Brian Krebs from The Washington Post has been advising the average Windows user on various things. A while ago, people started asking him if they could trust a Service Pack for the .Net framework. While you probably are well aware about .Net, what it is and what it does, many people are not. So Brian took it upon himself to test the SP and after some time gave it a go.

However, it seems now that when installing this update, Microsoft is so friendly to add their own add-on for FireFox. While it is nice to see that MS is acknowledging FF as a major player in the browser world, it is not the normal way to install add-ons. One of the great features of FF has always been it extendability, but moreover the choice what & when to extend it.

No big deal right? Let’s just go and remove this unwanted extension. Right, this would work with any other developer, but we are dealing with Microsoft, which means the ‘Uninstall’ button is disabled, and removing the add-on is only possible through some obscure registry hacks, with which you don’t only risk in breaking the good operation of your favorite browser, but also your whole OS when you don’t really know what you’re doing.

Nobody really knows how this add-on behaves, but personally I don’t like this situation at all. Like Brian says in his article, it makes you wonder what else Microsoft’s installs behind your back… Maybe calling this malware is a bit over the top, but nevertheless I’m going to tag this post with it, since such behaviour is typical for malware, and it’s not because it’s coming from MS that we should keep one eye closed.

It’s already bad enough the Redmond company does not seem to be able to create a decent browser of their own, but now they seem to have to mess up the work of others as well. I for one am not very happy with this. In fact this makes me going to avoid Microsoft software even more than before, and I hope the same for you as well… Remember, it’s for your own good .

The competing browsers are Firefox 3, Safari, Google Chrome, Opera and Internet Explorer 7. Tests performed include the new V8 javascript test, browser extensions testing, the Acid 3 test, a Flash test, a Javascript test and a general speed test.

Firstly, they performed the V8-test. This is quite a new test for the rendering of javascript. When the V8 code is included in your browser, this test is blazing fast. Currently only Google Chrome & the new Firefox alpha (MineField) include this code. Since Minefield is not officially out yet, it speaks for itself that Chrome is the winner here.

Next up is the browser extension test. This is for testing XML capabilities. Here IE7 did not come out good at all, since this is not supported in it. The winner here is Firefox, but the differences between the other 2 browsers is minimal.

Third test, Acid 3. This tests the default settings of the browser, plays an animation and compares the result to a reference. To pass this test, the browser must have a final score of 100. None of the tested software passed, but the best one was Opera with a score of 85.

Fourth up is a flash test. Of course when you install flash it’s used by all browsers, but not all render the same flash animation/video at the same speed. This test is best performed by Firefox.

Next test is for javascript. The tester used the SlickSpeed test, which is normally used by developers to test for compatibility. Here, IE7 failed miserably since the test took a ridiculous amount of time to load. Safari didn’t complete it, and the rest went OK. The winner here is Google Chrome.

Last but not least is the Webspeed test. Testing some content-rich websites, the tester checked which browser was able to load them te fastest. Differences between all browsers are not that large, but again here Chrome wins.

The final score is 1st place for Google Chrome. Firefox finishes as second and Opera as third. Safari & IE7 both didn’t perform that well. This shows again that free is (at least in this case), better. Granted, you could consider all of the tested browsers ‘free’, but the differnce is that the three ‘winners’ aren’t usually shipped with an OS. Again Firefox here is a bit of an exception on this rule since it’s becoming more & more the default in a lot of Linux distributions.

All in all, I think both Chrome & Firefox are the best browsers currently available. Chrome might be the winner today, but Minefield is looking promising as well, and might just kick Chrome of that number one place soon.

While this release is far from finished, it’s already gaining popularity on the web. One of the most amazing things about it is its speed. With what is reported to be fastest javascript-engine of the world, it’s even leaving Google’s Chrome browser behind by 10%.

Of course there are a few drawbacks. Not all your plugins will be supported, but a lot of them already seem to work. Since this is an alpha release, it’s bound to have some bugs, although no huge problems have been reported so far. A plus to counter these is that installing this version does not affect your current Firefox installation, so you can happily run both next to each other.

All in all, for this stage in the development, I’m very impressed. In fact, I’m considering replacing my usual Firefox 3.0 with this one for my day-to-day use. If you’re tired of slow browsing, give this newest Mozilla-child a chance!

This new version, which is supposed to be an even more fierceful competitor for Adobe’s popular Flash player, looks very promising. Among one of the most eye-catching improvements is the promise that this new version will be shipped with cross-platform and cross-browser support.

Supported platforms are Microsoft Windows (duh ), Mac OS X, but surprisingly, also Linux. For the browser world, you can use Internet Explorer (another big duh of course), but also Firefox and Safari.

I’m glad too see Microsoft has gotten the message from the community and is releasing this functionality also for Mac & Linux users. With version 1 so closely tied to their own Windows platform, they have had a lot of criticism to endure. Of course Mono (2) promised to partly cover these platforms, but it’s nice to see that our Redmond friends took a closer look at some other popular operating systems.

On the browser side, I’m a bit disappointed to not see any Opera support. Probably in the next few weeks we’ll see some workarounds and community patches surfacing for this, but nevertheless, I’m surprised it’s not natively supported. However I’m sure this is only a matter of time.

Whether this newest Silverlight release will be nibbling at the market share of Flash is still to be seen. So far, I haven’t really seen much use of it myself, apart from during the Beijing Olympics, where Microsoft had cleverly set up some partnerships in an attempt to boost their software use. The main drawback at the time was of course the lack of support for other browsers and platforms. Now that this has been solved (however yet to be proven), Silverlight can finally really take off. Probably more partnerships with big content providers are coming, but now at least it has a good chance of breaking through to the mainstream.

I’m sure that we’ll hear and mostly see more about this the coming weeks/months. For the time being, I’m going to take a look how Silverlight performs on my Ubuntu/Firefox setup . To be continued …

Update 15/10: Tried to download it yesterday for Linux, but currently the runtime for this platform is not yet available… Only Windows & Mac are to be found.