Free Hyper-V

We've called Hyper-V virtually free since it was only supposed to cost $28 (a strange price indeed). Now it's literally free. The $28 price cut was made during a huge Microsoft virtualization rollout announcing the imminent delivery of the standalone rev of Hyper-V.

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/09/20080 comments

Red Hat Goes Virtual

Qumranet was unknown to me before Redmond magazine Editor Ed Scannell did an interview with its CEO. I found out from Ed (and CEO Benny Schnaider) that Qumranet has an open source Type 2 hypervisor. That means the hypervisor runs on top of an OS (in this case Linux) and the OS runs against the processor.

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/09/20080 comments

Chrome: Welcome to the World of IE

Let's start with Chrome. Soon after the beta came out, security researchers reported a denial of service vulnerability. The same day, a researcher demonstrated how a "malformed URL" could take the browser down. All this a day after the beta came out!

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/08/20080 comments

Mailbag: Chrome First Impressions, More

Chrome is nice...but no dice. After succumbing to the overwhelming buzz about the browser, I was one of the first in this part of the world to get my copy. My immediate impression (from using the browser and reading the comic) is that the Google Chrome team designed the browser for the pages, not for the humans browsing.

Reload All Tabs (or Refresh All, in IE talk) is missing. Imagine your Internet connection going off briefly, and you have like 19 tabs open (after all, memory usage isn't an issue). You will have to refresh each page one at a time. Also, when Flash crashed in one of my tabs, it crashed in all tabs. Where is the isolation? "Evil:%" as a link on mouse-over or typed in the "omnibar" crashes Chrome completely, warranting a restart. Also, it had a problem handling a certain malicious site I came across.
-Anonymous

I love Chrome. Yes, it is sparse, but it doesn't have the excess baggage and Band-Aids of 10 years of kludges. Its approach to security, processes and even compilation of JavaScript are all innovative and it shows. It seems rather solid for a beta (a shame it used the unpatched version of WebKit as the MS press hounds are HOWLING about insecurity already).

I imagine that what Google did with Chrome is very similar to what MS needs to do with Midori: start from scratch based on today's paradigms.
-Rob

I have tried Chrome briefly. One of my home pages is a Microsoft personalized Live page. I could log into my Live account but the personalized pages would not display -- it always went to the Live search screen no matter what I did. I also could not figure out how to get the bookmarks listing to always be open on the left side of the program as in IE and Firefox. When you have a wide screen, there's plenty of room to have that open and still have horizontal space for page display. It did seem faster than IE but about the same as Firefox.

Biggest concern is what Chrome is doing under the covers to track activity and report back to Google. Call me paranoid but...
-Jim

I gave Chrome a whirl and I've been kind of puzzled by the number of people that say it is so much faster than other browsers. I did a side-by side comparison on three of our own sites that are kind of slow and I did not see any appreciable difference in performance between Firefox 3, IE 7 and Chrome. I did like the sparse layout so that more of the page shows in the browser, but it wasn't as big a difference as I thought it would be. Overall, it is a nice browser but as someone who works at a Web design firm, my main reaction is, "Great, another browser to test against." Oh well, more work for us.
-Cameron

I tried Chrome on Vista Business and got an execution error. It loaded the interface but I could not load any pages.
-David

I thought I had a solution in Chrome only to be disappointed once again. I have two Gmail accounts. Firefox only allows me to have one opened at a time (I open them both, but when I access one account, the other one automatically gets signed out). I thought for sure Chrome was the answer -- especially after reading the introductory comic strip about different access for each tab and how crashing one would not crash any others. I -- foolishly, it appears -- concluded that since the tabs were not synched together in any way, I could open both Gmail accounts and access them without fearing one would get logged out.

Not so. In Chrome, the same symptom appears when I open both accounts; accessing one for action signs out the other. Perhaps only one may run from any single machine? Not the case. I open one in Firefox and the other in Chrome and both may be accessed in turn without knocking the other offline. My conclusion: Chrome is smoke and mirrors. Great concept, poor execution. Perhaps I'm not knowledgeable enough to understand how it works. If all the tabs in Chrome work independently of each other, how would it know to sign one Gmail account offline when the other is accessed without knowing that I'm opening both accounts from the same machine in two different browsers? My head hurts.
-Earl

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/08/20080 comments

A Light Patch Tuesday

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/08/20080 comments

Microsoft's Big Virtual Shindig

The biggest news, in my view, is the release of a standalone version of Hyper-V. Until now (actually, it doesn't ship for another month) you had to buy Windows Server 2008 to get it.

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/08/20080 comments

Browser Market Getting Fun

Even before Google made its Chrome play, the competition was already heated. Recently, management consultancy Janco Associates claimed that IE had only a 58 percent market share. Oddly, it gave Google Desktop a 4 percent share, even though that isn't even a browser.

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/04/20080 comments

Chrome Might Get You Home

I downloaded Chrome on a spare computer -- the one my daughter Lauren gave me when she made her now famous and controversial switch to the Mac -- and gave it a whirl.

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/04/20080 comments

TNT Software Blasts Out Upgrade

The company actually changed its plans midstream, according to VP of Sales and Marketing Brent Skadsen.

"Our plan was to rush out an interim build of ELM to support the adoption of Windows Server 2008 and Vista. Originally, the scope was to efficiently monitor systems running these new operating systems," he said. "Then, it expanded to run on the platform. As the project developed, it became clear, supporting Windows Server 2008 required monitoring 64-bit systems and adding a mechanism to manage the higher event log frequency. In addition to boosting the performance and scalability, filtering features were designed to reduce the event noise." More

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/04/20080 comments

Mailbag: More Thoughts on Vista, Mac and IE

For my corporation, I feel it's an unnecessary migration to go from XP to Vista. The migration plus the learning curve for users is not necessary since there is little that is tangible lost for us by staying on XP, a now stable and well-known platform with huge user acceptance. It's a big decision for a company to commit the resources to migrate. In this vein, management must see a business-need incentive to approve the leap.
-Brian

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/04/20080 comments

Mailbag: All Eyes on IE, More

The beta 2 of IE 8 is a significant improvement over IE 7, although still quite buggy on some sites because of the changes to comply with W3C standards. I'm just wondering if sites will be willing to change for IE 8 to W3C or mark as compatible with older versions of IE.

The feature that was the most impressive was the more secure capability to identify dangerous Web sites such as phishing sites. Checking for dangerous Web sites is a big jump for IE. In the beta 2 release, they stepped up the warning message to be sure it is hard to miss. Yet to be seen is whether the loose coupling helps with performance. The use of Accelerator to invoke a map is a nice feature. The recoverability feature has limited value for my use. The changes further place IE 8 as a browser that is trying to catch up with Firefox along with the many Firefox add-ons, but also likely to keep IE as a highly popular browser that remains as a corporate standard for most Fortune 500 companies.
-Joe

I have not seen any reason to use IE over Firefox. I stopped using IE because it kept crashing (locking up) and I have not had this problem with Firefox. I have not used IE since V7 first came out so this may not be an issue today. However, Firefox seems so much more flexible and extendable that I have never considered going back. And with the new features in Firefox V3, I just love it even more.
-Wayne

Unless Firefox becomes manageable at some point, it'll always be useless in a business. With no ability to remotely install, patch, configure and monitor Firefox, companies that care about security are forced to use IE no matter which browser they prefer. Hopefully, the new version of IE will catch up to Firefox's usability and performance advantages.
-Dave

There's no compelling reason to use IE over Firefox, though there's a compelling reason to use Firefox over IE: The last time Microsoft gained a monopoly in Web browser usage, it let the product stagnate for years, festering into a massive security problem and massively slowing the development of the Web in general.

I'm glad that it has started its photocopiers up again, because Mozilla and Apple need something to compete against. But Microsoft has proven time and again that it doesn't innovate, and as soon as its products are "good enough" that its competitors lose ground, it stops progressing. We need to make sure it continues to have something to copy.
-Anonymous

In my opinion, IE's share of the browser market is a direct result of its bundling with Windows. If users had to download it separately, Firefox (or perhaps some other player by now) would have the commanding lead in browser market share and IE would be an also-ran at best. Security exploits would orient around Firefox or whatever browser that happened to be the most popular.

In the past, I've used every available version of IE, Netscape, Firefox and several of Opera. I've found that each one has had its share of annoying quirks and agreeable features. I like the fact that Firefox doesn't use ActiveX and I also like the fact that IE uses integrated Windows authentication. It all comes down to usefulness. Neither browser is the be-all/end-all platform by which to enjoy the Internet. IE 8 will be no better or worse; it'll just be the next version with its set of features and quirks as the all the previous versions have had.
-Jeff

I think that the big thing missing in IE are plug-ins. Now, I'm not an expert, and I know that some plug-ins for IE exist, but the one I really miss is something like Foxmarks. I have four PCs and at least with Firefox all PCs' bookmarks are constantly in sync.
-Dave

I am happy that Firefox is out there because this forces Microsoft to make IE a better browser. The features in IE 8 will be a direct result of this.

The only other Web browser that could give IE a run for its money would be Apple's Safari. If Apple plays its cards right, it could sneak in Safari on everybody's PC through the use of all the "i" devices it sells.
-Brian

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/03/20080 comments

Mac Clones Coming Back?

There is one feisty clone maker out there: Psystar of Palo Alto. Psystar apparently has some kind of license for the Mac OS which the company thinks gives it the right to make clones. Apple, of course, sued. Unexpectedly (at least to me) Psystar sued back, claiming that Apple has an illegal monopoly over its operating system.

Posted by Doug Barney on 09/03/20080 comments