In Front: Microsoft's Worst Nightmare

Business 2.0 ^ | October 20, 2004 | Om Malik,

[budman_2001]

Blake Ross is lounging at his parents' Florida Keys condo, thinking ahead to his first day back at Stanford. His goal for his sophomore year: nothing less than to "take back the Web" from Microsoft (MSFT).

You might think the shy 19-year-old is outmatched. Think again. Ross, a software prodigy who interned at Netscape at age 14, is the lead architect behind Mozilla's Firefox -- a revolutionary new browser that's catching on the way Mosaic did in 1993. In beta for the past four months, Firefox version 1.0 is set to be released in November. With that, Ross will issue the first truly formidable challenge to Internet Explorer that the world has seen in seven years.

"We're hoping for 10 million downloads in 10 days," Ross says proudly.

http://www.business2.com/b2/web/articles/0,17863,714129,00.html

[Straight Vermonter]

What do you use to collect stats from your site? I am using a free program and getting what I pay for.

[goldstategop]

Yes. Just make a System Restore point so you can easily revert back to your prior configuration if it does give you problems.

[familyop]

Thanks for helping GeronL.

[GeronL]

and a CD backup is not necessary?? Because I haven't made one and it prompts me to do so before I install SP2.

[budman_2001]

No prob. Glad to.

Another advantage to using tabs, and one FF task, is that I can close all FF windows with one click.

Which I'm going to do now, and go catch some winks.

[familyop]

I'm using Awstats. It's great, but it runs pretty heavy on resources. ...thinking about writing one in C++, although that will take a back seat to other things and might be a while.

[goldstategop]

Not necessary. Just set a system restore point and skip the CD backup if you don't enough CDs. Besides if Windows went south, you'd need to reinstall it anyway. I assume you have all of your important files saved to CD? Its less worrisome if you made a CD image of your entire Operating System via Norton Ghost.

[Straight Vermonter]

Thanks.

[familyop]

...just to make sure you saw the link in the following, from budman_2001.

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1259635/posts?page=54#54

[Russian Sage]

If it is free, that sounds like a bad business model

Mozilla/Firfox is not a business. But, if your business could use a world class browser's code base to create your killer app product, then free is a good business model.

[GeronL]

Besides if Windows went south, you'd need to reinstall it anyway. I assume you have all of your important files saved to CD? Its less worrisome if you made a CD image of your entire Operating System via Norton Ghost.

My computer came with Windows XP, no disc. Norton Ghost?? Like I have money to buy that.

[GeronL]

yes, saw that thanks

[GeronL]

When I have a business, I'll let you know =o)

[jpsb]

How does BSD compare to Linux? I mainly use Windows 2000, but I have a linux box too, don't really like the colored fonts, etc. A nice Unix box, with good a good system administration package would be fine with me. Something easy to setup and serve an DSL gateway, router, webserver etc, would be cool. Must be able to run lastest Apache, Tomcat, java. Must have c compiler and of course X.

thanks

[DB]

Suggestions?

Thunderbird.

It's the Mozilla mail client.

Supports multiple mailboxes much better, supports digital IDs and encryption. Much better than Eudora in my opinion and I've tried both. I refuse to use Outlook or Outlook Express.

[familyop]

My guess is that the following would be one of the easier versions to install. ...hadn't really looked into that, because I download everything via CVS and make it from source. Have a look, and see what you think. Generally, the BSD systems are ranking as more secure than Linux in surveys (kernels not as susceptible to buffer overruns from other packages, maybe?).

http://www.freebsd.org/

Security is a better (cleaner code) in some of the other versions (OpenBSD, NetBSD,...), IMO, but the time to learn would be rather higher for many.

[Colorado Buckeye]

Blake Ross is lounging at his parents' Florida Keys condo, thinking ahead to his first day back at Stanford. His goal for his sophomore year: nothing less than to "take back the Web" from Microsoft (MSFT).

Hey Blake! Want to not only make a big splash but also create something that people will actually pay for? Create a browser with a button right on top labeled:

Animations(On/Off)

This one button should turn off animated gifs, Java animations, Macromedia, and etc. I am sick of seeing animations when I don't need them.

[twntaipan]

I have Mepis on my desktop--I love it. I installed to the hard drive from the LiveCD. Exceptionally stable, never crashes the system (occasionally the Xserver gets bonked, but restarting the session is a breeze. And Warren added mppe support to the kernel, so logging in to Micro$oft VPNs is easy (his distro is one of very few Linux distro's with that built in to the kernel).

No worries at all about worms and viruses, and I am making great use of older equipment.

I just installed Ubuntu on my older Sony notebook--very very sweet distro.

[twntaipan]

Have you tried the User Agent extension? One of the web sites my wife likes to visit (talbots.com--expensive!!!) did not render right in Firefox until I added User Agent, which spoofs the web server into thinking Firefox is IE6 on Windows XP. Now Firefox fully passes the WAF (wife acceptance factor).