I’m loving it.  Oh sure there are some things I’d like to see different, like being able to use a different email program other than Outlook or Outlook Express for contacts, calendars, etc… like Thunderbird.  But there are so many positive aspects to the iPhone and the ‘cool’ factor.

Additionally, I asked Barry to bring down some products from their bakery and Shnewt was trusting enough to lend me his sweet Canon EOS 5D DSLR camera.  Wow… What a great camera.  It’s got more features than you can imagine, takes fantastic shots and, best of all, my old Canon 100mm macro lens bolts right in and works great.  I just hope it is waterproof  ‘cuz I’m constantly drooling all over it.

Now I just have to find a way to keep it a little longer… like for eternity.

Some bread photos:

And a shot of the cat…

Netscape is dead.

AOL, the company that bought Netscape back in 1999 for a ridiculous amount of cash (reports range from $4 billion to $10 billion) has announced that the once mighty browser will not be supported after February 1, 2008.

The remaining 4 users of Netscape will be devastated.

Netscape was the first commercially available browser back in its glory day and it took off like a rocket. Of course once Microsoft realized the importance of a web browser, they fast-tracked development and incorporated IE in their operating systems. The move proved pivotal in the browser wars and signaled the downturn in popularity for Netscape (I mean, who would pay for a browser when IE came free?) Only the die-hard technogeeks continued to shell out for Netscape (and only as a feeble act of defiance against Microsoft). Eventually Netscape realized they could not continue to ask people to pay for a web browser and started offering it for free.

The biggest issue I remember, being in the software testing field back then, was ensuring our products were ‘browser compliant’… meaning nothing broke when you used IE or Netscape and the web pages looked and functioned properly. Unfortunately, Netscape broke web pages alot back then. That created alot of headaches for the developers, who grudgingly re-wrote code and developed ‘hacks’ to deal with incompatibility issues with Netscape. It wasn’t until v4.0 came out that issues started to be resolved… and even then many incompatibilities still existed when viewing the same web page between IE and Netscape.

That’s not to say IE was golden. IE tended to ignore improperly written code (and likely still does) and didn’t follow W3C standards for HTML and web coding for many years (I haven’t tested software for more than a few years so I’m not up to speed on whether or not recent IE versions have improved or not).

Fast forward to 2003, when the Mozilla foundation was established to, essentially, make the internet experience less ‘techie’ and more friendly for the average joe.

Soon, a new browser, Firefox, based on the core code of Netscape, was born. But this was like no other browser to-date. This browser was ‘open source’, meaning essentially any developer who wanted to enhance future versions of Firefox were welcome to volunteer their skills and time to do so.

Essentially what started out as a small band of ‘anti Microsoft’ developers with a browser took root and spawned several open source projects, including Mozilla Thunderbird (an email client) and a very popular bug-tracking tool I’ve used in the past, Bugzilla.

So I guess in reality Microsoft didn’t snuff the life out of Netscape as it had hoped to do. Instead, they made a martyr out of Netscape, and Firefox lives on as a free alternative to the money-grabbing, evil monolith of Microsoft.

I’ve used Firefox for a couple of years as my primary browser and love it.

Incidentally, which browser do you use?