MediaFox: A Firefox Build with Media on the Mind
Windows
only: If you're considering ditching your cable television altogether
and partaking of the buffet of free media available online, you
definitely want to check out MediaFox, a custom version of Firefox Portable.
Lifehacker reader Andrew Royce decided to stop paying for cable service and start using the web to get his television fix. He wanted a way to centralize his media experience and make the interface less like staring at his web browser and more like using a polished media client. Using a copy of Firefox Portable from PortableApps as his framework he dialed down the brightness and customized the appearance of Firefox with the Pitchdark theme. From there he added in various extensions to make his viewing more enjoyable like Autohide, which adds the handy fullscreen button to the toolbar, and FoxyTunes for controlling his music. Next to the button for Autohide is a quick launch button for Cooliris which displays videos and pictures in a cool cover-flow style scrolling wall. Andrew also tweaked Firefox to not launch common media formats in a separate player, but to keep everything within Firefox itself for a more streamline experience. Finally to actually keep track of all his favorite shows and media he created a custom bookmarks toolbar with links to the different television networks and their most popular shows. Check out the photos below for screenshots and closeups of his tweaks.
While all the pieces of Andrew's modification are publicly available and you could recreate the build with a few minutes of tinkering, he was courteous enough to create a virgin build with all the modifications ready for you to enjoy. Below is the a link to the build at Dropbox. If you have your own awesome tweaks or tricks for making internet-based media more enjoyable, sound off in the comments below. Thanks for sharing Andrew!
Windows 7 Beta Available "No ETA" on Product Keys"
The 2.4GB Windows 7 public beta download is now no longer available from Microsoft, but the 2.5 million product keys Microsoft's promised are not yet being distributed.
Update, 5:30PST: Product keys are available, with many readers reporting success.
Update, 1:30PST: Computerworld reports that a Microsoft spokesperson said that the company is shoring up their servers to deal with the unexpectedly high demand for the Windows 7 Beta download.
The Microsoft spokeswoman did not know when users could expect to download the beta. "No ETA at this point," she said via a follow-up instant message.
The direct download links below DO WORK!
Update, 2:45PST: Thanks to Asian Angel, the direct download links have been updated to working versions below.
The direct download links to the disk image which you can burn, install, and run for 30 days are here:
What we're waiting on right now are the 2.5 million product keys
Microsoft said they'd start handing out at noon today PST. Till that
happens, you can get started on your download now using the links
above. The beta (build 7000) will run just fine for 30 days without the
key. Computerworld also reports that without an official Windows 7 product key, you can extend the trial from 30 to 120 days using the slmgr -rearm command.
How to Dual Boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista
If you're dying to try out Windows 7 but aren't ready to give up your installation of XP or Vista, let's take a look at how to dual boot Windows 7 with XP or Vista.
Step 0: Download the Windows 7 Beta and Burn It to a DVD
Assuming
you've already downloaded a fresh copy of Windows 7, you'll need to
burn it to a DVD in order to do a fresh installation. To handle this
task, grab a copy of the most popular CD and DVD burning tool ImgBurn, burn the ISO to a DVD, and move right along to step 1.
Step 1: Partition Your Hard Drive
Before you go installing Windows 7, the first thing you need to do is create a new partition on your hard drive to hold the new installation of Windows. Partitioning your hard drive will vary depending on whether you're running XP or Vista—namely because Vista has a partition tool baked in, XP does not.
Partition Your Hard Drive in XP
To partition your hard drive in Windows XP, you'll need to download some sort of third-party partitioning software. There are a lot of options available, but I prefer to stick with the previously mentioned GParted live CD, a free, open source boot CD that can handle all kinds of partitioning duties.
To use it, just download the GParted Live CD,
burn it to a CD, then reboot your computer (booting from the disc).
You'll boot right into the partitioning tool. HowtoForge's previous guide to modifying partitions with GParted is a great place to start, but it's a fairly basic procedure:
- Resize your current OS drive to free up enough space for a Windows 7 partition (the minimum system requirements ask for 16G
. - Create a new partition from the newly freed space.
- Apply your changes.
Partition Your Hard Drive in Vista
The folks at Redmond were kind enough to include a disk partitioning tool in Vista if you know where to look. So go to Control Panel -> System and Maintainence (skip this one if you're in Classic view) -> Administrative Tools -> Computer Management. Once you launch the Computer Management tool, click on Disk Management under the Storage heading in the sidebar. It's partitioning time.
Luckily we've already gone down this road before in step-by-step detail, complete with pictures, so check out our previous guide to creating a new partition in Vista. In a nutshell, you'll need to shrink your current OS partition to free up at least 16GB of disk space (per the Windows 7 minimum system requirements), then create a "New Simple Volume" from the free space.
Step 2: Install Windows 7
Now that you've done all the heavy lifting, it's time for the easy part: Installing Windows 7 on your new partition. So insert your Windows 7 disc and reboot your computer (you'll need to have enabled booting from your DVD drive in your system BIOS, but most PCs will have this enabled by default).
Once
the DVD boots up it's a simple matter of following along with the
fairly simple installation wizard. When you're choosing installation
type, be sure to select Custom (advanced) and choose the partition you
set up above. (Be careful here. Choosing the wrong partition could mean
wiping your other Windows installation altogether, so make sure you
pick the new partition you just created.)
After you select the partition, go grab yourself a drink and let the installer do its work. Windows will run through some installation bits, restart a few times in the process. Eventually you'll be prompted to set up your account, enter your license key, and set up Windows. Keep your eyes open for fun new Windows 7 features, like your new homegroup (and the accompanying password). When it's finished, you're up and rolling with your new Windows 7 installation.
Congratulations!
You should now have a new entry for Windows 7 on your boot screen when
you first start up your computer. You've now got all the tools
necessary to dual-boot Windows 7 and XP or Vista—or even to triple-boot
Windows 7, Vista, and XP.
This isn't the only way to set up a multi-boot system by any means, but it's how I pulled it off. If you've got a method of your own that you prefer, let's hear it in the comments.
A sneak peek at the Windows 7 Release Candidate
Last week, Windows 7 build 7048 escaped from Microsoft’s labs and quickly made its way to the Internet, where the x86 and x64 versions quickly became top downloads of the week.
This build is not the long-awaited Release Candidate, but it does include a slew of bug fixes, design changes, and interface tweaks checked in as part of the march toward an RC, much of it based on feedback from beta testers. What you see in this build is not experimental; given the development process for Windows 7, it is a near-certainty that the changes you see here will make it into the final product.
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Over the weekend, I installed the x64 and x86 builds of Windows 7 build 7048 on two desktop PCs and two notebooks. The process was remarkably smooth and fast in every case. For the most part, installation went smoothly, with most drivers installed automatically, from the source media or from Windows Update. An upgrade of a Dell Latitude XT was nearly problem-free. On a clean install of a Dell XPS M1330, I had to track down a missing wireless adapter and replace the default sound driver with a Dell-supplied Vista-compatible version before the system would produce sound.
Several people, including my ZDNet colleague Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, have offered first looks at this build of Windows 7. For the most part, they’ve focused on a handful of obvious details, especially the greatly expanded options to remove Windows features such as Internet Explorer and Media Player. For this post, I decided to dig deeper and see what sorts of changes you’re not likely to notice right away. I’ve winnowed my list down to 21 separate changes; most of the changes fall into one of the following four buckets:
- Fit and finish, especially tweaks to make the user interface more consistent
- Branding, such as icons and sounds (we’ll see more of this, I’m sure, when the product is finally released)
- Last-minute usability tweaks
- Some image-driven changes, such as a scrubbing of negative language from the Windows 7 Reliability Monitor
I’ve documented what I found in this post and in an accompanying image gallery. Here’s a road map:
Page 2: Basic features, reworked
Page 6: Backup and recovery options
The basics
1. A new way to switch Control Panel views.
In the Windows 7 beta, the only way to switch to Control Panel’s all-icons is to click the All Control Panel Items icon at the bottom of the category view. That design apparently flopped in usability testing. In this build (and presumably in the RC) you can click a View menu at the top right of the Control Panel window to choose between Category view or large/small icons.
2. No more Aurora backgrounds.
In the beta release, sidebars on the left side of Control Panel windows followed the Windows Vista design, with white text on a dark background that resembles the old Aurora theme. For the RC, the design is changed to a light blue sidebar. Black type on this lighter background should be easier to read than the older white-on-dark-blue scheme, but some testers have complained that the new design is too faint and lacks contrast, especially for those with less than perfect vision.
3. Support for pen/touch devices.
The System Properties Control Panel includes a new line that indicates whether you have any touch or pen-enabled devices. The current crop of drivers for touchscreens is weak, however. The Dell Latitude XT shown here is capable of recognizing multi-touch gestures, but the only way to enable that support is by installing a very ragged beta driver from N-Trig.
It is, of course, completely unrealistic to think that Windows will ever be problem-free. But in this build, the word problem has been scrubbed from the Reliability Monitor front page. In the beta release, the heading referred to “your computer’s reliability and problem history.” In this build, there’s no mention of problems in the heading. The explanations of the 1-to-10 scale in the caption and along the right side of the graph are also changed to remove negative references to “least stable” and “poor reliability.”
5. Windows LiveID integration.
Now that a beta client is available for Windows LiveID, you can link your Windows logon to a Windows Live account. One advantage is quick access to Windows Live services, including Hotmail and Messenger. This is still a roughly drawn feature, though, and its full outline won’t become apparent until some additional pieces of the puzzle are unveiled.
Shell and UI tweaks
6. Tweaks to Windows Explorer.
A couple of months ago, I wrote, “If you love Windows XP, you’ll hate Windows 7.” Nowhere is that more apparent than in the new design of Windows Explorer. There a slew of tweaks in the post-beta builds designed to mollify old-school Explorer fans. For example, pressing Windows key+E now goes to the Computer pane by default, instead of to the Libraries pane. In the beta, right-clicking Libraries in the Navigation pane revealed a Delete menu that didn’t work; that menu is gone in RC builds. In the screen shot I’ve taken here, you can see the alternative Navigation pane, which resembles the XP-style Folders list.
7. Changes to library windows.
Speaking of libraries… This new addition to Windows 7’s file management arsenal is likely to be the most controversial. A slight change in the interface design is designed to make library windows more consistent with folder windows and and increase discoverability of this feature, We’ll see if it works.
8. Usability tweaks for the Homegroup feature.
The other Windows 7 innovation that’s likely to cause headaches for upgraders is the Homegroup feature. For post-beta releases, you can skip the Network and Sharing Center and right-click the Homegroup entry in the Navigation pane to see this group of options.
In the Vista era, onbe of the most vocal UI complaints was over the ancient (Windows 3.1 era) Add Fonts dialog box. It’s gone in Windows 7, and in fact the Fonts folder has received a pretty impressive makeover. Favorite feature is the ability to hide fonts (such as those used for alternate languages) from application menus. In this release, the info pane at the bottom of the Fonts folder is reworked to hide mostly confusing file and designer information.
The differences in design are profound if you go from XP to Windows 7; you have to look much more closely to see the subtle changes in this post-beta version.
Eye (and ear) candy
10. Aero Peek is now the official name.
Everyone knows that Microsoft can’t come up with a sexy/clever/compelling name to save its life, right? Imagine my surprise, then, when I saw this change in the Taskbar Properties dialog box. The boring Desktop Preview feature is now officially called Aero Peek, a colorful name that was previously used only in demos,
I wasn’t surprised to see a slew of new Windows wallpapers in the Desktop Backgrounds folder. I was, however, startled when I counted a total of 13 new sound schemes in Windows 7 Build 7048. I especially like the Raga scheme, which add sitar-drenched Indian sounds at unexpected moments.
Icons are nearly pure eye candy, but for product designers they’re also an essential part of the branding process. The samples I’ve selected for the gallery include Calculator, WordPad, Paint, Homegroup, and Control Panel. They’re clearly a different approach from the current icon set, with a straight on approach instead of a tilt, and a simpler, bolder design.
13. Easier adjustments for ClearType settings.
The ClearType wizard in Windows 7 does an excellent job at helping you tune settings so that type is readable, especially on LCD screens. This subtle tweak in build 7048 adds a ClearType settings option in the Display Control Panel, where it’s much more likely to be discovered by someone tinkering with a system’s visual settings.
14. New ribbons for WordPad and Paint.
You have to look pretty closely to see these mostly cosmetic changes in WordPad (new icons on the Home ribbon, new checkboxes on the View ribbon). I’m more interested in the fact that WordPad allows you to open and edit documents saved in the Word 2007 native format with the .docx extension. On a default installation of Windows 7, without Microsoft Office, this file type is identified in the file properties as Office Open XML Document type.
15. Windows Media Player 12 now streams to Internet.
ZDNet’s Zack Whittaker deserves props for noticing this new feature and writing it up with more details about the user interface. It’s clear that Microsoft plans to create a channel you can use (in conjunction with a Windows LiveID) to stream music over the Internet, giving you access to your full music collection on a notebook, work PC or, presumably, a mobile device. Exactly how this feature will work, thogh, is still a mystery.
16. A smaller, slicker Mini Media Player.
Windows Media Player has had a mini player for as a long as I can remember. The version in the public beta of Windows 7 is clunky, to put it kindly. The revamped mini-player in build 7048 is much smaller and more elegant. Its playback controls are transparent, and slide out of the way until you move the mouse pointer back into the player window. If you prefer the clunky look, you can still resize the window and customize it (showing the playlist, for example). This image shows the default mini-player at actual size.
17. Radio station presets in Windows Media Player.
Through the years, radio stations have popped up and disappeared in different releases of Media Player. In Windows 7, the Radio Stations link has made a triumphant return to the main navigation pane, where it sits at the same level as Music, Pictures, and Recorded TV. In this build, however, the interface for saving radio stations is still missing, so it’s hard to see how the feature will work when it’s finished.
18. A simpler Now Playing background in Media Center.
When you play an album or music playlist in Media Center, Windows 7 replaces the boring blue Vista-style background with a wall of album covers, drawn from your collection. In beta builds, the wall slides down the screen, refreshing itself constantly. In build 7048, you have the option to make the album wall static or remove it completely; the latter option might be boring but provide a better experience on extender devices with low-powered graphics hardware.
Backup and recovery options
19. Simpler explanation for Advanced Recovery Methods.
The backup and recovery tools in Windows 7 are more usable than in previous editions, but they’re still daunting for non-technical users. As I went through the backup feature, I was struck by the sheer number of changes to headings, descriptions, links, and buttons. Clearly, this is an area where Microsoft has been doing extensive usability tests. Will the shorter, less technical headings and descriptions here make it easier for mere mortals to restore a backup? Only time will tell.
20. Simplified terminology for Backup options.
In this post-beta build, Microsoft appears to have settled on “system image” as the term it prefers over “image backup.” This is the sort of esoterica that usability experts argue over, and presumably the changes shown here are lab-tested and user approved.
21. More user data included in default backup sets.
If you use the Backup program’s default settings to create a system image and back up all data files, the Backup program makes some selections of folders it will back up for you. Noteworthy additions in this build include the Downloads folder and the hidden AppData folder, which often includes important data such as e-mail messages, address books, and program preferences.
These locations were inexplicably excluded in earlier builds; it’s good to see this sort of change made even at this late date.
And that’s my report. Have you downloaded this build (or a later one)? Any additional discoveries to report? If so, leave them in the comments.
Upgrading older systems
Every couple of weeks somebody asks me whether it makes sense to move from an older Sun SPARC machine to a new x86 machine running either Linux or Solaris. My usual answer is that it depends: mainly on what the thing is supposed to do, how it fits with the other stuff you have, and who looks after it.
This week, however, I want to look at various aspects of that question and see if it’s possible to offer a clearer and less general answer.
In most cases the driving force for this comes from the fact that support costs on older hardware move in the opposite direction from purchase costs for warrentied hardware of comparable or greater processing power - but the primary issue in making that change comes from the need for architectural change imposed because the current version of what you have in place has moved too far upscale relative to your requirements.
Basically, as your hardware gets older your monthly support costs become an ever increasing fraction of the cost of replacing it with comparably powerful new gear - new gear that typically comes with a year or more of warranty coverage as good or better than the coverage you’re paying for on the old gear. At the same time, however, the fact that the applications still work on existing hardware means that the replacement hardware comes from much lower down the relative performance scale - and adopting it can often require an architecture change.
On net, therefore, the incentives sometimes work for change, and sometimes against - and sometimes they collide in unpleasant ways.
One former client has an application, for example, that’s both mission critical to his business and essentially unchanged for over ten years. It currently runs on a pair of Sun 450s from the Solaris 2.7 days - and while he could get better performance at near zero incremental cost by swapping in a pair of otherwise retired Xeon servers running Linux, he has no incentive to take any risk because the thing’s success makes it invisible to user management and he stopped paying Sun anything in about 2003 when he put a decommissioned, but fully functional, 450 away as a backup.
Another has huge incentives to change - but can’t for internal political reasons. On the incentive side they’re currently paying IBM more per quarter in support on a couple of P690s and a shared disk store than it would cost to replace them with brand new T5440s complete with three years of gold support - and on the negative side their original ERP decisions were so bad (customization and best of breed) that the company nearly went under getting anything working, and so user management will now reliably throw panic hissies if anybody in IT so much as thinks about making any changes.
And yet, the simple bottom line is that both are going to have to change - it’s just a fact of life: costs change; gear becomes obsolete, old software becomes a drag on positive change, failure risks increase as equipment goes past its engineered end of life.
Some general considerations for small systems change
Let’s assume a scenario under which the older system you’re thinking about upgrading is relatively small, support costs are high, and you can’t obviously transfer its workload to some other, larger, machine with adequate idle capacity.
Specifically, lets assume you have a Sun 490 from a few years ago (4
x 1.8Ghz USIV, 16GB, 4 x 73G that’s still under support and runs an
engineering document and database application critical to everyone from
R&D to the people handling customer warranty claims.
It works, but the hardware is getting old - and support costs seem outrageous relative to the nominal cost of PC style servers: your predecessor signed up for full 24 x 7 Gold level support at nearly $8,000 per year - about 10% of the nominal list price when he bought it- and lots of people claim you can get ten PC servers for that: one for every six weeks in support costs.
This is, in other words, Red Hat’s dream scenario - the primary one their anti-Sun campaign targets, and the one in which you’re supposed to believe that buying a free Linux from them will give you better performance for less money.
In this situation the key things to consider are:
- your tolerance for system failure;
- your tolerance for security (in the PC sense) risk;
- constraints on future change opportunities;
- I/O limitations and storage growth rates; and,
- staffing related issues.
Note that application level SPARC compatibility is not directly an issue - any application can be either migrated or replaced if the incentives for doing it justify the risk and costs involved. It’s easier, of course, to upgrade to binary compatible HW/OS combinations, but that’s a cost/benefit issue, not an absolute.
The failure tolerance issue comes down to this: SPARC (and Power) systems are built to higher quality standards than x86 ones - and that’s true whether you’re comparing at the low end, mid range, or high end in each category. As a result the issue here is whether you care about the quality you’re paying for with that 490.
It’s a low end machine for SPARC but to match the quality in the x86 world you have to go to the higher end stuff: typically Compaq’s Proliant line, and that costs more than a new SPARC machine would. To make hardware savings, therefore, you have to be willing to accept a higher risk of hardware failure - so this comes down to how much of that you can tolerate.
All management speak aside, this is ultimately a gut call: my own rule of thumb being that if your users can see a cost difference between eight hours a year in downtime and two, then sticking with the higher end gear will be the right thing to do even if that cost difference seems smaller than the hardware savings .
The security (in the PC sense) issue is this: you only care about the risk of attacks that work or could work - meaning attacks that exploit code or process vulnerabilities in ways that can be directed against you. Since every OS and application has code vulnerabilities, and every process involves people and/or networking, the determining factor is how high the exploit barrier is.
In the x86 world exploits are virtually synonymous with vulnerabilities, but because this isn’t true for PPC or SPARC the barriers there are much higher - witness, for example, Apple’s transition from a company that could build a security reputation while ignoring vulnerabilities on PPC to an x86 maker that’s rapidly losing its reputation for security despite obsessive patching.
Again the question is one of comparing risks to possible costs and other consequences: basically, the worse the consequences a successful attack could be for you, the further you want to stay away from x86 - and if there’s a genuinely compelling reason to use x86 in a high value situation, bite the bullet on porting your application to OpenBSD and have security experts go over your code line by line as part of that process.
The opportunity cost issue on software change is one of the hardest to get your head around. The question is at what point change now starts to significantly drive up the cost of future change. In the obvious version of this you make a change decision today, and tomorrow’s vendor announcement means you’ve spent the money buying the wrong thing -but the more interesting, and more subtle, version is that you spend your change budget (including non dollar spending like stressing out user management’s tolerance for change) and tomorrow one of your people comes up with a new idea that you really want to implement but can’t -and one thing I’ll guarantee you is that nobody on your staff will really buy into your reasons for saying no.
This is where the option of doing nothing as long as possible really shines: the maxim about a tax delayed being a tax unpaid works here - if it’s Unix, and it works today, leaving it alone will pretty much guarantee that it works tomorrow -and, in these kinds of situations, that can be a good thing.
In contrast to opportunity costs, the storage issue is dead simple: those 73GB disks in the 490 can be upgraded to 146GB at minor cost, but going beyond that means either getting an external JBOD or trading off significant new costs against performance. Either way, once volumes get much past 4 x 146GB, the fact is that new gear with terabyte disk sets and full warranties usually combine lower cost with lower risk and higher performance relative to adding disk to old systems.
And, finally, there are staffing issues. People will tell you that switching from Solaris to Linux will make it easier to find qualified staff, but that isn’t true. Unix skills are usually easily transferable: if your current staff can keep their hands off that 490 running Solaris, they can probably keep their hands off a Linux replacement machine too -and, similarly, if you can hire someone who can get Linux set up and running properly, the chances are that Solaris won’t give them any trouble either.
Conversely, if your staff reports that 490 as unreliable, the one thing you can be assured of is that they’re causing those failures -and not only will they do the same thing to a Linux replacement, but whatever root cause (usually a manager whose skillset doesn’t match the technology) is driving this will also limit your ability to retain any new people you bring in with better skills.
Thus the positive bottom line on staffing is that if your shop is working well, there won’t be anything scary about transitioning between Linux and Solaris - in either direction.
Conversely, if what you’ve got is a skills-technology mismatch you have two choices: change the people, or change the technology - and do it before you change anything else because not facing up to the issue condemns you to a long and slow death by a thousand failures.
So what’s the real bottom line on all of this? Support costs may be a lever for getting people thinking about change, and technology continuation may have value for you, but in the end these kinds of decisions almost always come down to intangibles: guesses about future risks and opportunities, not the small dollars involved in support contracts.
Firefox 3.0.7 fixes 47 bugs, 17 critical
The latest update to Firefox pushed out to users last night via automatic update addresses 47 bugs and enhancements, according to Mozilla. 17 bugs were marked as “critical” or higher.
Five potential security vulnerabilities were patched including these 3 that were marked as “critical”:
- MFSA 2009-10 Upgrade PNG library to fix memory safety hazards
- MFSA 2009-08 Mozilla Firefox XUL Linked Clones Double Free Vulnerability
- MFSA 2009-07 Crashes with evidence of memory corruption (rv:1.9.0.7)
Glenn Randers-Pehrson, Martijn Wargers, Jesse Ruderman, Josh Soref, Gary Kwong, and Timothee Groleau were credited with identifying and reporting the problems.
Most of the issues involve common C/C++ memory management bugs such as freeing uninitialized memory or memory that has already been freed. If Firefox were written in Java or C# or any language with automatic garbage collection they wouldn’t have these problems, I’m just saying…
Mozilla has been updating Firefox 3 approximately once a month since its release in June of last year. Here’s a list of all the updates so far:
- v3.0.7, released March 4, 2009
- v3.0.6, released February 3, 2009
- v3.0.5, released December 16, 2008
- v3.0.4, released November 12, 2008
- v3.0.3, released September 26, 2008
- v3.0.2, released September 23, 2008
- v3.0.1, released July 16, 2008
- v3.0, released June 17, 2008
Related articles:
Coming on Patch Tuesday: 3 Windows bulletins, 1 critical
Microsoft today outlined plans to ship three security bulletins for software vulnerabilities in the Windows operating system.
One of the three bulletins will carry a “critical” rating, meaning that it will cover flaws that could be exploited to launch remote code execution attacks.
According to the advance notice from Microsoft, the other two bulletins are rated “important” and can expose Windows users to spoofing attacks.
All three bulletins require a restart after deployment.
All supported versions of Windows will be affected by next Tuesday’s releases, including the newer Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008.
This month’s batch of patches will NOT include a fix for a known — and under attack — code execution vulnerability affecting Microsoft Office. Microsoft has already issued a security advisory on the Office attacks (via rigged Excel files) with some suggested mitigation guidance.
Microsoft hedges its Windows 7 bets with new IE 8 'removal' option
Microsoft has taken another step to hedge its Windows bets in case the European Commission lowers the boom on Redmond’s browser-bundling practices.
With the current Windows 7 Build (No. 7048) that is circulating among selected testers, Microsoft is making it possible for Internet Explorer 8 to be removed from the Windows operating system, according to the AeroXperience site, and other testers with whom I’ve spoken.
“Removing” here is somewhat of a loaded — and perhaps overzealous — word. Microsoft can easily remove the IE 8 browser from startup. But over the past few years, the company has integrated the guts of IE into the operating system.
As Bryant Zadegan explained on AeroXperience: “This [new IE 8 removal option] only seems to wipe the actual executable running Internet Explorer 8 (iexplore.exe), but given that many of the most vocal proponents of choice were just looking for an option to functionally remove IE8, this might’ve been the only way to do it without killing the rest of Windows.”
One Windows tester, who requested anonymity, emphasized that the new “remove IE 8″ option was primarily cosmetic. “(The Windows) Explorer and Internet Explorer use a ton of shared libraries because they both perform similar and intertwined actions,” so that makes complete removal of IE from Windows near impossible at this point, he said.
The Windows team has been believed to be readying its “Plan B” in order to try to head off a potential derailment of the release of Windows 7 as a result of an ongoing antitrust case levied by Opera Software in the EU. Opera claimed Microsoft’s policy of bundling IE with Windows reduced consumer choice. In January, the European Commission (EC) issued a “statement of objections” in the case, indicating to many that it was prepared to find Microsoft guilty and force the Redmond company to take some kind of remedial action in the EU. Last month, Mozilla joined the complaint and Google requested the right to do so.
Interestingly, Opera officials have not asked for Microsoft to be forced to exorcise IE from Windows; instead, Opera execs have said they are advocating Microsoft to be forced to distribute other vendors’ browsers alongside IE. But the Windows team seems to be operating under the assumption that the EC could require the company to remove IE from Windows. Microsoft seems to be trying to further componentize Windows 7 so that such a requirement would have less potential negative impact on Windows 7’s release schedule.
The Technologizer tech-enthusiast site recently reported that the Windows team is still on track to deliver Windows 7 in the third quarter of this year, but is ready to delay Windows 7’s release until January 2010 if the EC requires the company to remove IE from Windows. (Microsoft isn’t commenting on either of these dates.)
I asked Microsoft for a statement on the new AeroXP report, as well as the Plan B scenario for Windows 7 in general. Still no word back.
Update (March 5): The Windows team delivered an official no comment. A spokeswoman added the following statement: “Windows 7 is still in development and currently in beta. We have no new information to share regarding any of the product’s final features.”
Update 2 (March 6): Microsoft has decided it does have information to share, after all. The company posted an acknowledgment of its decision to allow IE 8 to be removed from Windows 7 (an option most testers will see in the next month or so when the Win 7 Release Candidate build is issued) — but didn’t mention the Opera antitrust suit as a reason for the decision.
Micro-Kindlenomics: My cost benefit analysis
Amazon’s Kindle 2 cures all of the ills that afflicted the e-tail giant’s first e-book. It has better navigation, a handy definition feature, a five-way controller and a text-to-speech feature that has raised a ruckus. But the decision to upgrade to the Kindle 2 comes down to the microeconomics: Are the features good enough to entice users of the first Kindle to upgrade to the new one at the same price–or more if you include a new cover?
That
decision is a bit of a tough one for me. I have the first Kindle and
acknowledge that it is clunky in spots. I turn the pages too easy, the
resolution isn’t as good as Kindle 2 and it has one button that
navigates pages. The Kindle 2 is sleek–even the charger is well
designed. Next to the Kindle 2, the first Kindle is kind of homely.
Kindlenomics: Keep publishers and authors happy (cave once in a while)
Review: Amazon Kindle 2 5-way controller more significant than form factor improvement
The problem is that the Kindle 2 is $359. A new Kindle cover, which is a vast improvement over the first version, is another $30. The big question: Is the latest Kindle sleek enough to convince existing owners to toss what they have today and shell out nearly $390 for a new one with a cover?
If you don’t have a Kindle yet, the latest version makes it a no-brainer to get off the fence. I have no problems recommending the Kindle 2 to anyone buying an e-book. However, you should read Matthew Miller’s review and check out the Sony e-book comparison gallery.
For me, the Kindle 2’s price is a barrier. If there were a discount for current Kindle owners–or a rebate for recycling the first version–perhaps the price would be more palatable. A price of $199 would be a no-brainer for me. I’d upgrade to the Kindle 2 in a heartbeat at that price point. A price of $250 may also do the trick including the new cover that secures the Kindle 2 nicely. Anything more than $250 is seriously pushing it.
Based on my Kindle 2 review unit I created the following evaluation, which weighs the new features and what I’m willing to pay for them (click to enlarge).
Add it all up and I’ll stick with my homely Kindle for now. However, should my old Kindle fall apart, get lost or fall from a building I won’t weep too much with the Kindle 2 on the market.
