algorithm is simpler but the point is Drigg shows how easy it is to replicate Digg’s core functionality. I hesitate to even call Digg’s algorithm an algorithm because it’s not that complex. I’ll call Google’s search engine an algorithm because that actually is very complex and difficult to emulate (or else someone would have done it already, like Yahoo or Microsoft perhaps).

Less Interest in Digg Over Time

I used to frequent Digg more when it was just tech news and I’d actually go deeper into the pages of news but they’ve now branched into so many things, it just feels noisy. And I hate how there’s so much content spam where the sites that show up on Digg actually aren’t the original source of the content. They’re either just reproducing it, linking it, or providing commentary which I don’t really care for. When I’m interested enough to click on a Digg link I want to see the original source. Now I pretty much only visit Digg every couple of days and I just check out the top 10 list. I kind of suspect the same cycle happens for most other users, some of whom probably never go back.

Sell Now or Risk Lower Valuation in the Future

So that’s why I think Digg needs to sell. The linked article mentioned Digg was looking for around $300 million before but it now expects less. And Digg has constantly been rumored as an acquisition target but nothing ever materializes, while other properties are getting snapped up left and right. I think that’s probably because no one thinks Digg is worth it. I still think it isn’t. After all, Digg hosts none of its own content and depends on users to post links, which numerous other services also do. Digg can easily lose huge swaths of users to other services. But companies like Google and Microsoft don’t mind throwing around 200-300 million bucks.

Actually Jay Adelson, Digg’s CEO posted a short statement saying the rumors of an acquisition are false but who knows. Regardless of that I think if the principals and investors at Digg want to cash in, now is the time. Keep waiting and that bubble will deflate even more.

For those that are unfamiliar with Acid2, it’s a browser rendering test that uses various browser features and web standards to display a smiley face. It’s hard to render correctly and doing so just means the browser supports a certain baseline of features and standards specifications. Even my preferred browser Firefox doesn’t quite render Acid2 correctly but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s a bad browser.

Internet Explorer is notoriously horrible with standards support and there are numerous rendering bugs not seen in any other web browser. But this is a lot more transparent to the end user than it is to those working in web development like myself. I have to devote a significant amount of time and effort just dealing with IE6. IE7 is much improved but still not quite there yet. 99% of all browser compatibility issues that crop up in my work is related to Internet Explorer.

That fact that IE8 renders Acid2 correctly bodes well for the new release. Of course, not even a beta is available yet so we’ll just have to wait and see how IE8 turns out.

They play automatically as soon as the page loads - you don’t even need to hover over it. Talk about f*cking intrusive and annoying as hell. That whiny voice just makes it so much worse; it makes me want to tear my hair out, it’s that annoying. Whoever came up with these ads needs to get punched in the face. Website operators, if you want a sure-fire way to drive visitors away then these ads are the way to do it.

Advertising that pisses people off = FAIL

So I was recently looking to install a virtual machine with Linux and use the Konqueror browser to approximate/simulate Safari testing (Safari and Konqueror both use the KHTML/Webkit rendering engine). Now it looks like I don’t need to go through that hassle. The new version of Safari is still in beta but thanks Apple - this is a great help to web designers/developers.

It seems people are reporting security problems with the Safari beta. Hopefully these get patched up soon (Can you imagine an IE release with security problems? Everyone would be getting on Microsoft’s case. This goes to show Apple is no different.)

SixApart Did This To Themselves
You see, several years ago I used to use MT on my site for blogging. A LOT of people did. Then they switched to a commercial license. Since my usage is for personal use, this doesn’t really affect me. But I remember the functionality back then just kind of annoyed me, with all the rebuilds, pop-up comment boxes, and generally slow-feeling Perl backend. I switched to another platform called Greymatter (which is all but dead now) for literally a week, and then switched again to Wordpress. I’ve never looked back since. Like I said before, Wordpress has great core features and wonderful extensibility. The developer community and number of plugins is simply unmatched by anything MT has to offer.

A Defensive Maneuver
SixApart (the company behind MT) announcing they’re open-sourcing it is a defensive maneuver against Wordpress (WP). Simply because WP is thriving and has completely leap-frogged MT. SixApart is doing this simply to catch up in a sense. Not only that, the hosted version at Wordpress.com is growing like crazy as well (not to mention their VIP program). SixApart has all these redundant services like Vox, LiveJournal, and Typepad. They originally had Typepad and then, infused with new funding, they went out and bought LiveJournal (LJ) and developed Vox in-house.

Very Little Synergy
Why they did this is completely beyond me because there’s no synergy. Sure they’re buying the large userbase but they haven’t really leveraged that too much have they? LJ is a FREE service and there’s really no advertising on member pages to speak of. Then they go and build Vox which is also FREE. Where’s the revenue coming from? What is their business model. How many ways can you spin a blog service/community? Why build Vox when you have LiveJournal? Now, TypePad seems to be their only paid service and it’s basically hosted MT. Why not just have ONE service, ONE brand to focus on and market, using the same infrastructure, and have multiple tiers of service from free personal blogs (LiveJournal-type service) to paid business blogs (TypePad-type service)?

I could be wrong, but I think SixApart is bleeding cash supporting their various services or at least they’re not as profitable as they’d like. I mean, venture capitalists seek large returns. So either you get acquired, go public, or you just go out and make a ton of money (often you need the latter to achieve the former two).

Wordpress is Too Far Ahead
I’m pretty confident in my opinion (in the absence of research data) that Wordpress has more users and is growing much faster than MT. Non-technical personal users can use Wordpress.com, more advanced users host their own Wordpress (like I do). Any business or corporation needing more advanced solutions can hire a developer/consultant to customize their own self-hosted Wordpress without having to buy a commercial license.

Unless MT4 comes out with some amazing new features, I really don’t see a reason to switch at all. Personally, what I’ve seen so far hasn’t been that impressive. I think SixApart is just too late - they should have acted earlier while Wordpress was growing by leaps and bounds. I remember distinctly more than a year ago, thinking “what the hell is SixApart doing about Wordpress moving so fast on their turf?” Well, nothing much really, not then and not now.

One Last Note (P.S.)
If Facebook or a 3rd party develops an excellent blogging service using the Facebook Platform what the heck is MT going to do? They’re building social/community features into MT4.0 presumably to get into social networking. But if Facebook comes out with some awesome blogging feature integrated with everything else they got going on, how do you beat that? I’m going too far on a tangent here but Facebook Platforms is just f*cking brilliant. Seriously. They created open API’s that allow 3rd parties to basically enhance the Facebook service for them - very smart. Yahoo might regret not ponying up the moola to acquire Facebook although my take-away was that Facebook didn’t really want to be acquired yet - now you know why.

I think by FAR the largest strength of Wordpress is the plugin system which allows you to extend Wordpress as far as you want without having to alter the core system underneath it, making upgrades much less painful. For example with shopping cart software like osCommerce, both the frontend and backend coding are horrible and it’s jumbled together. Almost every single third party contribution made to this software requires alterations to core code and database tables. So if you have a highly customized installation and you need to upgrade it to a new version, it’s going to be a nightmare.

A little explanation for those not familiar with this stuff:
With osCommerce, when you upgrade you have to port over all of the changes you made to the new version and this can quickly get VERY complex depending on what modifications were made and how the new version has been altered. On the other hand with Wordpress, I can simple deactivate all my plugins, upgrade Wordpress, then enable all the plugins again. I don’t even need to touch the frontend theme/template. It’s a world of difference.

A new version of Oscommerce is under development but as far as I can see it’s basically being developed/controlled by one person and development is PAINFULLY slow. If I had the time and resources I would definitely jump into web application development for some niche markets where there really is an opportunity to provide something better than the current offerings. Also contrary to popular belief, open source does NOT mean you can’t make money.

Broadbandreports is really informative by the way and there’s a huge forum community sharing information. Well apparently it seems Time Warner Cable is in the process of upgrading access speeds and Queens, NY standard service (5mbps/384kbps) was upgraded to 10mbps/512kbps sometime in December. They haven’t really announced this publicly so I was never aware of this - that’s literally double the download speed and a decent bump on the upload speed. I’d prefer something like 1mbps upload, but it’s okay (guess I have to wait for super speed FiOS to be available, c’mon Verizon!).

So I power-cycled my cable modem (cut power to it for at least a minute) but after testing it, there was no improvement. I was a bit irked because many people said the upgrades were in effect for Queens. Then I remembered I set my QoS (Quality of Service) settings to max out at 5mbps/300kbps - I changed this accordingly to 10mbps/500kbps and wa la, speed tests now show the upgraded speeds.

I’m a happy camper now that I have my upgrade - and to think I haven’t been taking advantage of this speed boost for nearly a month. This will tide me over until FiOS is available. And obviously with Verizon DSL’s slow speeds, RR would never have made these free speed boosts. Many people on those forums have indicated it’s because of Verizon’s increasing FiOS deployment that’s motivating RR to upgrade the speed. So hurray for competition.

More on FiOS
After reading the forums, it seems that Verizon is rolling out FiOS for individual homes first because multi-dwelling units (MDU’s) are a bit more complicated. I live in a co-op and it’s basically this huge block of 2-story connected houses/apartments. It’s not as bad in FiOS deployment terms as tall apartment buildings but they still need to work it out with the property managers before they can start installing the hardware and fiber on the property. I assume this just hasn’t happened yet because FiOS is available just 2 blocks away from me. I’ve also read some spotty information that it’ll be available in many parts of Queens in March 2007 so I hope that’s true. Verizon’s actually implemented their own speed upgrades due to competition from Comcast in some territories. Mmmm, competition = good for the consumer. Consolidation and massive mergers = bad for the consumer.