Interesting: Google Apps has stated they will support the last major version, and the second-last of web browsers.

As of August 1st, we will discontinue support for the following browsers and their predecessors: Firefox 3.5, Internet Explorer 7, and Safari 3.

I suppose IE6 was around for so long that it’s easy to think of IE7 as being “new”. But in fact it’s five years old this year (official release October 2006), and was officially superseded two years ago.

Hopefully all those corporates who dragged their heels on IE6 can move a little faster off IE7.

Interesting piece by Ed Bott: Malware authors target Google Chrome (on Windows).

Sounds similar to these kinds of fake Windows anti-virus scans which you see around the place, and try to convince you to click and download an executable which will supposedly clean up your PC:

This type of thing reinforces the fact that no browser/platform is safe from malware, and that it’s important not to regularly run your account with Admin privileges on your PC.

Personally I reckon it wouldn’t hurt to have a setting in Windows (and other operating systems) that prevents running executables from any directory where the current (non-Admin user) has write-permissions, eg only letting them run programs that have been installed by an Administrator.

Does any OS offer something like that at the moment?

I’ve noticed that Transport For London do this irritating thing: they move (“archive”) their corporate media releases content each month.

So this:
http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/19678.aspx

– which has been quoted widely as the press release for the Royal Wedding Oyster Card, for instance on the popular Going Underground blog — gets moved to:

http://www.tfl.gov.uk/corporate/media/newscentre/archive/19678.aspx

The old link returns a 404.

WHY? It just seems utterly pointless.

The other thing they do is fail to show, or even link to pictures on their media release pages, even in cases like this where the picture is of prime interest, as the story is “Mayor unveils design of the royal wedding Oyster card”. Instead they make you ring the TFL press office.

Perhaps they haven’t noted the rise of social media, where the messages you put out can be spread by bloggers, Tweeters, Facebookers — none of whom will have the time or motivation to ring your press office to get hold of a photo.

If you hide the official information too much, people will end up relying on the unofficial information out there. Less detail, less reliability, and you’ve got less control of the message you want to put out.

Seems an odd way of doing things in the 21st century.

(I only had this rant because I was looking for a picture of the special Royal Wedding Oyster Card.)

Beware of Horde’s IMP webmail client and its access/shortcut keys.

One that’s caught me is that if new email composition is set to be in a separate window, and access keys are on, then Alt-F4 (which in Windows is normally the equivalent of Close) is pressed, instead of saving the email to Drafts, or cancelling the email, it sends it.

I’m a common user of Alt-F4, which means several times I’ve thought I was cancelling the email, but instead it’s sent it.

Another is Alt-D for Delete (the current message). On many browsers this predates Ctrl-L to go to the address window, and while I know I should learn Ctrl-L, I still commonly press Alt-D. If Horde is configured to not even put the message into the Trash, carelessly pressing Alt-D will zap the message forever more, no trace left.

To prevent these happening again, I’ve now turned off Access keys: Options / Global options / Display Options / Should access keys be defined for most links?

This “Mailbook” advert appeared on Scrabble, just below the normal Facebook toolbar.

Seems dodgy to me. It’s a quite misleading way to try and get you to click on the ad.

Surprised Facebook would allow something that appears so similar to their own navigation.

Maybe they haven’t spotted it yet. I wonder if the icons are pixel-for-pixel copies?

I was taking a quick look at the browser stats on my personal site for February:

MS Internet Explorer 31.4 %
Mozilla 19.5 %
Firefox 18.9 %
Google Chrome 10.9 %
Unknown 8.7 %
Safari 6.3 %
Opera 0.9 %
IPhone (PDA/Phone browser) 0.7 %
Android browser (PDA/Phone browser) 0.5 %
NetNewsWire (RSS Reader) 0.4 %
Others 1.4 %

The detailed breakdown tells me that the most popular MSIE is version 8, with 13.7%. Then MSIE6 with 11.3%, and MSIE7 with 6%. Virtually nobody’s using MSIE9, with 0.2%. Worryingly there are a handful of hits from other older MSIE versions, although they’re all at 0%: versions 5.5, 5.01, 5.0, 4.01, 3.02 and would you believe it 2.0 all get a mention.

In Firefox land the biggest is version 3.6.13, with 13.2%, followed by a few on version 4.0, and other variations of 3.

Most of the Chrome users are on the current version 9.

There were a small number of hits (all less than 0.1%) from such rare beasts as SeaMonkey, Blackberry, Nokia browser, and the various versions of Netscape — everything from version 0.91 (!) up to 8.1. A bunch of various RSS readers are also in there.

But the real mystery is the figure of 19.5% for Mozilla. What does it mean in this context? Is it a munged reading for more Firefox browsers, a generic compatibility claim from various unidentified browsers, or something else? The detailed breakdown doesn’t tell me anything.

I love GMail, and this error probably seemed like a good idea when they coded it…

…but it’s just irritating.

Please trust me. I know what I’m doing. I know I’m replying to something in the Trash. I don’t care if the sent copy isn’t saved… invariably it’s going to an email list which I have no interest in archiving for myself when it’s stored on Yahoo’s servers or whatever.

So I don’t need this error popping up unpredictably multiple times to interrupt me, when I’ve seen it hundreds of times before.

In fact despite the wording, I didn’t save the message. GMail auto-saved it for me.

And when I send the email, just to cap it off, I get this:

1. These shouldn’t even be Errors. They should be Warnings.

2. How about an option to turn these warnings off, once and for all?

Amusing comment spam left on my personal blog:

Spammers leave spam comments in the belief that they will gain better search engine rankings and traffic by building as many links to their websites as possible. Spammers often employ bots or other automated systems to look for mortgage blog and website and leave self serving promotional comments links..Spam is a numbers game so if spammers can send automated spam to large numbers of websites for very little money so even if they convert a small percentage of the sites they spam they can make a profit..Spammers will also leave links to their websites in an attempt to push link juice or Google Juice to their websites but most mortgage websites and blogs add a rel nofollow tag to prevent the passing of pagerank or link juice.

And this one, from a user apparently who signed him/herself “penis enlargement”.

It’s so hard to get backlinks these days, honestly i need a backlink by comments on your blog / forums or guestbook to make my website appear in search engine. I am getting desperate Now! I know you’ll laugh while reading this comment !!! Here is my website penis enlargement [url deleted] I know my comments do not relate to the topic, but PLEASE HELP ME!! APPROVING MY COMMENT!
Regards: PoormanBH2011

Yeah right. Like I’m going to approve that.

BTW, both were caught correctly by Akismet.

At 9:30 US EST (14:30 GMT) today, the official announcement that IPv4 addresses have run out is expected. It’ll be webcast live from Miami.

On Thursday, 3 February 2011, at 9:30 AM Eastern Standard Time (EST) [14:30 UTC /GMT], the Number Resource Organization (NRO), along with the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, the Internet Society (ISOC) and the Internet Architecture Board (IAB) will be holding a ceremony and press conference to make a significant announcement and to discuss the global transition to the next generation of Internet addresses.

Update Friday:

The Number Resource Organization (NRO) announced today that the free pool of available IPv4 addresses is now fully depleted. On Monday, January 31, the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority (IANA) allocated two blocks of IPv4 address space to APNIC, the Regional Internet Registry (RIR) for the Asia Pacific region, which triggered a global policy to allocate the remaining IANA pool equally between the five RIRs. Today IANA allocated those blocks. This means that there are no longer any IPv4 addresses available for allocation from the IANA to the five RIRs.

– Free Pool of IPv4 Address Space Depleted

A quick timing test on my main home workhorse computer, which isn’t the fastest in the world, but isn’t the slowest either. (Windows 7, Athlon 64 X2 dual core 4400+ 2300 Mhz, 3 Gb RAM, on a fast ADSL2+ net connection.)

Having started Windows and logged onto a clean desktop:

• Start Chrome with GMail set as the home page: 8.5 seconds to ready
• Start Thunderbird: 11.6 seconds to ready

No wonder people are heading into the cloud.

Subsequent timings (without a reboot, so some things may be cached, eg later in a session when you’ve closed your email and you want to go back in):

• Chrome with GMail: 3.4 seconds
• Thunderbird: 3.1 seconds

Interesting.

I had a quick look at Facebook’s Download Your Information feature — evidently added a few months ago due to criticism about the accessibility of people’s data once it’s dumped into the Facebook bottomless pit.

You can find it via the My Account screen, by clicking Download Your Information.

It asks for some time to compile all the information — in my case this took about half an hour — then emails you to say it’s ready to download, and provides a link and re-checks your password.

It comes as a single zip file, with HTML and pictures inside it.

Opening the index.html file, you’ll find a version of your Profile page, with links to all the other information in the archive, including Wall, Photos, Friends, Events, Messages.

The Wall in my case was 1.5 Mb of HTML, going back to 2007, and I suspect is every Wall post (and replies from friends) I’ve ever made. Friends is just an unlinked list of all your friends (name only). Messages has all your message threads, and replies.

You can browse the photos via the directory of the same name; subdirectories reflect the folders. It looks like all the photo files are at the size that Facebook shrunk them down to when they were uploaded.

To actually get this information into another service, you’d need to do some trickery with munging the HTML. The code they’ve used seems relatively clean and easy to parse.

So all in all, quite a handy feature, and goes a long way towards dispelling fears that information pumped into Facebook was lost forever behind a zillion clicks of to show “Older Posts”.

(It doesn’t appear that Twitter has a comparable feature.)

Sometimes Gmail decides your session has expired, when you’re in the middle of writing an email.

If you’re lucky you might be able to copy the text from the draft out. If not, the most recently saved draft may or may not be up to date.

This is bad design. Why interrupt like this when you’re in the middle of something?

If you must have sessions that expire, than at least give the user a bit more time to actually finish what they’re doing — send and/or exit the draft — and then ask them to logon again.