Drastic stuff

Even if you only use IE, you gotta thank Firefox for getting Microsoft to reconstitute the IE group. Without firefox, you’d still be on IE 6.

A comment by Solarion on Firefox turns five: half a decade of web liberation - Ars Technica.

Firefox is a brilliant piece of software, but the competition it stirred up in the browser market is it’s biggest achievement. In the last few years Internet Explorer has been revitalised, while Apple, Opera and Google have all pushed the game forward. Bravo!

Rupert Murdoch says he will remove stories from Google’s search index as a way to encourage people to pay for content online.

Murdoch could block Google searches entirely | guardian.co.uk (via lkm).

This is an interesting one. The way Murdoch sees it, he’s paying journalists to come up with high quality content and the likes of Google are coming along and taking it for free.

I can completely understand that point of view. But I can’t quite get it to tally up with reality.

Try as I might, I can’t get Google News to show me an entire article from one of his sites (or indeed anywhere else). I get a headline, a summary and a link out to the story, at the originating site.

I imagine Google provides a decent percentage of the traffic coming in to Murdoch’s various websites. Closing that avenue off can only mean a fall in advertising revenue (albeit with a reduction in operating costs). Surely it’s only going to harm Murdoch’s cause?

When there are so many high quality free news sources on the internet, aren’t most people going to go to one of his competitors instead?

I love Photoshop. It’s where I spend eight hours five times a week. I just wish that one of these days, instead of piling on more furniture, they’d clean up the place.

Slide Different - Neven Mrgan (via Mr Gruber).

Actually, that reminds me: Both Apple and Microsoft have taken that sort of approach to the latest releases of their respective operating systems. Both MacOS 10.6 and Windows 7 are slimmer, faster and fitter versions of their predecessor. There’s no huge new features as such, they’re just better. I’d love to see Adobe take the same approach to the fifth iteration of their Creative Suite.