technology

My company just instigated a complete ban on instant messaging clients, supposedly for security reasons. While I agree that instant messaging applications may not be the most secure and probably should not be used internally for sensitive information (for which an internal instant messaging deployment of some sort would be preferable), I feel that instant messaging has become such a commodity for personal communications that removing this privilege is a highly significant and intolerable restriction....

Firefox 0.9 has been released a few days ago, and it certainly looks worthy of upgrading to (or installing, if you’re not using it yet). Joel Spolsky lists three reasons to switch web browsers today. Of particular interest is the following one: You’ll help break the Microsoft Monopoly on web browsers. Microsoft took over the browser market fair and square by making a better product, but they were so afraid that Web-based applications would eliminate the need for Windows that they locked the IE team in a dark dungeon and they haven’t allowed improvements to IE for several years now....

I just logged into my Yahoo Mail account for the first time in a few days and was alerted to the fact that my storage size has been increased from 6MB to 100MB! For more information, see this article at Wired News. This is a very smart move on Yahoo’s side that is bound to take a lot of the steam out of Google’s Gmail. Sure, 100MB is only one tenth of Gmail’s 1GB, but it should be more than enough for most purposes....

Everybody appears to be very upset about Google’s new Gmail service because it analyzes the user’s emails in order to deliver targeted ads. Yesterday, California’s Senate passed a bill that restricts Gmail by requiring it to perform all analysis in real time, i.e. without storing any information, among other things. Personally, I don’t see what the big deal is. Last I heard, this was a free country, and nobody is forced to use Google’s Gmail service....

Is it just me, or is there really no good way of sharing bookmarks between Mozilla (or Firefox) and IE? While I used to browse using IE up until recently, I find myself using Firefox most of the time these days, mostly due to its excellent support for tabbed browsing (does anybody else find it surprising that IE still does not support this feature?). However, I still use IE sometimes, and I would really like to see a good way of sharing bookmarks between these two browsers....