From my perspective the Mozilla Foundation has done a terrific job developing Firefox and more importantly distributing and marketing the product. The latest version of Firefox is a very shiny software product and has been remarkably stable on the few computers I've installed it on. 

I haven't yet installed it on my main work computer; however, and tonight I was prompted to install the upgrade--not just an upgrade for Firefox 2, but upgrading to the completely overhauled Firefox 3.

Autoupdate notification mechanisms really are wonderful creatures for increasing the penetration of new versions of software. It is a damn shame that Microsoft didn't or couldn't manage to increase the market share of IE7 by harassing IE6 users until they upgraded.

One of the best things that Adobe has done is build in easy upgrade paths for its Flash software so that the vast majority of users are using the latest version of the software.

Recently we've been doing a significant amount of performance work preparing to take the ONEsite platform to the next level.  We've crossed a number of incredible milestones recently (total number of users on the platform, amount of new user generated content per day, amount of data imported from other platforms, etc.) and have been proactively tackling existing performance issues whilst planning for the next waves of growth.

While there are a number of great blogs discussing how to increase performance, nothing beats a well-written book (except for personal experience, of course).  That being said, I've been particularly impressed with two books recently.

First off is Steve Souders "High Performance Websites for Front-End Engineers."  This book details how to improve the client-side performane of a website.  This involves everything from gzipping stylesheets, to minifying javascript, to parallelizing browser connections to increase performance for modern Internet connections.  Steve works at Yahoo! as "Chief Performance Yahoo!" and definitely knows his stuff.  The book is well written and filled with things you may not have realized if you mostly pay attention to the backend side of things.

Next up is the 2nd Edition of "High Performance MySQL."  I simply cannot say enough wonderful things about this book.  The 2nd Edition is twice as thick as the original and every single chapter seems to be both relevant and insightful.  The book covers everything from replication setups to advanced MySQL storage engines to Sphinx and full-text search indexing.  Here at ONEsite we are very fond of MySQL, Sphinx and all the other great LAMP technologies that make up the foundation of the ONEsite platform.

Great things are ahead!

Yesterday an installer from ATT came out to hook me up with U-Verse at my house.  U-Verse is ATT's Fiber-to-the-Node solution for triple play network access (Phone/TV/Internet).  Newer houses actually have fiber to the home--in my case I have fiber to the telephone pole and then 1000 feet of normal twisted pair to my house.

I haven't had a chance to dig into the service too much thus far, but I am thus far impressed with the TV picture quality, channel availability, pricing and Internet connection.  I have more premium HD channels than I had with Cox, and the DVR also has a much slicker interface.

I trust the all-digital strategy more than the limited bandwidth of cable providers.  ATT hasn't invested as much in their consumer fiber infrastructure as Verizon, but they definitely seem to be aggresively attacking the cable barons.  All in all competition is good.

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.