Thursday, December 18, 2008

New Interfaces

Although I have shuffled through web browsers over the years, from Nexus to Opera, I never really favoured Internet Explorer. At first I just found it inferior to Navigator, then I got annoyed when Microsoft bundled it with 98, and then I grew really annoyed when the anti-trust suit case became mired in its own complexity. (At least the EU's decision had some bite). Finally, the large number of security vulnerabilities alarmed me, the latest of which has necessitated drastic action. Although a patch was eventually released, users were actually encouraged to switch to Firefox and Opera; furthermore, this internal flaw spanned versions from 5 to 8, which is still in beta. (Perhaps, instead of updating 6 with features taken wholesale from Firefox, Microsoft should have fixed some of its legacy code.)

Fortunately, the Web constantly evolves and presents users with a plethora of options. Check out the Guardian's Top 100 Sites for the Year Ahead to discover some of them. My favorite from this list, apart from the regular standouts like Clusty, is Cooliris. This browser add-on is an image based search engine, in which you scroll through a "wall" of images to find your match, news item, or product. This approach is truly innovative and really worth trying. Other innovations, more of which should be coming, refine searches by minority or interest groups.

To escape all this check out the working model of the Antikythera Mechanism:

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Hey D:
Pretty fascinating clip. I am always amazed at how 'advanced' society was so long ago. I'll check out some of the browser tips...Hope all is well.
Cheers,
J

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