Yesterday was an exciting day for fans of the Mozilla's Firefox web browser.  By varying accounts the latest version of the Firefox browser was downloaded perhaps 5 million times on its first day of release.

Web browsers have come a long way since the early days of WorldWideWeb and Mosaic and their like.  Gone are the days when you had to optimize multiple layers of embedded tables in order to get Netscape to render your page in a decent amount of time.

The release of IE8 this year is going to further mix up the playing field for browsers.  Hopefully IE8 will behave quite well so that we won't have to manage CSS for both IE6, IE7 and IE8.  Safari has also been making inroads recently, both on Mac marketshare and on its Windows version..

Will IE's market share dip below 50%?  Only time will tell...

I got to the office today and decided I needed some music to listen to while I worked. Yesterday Andy had mentioned to me that he had the new Weezer album shared on his iTunes library. Well, I decided to give it a listen. Unfortunately, the iTunes DRM would not let me even preview his tracks. Woe is iTunes.

I had been thinking about Amazon.com (since their site was down for several hours yesterday) so I decided to give their MP3 download service a whirl. The album was $8.99 for 256kbps MP3s, DRM-free. Downloading from Amazon requires their MP3 Downloader application which is now available for Windows, OS X and Linux.

Unfortunately, the application crashed after downloading a few tracks. This may be Vista's fault, who knows. I had clicked on 'Listen to Selected' which opened the track in Winamp (my default MP3 player).

After the downloader crashed I went back to my web browser and clicked on the link to download the album again. If I had already navigated away from the page I assume there would have been another spot in my order history for me to download it again... I hope.

Would I download from Amazon Music in the future? Sure. I haven't quite decided where I stand on DRM and digital possessions. I've honestly bought more DVD-Audio discs in the past year than I have regular albums over the past 5 years.