All Things Digital

After seven months in beta, the latest iteration of the application that reignited the browser wars is finally here. Firefox 3 debuts today and to mark the occasion, Mozilla, the nonprofit behind the popular open-source Web browser, is rallying users to help it set a Guinness World Record for highest number of software downloads in a single day.

There isn’t yet a Guinness World Record for most software downloaded in a single day, so Mozilla will truly have rewritten the record books if it manages to set one. The group’s hoping for 5 million downloads–not an unreasonable figure, given that Firefox 2 was downloaded 1.6 million times the first day of its release. Indeed, Mozilla’s already well on its way to reaching that goal: 1,721,775 users had already pledged to download the browser upon its release today at 10 a.m. PDT.

What can they expect from Firefox 3? More sophisticated bookmarking, endless customization possibilities, an “awesome bar,” more robust malware protection and a browsing experience that Mozilla claims is seven times speedier than Microsoft’s (MSFT) Internet Explorer. Said Walt Mossberg, “Firefox 3.0 is the best Web browser out there right now” and that it “tops the current versions of both IE and [Apple's (AAPL)] Safari in features, speed and security.”

Clearly, Firefox 3.0 is a force to be reckoned with now more than ever before. As of May, the browser’s worldwide market share was 18.4%, while Internet Explorer’s stood at 73.8% according to Web metrics company Net Applications. Where will it stand after setting that world record?

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates delivered his last scheduled speech as the full-time chairman of Microsoft (MSFT) this morning. He spoke at length about Microsoft’s application development plan, the August debut of Internet Explorer 8 and the company’s efforts to compete with Google (GOOG). But all paled in comparison to his discussion of Microsoft Robotics Developer Studio and the egg-throwing Ballmer-bot created with it. Transcript and video below …

Robot: Developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers; developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers, developers.

Bill Gates: Good; we’ve got the Ballmer-bot pretty excited here. It’s an amazing-looking robot. It’s just balancing itself, and fantastic.

Patrick Deegan: Yeah, what you see here is the latest in robotics technology. The Ballmer-bot features a dynamically stable mobile base, a rotating torso and two dexterous arms. This makes it so that it’s even able to throw eggs.

Turns out the highlight of today’s MIX08 event wasn’t Silverlight and Microsoft Expression Studio, but IE8 (Internet Explorer 8). Speaking at the Microsoft Web development conference, Dean Hachamovitch, the IE group’s general manager, announced IE8 Beta 1. In addition to Web standards compliance, the new browser showcases some new features and improvements, among them
Activities–”contextual services to quickly access a service from any Web page”–and Web Slices, “a new feature for Web sites to connect to their users by subscribing to content directly within a Web page.”

These sound pretty slick. Still, as Joe Wilcox notes over at Microsoft Watch, it’s a little odd that Microsoft would introduce proprietary browser specifications like these after its recent commitments to interoperability.

Microsoft is serious about its newfound commitment to interoperability–serious enough to make Internet Explorer 8 Web standards-compliant out of the box.

In a complete reversal of earlier policy, the software giant has decided to make IE8 default to a standards-compliant mode of rendering Web pages that favors interoperability, rather than an IE7 rendering mode that favors Microsoft (MSFT). “Microsoft recently published a set of Interoperability Principles,” Internet Explorer General Manager Dean Hachamovitch wrote in a post to the IEBlog. “Thinking about IE8’s behavior with these principles in mind, interpreting Web content in the most standards-compliant way possible is a better thing to do. We think that acting in accordance with principles is important, and IE8’s default is a demonstration of the interoperability principles in action.”

Quite the change of heart. Guess a record $1.35 billion in antitrust fines changes your perspective on these things. Certainly, Hachamovitch implies as much in his post. Writes Hachamovitch, “While we do not believe any current legal requirements would dictate which rendering mode a browser must use, this step clearly removes this question as a potential legal and regulatory issue.”

It certainly does. And if you don’t believe Hachamovitch, just ask Brad Smith, Microsoft senior vice president and general counsel. He said exactly the same thing, using exactly the same words in a company press release announcing IE8’s Web standards compliance.

Well, Opera must be a little red in the face right about now. A week after it complained to the European Commission about Microsoft’s failure to support Web standards, the company said that a preliminary version of its Internet Explorer 8 browser passed Acid2, a test developed by the Web Standards Project to help browser vendors ensure proper support for Web standards.

Passed it the day before Opera filed its complaint, too.

“With respect to standards and interoperability, our goal in developing Internet Explorer 8 is to support the right set of standards with excellent implementations and do so without breaking the existing Web,” Internet Explorer GM Dean Hachamovitch wrote in a post to IEBlog. “… We have a responsibility to respect the work that sites have already done to work with IE. We must deliver improved standards support and backwards compatibility so that IE8 (1) continues to work with the billions of pages on the web today that already work in IE6 and IE7 and (2) makes the development of the next billion pages, in an interoperable way, much easier. … Now, with all that context, I’m delighted to tell you that on Wednesday, Dec. 12, Internet Explorer correctly rendered the Acid2 page in IE8 standards mode.”

So much for Opera’s saber rattling …

Looks like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer may have a shot at a second dinner date with EU Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes.

Less than three months after agreeing to comply with key elements of the European Commission’s 2004 antitrust order against it, the company is facing new accusations of monopoly abuse. Norway’s Opera Software ASA said today it has filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft in the European Union, accusing it of stifling competition by tying its Internet Explorer Web browser to Windows and hindering interoperability by not implementing widely accepted Web standards.

“We are filing this complaint on behalf of all consumers who are tired of having a monopolist make choices for them,” Opera CEO Jon von Tetzchner said in a rather here-I-come-to-save-the-day statement. “In addition to promoting the free choice of individual consumers, we are a champion of open Web standards and cross-platform innovation. We cannot rest until we’ve brought fair and equitable options to consumers worldwide.”

And reminded the world that Opera is not just a drama set to music, but an unpopular Web browser, as well.

Opera asks that the EC’s competition division force Microsoft to unbundle IE from Windows and require the company to follow fundamental and open Web standards, which is an interesting twist on the old antitrust classic. And one that may have some legs, given IE’s inability to pass the Web Standards Project Acid2 test. “Microsoft often participates and even promises to support these standards, but we find it often isn’t the case,” Opera CTO Håkon Wium Lie told ZDNet. “We find bugs and programmers have to code around (Microsoft).”

It’s taken the better part of a decade, but Microsoft has finally managed to settle the patent-violation case brought against it by Eolas Technologies. First filed in 1999, the lawsuit claimed Microsoft’s Internet Explorer wrongfully used Eolas’s technology for running external applications in the browser. Eolas won $520.6 million in damages from Microsoft in 2003, but Redmond appealed, questioning the patent’s validity.

At the time, it seemed the company had no intentions of settling, saying it would rather ship an altered version of Internet Explorer 6 that sidestepped the company’s patent. “We believe we have substantial grounds for reconsideration by the judge,” said Michael Wallent, a general manager in Microsoft’s Windows division. ” … [T]he idea that we would pay more than $630 million ($520.6 million in damages plus $111 million in interest) to get rid of a single mouse click on a small fraction of Web pages is not something that we’re entertaining.”

But after a few more years of pitched battle, Microsoft has apparently softened that stance a bit. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer reports that the two companies have finally resolved their differences. According to a letter to Eolas shareholders from COO Mark Swords, the companies settled the case last Friday.

Terms of the settlement weren’t disclosed. That said, enough money seems to have changed hands to warrant a dividend of between $60 and $72 per share to shareholders.

Given the chance, how would you alter the course of your career? Well, if you worked at Microsoft’s Security Response Center, you might consider taking a job as an Olympic drug tester, a gravity research subject, or a “whale-feces researcher”–vocations that all rank as improvements over a position at MSRC on Popular Science magazine’s 2007 list of the absolute worst jobs in science:

Do you flinch when your inbox dings? The people manning secure@microsoft.com receive approximately 100,000 dings a year, each one a message that something in the Microsoft empire may have gone terribly wrong. Teams of Microsoft Security Response Center employees toil 365 days a year to fix the kinks in Windows, Internet Explorer, Office and all the behemoth’s other products. It’s tedious work. Each product can have multiple versions in multiple languages, and each needs its own repairs (by one estimate, Explorer alone has 300 different configurations). Plus, to most hackers, crippling Microsoft is the geek equivalent of taking down the Death Star, so the assault is relentless.”

Sounds awful, yeah? Perhaps not quite as bad as inhaling formaldehyde fumes as a biological-supply preparer, but bad. “It’s one of those classic jobs, which isn’t gross or dangerous in any way, but the overwhelmingness of the task at hand makes it so daunting that only the most intrepid would venture there,” PopSci executive editor Michael Moyer told IDG. “We did rate the Microsoft security researcher as less-bad than the people who prepare the carcasses for dissection in biology laboratories.”

But sadly, quite a bit worse than working as a whale feces researcher.

“Whale feces or working at Microsoft? I would probably be the whale feces researcher,” said Moyer. “Salt air and whale flatulence; what could go wrong?”