Jared W. Smith

It’s been around a month since I pulled the trigger and made the Google Chrome beta channel (which I’ve since upgraded to the dev channel for extension support) the default browser on my Mac. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough to where I can’t go back to Firefox now as my daily driver.

The three big reasons why Chrome reigns supreme? Speed, more speed, and WebKit. And now that extensions have come over to the Mac, there’s not too terribly many reasons to stick with Firefox anymore.

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Random observations made on an approximately three-to-four day blogging hiatus that involved a great photowalk (the above photograph and two new images in the titlebar rotation being products of said photowalk; you can find the rest in my Flickr set), an epic lazy day spent with Windows 7, and other day-to-day snippets: read more »

Ray tagged me like a bajillion years ago to show off my Start menu. I never do memes, but what the heck. Everybody who reads this blog probably wonders why I never update anymore.

So, in the interest of being a smartass, I present my Dock instead. ;) Bwhaha.

I failed to mention that I also installed Mac OS X 10.5 “Leopard” (yes, the full, official name) on my work MacBook Pro this weekend. In addition to its reflective dock, transparent menu bar (why, God, why?), and impressive new Finder view, it’s got quite a sense of humor. Check out the icon for my Windows desktop machine as seen in the Finder:

The Windows 9x-era BSOD is a clever way to avoid having to license the Windows logo artwork. Also note the beige CRT (and yes, I own more of those than I care to admit, but the machine in question sports a Dell 20″ widescreen LCD, for the record ;) ). A few years ago I would have been screaming about militant Apple elitism, but this is too funny to ignore (and to get mad at).

As for Leopard itself, it runs pretty well. There are a few bugs with AirPort that need to be squashed, though — I do like to be able to log on to my wireless network after I resume. The frame rate of the Dock could also use a little optimization, but it IS doing a lot more than it used to.

My favorite feature, though, is Spaces — yes, I have multiple desktops on the Mac now, as I would as if I were using pretty much any modern window manager on Linux. I love having the ability to shuffle applications around accordingly between the desktops. The only improvement I could possibly see with Spaces is perhaps better Expose integration, but I’m not going to complain too much. Leopard’s a good release, but it’s good advice to hang on for 10.5.1 (or 10.5.2 for that matter).

The BBC reports that Internet security firm Sophos is recommending users to switch to Macs to avoid malware installed over the Internet.

Does this make some sense? Absolutely — there’s very little malware currently available for Mac OS X. However, security through obscurity is only a temporary condition, and that any mass exodus to Macintosh, however unlikely that may be, will ultimately bring with it a torrent of malware. Granted, the Mac OS X architecture does make it much more difficult to bundle malware applications. Not having its browser totally integrated into the OS is a good start. However, a little social engineering goes a long way. That’s how most malware is installed these days, and there isn’t — and there may never be — any effective software solution for overcoming that. Education is the key.

Personally, I think Windows Vista will improve this situation quite well for Windows users — it’s so secure, you can’t even delete a shortcut without confirming it three times. :P In all seriousness, decoupling IE from the operating system — something Microsoft once said was “impossible” (ha!) — will make a big difference on Vista. I’ve also noticed that Windows XP Service Pack 2 has had a lot to do with alleviating this problem. There’s still that lousy social engineering aspect, though, and it all comes back to user education, because no operating system is 100% secure. I’ll leave how to tackle user education to another post or 40…LOL. Time to go to bed.

J