Phil Huang

Category: Internet

  • IE6 is Finally Dead

    IE6 usage in the US has now officially dropped below 1%! Finally, this horrible browser is dead and web developers everywhere can rejoice in not having to work with this outdated browser. I know some businesses still use it but personally, for my work, I’m dropping support for IE6. Trying to work around its limitations…

  • WordPress Themes are GPL

    WordPress is an open-source content management system for websites that I use very often for my personal projects and client work. In fact, it powers this site as well. Recently there was a very contentious and public spat between Matt Mullenweg (original co-developer and primary frontman for WordPress and CEO of Automattic) and Chris Pearson…

  • GGF Pirate Bay Plan is a Bad Idea

    Some of you may know that a company called Global Gaming Factory (GGF) announced it worked out a deal to buy the popular torrent site, The Pirate Bay. The initial report said the price would be $7.8 million. Long story short, that may not be so, but it should still be several million dollars. What’s…

  • Firefox 3.5 Is Faster

    10/19/2009 UPDATE Well a few months later and I just wanted to come back and update this post. I take back the “Faster Start and Close” claim and want to reinforce that Firefox is a memory hog. Firefox 3.5 is just as slow, if not slower, to start up and slow to close down than…

  • Time Warner Cable Bandwidth Caps

    Bandwidth caps are bad for consumers, plain and simple. It’s simply a way to squeeze more money out of consumers while the cable company’s costs are largely fixed. Granted, they’re only expanding to a few select markets (including Rochester, NY), but they’ll be crazy to do this in any market where they actually have competition…

  • Boo to the “Amazon Tax”

    New York recently enacted a new tax law that requires Internet-based retailers to collect sales tax from customers based in New York. The tax has been informally dubbed the “Amazon Tax”. If you do any kind of online shopping you know that most of the time you don’t get charged sales tax on your purchases.…

  • Digg Looking for Buyers

    So TechCrunch recently reported that Digg is looking to be acquired. Note that this is not official and is an unconfirmed report. Among the parties bidding on Digg are Microsoft and Google. I think it’s about time and if Digg doesn’t sell soon, it’s going to have to lower its expectations more and more. Honestly,…

  • IE8 Passes Acid2 Test

    Many of us web designers/developers never thought we’d witness Internet Explorer pass the Acid2 rendering test but Microsoft announced yesterday via IEBlog that their internal version of IE8 has done just that. Now if they could push this browser out sooner, it’d be great because the sooner IE6 gets ditched, the better.

  • Those Annoying Speaking Ads

    Recently I’ve encountered (quite often now) an extremely annoying form of online advertising. When you view a web page with the ad, a high-pitched, annoying, high school girl voice comes on suddenly and says, “Congratulations, you have just won a free iPod nano!” or something to that effect. I think it drones on with instructions…

  • Safari on Windows

    Apple released a new beta version of their Safari web browser yesterday. Normally this news wouldn’t be that important to me but this new version now works on Windows! As a web developer this is great news because now I don’t need to use/borrow/buy a Mac just to test my work in Safari. As I…