inside aebrahim’s head

I just noticed that Firefox is the featured article on Wikipedia. It’s been like that for a few days now (according to the page history), but I thought I’d point it out anyway.

I have a question for webmasters out there who have some experience with SEO. How does Google treat the following?

a) Text that has class=”foo” where class foo is undefined.
b) HTML comments (including IE’s conditional comments).

My expectation is that it that for (a), class foo will be ignored entirely (no loss or gain in terms of SEO), and that HTML comments (including conditional comments) are also ignored entirely.

Does anyone have evidence to the contrary? Maybe some Mozilla folks out there know about this. I’m not worried about this for my blog, but another site that is considering advertising Firefox in place of some normal header text. For them, even marginal loss in terms of SEO may place it below another competing site (which would be unacceptable). Thanks in advance for your input.

Take a look at http://blog.ebrahim.org/ using Firefox, Mozilla or Opera. Then take a look using IE. Notice any differences?

If you were browsing The Register on Saturday using Internet Explorer, and weren’t using Windows XP with Service Pack 2 installed, chances are your computer has been infected with a virus. One of their ad providers, Falk AG was compromised, and the ads they served exploited the Bofra/iFrame set of vulnerabilities in Windows/IE to install a viral payload on viewers’ machines. Slashdot is also running a story on it.

The Register is apologising for the incident, and recommending that all their visitors who used Internet Explorer but were not using Windows XP with SP2 perform a full virus scan on their system and install SP2 immediately. They’ve also suspended Falk AG from their ad rotation system pending an explanation.

How’s that for security, Microsoft? If you aren’t using Windows XP with SP2, protect yourself by using Firefox 1.0 instead of Internet Explorer. Even if you are using SP2, it’s still a good idea. You never know what other exploits are lurking out there waiting to infect you.

Microsoft has made life too easy for would-be hackers. It used to be that they had to convince you to do something stupid. These days, even that’s not necessary. You can get infected just by visiting random websites that you trust. Imagine the impact if one of CNN’s ad partners had been involved here.

If you haven’t yet installed SP2, the best way to get it is by filling out this form. Microsoft will ship you a Windows XP SP2 update CD at no cost, to almost anywhere in the world.

Thanks to yusufg for letting me know about this.

UPDATE: Falk has issued a statement regarding the above incident. Apparently it was caused by a flaw in one of their load balancers that was exploited to redirect ad requests to search.comedycentral.com, which served the malicious ads.

Happy Birthday! You know who you are, and I wish I could be there to spend it with you!

Most people know that I’m a loyal Firefox user. Some people know that I’m also a loyal Opera user. Why do I mention this, you ask.

There has been a fair amount of Opera-bashing within the Firefox community, and an equal amount of Firefox-bashing in the Opera community. Now with Netscape doing an about turn and adopting Firefox/Mozilla as a codebase again, lots of people are bashing Netscape and questioning their motives and wondering what the point is of Netscape doing all this work when Firefox is already there.

I’m going to ask two questions:

1) What’s good for the web?
2) What am I looking for in a browser?

From the point of view of the first question, having all these alternative browsers around is an excellent thing because it drives adoption of standards compliant user agents. I only care that Netscape is releasing a new version based on Firefox insofar as it will drive adoption of Gecko based user agents. This is a good thing. Opera is our ally here. KHTML (and Safari) are our allies here.

In the end, an open web is good for everyone (except for the monopoly who lost out on monopolising the web with polluted ’standards’). The more standards compliant user agents we have out there that don’t support proprietary technologies, the less people we will see relying on utilising those technologies for their services, and the more accessible the internet is for everyone. Driving adoption of open standards is the most important goal of the Mozilla Foundation (as I see it). Firefox is merely a tool that’s used to fight that war.

So onto the second question. To fight that war you need good weapons. Firefox is such a weapon. In order to get normal users to help you win your war you need to get them to care about it. The problem is that you can’t (and will never be able to) get normal users to care about web standards. You have to give them some other incentives. This is where Firefox really shines, because it offers incentives that most internet users can relate to. That’s why it’s so popular. And that’s why it’s such an effective tool. Presumably Opera’s goals are to turn a profit, but that doesn’t mean that they can’t be an ally in creating an open web. Netscape falls under a similar category. Whatever people think about their settlement with Microsoft, and how they treated Mozilla, there is no doubt that driving adoption of Gecko based user agents is a good thing.

Different people want different things out of a browser. As many who use the Mozilla Suite will attest, Firefox is not the right browser for everyone. But that doesn’t matter. When there are alternatives like the Mozilla Suite, Opera, KHTML, Safari, et al., browsers have to compete on features, which is good. Better browsers means better productivity and happier users. If standards compliant user agents can offer this (and today they are), then we can use them as tools to get the average user to help us bring our goal of an open web to fruition.

According to the South China Morning Post, HKBN, a broadband provider in Hong Kong is rolling out a 100Mbps consumer broadband service (paid registration required). Some excerpts from the article are as follows:

“Hong Kong Broadband Network on Tuesday unveiled a new 100Mbps broadband service it claims is the fastest for residential users in Hong Kong. The company also demonstrated a premium one gigabit per second service that will be available by the second quarter of next year.”

“However, users paying the $268 per month will benefit from the 100Mbps bandwidth only when browsing local-based content - for international content the bandwidth is limited to 20Mbps. Users wanting the full 100Mbps bandwidth for international access will have to pay $1,980 per month.”

“With HKBN’s new super-fast services upload and download speeds are the same.”

All prices are in Hong Kong Dollars. HK$7.8 = US$1.0.

This is really great news for all of us in Hong Kong. Being able to browse overseas sites at “only” 20Mbps is fine with me, especially if its coming with a price tag of only US$34/month. Also of note is that bandwith is symmetric, which is amazing.

This is what happens when you have a market that has over 10 broadband providers who fiercely compete for your business. They even plan to roll out GigE service to home users who are willing to pay for it.

I was browsing through SuprNova.org today as I sometimes do, and found this little gem. Thought I’d share it with others. It appears to be a copy of the Air Mozilla broadcast. The file appears to be in Ogg Vorbis format.

Due to increasingly large amounts of comment spam, I’ve disabled comments for posts that aren’t featured on the front page of my blog. If you really want to comment on other posts, feel free to email me and ask for a particular entry to be opened up for commenting. I’ll be more than happy to do that.

I really wish I didn’t have to do this, but given that over 95% of comments on older posts are spam, I feel that I have no choice, since I’m getting sick of logging into MT to delete comment spam.

If any Movable Type developers are reading this, can we please have an interface in the entry power-editing mode for toggling the comment and trackback status of posts? That would have turned what was a 35 minute long task task into a 5 minute long task.

If any comment spammers are reading this, you suck. You take a good thing and spoil it for everybody.

I’m wondering if anyone has suggestions for good email footers that are 2-3 lines long that can be used for plugging Firefox. One that I came up with is:

Tired of popups, spyware and viruses?
Download Firefox 1.0 today: http://getfirefox.com/

Can others think of something better? My rationale for not advertising new features is that people are more likely to be annoyed by current problems than enticed by new features that are merely buzzwords to them.