techno.blog("Dion")

If you go to a page that doesn’t exist, you normally get a lame 404 error that will have in it:

• 404. Error.
• Sorry, couldn’t find X, so here is our interface, go find what you want

When I was looking at the Longhorn photos that just came out, and happened to hit a URL without an image.

It is cool that the 404 handler worked out other files that I maybe want to go to based on the URL itself.

Bob has posted about bittorrent integration in: Opera Integrates BitTorrent.

I do concur that it makes sense to have this kind of thing hidden from the user.

I am a little scared that torrent will be the only way to get to something. I often run into situations where the torrents are all screwed up and I shout “I JUST WANT TO DOWNLOAD THIS DAMN THING”.

So hopefully you could do something like:

<a href=”torrent://www.almaer.com/torrents/coolradioshow1.torrent,http://www.almaer.com/media/coolradioshow1.mp3″>

or a level of abstraction:

<a href=”abstraction://www.almaer.com/virtual/coolradioshow1.abstract”>

We need this to be a standard, and not just in Opera ;)

The new Netscape 8.0 is getting hit from all sides:

Mozilla Firefox

Ben Goodger has written that Netscape 8.0 is unsafe.

He also talked about the new Google hire Brian Ryner, who is known for his XForms work.

IE

Over at the IE Blog they give you the fix needed to get XML support working again with IE. It seems like Netscape got a bit naughty:

We

We are seeing that “security” is the topic that Microsoft is going to use to attack Firefox. There has been many claims that IE is actually “more secure” than Firefox.

The problem is that it is hard to make an Apples to Apples comparison, due to the open environment vs. closed, and market share of the browsers.

Firefox 1.0.4 was just released to fix the arbitrary code execution vulnerabilities.

The Firefox team is proud that this update happened in the space of a couple of days.

It will be interesting to see the new battle when IE7 comes out :)

I like how Firefox changes the URL area background when I am on a https connection. It is good to give more feedback.

With all of the phishing and pharming going on now-a-days, it would be cool to do more things like that.

For example, what if the background went red when you went to a URL that was looked up via /etc/hosts (and equiv) instead of DNS.

Not only would this help you realise that something could be wrong in your hosts file, but I also forget that I have put some items in there. The other day I thought a site was down when in fact I had it in my hosts file and the site had changed locations!

The IE Blog, and Chris Wilson have come out talking about an upcoming beta of IE 7.

There has been a lot of talk on what will be in the browser:

• Tabs?
• SVG?
• CSS fixes?
• JavaScript updates?
• … insert other FireFox feature …
• … insert other “standard” support feature …

The blog entry discusses the fact that CSS support will be fixed (and hence a lot of CSS code that expects the broken IE behaviour will become broken itself) and PNG alpha channel support.

Looks like they threw a little bone out, without really coming out to say what will be here ;)