"I wonder if it’s worth some sort of cross-vendor campaign (Mozilla, Microsoft, Opera, WebKit/Apple) to get users to adopt modern browsers in a much more rapid pace. IE6 is hanging around for much longer than one would like. I suspect IE 8’s adoption won’t be very quick either. Perhaps it’s necessary for it to be combined with a GoPHP5 style campaign where older browsers are unsupported as of an arbitrary date."

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On Monday, Microsoft announced from their IEBlog that they were reversing their decision for how Internet Explorer 8 would be compatible with Web pages designed for Internet Explorer 7 as well as Internet standards. You may recall that earlier this year Microsoft announced that Internet Explorer 8 in "Standards Mode" would actually be rendering pages in Internet Explorer 7's "Standards Mode". If you really wanted to have IE8 follow the latest standards then you would need to insert a special <meta> tag to your pages.

While developers and users expressed opinions on both sides of the issue, I think it would be fair to say a large number of people were not happy with this decision. In my own comments, I stated that "this is just plain crazy" of a move by Microsoft as it held onto ideas of the past and not the present. In a March 3, 2008 post, Microsoft's Interoperability Principles and IE8, the IE team explains what you can expect with IE8 compatibility based on their changed decision.

It's that time of year again, I need to purchase a new laptop. Instead of relying on the search engines to find reviews, I've found in the past that people that visit my site are probably the only experts I really need to take advice from. You guys are absolute tech geniuses!

This time around, all I need is a laptop with Linux in the $500-$1000 (USD) range. I likely will dual-boot the laptop with Windows, but it is Linux compatibility I'm most concerned about. My choice in Linux distribution is Ubuntu or Redhat/Fedora Core. So if you've recently bought a laptop that is close to these specifications, how well does it run Linux? Would you recommend that I buy a similar laptop for my next purchase?

Any advice, tips, or reviews is appreciated!

I'm currently testing a development version of Mozilla's Firefox 3 (codenamed Gran Paradiso). The contents of the release notes for Gran Paradiso Alpha 1 may surprise a few users.

Currently Firefox 3 is scheduled to be officially released in May 2007. When Firefox 3 is finally released it is expected to no longer support older versions of Microsoft Windows including Windows 95, Windows 98 and Windows ME. Support for Apple's Mac OS X 10.2 will also be dropped. For the Mac platform, Mozilla is recommending users run Firefox using OS X 10.3.9 or higher.

Several new features for the Alpha 1 version of Gran Paradiso include:

• Cairo is now being used as the default graphics library, affecting all graphic and text rendering
• Cocoa Widgets are now used in OS X builds
• An updated threading model
• Changes to how DOM events are dispatched (see bug 234455)
• Changes to how web pages are painted
• New SVG elements and filters, and improved SVG specification compliance

Many of the new features are a result of changes in the Firefox rendering (layout) engine, Gecko. For this alpha version, Gecko 1.9 Alpha 1 is being used under the browser's hood.

The start of compatibility fixes for PHP applications. Serendipity 1.0.3 released to so the blogging application can properly run under PHP 5.2.0.

Because of the issue with PHP 5.2.0 mentioned before, and the 1.1 release not hastily being pushed out the barnyard, the Serendipity Team has decided to release a 1.0.3 version that fixes the mentioned problem. Complete Story

It was announced by Joomla.org that the Beta for Joomla! 1.5 is expected to be released on October 12th. Some of the goals and features that are to be included in this new version of the content management system are:

• Substantial improvement in usability, manageability, and scalability. The project team's goal is to improve Joomla! "far beyond the original Mambo foundations".

• Expanded accessibility to support internationalisation, double-byte characters and Right-to-Left support for Arabic and Hebrew languages.

• Additional integration of external applications through Web Services and remote authentication such as the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP).

• Enhanced content delivery, template and presentation capabilities to support accessibility standards and content delivery to any destination.

• A more sustainable and flexible framework for component and extension developers.

• Deliver backward compatibility with previous releases of components, templates, modules and other extensions.

Of all the features listed above, I would think organizations would be most excited about in Joomla! 1.5 is the ability to support remote authentication services such as LDAP. Most organizations would like to see their employees only have to log into their enterprise software once and not have separate user names or passwords to access e-mail, calendar system, groupware, and content management systems.