Firefox 3 – The awesome bar

A new update to Firefox has just been made available. An up-to-date version should now be at 3.0.2. Update soon if you have not been auto updated already.

Incase you are  still on the 2.x version for Firefox, you should know that the 3.x versions have greatly improved performance for JavaScript based apps (besides other things) and that means things like GMail, Yahoo Mail, Google Reader etc. that you use regularly.

It also has this great new address bar called the “Awesome bar” because it’s…awesome. It remembers the frequency with which you visit URLs and predicts the site you want to visit from just the first few characters you type in. It doesn’t even have to be characters of the URL from the begining. It can be keywords which occur in the middle of the URL as well. And it can be a word in the title of the page as well! And you have to do absolutely nothing to configure it since it is enabled by default and gets more accurate as you use it.

Awesome, isn’t it?

Yes, Google Chrome, Google’s official entry to The Browser Wars, has come along and it may have some fine features as well. But it’s just not mature enough for me yet. Most importantly, it doesn’t have all the addons that Firefox does at present. But if Google is backing it, Mozilla will sure need to work hard to keep the users that have migrated to Firefox from IE over the last few years.

What Google would now like is that Chrome improves to the point that full fledged browser based applications start replacing desktop based apps. Apps, which are not dependant on the OS or browser that they are running on. Apps, which result in revenue to Microsoft.

Fixing a problematic optical mouse

I have had a Microsoft Basic Optical Mouse for around 2 years now. And in these two years I’ve mistreated it more than any other piece of computer hardware I own. Dropping it many times, falling asleep on it, stepping on it being some of the abuse it survived. And it worked well for me without any trouble. Until yesterday.

The left mouse button just stopped working. Out of 50 clicks it would maybe respond to one. I gave it a thorough shaking in disregard to the sensitive optical equipment it carried but it didn’t do me much good.

Was it time for me to buy a new mouse? The thing was still in its warranty period that extended to 3 years as far as I know. So I could turn it over to an MS authorized service center for fixing. But it didn’t seem worth the time, effort and uncertainty involved. So I decided to try and fix things myself and in the process void my warranty by removing the seal covering the screw that attached the mouse cover to the body housing the chip/optical sensor.

The inside of a mouse is not too interesting. But you ought to take a look sometime. The scroll wheel is toothed and is placed between an LED and an optical sensor to detect the movement of the wheel. One thing that I noticed was that most of the weight of the mouse was artificially introduced in the form of large piece of iron screwed to the body to make the otherwise “too light” mouse easy to glide on a surface. So every time that I used to drop the mouse, I was needlessly worried about breaking things inside. It is only the body that suffers a shock due to the attached weight. The stuff inside seemed to be quite safe from the effects of a fall. I unscrewed the chip inside. Cleaned out the dust. Moved the mouse around my desktop by gliding only the optical sensor-chip around without any body. Felt rather geeky doing that . Now for the tense moment…trying out the left button directly by pressing it with a ballpen (I had removed the outer body). The button worked fine ! Yay !

So I cleaned out 2 years of accumulated dust and dirt. Screwed things back in place. Made sure that the button on the body was aligned to the button on the chip inside and dealt with rather irritating interlocking mouse-body parts in the process. And screwed the parts together.

That’s it. My mouse is now as good as new. A neat amount of time, hassle and money saved with 20 minutes of work. Most people, being technophobes, would probably have called their computer salesman who would have happily sold them a new optical mouse for around Rs.500 and offered to do them a favor by taking in their old, “broken” mouse for Rs.100 or so.

Just takes a moment to try and fix things. Often, the problem is quite simple. More people should give it a try.

Microsoft & Monopoly

When I played the game “Monopoly” several years back, I had no idea that a monopoly was a bad thing. But trust me, it is. Most of the people I know still think that Microsoft is the greatest software company out there and that MS has done a great service to all of us by bringing Windows to us. I urge them to think again.

Yes, Microsoft created share holder value. It was the one of the fastest growing companies over a long period of time. It sure made a lot of people rich. But it did so often by anti-competitive practices and left people stuck with no choice other than what monopolistic MS offered them.

So why exactly is a monopoly bad for everyone ? Because it stifles innovation. Once there are no worthy competitors in the market, a company can dictate terms. Microsoft did. It shoved poorly built, buggy, insecure, unstable Operating Systems like Windows 3.1, 95, 98 at a high price at us for years because there was hardly any competing product. This it achieved through shrewd business practices for which it has faced extensive litigation. But the damage has already been done.

Here are a couple of examples of their monopolistic practices.
1. Murder of Netscape ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Browser_wars )
2. Attempt to kill Java (The 1998 anti-monopoly case against Microsoft revealed a Microsoft internal memo. The memo revealed that Microsoft’s “strategic objective” was to “kill cross-platform Java.” by “grow[ing] the polluted Java market.”)

…and there are many others if you care to Google a bit.

The effect a monopoly can have on the market can easily be seen in the Telecom sector in India. Remember the days when the Govt. owned telecom major VSNL had a monopoly on providing Internet service in India for several years ? There was next to no improvement in service for years. VSNL didn’t need to improve. Unreliable, 33 Kbps max data rate over copper phone lines at high costs was the only choice you had. If you didn’t like it, you could do without it. Fast forward only a few years post granting of licenses to private operators and see what we have today. GPRS/EDGE, ADSL, Cable Internet, extensive networks of fibre optics…..overall something which one could not have even imagined if the VSNL monopoly had continued. Now imagine what could have been if Microsoft had not used monopolistic practices in the first place many years ago and allowed competition to develop.

When someone says that Windows XP is easier to use, do ask them to compare the length of time that they have been using Windows to the time they may have spent using the other OS, say a popular variant of Linux like Ubuntu or SUSE. In most cases that I know of, the answer is that the time spent using Windows and Linux is something like 10 years Vs 10 days. So really, one ought to to use the OS a bit before they realize that “the other OS” can be just as easy to use if they used it enough. And in case of Linux, it is usually free of cost which is important when licensing issue are considered.

Cost. Aha…that brings us to the concept of “Total Cost of Ownership” or TCO. Microsoft, which has been losing market share in the Server Operating Systems category to Linux based OSs has recently started projecting itself as having the lower TCO inspite of having a higher licensing fee because of lower costs involved in training staff to use the OS and related software since most users are already familiar with “the MS way” thanks to its monopoly. So you see that despite Linux being cheaper, more secure and more suited for the job for a networked environment, Microsoft still wins. Not because it has a better product. But because it has a monopoly.

And while we are still talking about TCO, a recent news item had me in splits….

The launch of Windows Vista will create more than 50,000 technology jobs in six large European countries and will lead to a flood of economic benefits for companies there, according to a Microsoft-funded IDC study.

Isn’t a new OS supposed to reduce work ? Naah. Not with MS apparently. More people will be needed to be hired to install it. To install the additional hardware it needs. To upgrade it. To fix it. To fix the problems the fixes create…you get the drift, don’t you ?

A lot more money and effort could have gone into developing GUIs for Linux or any other OS. Hardware manufacturers would have provided drivers for Linux by default. Microsoft would have been forced to develop its own OS along more security focussed lines saving all of us incalculable hours of trouble with viruses, crashes, data corruption and intrusions into our privacy. One can go on and on. But in short, we would have had more choice today. And many of these choices would have been better than the best that we do have today had it not been for Microsoft’s monopolistic past.

Do you now feel that you have been affected by Microsoft’s monopoly ? Or are their any other monopolies that come to mind ? Do leave a comment.