Every since Google Chrome came out, it didn’t do much for rendering pages in all their glory with the best rendering and mime types etc showing pages the way they were supposed to. What it did was to produce a web page with most of the standards at blinding speed. Most web pages worked fine with it. However, with the web expanding more and more and with HTML 5 playing more a role in what you see online, they’re beginning to show their underwear. And its not bright.

Take Yahoo’s new beta email. Right now, if you try to pull up their email with attachments, you get a mush of characters where its trying to render the mimetype instead of setting it up as downloadable file icons the way Yahoo intended. Things seem to work fine on IE and FireFox. I haven’t tried Safire and Opera as yet but I would expect that Chrome in their quest to be the best browser would’ve had the best renderings, the most up-to-date capabilities. Afterall, FireFox is developed for free by concerned and dedicated programmers. Google has bazillions of dollars to throw around for stuff like this. Hmm. Note to self: money doesn’t get you good code. Good programmers do. Sorry for the digression.

With the Chrome books coming out which would essentially give you a view of the whole web world through the Chrome browser, I’m concerned about what would be left out. Maybe they really want the whole world to use Gmail, whose interface hasn’t changed much since its formation. Got to say that they do have a lot of offerings in the GoogleShpere but with what’s happening out there now, they have some catching up to do with their shiny browser which is already beginning to look quite dull. Fast but dull.

Cyber Security, the new badlands.

It makes all the sense in the world. You hear the stories of folks who have been living in a neighborhood talk of how it used to be back in the day. Oh I left my back door open all the time. I remember going out on vacation with the back door open and came back to see it still open and everything inside. Now even if you keep it closed, someone is either trying to break into it or is trying to invade your home.

Now we have the computer. More and more we are becoming absolutely dependent on a computer. I sometimes try to think of how I would survive without it. In fact the last time I travelled to Guyana, my home country, I was reminded of my dependence on it. Thank God, there’s a cyber cafe where I would go everyday for an hour to have breakfast, check my email and (“gasp”) work! Yes, I actually worked at my job located in Atlanta, GA while on vacation in Guyana.

Back in the day, security was important but not as important. Viruses were simply meant to disable computers and bring down networks. These were programs designed by guys who probably had too much time on their hands to test concepts. There wasn’t any money to be made, only bragging rights. Even when the web was young, viruses weren’t something that was meant to do any more damage than this. In fact, one of the things about the creators of the software for the web was to make sure there was a separation of the web and the user’s machine.

Eventually, however, a new phenomenon started and when it did I still have to research but I do have a great estimate. One day when the internet was very young, probably 1995, a husband and wife lawyer team by the names of Laurence Canter and Martha Siegel decided to market their service by sending an message to what was then the USENET, a precursor of the world wide web. If I’m not mistaken, thus was born the phenomena.

In the web development world, you know You’ve met a geek when they talk of the glories of Open Source software. You’ll hear of how much better Linux is than Windows, how much you don’t have to spend on any of the technologies that are open source and how much “easier” they are to use. Of course, no one speaks to the time factor involved. Time as a cost is always something to be looked at and here is where much of the hidden cost of OpenSource software comes into play.

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