Lifehacker, a blog about using new technology and apps for practical living, has listed what it thinks are the best applications of 2006. A lot of the software listed are free, and some of you may be interested in taking advantage of what they recommend. Free VPN software, woohoo!
I haven’t talked about it at all, and that’s probably because I haven’t been terribly interested, but version 2 of the Firefox web browser is ready to launch any moment now. I haven’t been paying much attention to it because I’ve been extremely happy with Firefox 1.5, and I usually get wary of major version number upgrades in case the changes are too drastic to my liking. However, typicially being an early-ish adoptor of these kind of things, I decided to download the Release Candidate version this morning and give it a shot. I’m glad to say that it’s stil largely the same Firefox I know and love. The improvements are subtle but nice. However, lots of themes and extensions aren’t quite compatible with it yet. So if you like your extensions, it probably would be a good idea to wait a while to upgrade, especially since the improvements aren’t major and 1.5 is still a great modern browser.
I also installed Internet Explorer 7 on my laptop, and I’ve only toyed with it a little bit. I haven’t put it through the ringer for CSS rendering, which is my main interest, but the initial reaction that it is definitely an improvement. Yay for full PNG support! The UI is actually a little off-putting. It’s a bit changed up from the way IE has been doing it since IE 3. I know Microsoft is on this “let’s try to innovate the UI” kick, but this may be a bit much, especially for all the people who have used their browser for so long. People will eventually find their way around it, but it’s a little jarring. Of course, it’s also nice to finally see IE natively have tabs.
Also, out of the gate for some time now is Opera 9, which is a very solid browser with a lot of great features – many of which were innovated by Opera and has become popular features in more widely-used browsers.
Apparently the people at Microsoft has announced that the first final release of Internet Explorer 7 will be out sometime this month and will be released as one of those automatic critical updates that can be downloaded on “Patch Tuesday”. There’s some speculation that this could be as early as tomorrow.
So, if you’re not careful and not prepared, you may find Internet Explorer 7 on your computer by the end of the week without knowing how it got there.
The current rumor mill about IE7 is that it significantly more secure than IE6, and this was more or less the focus of the IE development team. While a fair amount of CSS bugs are fixed and CSS 2 features missing, apparently there are still plenty of old annoying bugs still around.
A stable release of Opera 9 just came out today. Opera is a great browser that holds its own well against Firefox and certainly beats IE. Opera has been free and ad-free for some time now, so there’s no reason why you shouldn’t download it and give it a chance.
Stalking people on the internet is easy, but one man saw fit to make it even easier. Presenting, Stalkerati!
