Microsoft's Emergency Patch
By now, your computer has probably already downloaded and installed an emergency out-of-cycle patch from Microsoft. On Thursday, the company released a patch on an emergency basis, the first time Microsoft has done this in more than 18 months. When Microsoft takes this step, you know something serious is afoot. Windows Secrets has an article that includes links to the download site at Microsoft. Patches are available for all versions of Windows from Win 2000 through Win 2008 Server. The download is relatively small (633K for XP) and installation should not be delayed.
The Absence of Chrome in Chrome
In browsers, "chrome" is the stuff that surrounds the main window. Some browsers have a lot (Firefox is a good example), most have some (such as Internet Explorer), and a few have just a little (Safari). Now Google's Chrome has taken chrome to a new minimalist height. Or should that be "depth"? There is virtually no chrome on Chrome, which makes the name ironic. Without setting Chrome to be my primary browser, I used Chrome almost exclusively for a week. And I like it. Chrome may not be ready for prime time just yet, but it's an amazingly good start. And, at the end of a one-week trial run, I did tentatively set Chrome as my default browser.
There's been talk that Google's long-term plans are to knock off Microsoft with this new browser, but it seems to me that the likely first victim will be Firefox. Only a few brave people will be willing to work without Internet Explorer, but not too many people are willing to have half a dozen browsers installed, either. It's the adventurous folks who will try Chrome and may find that they like it. Those are exactly the same people who are among the Firefox base.
There aren't plug-ins for Chrome (yet), there are some known security issues, and Chrome has a feature that keeps information about your Web browsing habits that some will fear and others will resent. I would say that someone will invent a way to turn off this feature, but I can't say that because somebody already has. Each Google Chrome has a unique ID identifies the user and Google doesn't make it easy to remove this ID. UnChrome from AblesSoft replaces your ID with null values to make your browser anonymous. Ablessoft says Chrome's functionality is not changed and you need apply the patch only once. UnChrome is free.*
What's to Like and Not to Like about Chrome?
Click any image for a full-size view.
There's more to like than not to like. This is a full-screen view of Chrome operating full-screen, which is my preferred way of operating. Apple users like to scatter little windows all over the place, but I prefer to switch among full-screen applications. This image illustrates 6 features of Chrome, most good:
- The full screen version of Chrome places all the tabs on the window's roof. Most programs leave a title bar there and I have a clock/calendar operation that fits nicely at the top of the screen. Because Chrome ignores the standards established for Windows, it's difficult to use the clock calendar because it gets in the way of Chrome's tabs. Office 2007 also places information in this previously dead area, so even Microsoft isn't following its own standards.
- Notice that the domain name is highlighted. This is a small point, but a good one for usability because it adds clarity.
- I can put my most commonly used shortcuts here, and these need not include the sites I always want to have open. Like Firefox and Opera, Chrome accepts a list of sites to use when the browser opens. That means this list can be sites I might want to use regularly, but not the most critical sites.
- Two menus are here, one that deals specifically with the page being viewed and one that controls Chrome's overall settings.
- I was able to import all of my bookmarks, saved passwords, and browsing history from Firefox and they're all available right here.
- Because of the minimalist approach to layout, Chrome leaves most of the screen available for the website you want to view.
When I open a new tab, Chrome shows me thumbnails of the sites I have visited the most, not just the sites I have visited most recently. It ranks what it shows by popularity. The more times you visit a site, the more likely it is to show up here. You also get a list of sites that you have recently added as bookmarks and a list of the tabs you've most recently closed.
Or you can click the link to see your recent browsing history. From this page, you can select a link to open the site again or delete an entire day's worth of browsing history. This needs to be a finer-grained control. Instead of deleting by day, it should be possible to delete individual sites. That will probably be added in a later version, but I can see how being able to delete a day's worth of history would be useful if you're trying to debug a problem with a site and you want the cache cleared but you don't want to clear everything.
On the history listing, some links have stars. This means they are in my list of shortcuts. I can click the star to edit the name of the bookmark, change its location, modify the URL, or delete it from bookmarks.
Another way to find something is to just start typing it. Here I've typed "microsoft" and Chrome shows me options for a Google search for the term, some Microsoft pages, and some non-Microsoft pages that refer to Microsoft. I also have the option to see recent Microsoft pages I've visited.
This is an excellent feature. If I'm researching something, I may visit dozens of sites and many pages within a site. Being able to see a list of the pages I visited while at a specific site is quite helpful.
When it comes to options, Chrome doesn't yet have a lot of settings. There are no add-ons, so the only changes are what Google calls "Basics, Minor Tweaks, and Under the Hood".
Basics: These are the settings that nearly every browser has—what should happen on start-up, what you consider your home page, which search engine you want to use by default, and which browser should be your default.
Minor Tweaks: Here is where you tell Chrome what your default download location is or instruct it to ask where files should be saved, where you specify whether Chrome should save passwords, and where you tell Chrome what language to use.
Under the Hood: As you can see, this is the longest section by far and it's the area that advanced users. Technical issues, security, and privacy are covered here.
Memory Management or Memory Manglement?
Most browsers use what's called a multi-threaded model for their tabs. Chrome uses a different approach. Actually, it's an older approach. Instead of launching a new thread for each tab, Chrome instantiates a new browser process for each tab. These various processes have inter-process communications so they all look like they're part of a single process, but they're actually separate.
In an operating system with robust memory management tools, this wouldn't be necessary, but it solves a problem that's common to Windows. If you use Firefox, even version 3, which has made great strides in this area, you know that opening and closing windows will eventually cause Firefox to grow huge. That's because when a tab is closed, memory is released but some of the memory is never reused until the browser is shut down. I'm one of those people who always has at least a dozen browser tabs open. Throughout the day, they come and go. With Firefox, I know that I'll probably have to close the browser sometime during the day and restart it. I haven't needed to do that with Chrome.
But after using Chrome as my primary browser at home and at the office for more than a month, I went back to Firefox because a number of websites don't recognize Chrome yet or don't work properly with Chrome.
*I haven't bothered to UnChrome Chrome yet because having a few marketers follow me around doesn't particularly bother me. Given my world view, my occasional unwillingness to "just shut the f--- up" (as some of my acquaintances put it), marketers don't come even close to showing up on my radar.
Bottom line: How do you rate a free program? It's good, but not yet great. It's free. So it earns 3 cats.
This is the browser to watch. As much as I like Firefox because of all the plug-ins that are available, it looks to me like Chrome may be the long-term winner. Google certainly has the resources to develop the best browser on the planet. Only time will tell whether they actually do.
For more information, visit the Google Chrome website.
WinZip is Twelve
WinZip has been around for a long time and it continues to evolve. The latest version is 12 and there are new features for image compression and management, support for new compression methods, improved compression performance, and support for additional archive formats. The new version also doesn't work with older versions of Windows, but just with Windows 2000, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. Sorry, but time marches on. If you have an older operating system (Windows 9x, Windows NT, or Windows Me, for example) you can continue to use the version of WinZip you have installed.
What's New?
Click any image for a full-size view.
One of the most surprising changes is WinZip's claimed ability to compress JPG images. This was previously thought not to be possible because the JPG format already compresses images. But WinZip says that version 12 will compress digital images by 20% to 25% without any loss of photo quality or data integrity. True? Maybe, but in my tests, it seemed to be more wishful thinking than fact.
I started with 13 images that had already been reduced. Thirteen JPG files were 1.94MB uncompressed. when I had WinZip compress them, the result was 1.993MB. Big difference! So I looked for a directory with more files that hadn't been reduced in size already. I found one with 54 images (121 MB). These compressed to 120.38 MB. The difference is negligible. I tried several other tests and was never able to get more than about 1% additional compression so, at best, the extra compression isn't something you should rely on.
But wait. That seems out of character for WinZip. So I dug a little deeper and found that by default WinZip uses "legacy compression", which is compatible with older versions of WinZip and with other compression programs. I changed the setting to "best method" and received a warning. The resulting ZIP file was 20% smaller than the existing JPG files.
So the extra compression has a price: Your receiver will also need to have WinZip 12.
WinZip’s enhanced send feature allows you to compress images and send them as e-mail attachments with a single click. Once the file is compressed, WinZip hands the file off to your e-mail program.
WinZip has been able to open other types of compressed files for years, but the WinZip 12 adds the ability to read and extract files from 7Z archives, CD and DVD ISO, IMG disk files, in addition to commonly used compression methods such as RAR, BZ2, CAB, LHA, Z, GZ, TAR, UUE, XXE, BinHex, and Mime.
At some point WinZip became a part of Corel. That doesn't mean that the company has moved to 1600 Carling Avenue in Ottawa. The WinZip folks are still in Mansfield, Connecticut, and they're still creating what is probably the most robust data compression application available to Windows users.
Bottom line: WinZip is again the compression tool by which others are measured.
Given the low cost of storage today, I'm not sure that the Pro Photo version of WinZip is worth the additional cost. But if you send a lot of images by e-mail, and particularly if you send using a modem instead of a high-speed connection (or you send to someone who uses a slow connection), the few extra dollars may be money well spent.
For more information, visit the WinZip website.
Nerdly News
Streaming Hot
A while ago (December 23, 2007, to be exact) I wrote about the Netflix "Watch Now" service. I didn't think much of it. "Recently Netflix added a Watch Instantly feature that allows me to watch a certain number of hours worth of movies every month on my computer. I can now say that I've done it once. That was enough." At that time, the service wasn't very reliable. But I tried it again this month. Much has changed in 11 months.
This isn't to say that I expect to spend a lot of time watching videos on the computer, but maybe the occasional 45-minute long "one hour" TV program (recently I watched a few early Rockford Files shows with James Garner). It's annoying to Mac owners that there's still no Mac player from Netflix, but Netflix founder Reed Hastings says the company continues to actively work on a Mac solution.
You also can't watch with a Linux machine. Or with any browser other than Internet Explorer version 6 or later running on Windows XP Service Pack 2 or Vista. If you have an Intel-based Mac, you can boot to Windows using Boot Camp, Parallels, or Fusion and watch Netflix movies.
Hastings says the Starz premium cable network has closed their Vongo service and will now use Netflix as its Internet delivery provider. Also coming this year, streaming Blu-ray movies. It'll be interesting to see how Internet service providers react to that.
Yahoo! becomes "Yoo-Hoo?"
Yahoo will lay off at least 10% of its worldwide workforce in an effort to get expenses under control. That's about 1500 people. Yahoo's income dropped more than 60% in the third quarter after Yahoo shrugged off a proposal to be acquired by Microsoft and the company's stock price is about one third of the $33 per share that Microsoft had offered.
Yahoo has been looking into a joint operating agreement with Google or maybe a merger with another member of the walking wounded, Time Warner’s AOL. Neither of those arrangements has led anywhere yet.
The Olympics and the current presidential campaign have translated into more traffic for Yahoo, but not more money. CEO Jerry Yang says the goal is to reduce annual expenses by more than $400 million. A story in the New York Times says quotes some analysts as criticizing Yang. According to the article, "[U]nder Mr. Yang, who became chief executive in June 2007, Yahoo has been lurching from crisis to crisis and has been unable to outline a credible turnaround plan. The layoffs are not likely to address some of the problems plaguing Yahoo, which include a loss of market share to Google in Web search and to others in display advertising."
Although Yahoo cut about 1000 jobs already this year, acquisitions and other business activities actually left the company with more employees than at this time last year.
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