At the time Firefox was a breath of fresh air. It was just a browser without all the mail, IRC client, web page designer that came with Netscape. It was very fast. It had cool features like tabs. Linux was well supported.

Over time this has changed and I find Firefox getting slower and less relevant. The developers seem to be under the impression that Firefox users are their personal army to push web standards. I only used Firefox because it’s a tool not because of any social movement.

Things like how Firefox handles SSL, specifically self-signed certificates are a pain compared to other browsers. I hate it when my browser crashes and I lose all open tabs/windows. Things seem to get worse every new Firefox release.

In the past I didn’t have much of a choice, I had to put up with this as under Linux there wasn’t anything else available. That however has changed with Google Chrome. It’s much better than Firefox ever was and I’m now using it full time.

The GNOME developers have also dropped Firefox/Gecko and are moving to WebKit. This is the same engine Google Chrome uses as well. In the very near future, I except Firefox will no longer be the default browser in most Linux distributions.

On Windows, I also expect Firefox usage will drop. Microsoft has made Internet Explorer v8 much better and somewhere in Redmond they are working on v9, v10, etc. As people upgrade to Windows 7, willl they keep using Firefox? I suspect IE will start be “good enough” for most people.

On the Mac, most people are going to use the default and that is Safari.

When you look at the mobile scene it’s much the same. Microsoft is going to use IE in Windows Mobile devices. Google has another WebKit based browser for Android. Apple has Safari on the iPhone. Nokia will use WebKit as they now own QT.

Notice how the industry seems to be standardizing on WebKit? The odd man out there is Firefox. Who is going to use Fennec on their phone?

Another thing to consider is that the Mozilla Corporation gets most of their funding from Google. It’s not very hard to see that coming to an end too as Chrome becomes more important.

Note there is an iPhone SDK available for Snow Leopard now (400MB download) at the iPhone Dev Center

Too bad Apple insists on phyical CDs. Would be nicer to just buy an ISO and I could burn my own DVD to upgrade.

Hopefully this upgrade won’t cause any issues with XCode/iPhone development.

See the press release

In theory this should also mean that Rogers or someone is going to introduce Android based phones in Canada soon.

Hopefully soon we will be able to publish our paid applications in the Android Market without having to setup a presence/merchant account in the US.

Daniel Robbins was the original creator of Gentoo Linux. He did a good job too but some users were not happy and kept pushing him to manage the project more in the “community”. From there, you get the Gentoo council and lots of processes. Now things get masked longer, more software in overlays of varying quality, devs leave because of personality conflicts, and the distro seems a bit stagnant.

I was glad to see Daniel developing again. I emailed him to get more details about Funtoo. Depending on what their goals are, I might switch over.

I see now that you need to use PayPal for consumer purchases and to accept payments. For anyone who’s familar with PayPal that means even more fees to get your money. No wonder split is 80/20.

For development, it says appears to be Java/Eclipse based. Interestingly it seems the requirements say you need Windows. Perhaps their Eclipse plugins are not cross platform?

Also troubling is that you need a different JDE depending on which device(s) you want to target. From RIM:

For example, an application built in BlackBerry JDE 4.1 runs on a BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry® Device Software 4.1 and later. It does not run on a BlackBerry smartphones running BlackBerry Device Software 4.0. Thus, when building applications, you should use a BlackBerry JDE version that matches the lowest version of BlackBerry Device Software you want to support.

How do you know which versions are most common in the wild? Should you just assume everyone has the latest version?

Will their users actually buy apps too I wonder. Their biggest customer wins historically has been older people who wanted to get work email on the go. Not quite the kind of person who downloads apps on a whim. The pricing tiers are okay, but interesting you can’t charge $0.99 for anything. It’s either free or $2.99 USD and goes up from there.

Doesn’t look very appealing to me as a developer. We will have to pass on this market. I’m really starting to think RIM is the modern day Nortel.

I’ve been waiting for that for a while. I’ll have to try it out soon as I find that Epiphany/Gecko that I’m using now crashes a lot.

Like Apple and Google, they are doing the 70/30 split with the developer for revenue. They plan to have the marketplace open for business in Q4 2009.

I don’t have a problem with the developer fee or the 70/30 split. However the $99/app charge just feels nickle & dime. They don’t do this if you are developing for Windows desktop and/or server.

Windows users have a very bad history with piracy. I know more than a few Windows Mobile users who pirate/steal things like TomTom and other 3rd party apps. I wonder how piracy will play out in the new marketplace.

Once thing I wanted to do was update the BIOS to the latest vendor recommended version. Unlike my old D620, the E6400 BIOS is some kind of Windows/GUI thing and no longer fits on a DOS boot disk (~2.88MB for BIOS update alone). Since I run Gentoo Linux I have no way to update the BIOS.

It was suggested I try using something like BartPE to boot into a Windows Preinstalled Environment. This failed as well because for some reason WinPE just hangs on boot. I’ve tried numerous things to workaround but nothing helped.

Asking Dell about it, they explained the E6400 only supports Windows Vista. That’s just lame. They should be able to provide a Linux-compatible way to flash the BIOS or at the very least provide a WinPE boot disk to do it.

Update:: Found a solution using FreeDOS/syslinux here