This Old Blog

Found this while slumming on Yahoo (you don't think there's just a tiny bit of Yahoo schadenfreude going on here, do you???). If Bing's first month represented Microsoft's (MSFT) best shot at stealing search market share from Google (GOOG) -- complete with Bing ads everywhere -- it's a huge disappointment. Microsoft's U.S. search market share was 8.4% in June, up from 8.0% in May, according to comScore. It would have been a disaster if Bing didn't grow at all with all that advertising and free promotion via news coverage, so at least it's up a little. (And represents Microsoft's best month since 8.5% share in January.) But gaining 40 basis points -- especially as Google's 65.0% share stayed steady -- is not an impressive victory. It'll still be a few months before we know if Bing is going to be a long-term success for Microsoft. But based on this lackluster first month's showing -- and recent survey results suggesting 98% of searchers wo...

I mentioned earlier how Intel might be concerned that Google's Chrome OS is targeting ARM as well as x86. Turns out Intel has been 'in' on this Chrome OS thing for some time now. PCWorld reports that Intel has been helping Google develop features of Chrome OS to work better with Intel processors. And that's a good thing, considering that Intel processors are in "around four-fifths of the world's computers." But what's telling is that Intel was not mentioned as one of Chrome OS' early supporters in Google's initial announcement. Why? Google is aiming the Chrome OS at desktops, laptops and netbooks, all devices dominated by Microsoft Windows, so supporting Chrome could put Intel in an awkward position with Microsoft. There's that accusation again that Google is aiming the Chrome OS at desktops and laptops, not just netbooks. Again, I have to keep going back to Google's original announcement and the emphasis on netbooks, netbooks, netboo...

I take the title of this post from Fake Steve Jobs' post, " Let's all take a deep breath and get some perspective ." FSJ's post was bitingly funny (as always) and pointed out some interesting truths (again, as always). But then I ran into Jack Schofield's article on Google's Chrome OS , where he went on to opine: Either way, the idea that businesses are soon going to replace Windows with Chrome OS is beyond fanciful. Businesses whinge like mad when they have to adapt one of their tens of millions of "legacy" programs to run properly on IE8 rather than IE7, or IE7 rather than IE6, or whatever. The minor changes from XP to Vista were apparently beyond many of them. They're not going to rewrite 10-15 years worth of programs to run them via Chrome OS any time soon. Even if they want to, and can afford the attempt, it's going to take a decade. Wowsers! He's absolutely right, if you assume that Google is trying to push Chrome OS as a replac...

I'm sure I'm the last to comment on Google's Chrome OS. I'm getting my information from the usual suspects: Ars Technica , Wired ( here and here ), Yahoo , and CNN , to name but a few. Here's my take on all this. All the Linux distributors are going to adapt or die, and frankly, I think many of them will die. They need to. Up to this point Linux has been dominated by the Big Three: Redhat, Novell (SuSE), and Ubuntu (Debian). Everybody else has been a pygmy to these three giants, and that includes Mandriva (the distributions formerly known as Mandrake and Conectiva). Regardless of the current incumbents size it will drive the concept of product quality down every one's throat, and frankly, it's about time. That drive towards quality should (I say should ) also clean out the silly political posturing by some Linux notables about what they will or will not do based on their unique interpretation of the GPL. With Google officially in the ring, this has now beco...

If anyone is interested, I've got a Twitter account (@wbeebe). I've also broken down and got myself a Facebook account ( http://www.facebook.com/william.beebe.jr ). I've got a fairly active Flickr account ( http://www.flickr.com/photos/wbeebe ). Last, but not least, is my LinkedIn account ( http://www.linkedin.com/in/williambeebe ). So when I'm not here, I'm obviously elsewhere, both on and off the web.

I may have my gripes about some of Chrome's peculiarities, but I've never complained about the Big Issues like Stability. Chrome once again showed me why it's good to have around. A tab/page with a Flash plugin crashed, and another tab showed that just the Flash plugin itself crashed. In neither case did the browser show any instability. The tab recovered itself nicely and I kept on going. That's what I want in every application: rock-solid stability. That's why I use Chrome over any other Windows-based browser. And frankly it's just one more reason why I continue to use Microsoft Windows.

Yes, you shouldn't bite the hand that feeds you, especially for free. But I've had enough. First, I get the occasional comment I need to moderate (don't be shocked, but some people actually read and respond to my rambling writings). When I do, I go to my blog and into Comment Moderation to see them listed. So far, no problem. However, when using the latest Chrome (2.0.172.33), I can't click on the expand arrow to expand the text. It works just dandy in Firefox 3.5, but not so much in Chrome 2. Where's the problem? I'd say Chrome, but I would need to grab the Javascript behind the expand control just to make sure. You know, in case somebody is checking browsers and versions and forgot about Chrome version 2. Something silly like that. Second, I now type everything in raw HTML and text instead of Compose. Why? Primarily because some genius decided to wrap every single paragraph in a pair of empty div tags. This expands the space between paragraphs to more than one...

Tuesday 30 June was the day that Firefox 3.5 was officially released. Many sites sang glorious hymns to its new features and overdue improvements. Based on those initial reports (I'm so gullible) I went slumming over to mozilla.org and downloaded the 3.5 installer. Know ye that I am a unrepentant Googlite, preferring to worship at the shiny altar of Chrome. I've used Firefox for a long time, helping to use and test it when it was first known as Phoenix (remember them big ugly orange buttons?). Light and lean when compared to Mozilla, it was just what I wanted and needed for my own personal use. Time marched on, and Firefox accreted features and bloat. In particular it became a memory hog around version 2. I left Firefox at version 2 on my Windows notebook, while upgrading to version 3 under Linux (both willingly as well as part of the general release schedules). I was never really tempted to move from 2 to 3 under Windows; after all, It Worked For Me and that was all that matte...