Recently I posted on my discovery of spoon.net, a service which allowed you to virtually run web browsers on a PC with no install for free. This service seemed to answer the cross-browser testing problem for all PC based web designers; until I re-visited the site again in the last few weeks and discovered Microsoft support had been stopped.

As I am a Mac based designer I hadn’t been using the service that often, so when I revisited the service to see if Mac support had been added I was stunned to see IE had been removed. I was greeted with a message explaining that they hoped to have IE support back soon, so I waited a few weeks and visited again, this time the message was a little more vague, it read ‘Come back soon for more information on how to use Internet Explorer with Spoon!’. So it would seem that Microsoft have pulled the plug and after doing a little research discovered that apparently it is to quote a phrase ‘violating Microsoft’s intellectual property rights’.

Just when something as user-friendly as spoon looked like curing the age old issue of cross-browser testing Microsoft come in with their size 9 boots and squashed the most important part of the service. Yet again Microsoft fail to make their already free software totally user friendly and web designers the world over will need to find alternative ways of checking their websites in all versions of IE.  What Microsoft fail to see is the bigger picture, this move will surely just help accelerate and compound the hate for all things IE and even Microsoft in an increasingly competitive browser market?

I personally hope spoon manage to overcome this ridiculous issue with Microsoft, or at very least Microsoft realise they are being so small minded it will ultimately be detrimental to their already floundering business.

Until then if anyone has discovered any great alternatives to the IE testing issue for both Mac and PC please let me know.

I recently read Top Ten Reasons You Should Quit Facebook written by Dan Yoder, and as with all articles I read it thoroughly before passing judgement, though it did feel paranoid and biased even with the little disclaimer at the beginning.  So after taking some time to absorb his opinion I realised mine hadn’t changed, I didn’t disagree with all the points but did feel it certainly wasn’t a balanced view.

In this post I am not going to analyse each of the ten reasons individually or too closely, this will just be my opinion as a user, consumer and social being.  Just in case you haven’t read Dan’s full article (link above) I have listed the ten reasons here for easy reference.

1. The Facebook application itself sucks
2. Facebook doesn’t (really) support the Open Web
3. Facebook makes it incredibly difficult to truly delete your account
4. Facebook is not technically competent enough to be trusted
5. Even your private data is shared with applications
6. Facebook is a bully
7. Facebook is pulling a classic bait-and-switch
8. Facebook has flat out declared war on privacy
9. Facebook’s CEO has a documented history of unethical behavior
10. Facebook’s Terms Of Service are completely one-sided

Firstly, I am going to cover the repetition of reasons five, seven, eight, nine and ten.  Basically these five reasons are at the centre of the ‘paranoia’ I spoke of earlier; they state between them that Facebook is changing its terms of service so that it can share your data, making it publically available while at the hands of some unscrupulous overlord (when you say it like that you can see why I use the word ‘paranoid’!).  My issue with this perception is that Facebook is a business that offers a service for free, obviously they need to monitise this and as user data is a growing market I think they would be foolish not to focus on its potential.

So let’s take the supermarket Tesco for example, they have been collating shopper buying habits now with their ‘Clubcard’ points system for some years and I suspect they aren’t just collecting this data for the fun of it; surely it stands to reason that if they know what you are buying  they can target you more effectively and increase their profits.  My point is that either Tesco get our data and hit us or another company collects the same data and sells it to someone else, one way or another they will find the information they want.  In addition, if this data is being used for the hard sell of products then doesn’t the user simply need to become more aware and less gullible.  In addition to this, who is to say that collection of user data is a bad thing, companies selling you things you need so you don’t need to shop around may not sound that bad to some shoppers, or am I missing something?

We should also bear-in-mind that Facebook is a huge brand, like Microsoft if it steps out of line or tries to monopolise the market it is big enough to be noticed by all the authorities that matter, and they are not stupid.

Can Facebook be trusted technically and does it really support the open web?  These two views seem to me to be biased as I am pretty sure there are many other big brand names whose websites are like Swiss Cheese technically, and i don’t think it is alone in its fear of the open web, just look at the newspaper industry, the fear of not making enough money will always win unfortunately.

For balance, I do think the interface could be more intuative and stable, and if account deletion is as difficult as Dan states then this is a negative.  However, I do have a number of friends who have decided to leave Facebook for different reasons than Dan states but they didn’t seem to have any problems leaving at all!

In conclusion, Facebook has been a revolution for people in all walks of life.  It has helped millions communicate with family and friends from all around the globe, it has broken down barriers and given those who can’t get out a window into a social world; if it wasn’t Facebook offering this service and sharing the data it would be some other organisation and many already are.  Even in the last few days Facebook has announced a new simpler way of checking the privacy settings on all accounts, that certainly sounds like a company trying to do the right thing to me!

The European Competition Commission have forced Microsoft to offer alternative web browsers with their operating systems, which will be available from March 2010 in Europe. This will obviously confuse some of the less techy users but it may also achieve something I think we all want – the accelerated demise of Internet Explorer 6!

The new Windows update once installed will give the user a choice of browsers, including Google Chrome, Opera , Safari and best of all Firefox. Those that simply think Internet Explorer is the web may find this confusing and ultimately will select the safe IE option – but hey, at least they upgraded. IE6 has caused us web designers a lot of trouble over the last few years and this force update may just make it truly possible for the first time to stop supporting it completely. The IE7 and 8 updates have helped reduce IE6′s domination but an active choice may just do enough to finally make this out-of-date browser insignificant enough to finally be ignored, ultimately this will educate the masses to the infinitely better options available.

With any luck this will be what most web designer have been waiting for, yes, it may take a while but it’s a massive step in the right direction.