Newspapers' New Owners Turn Grim - by David Carr from The New York Times - "Critics of newspapers say that part of the problem is that the industry has lost its ability to surprise. Tell that to the guys who have just bought in.... These are all smart businesspeople, with significant success in other endeavors, who took a hard look at the wave-tossed publishing sector and appointed themselves as life savers. And very soon after jumping in, they too began foundering in the tall waves."

Moving from WordPress.com to Self-Hosted WordPress in Plain English - by Michael Martine from Remarkablogger - "Sooner or later, you find out that out of all five billion themes available, you don’t really like any of them, but you have little to no say (or skill) in customizing all but a very few of them. Sooner or later, you discover that all the cool functionality other blogs have from something called plugins is verboten to you on WordPress.com."

Mozilla CEO says Apple's Safari auto-update 'wrong' - by Martin LaMonica from CNET News.com - "A lot of people appear to be bent out of shape about Apple using its auto-update service to distribute the Safari Web browser on Windows. The CEO of Mozilla, which makes the rival Firefox browser, calls it bad business."

Alternative browsers Firefox and Safari continued to slowly erode Internet Explorer's market share in January, with Firefox now holding just under 17 percent of the browser usage and Safari nearing six percent, according to the latest data from Market Share by NetApplications. Of course, this still means that Microsoft's market leader is used by three out of every four internet users, and at the current rate of decline, about three percentage points a year, it would be 2016 before it lost its majority status.

Naturally, by 2016 we'll all have brain implants to directly surf the entire contents of the GoogleNet, so it's silly to consider a world where Internet Explorer isn't the dominant browser for the short term.

After hitting a peak of 0.65% in November, Opera (the myNetworkTV of browsers) dropped to a 0.62% share in January.

Other interesting data from January showed Windows XP holding 75.07% of the operating system market, followed by Windows Vista at 11.96% (over a year since its introduction), MacOS at 7.57%, Windows 2000 at 2.71% (and you thought the XP holdouts were hardcore), and Linux variants at just 0.67%.

As always, I recommend Firefox with the NoScript add-on for a safer browsing experience, but regardless of your browser choice, make sure it's completely up to date with all patches, including updating any plug-ins or add-ons such as Java, Flash or Silverlight.

Mozilla rolled out an update to its popular Firefox browser late Thursday that patches several vulnerabilities, including four labeled as critical. Firefox users should automatically receive a message from the browser that an upgrade is available; if you don't see it, you can also patch your copy of the program manually by selecting "Check for Updates..." from the Help menu.

Mozilla also noted that users of versions of Firefox older than 2.0 are strongly encouraged to upgrade to the newer version, as the company stopped supporting the version 1.5 series last May. And the third beta version of the new Firefox 3 browser should be available next week.

New Tech Heroes recommends Mozilla Firefox 2 with the NoScript add-on as a good combination for maximum browsing security.

A popular tweak to Firefox may actually result in slower internet surfing if used improperly. Tests by New Tech Heroes show that setting the "pipelining" configuration setting to an excessively high number appears to result in throttling by either the user's ISP or by individual websites, or both.

Pipelining is a feature of the HTTP/1.1 internet protocol, which is part of the basic control structure of the Internet, what makes it work, if you will. Pipelining allows multiple HTTP (internet data) requests to be sent at the same time without waiting for an answer from the target web server. This generally results in faster web page load times, however, HTTP/1.1 is supported by most, but not all, web servers, so the pipelining technique doesn't always work. Also, if you're surfing the web on a dial-up connection, pipelining does you no good at all.

Browser support for pipelining is also variable. Internet Explorer, even in version 7, doesn't support it. Some reports suggest Opera does so by default. Firefox has pipelining turned off by default, but it can be activated by accessing Firefox's configuration page by typing "about:config" (without the quotes, of course) into the address field. This gives the user control over pretty much every setting used by the browser and any add-ons you have installed. Naturally, you want to be very careful when accessing this page, so you don't change a setting that causes Firefox not to function properly.

The problem with the pipelining setting is that several articles and blogs have recommended changing the "maxrequests" setting to 30 or more simultaneous HTTP requests. First, according to Mozilla's knowledge base, the number needs to be "any integer from 1 to 8 inclusive," which seems to imply that Firefox will only send a maximum of 8 HTTP requests at a time in any case. So setting it to anything larger than 8 isn't going to give any additional benefit. Second, consider that web servers have a limited ability to handle requests for data. Certainly it varies from server to server and network to network, but every server has a limit at which it can no longer handle data requests, and when that limit is approached or reached, the response time from that server degrades, not just for the user who reached the limit, but for all users currently trying to connect to it. So setting the "maxrequests" to 30 would also be a selfish behavior, and could result in the server's owner implementing methods to restrict such excessive data requests in order to maintain overall server reliability.

And it appears that is happening. New Tech Heroes Test Labs tried a number of settings for "maxrequests" in Firefox today, and discovered that values from 2 to 4 resulted in occasional disruption of web page loading, while settings from 5 to 8 resulted in the disruption every time we tested. Specifically, images loaded very slowly or not at all on the Google Image page we chose as our test page.

Methodology

All tests were run on a PC running Windows XP Home. We opened a blank Firefox (version 2.0.0.11, with "about:blank" as our home page) browser window with a single tab, and then directed the browser to "www.google.com." "IBM logo" was used as our search term, and after the web page search results were displayed, we clicked "Images" to see Google's display of matching images to our search term. The "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" setting was then changed in about:config, the browser closed, and then relaunched in the same method as described. The test was repeated for each integer value from 2 to 8 inclusive (setting "maxrequests" to 1 disables pipelining regardless of the value of "network.http.pipelining"). Our Firefox browser was configured to clear its cache and all other "private data" each time it closes, so there were no images pre-loaded from test to test.

NOTE: The same test was run using Internet Explorer 7, Opera 9.25 and Safari for Windows 3.04. In each case, the browser was set to its default settings. None of these browsers experienced any page loading difficulties when the "IBM logo" Google Image search was run.

Test results

• With a "maxrequests" value of 5 through 8, Google displayed only the first two images of the 18 that should have been shown. The other 16 displayed only Firefox's placeholder for loading graphics. After waiting from 10 to 30 seconds, the other images finally appeared, although with the value at 7, the images never loaded at all. Each integer value was attempted 15 times.
• With a "maxrequests" value of 3 or 4, the performance of the test search was more variable. Only twice out of 25 attempts did the behavior described about occur.
• With a "maxrequests" value of 2, no problems with the test Google search were observed in 25 tests.

Analysis

We're uncertain whether the throttling of HTTP requests was being done by Google at its web server or perhaps by our ISP (Comcast). Certainly Comcast has been in the news in the past year for placing limits on excessive bandwidth use by its customers (using BitTorrent and similar peer-to-peer networking applications), but does have to maintain its network's reliability to all users and so may be filtering pipelining requests as well. Or Google may be limiting such excessive pipelining requests at the server level. The exact source of the apparent throttling, however, is less significant than the evidence that setting the "maxrequests" value to anything higher than 2 may result in slower page loading, not faster as suggested by some of those promoting the tweak (and especially anyone claiming that setting the value to 30 is beneficial).

The New Tech Heroes recommend using Firefox's pipelining option, but also recommend keeping the "maxrequests" value between 2 and 4. Try different settings for yourself and use the highest value that doesn't result in degraded page loading behavior.

Turning pipelining on in Firefox

To turn the Firefox pipelining feature on, type "about:config" into the address field (no http://, just about:config). Scroll down to the settings for "network.http.pipelining" and "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" (a shortcut is to type "pipelining" into the Filter: field). By default, pipelining should be set to "false."

Double-click the "network.http.pipelining" line to change it to "true." Then double-click the "network.http.pipelining.maxrequests" line. A small window will pop up. Type a value from 2 to 8 (again, we recommend 2, but 3 or 4 may also work for you). Click "OK" to close the window. Close the "about:config" page and close Firefox. When you launch the browser the next time, pipelining will be on.

We welcome comments from other users who have experienced this behavior, especially anyone with knowledge about whether the source of the throttling is likely to be Comcast or Google (or both).

Drop-down menus. Animated introductory screens. Embedded videos and music. Live scrolling around an interactive map. All things we've come to expect when we visit a new web site. But this cool technology also brings with it additional security issues for anyone surfing the web.

While most of these scripts or plug-ins are completely safe, the possibility that malicious code is included within a Flash element or JavaScript script does exist. Anti-virus software and firewalls can catch some of the malware if it attempts to modify your computer or connect with the internet outside of your own network, but a better choice is to stop the scripts from running until you have a chance to decide whether to trust the website or not.

NoScript is a free Firefox add-on that does exactly that, blocking all scripting and plug-in activity until you make the choice whether to allow it. The add-on blocks JavaScript, Flash, Silverlight, PDF files, Java applets and other similar items by default. If you decide to trust the website, you can click on individual items to allow them, or choose to trust the entire site (permanently or temporarily) by using NoScript's menu, which is added to the bottom status bar of the Firefox browser.

Giorgio Maone is the developer of NoScript, which won one of PC World's 2006 World Class Awards. The add-on is free, though if you find it useful, a small donation is welcomed and can be made from the NoScript home page.

Microsoft's Internet Explorer browser lost market share again in December to Mozilla's Firefox and Apple's Safari browsers. IE held 75.8 percent of the browser market in December, down from 77.1 percent the previous month, according to data from Net Applications. Firefox increased its market share from 15.6 to 16.4 percent during the same period, while Safari went from 4.6 to 5.1 percent.

An interesting side note in Net Applications' data is the speed of adoption of new browser versions. Firefox 2 was officially released in late October, 2006, and just over a year later, nearly all Firefox users have upgraded to the newer version (96.5 percent use Firefox 2 versus 3.5 for Firefox 1.5). Internet Explorer 7 was released just ahead of Firefox 2, but it took until last month for the majority of IE users to have switched to version 7 (53.4 percent now use IE7, with most other IE users still on version 6, although some older versions are also still in use).

The New Tech Heroes have used the Firefox browser since its official introduction in November, 2004, and I continue to recommend it to our friends and clients for its security features and overall ease of use. Its growth in market share is largely due to its reputation as a more secure browser, as many of its innovative features are now part of Internet Explorer 7, including tabbed browsing.

Regardless of which browser you choose to use, it's vital to upgrade to the most recent version and, as with any software, make sure any security patches are downloaded and installed regularly. The browser has become the most common computer application, increasingly used to replace traditional desktop-based software, so its security is paramount to any home or small business computer.