dfbills.com blog

Well-known industry trender, Netcraft, has recently observed a spike in popularity of the Lynx web browser- particularly since the recent Pwn2Own competition.

Apparently growing concern over vulnerabilities in Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari are driving users to the hardcore Lynx browser.

“Lynx has not once suffered a buffer overflow in its image processing, and indeed has suffered no security vulnerabilities at all in the last 2 years.”

More details (and laughs) on my favorite April fools story of the day over at Netcraft in “Deluge of Browser Security Issues Drives Mass Migration.”

DSL Reports posted an interesting article “Broadband May Kill The Game Console Wars” which talks about the possibility of gaming in the cloud.  An fascinating item that I haven’t seen mentioned elsewhere.

Props to the folks over at Hootsuite.  Their 404 page was great, but the “fail whale” page is better!  Nice to see someone acknowledge a tech issue.

Thanks to David Steinberger for the grab.

Earlier today, Microsoft launched Internet Explorer 8.  This is their first major browser release since 2006.  Among the features are better standards support, increased speed and an attempt at feature parity with other modern browsers.

Oddly enough, Safari 4, Google Chrome and the Firefox 3.5 have all posted performance statistics showing that they are faster than IE 8. It’ll be interesting times as we all likely move to a third IE style sheet for modern standards-based layouts.

Sweet 404 page over at HootSuite.  I guess we’re there because “[We] like 404 pages”

404 Fowl Not Found

Perhaps you are here because:
• The page has moved
• The page no longer exists
• You were looking for a puppy and got lost
• You like 404 pages

Thanks to David Steinberger for the grab.

Apple has just released Safari 4 beta for both Mac and Windows.

Innovative new features in Safari 4 include:

Top Sites, a display of frequently visited pages in a stunning wall of previews so users can jump to their favorite sites with a single click;

Full History Search, where users search through titles, web addresses and the complete text of recently viewed pages to easily return to sites they’ve seen before;

Cover Flow, to make searching web history or bookmarks as fun and easy as paging through album art in iTunes

Tabs on Top, for better tabbed browsing with easy drag-and-drop tab management tools and an intuitive button for opening new ones;

Smart Address Field, that automatically completes web addresses by displaying an easy-to-read list of suggestions from Top Sites, bookmarks and browsing history;

Smart Search Field, where users fine-tune searches with recommendations from Google Suggest or a list of recent searches;

Full Page Zoom, for a closer look at any website without degrading the quality of the site’s layout and

Built-in web developer tools to debug, tweak and optimize a website for peak performance and compatibility; and

New Windows-native look in Safari for Windows, that uses standard Windows font rendering and native title bar, borders and toolbars so Safari fits the look and feel of other Windows XP and Windows Vista applications.

Apple really needs to spruce up their error pages.  I know this isn’t a 404, but hey- it’s Apple!

Regaining my focus on the clever 404 pages of the world wide web (now on computers for those of you who were waiting), I caught this humorous error screen this morning at 140it.com.  140it exists for one reason- to makes your tweet less than 140 characters. 

Rur-Roh
We’ve noticed an error and are working on getting it fixed.

Google has posted an interesting little piece entitled “2008: The year in spam” over on the Official Google Enterprise Blog.  This interesting analysis from the Postini Message Security team tells a little bit about our times.

Even big bad Facebook isn’t immune to the occasional web app error.  It is a bit rough when you get this on their homepage.

Sorry, an error has occurred.

We’re working on getting this fixed as soon as we can.