Bryan Pieper's Blog : Firefox

Last weekend, we went to Disney World. As usual, we packed the Mac Book with every intention of connecting to the World Wide Web at many points during the weekend.

We arrived at the resort on Thursday night and found a note in our room indicating that the internet was not going to be available starting on Friday. At this point, I was thinking to myself, “not a big deal.” Not a big deal, because I thought there might be another network in range.  As it turns out, the building we were staying did not have internet at all since it was very new. Not only that, there were no other networks in range. Bummer!

Microsoft has not been serious about Internet Explorer since the days of Netscape. Back in those days, they set out to oust Netscape as the #1 browser. As you know, they succeeded in that mission.

With Microsoft’s recent announcement of the preview version of Internet Explorer 9, I believe they might be serious about the future of Internet Explorer. More specifically, they seem to be serious about the idea of advancing the web.

When IE8 was released, Microsoft had basically upgraded its rendering capability to CSS2 and increased the JavaScript performance. The rest of features did little to advance the web. It did bring IE up to the days of Firefox 2, a little dated, but not bad!

Enter Internet Explorer 9, with Firefox-grade JavaScript performance, SVG, HTML5 features and support for CSS3. It is currently in development, but I see this as the most significant upgrade to IE since IE6.

Happy New Year! May you and your family be blessed in 2010 and the years to come! To start off the New Year, I wanted to list off some random thoughts in the tech and online world that have impacted me.

Do you own an iPod, iPhone or a Mac? A decade ago, that idea that one would choose a Mac over a PC was unthinkable. In 2000, I was a PC (and a Linux geek). Today, I am still a Linux geek, while I use a Mac at home and at work. 

The Mac and OS X transformed the consumer computing experience. This transformation has inspired a decade of new ideas and devices making Apple undoubtedly the most influential brand.  As I wrote earlier about the Apple Tablet, it could easily alter the mobile computing space again. Would Windows 7 be what it is today if it wasn’t for Apple?

Online search has changed dramatically. Yahoo is no longer numero uno. Have you used a metacrawler lately? Do you need to “Google it?”  We will see what Bing does this coming decade and what comes about from real-time search.

What is a web browser anyways?

For those of us in the tech community, this would be a stupid question.  However, the lay-folk out there may not know what web browser they have. In fact, in the last few years the browser landscape has changed dramatically. It seems like the browser race of the 90s is back. Google, Mozilla, Microsoft and Apple are releasing new browsers on a fairly regular basis.