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.

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.