My painfully poky week with IE 8 (Webware)

In the interest of broadening my horizons, I promised Microsoft I’d give Internet Explorer 8 a fair shake by trying the browser as my default for a week.

And, boy, am I glad that week is over.

Microsoft’s browser rules the roost with about two-thirds of the market, according to Net Applications, which collects a broad set of data on which browsers people use. There’s nothing like being built into the dominant operating system for winning a popularity contest. Microsoft takes advantage of that position by building instrumentation into IE that illuminates what a typical Web user is doing.

There’s typical, and then there’s me. As somebody who spends dozens of hours a week in a Web browser, I’m sorry to say IE 8 is not for me. Although my Web-heavy lifestyle isn’t average, I believe the challenges I face on the Web foreshadow what the rest of the world will experience as the Internet inexorably encompasses ever more of our work and personal lives. I prefer browsers that aim toward where the puck is heading, as the tired but useful cliche goes.

IE 8 (download link) catches up to where the puck is today. It’s definitely a big improvement over its predecessors, with some commendable features including default support for Web standards. And I do hope people upgrade.

It’s just that in my personal experience, IE 8 not in the same league as my default browsers, Google’s Chrome or Mozilla’s Firefox.

There are competitive points from these rivals that one might have thought would weigh in to my antipathy for IE 8. Google makes a big fuss about Chrome’s high-performance JavaScript engine, which lets it run Web-based applications with greater sophistication and alacrity. Firefox fans adore the wealth of extensions that can tailor the browser to innumerable specific needs without cluttering the interface for those who don’t want those features. Microsoft counters with a study that shows its page-loading speed generally beating out rivals.

Slooooooow
In reality, it was something more mundane that gave me a Pavlovian feeling of dread when it was time to use the browser: its interface is slow.

When it was time for basic interactions such as launching new tabs, switching tabs, closing tabs, commanding IE to open pages, and scrolling through pages, I found myself all too often waiting for the browser to respond to my mouse and keyboard. I did miss some Firefox extensions, though I’m not a big user of them personally, and I did find Web applications like Gmail and Google Docs a bit slower. But those two gripes paled in comparison to performance…

See the full article at Webware.

Habbo Pulled In $74 Million In Real Revenues Last Year From Virtual Goods And Advertising

Convincing people to pay for nothing, or rather for things with zero marginal cost to produce, is a great business model—in theory. In practice, there are so few examples to point to, and most of them are overseas, such as Helsinki-based teen virtual world Habbo. The virtual world’s parent company, Sulake, today reported some selective financial and user data for Habbo. In 2008, Habbo’s revenues rose 20 percent to $74 million (50 million Euros), and posted positive operating cash flow (EBITDA) of $7 million (4.8 million Euros). It was even slightly profitable on a net income basis as well, however the company chose not to disclose that exact amount.

Perhaps the bulk of revenues are being plowed back into global expansion or to pay the salaries of Habbo’s 300 employees (yes, 300). But its sub-10% margins so far are underwhelming. And Habbo is supposed to be one of the shining examples of a real business based on a virtual economy. It also makes money from advertising, but the vast majority of its revenues comes from in-world gifting and virtual vanity items.

Habbo says it attracts 11.5 million unique visitors a month (based on internal Google Analytics data) and that more than 120 million Habbo characters have been created. How many have been abandoned, though, is unclear. ComScore estimates 8.7 million worldwide unique visitors in February, down from 9.3 million in December.

See the full article at TechCrunch.

Why toddlers don't do what they're told

New cognitive research shows that 3-year-olds neither plan for the future nor live completely in the present, but instead call up the past as they need it. ‘There is a lot of work in the field of cognitive development that focuses on how kids are basically little versions of adults trying to do the same things adults do, but they’re just not as good at it yet. What we show here is they are doing something completely different,’ says professor Yuko Munakata at the University of Colorado at Boulder.

Munakata’s team used a computer game and a setup that measures the diameter of the pupil of the eye to determine mental effort to study the cognitive abilities of 3-and-a-half-year-olds and 8-year-olds. The research concluded that while everything you tell toddlers seems to go in one ear and out the other, the study found that toddlers listen, but then store the information for later use. ‘For example, let’s say it’s cold outside and you tell your 3-year-old to go get his jacket out of his bedroom and get ready to go outside,’ says doctoral student Christopher Chatham. ‘You might expect the child to plan for the future, think "OK it’s cold outside so the jacket will keep me warm." But what we suggest is that this isn’t what goes on in a 3-year-old’s brain. Rather, they run outside, discover that it is cold, and then retrieve the memory of where their jacket is, and then they go get it.

Source: Slashdot.

Top 10 tools for a free online education

It’s easy to forget these days that the internet started out as a place for academics and researchers to trade data and knowledge. Recapture the web’s brain-expanding potential with these free resources for educating yourself online.

LifeHacker has an interesting post listing some various sites where you can teach yourself a great number of things:

• Teach yourself programming
• Get a Personal MBA
• Learn to actually use Ubuntu
• Get started on a new language
• Trade your skills, find an instructor
• Academic Earth and YouTube EDU
• Teach yourself all kinds of photography
• Get an unofficial liberal arts major
• Learn an instrument
• Learn from actual college courses online

If any of the above interests you then go check out the original article at LifeHacker.

Archos’ Android-based MID on track for July?

It hasn’t been much of a secret that Archos has an Android-based tablet / MID in the works, but it looks like the company is now finally talking a bit more openly about it, and dropping a few choice details in its recent year-end results announcement. The key bit is that the company is apparently planning to release the device "at the start of Q3 2009," which is actually fairly specific as far as these announcements go, though no doubt still subject to change if Archos sees fit. Otherwise, the only word on the MID is that it will pack some telephony features and, of course, include all of Archos’ usual multimedia applications.

Source: Engadget.