Yahoo have released a beta of their Yahoo Mail webmail interface to Yahoo Mail users, it asked me whether I wanted to try the beta when I signed in recently. It uses Ajax, meaning that the interface is very slick and doesn’t need to reload the page to do most things. It looks like a response to Google’s Gmail, which has led in the area of webmail interface usability for some time. It may also be a response to the Windows Live Mail Beta, Microsoft’s up-and-coming version of Hotmail, which also uses an Ajax interface.

In my opinion, at the moment I prefer the Yahoo Mail Beta to Windows Live Mail Beta, it has a nicer-looking interface and it works in both Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer, where Windows Live Mail at the moment only works in IE.

The question is, will Gmail be rivalled by this new version of Yahoo Mail? Or even Windows Live Mail?

Tomorrow is April Fool’s Day and now the question is what Google will do this year.

Famously, Google have always done something for April Fool’s Day. They famously created a page detailing their search technology, and also recently released Gmail on April Fool’s Day, prompting people to wonder whether it was a prank or not. Apparently it wasn’t.

Will they release a new product tomorrow? Will it be GDrive, Google Calendar or something else??

To follow up from this post about new security flaws being found in Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser, it seems third parties have leapt to the rescue and released patches.

Security companies Determina and eEye Digital Security

Now just before I start, can I say that this story is likely to be highly speculative, and as yet there has been no confirmation by Microsoft of this report. If there are any updates about whether this is true or false (especially considering the 60% of Vista controversy), I’ll follow up this post.

EU told Microsoft it had Vista competition concerns [at Unofficial Windows Vista Weblog] [at Yahoo News]

There have been some rumours that the EU Commission are threatening to block European sales of Microsoft’s upcoming Windows Vista operating system if it includes certain features as standard, bundled with Windows.

EU spokesman Jonathan Todd was quoted as saying:

“We are concerned about the possibility that the next Vista operating system will include various elements which are currently available separately from Microsoft or other companies,”

I wouldn’t go as far as the Windows Vista Weblog have gone in saying that they might block Vista in the EU, I think, if this story is correct, that it’s more likely that Microsoft may have to remove some of Vista’s new features from European markets (like the ‘N’ EU-only editions of Windows XP, bundled without Windows Media Player).

So, don’t take this as fact (as I’ve probably reiterated too many times already), but it certainly may force Microsoft to change their strategy, at least in Europe.

Anyway, here’s my personal take on this story, but make of it what you will.

I have been wondering for some time why Bloglines seems to be the feed aggregator of choice for many people. It is buggy, often showing old items as new, it has a primitive interface and is short on features. Despite this, it is the market leader. I think the reason for this situation is a lack of decent competition. There’s Google Reader, which offers even fewer features, a silly UI and lots of bugs, as well as countless other competitors, but none stand out.

That is, apart from Reblog. I discovered it recently on Lifehacker, and whilst I failed to install the Open Source code on my server, I have managed to use its hosted service. Reblog is buggy, but it is early stage OS software, so that is to be expected. It works by splitting up your newsreading in two; skim reading, and then reading in depth. You look through all your incoming news, quickly selecting options using the keyboard to archive, follow links, or most importantly, publish. The publish option publishes the item to a users ‘reblog’, where it can be read in greater detail later. I can now spend much less time reading news because I don’t read everything I’m not interested in. I also pick up more stories as I feel able to subscribe to more feeds as I am now more efficient. My reblog can be found here.

The ‘reblog’ idea has greater potential, beyond just the user’s benefit. If it were possible to subscribe to feeds within Digg, with the publish option either submitting the story or a digg of the story if it had already been submitted, then an extremely powerful Web 2.0 ‘reblog’ community could be formed.

The other direction RSS is going is on the desktop. Obviously there’s Microsoft’s strides forward in the area, and there seems to be a new feed aggregator released daily, all with slightly different takes. Ultimately some sort of fusion of the ‘Web 2.0 approach’ and the Microsoft approach (a unified system based on an ‘RSS platform’) will provide the best future for feeds.

Windows Is So Slow, but Why?

This article by the New York Times is quite interesting, and it looks at why Windows can be so slow. Before people jump the gun, it’s not an anti-Microsoft, anti-proprietary article, read it if you want.

It says that one of the main reasons that Windows is so bloated (with Vista set to have about 4 times as many lines of code as XP) is that it keeps backward compatibility with old software and hardware.

The interesting comparison that they made here was with Apple and Mac OS. In 2001, Apple bit the bullet with Mac OS X. They basically rebuilt the whole operating system from scratch (OK, not quite, but you get the idea) and built it on a foundation of Unix. It was a major change in the way Mac OS worked, and none of the Mac OS Classic applications ran on it (you had to run a ‘Classic’ virtual machine).

XP was also a big step forward in the evolution of Windows, being the first consumer Windows OS to ditch the ageing 95/98/Me setup and go for a Windows NT-style setup. But the support for 95/98/Me applications is still there today, and although that is a good thing, it does make Windows more bloated, and hence slower.

I think that the question is, will Windows change like OS X did? With the release of Windows XP Professional x64 Edition (the version of XP for 64-bit processors) and with Windows Vista being released for both x86 (current generation Intel and AMD CPUs) and x64, we may well see older applications losing support and perhaps evolution on the Windows platform. Through that, Microsoft might not see the need to keep lines and lines of code to run legacy Windows applications, and hopefully, Windows speeds up a bit.

But will Microsoft ever do an OS X and completely overhaul everything? Will it be Vienna (the codename for the successor to Vista) that brings about this change? My answer, I don’t know.

Microsoft have announced that they have discovered more security flaws in their Internet Explorer browser for Windows. One of these vulnerabilites simply causes the browser to crash, but some of the others could be used to gain complete control of a victim’s computer.

These bugs affect versions 5.x and 6.x of Internet Explorer, but not the recent 7.0 Beta. So, needless to say, patch up as soon as they release the update (which should be 11th April), regardless of which browser you use. The reason behind this is that applications use the Internet Explorer framework (such as Outlook Express), even if you use an alternative browser for day-to-day browsing (like Firefox).

There’s an interesting story about this exploit here.

Sony are planning to build an online service, similar to Microsoft’s Xbox Live, on their upcoming PlayStation 3 console.

It will allow gamers to download games direct to the PS3′s hard drive. Like the new Xbox Live service with the Xbox 360, the basic service will be free to all PS3-owners, but to play games online a subscription will be required.

The PS3 will still be subject to the delay, and won’t ship until November this year, because of the issues with Blu-ray disc copy protection.

This certainly will be a formidable rival to the Xbox 360, however, with Sony already owning the majority of the video games console market.

Robert Scoble (who works for Microsoft) rather forcefully refutes the allegation that 60% of the code for Windows Vista was being hurriedly rewritten in these two posts:

Whenever you see a story that says 60% of any OS is gonna be rewritten you should demand that the journalist who wrote that be immediately and publicly fired. Totally 100% incompetent. Did NOT do their homework.

There is NO WAY a major OS can be rewritten without breaking everything and certainly not in a short time frame. Such a rewrite would take a decade to make work right and I doubt it would even after that.

He goes on to say:

A journalist and an editor needs to be fired.

In fact, two journalists and editors need to be fired since the story is now being rewritten without any brains being engaged.

Whilst Scoble is obviously biased, I can see his point that it would be completely implausable for Vista to be rewritten to that extent by January 2007. The story is made more unlikely by the widely known fact that Vista has already been rewritten to a large extent, after the lead developer burst into Bill Gate’s office one day to tell him that it simply wasn’t going to work. I think this type of story was inevitable after Microsoft delayed Vista, and that it is a symptom of the widespread irritation and disappointment.

Peter posted that Microsoft has delayed Vista the other day, and now it looks like Office is being delayed as well. That’s odd because the Office team has a reputation for being good at getting products out on time to a high standard, but they’ve obviously failed this time with Office coming out in January 2007, at about the same time as Vista. And that’s only if the deadline doesn’t slip more.

This is a problem for Microsoft; InsideMicrosoft’s Nathan Weinberg sums up the general feeling of intense disappointment in Microsoft. This feeling matters because Office is by quite a distance Micrsoft’s biggest earner, and competition to Office is really hotting up, on the desktop and potentially more lethally for Microsoft online, with the emergence of services such as Writely (recently aquired by Google), Zoho writer, iRows and Thumbstacks. I would have thought that Microsoft would be in a great hurry to bring out Office 2007 with its greatly improved functionality and usability to attempt to stop the growth in market share of these services, and then kill them by making Office Live the best online office suite available. Well, that’s what I would be trying to do if I were in charge.

Lets just hope that Microsoft manages to satisfy the expectations of the new products, ‘cos if they don’t, they’ve got problems.