From the official IE blog over at MSDN, Microsoft has announced that they’ll be pushing IE8 out the door via the Automatic Updates feature of Windows XP, and Vista. Users of the archaic IE6 and the soon to be ancient IE7 will get an ‘optional’ welcome screen asking them if they want Microsoft’s new browser hotness.
If you want to keep it retro and roll your old browser, Microsoft will simply nag you forever (as they should) about the new browser as an ‘optional’ update.
The most curious part of this announcement was that Microsoft will be releasing an “blocker” app which will allow system admins, and networking administrators (and other geek folk) to block the automatic roll out of IE8.
I think it’s pretty obvious that this is necessary (and also quite smart thinking by the folks at MS), but I think it speaks volumes to the differences between a small nimble company like Apple and Microsoft. Everyone is wowed by the small guy’s ability to shed the past and blaze a new trail, not ever thinking about the ones that are left behind. Microsoft’s approach is inclusive, and respectful to all the dinosaurs out there running the old stuff.
If you’re like me and you still have a few machines running good ol’ reliable and trustworthy (I keed, I keed) Windows XP than registry tweaks and optimization guides for XP are a very handy thing. Sure Vista is the new hotness, and to be really cutting edge I could publish information on how to tweak the registry of Microsoft’s newest OS. But I’ll play it safe and show you some tips on eeking every last bit of performance out of that old XP machine of yours. Kellys-Korner dot com has one of the best write ups for the Windows registry and it’s many tweaks I’ve seen in a long time. Totalling 399, you’re sure to find something useful in this guide.
Desktop two dot com is another application in a long list of online OS replacements competing to get a piece of this new market. The idea is that instead of your native OS like Windows Vista, Mac OSX or Linux, you’d run Desktoptwo, which is a purely online operating system that runs using Flash and Java.
The pros to this setup are a truly mobile and modular operating environment. Accessible from any web connected PC. The downsides or cons to online operating systems are the fact that they currently depend on an Internet connection (something that isn’t quite everyone yet) and also that it requires an existing operating system to run.
I’m going to repeat that last con so it sets in a little, “you need an existing operating system to run the online operating system”. This is a big con, and until PC’s can be built and deployed with a bios/light OS, online operating systems will remain a niche product reserved for uber geeks and specific users who require an online OS.
Torrent Freak has the good info on AllPeers which is a free extension for Firefox bringing socialness and BitTorrent to the masses.
Here’s a video snippet which mentions AllPeers (towards the end)
From Wiki…
AllPeers uses open source BitTorrent technology to facilitate file transfer.[1] The extension does not require any ports be opened. AllPeers encrypts its communication using standard protocols like SSL so as to protect the user against 3rd party intervention listening in.[2] AllPeers at the start its beta launch was 200,000 lines of C++ and JavaScript code.
