I have to thank Garrett for hooking me up with WinXP Professional (perfectly legitimately, of course) this weekend. Surprisingly, I manged to format, install, and configure it in less than a day on this second-hand Duron box. Had some problems on install with XP freaking out about the second HD, but I sorted it out by trial and error. There's still a PCI conflict that I can't seem to get rid of, but it doesn't affect anything. And the OS has managed to resurrect the onboard audio, which I thought was dead, and is using that instead of the Herc sound board, despite the fact that the Herc is installed and properly configured with up-to-date drivers. Doesn't really matter though. With just 128MB of PC100 RAM, I thought I would run into memory errors and slow performance, but it actually seems to be a bit faster than 98SE was. I think the Duron 800MHz gets the credit.
Firefox 1.0 broke the 25 million downloads mark yesterday. SpreadFirefox.com is planning a special update for later today. In related news, there's been a lot of yapping about Microsoft's pseudo-low-key announcement that an Internet Explorer 7 beta will be released this summer, and even more yapping about posting this information in an IE team blog, where the tech-types will see it first, on the same day that Firefox reached a landmark download number. I personally don't think there was anything particularly insidious about this (by MS standards). Blake Ross pointed out the most important line in this announcement:
I think of today’s announcement as a clear statement back to our customers: “Hey, Microsoft heard you. We’re committing.”
There has been a massive migration away from Internet Explorer since November. Firefox has become the most successful open-source application in history, and MS has to realize that they created this situation by allowing their software to stagnate for literally years, something you just cannot do when you have a monopoly.
So the question presents itself: Is it too late for Internet Explorer 7? I think so. By the time IE7 final is released, Firefox 1.5 and 2.0 will be too widely distributed. When the mass conversion to Longhorn begins (and it will), users will have to choose a browser; MS won't be allowed to prepackage their own again. So why get IE7 when Firefox is just as good and just as free, and by then, will have equal (or better) name-recognition? How will Microsoft focus their ad campaign? "Remember how much you loved us in 1999?"
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