I’m somewhat of a browser nerd. I’ve never realised how many web browsers I have installed, and the recent release of Google Chrome only adds to my collection.

Why do I, and quite possibly all computer fans in general, have so many browsers?

On my Mac alone, I have Camino, Firefox, Safari and Shiira. In a virtual machine, I have IE6, Firefox, Safari and Google Chrome. But why? I only use one.

Many people use the excuse of checking for compatiblity of their websites as justification for their browser collection, but you don’t really need two Gecko-based browsers, two WebKit engines but you probably do need half a million versions of IE.

I think the reason we have so many browsers is that we want to see how our primary browser will evolve.

Browsers generally steal ideas off one another (Firefox ’stole’ tabbed browsing off Opera, but IE ’stole’ it off Firefox) and through installing the largest range of browsers, we can see which innovative features will be integrated into ours. Shiira, for example, has many aesthetic features which I expect will one be adopted by other browsers whilst Chrome’s way of handling web apps will also probably soon be adopted.

The more browsers we see, the more features we can see and we know what our web experience will be like, even if we don’t switch browsers.

This post is from David Peralty, a Canadian problogger, who writes at xFEP, another Grand Effect blog.

Recently, there was a big deal made about how far we have come in search online. It seems some people think we have come 90% of the way to a perfect search system, probably meaning Google, and others say that we’ve probably only gotten 10% of the way to a perfect search engine.

This makes me wonder if we need a new search engine to come along, or just new innovations from the ones we already have. A long time ago, a fair number of geeks were using Alta Vista, a search engine that was fairly well known, but not really Yahoo! like in strength. Many people swore by its results and were happy, at least until a little search engine called Google started picking up steam. Now Alta Vista is, for most, just a distant memory, and Google seems to be the new goliath of search. But with Google’s business interests more focused on advertising, are their results getting more and more watered down, and gamed by people trying to make a quick buck?

There are new search engines popping up all the time, trying to either capture a certain niche, or attempting in some way to outdo Google, but is the new search engine that provides us the exact results we want already out there? Could Google, Yahoo or Microsoft do something revolutionary to enhance search that would make it the only system worth using?

Really, the importance of this whole conversation has a lot to do with the ever increasing archives of content stored online, and our growing need to be able to sift through information to find what we are looking for, and as school starts up again, and College students run to College Crunch or the ever important Wikipedia for help, I am left wondering if online search will ever be perfected.

What kind of results are you getting from search engines? Do you use any search engines outside of the big three? Let me know in the comments below.

I’ve used the Internet for about 10 years and I’ve had a website for about 8. I’m sure many of my memories are similar to other webmasters.

I decided to share some of the most interesting, and most embarrasing, memories of web ‘design’ and general use of the web which I have.

I think it demonstrates the progress I, and webmasters in general, have made that we’ve stopped some of these barbaric practices.

• Remember when you used a WYSIWYG editor? I used one called firstSite, which you can’t even buy on Amazon marketplace today. It was pretty user friendly though, having simple FTP as well as more complex facilities such as the ability to insert applets! Eventually, I progressed onto Dreamweaver and finally onto dynamic CMSes which didn’t even require an editor!
• Remember when you used your ISP’s free web hosting? I used NTL’s for quite a few years but I eventually needed more webspace and the ability to use PHP etc.
• Remember when you searched for free hosting, after you stopped using your ISP’s? I did, and I remember the number of ads I got. On the whole part, these free webhosts were pretty unreliable with the exception of Bravehost, who unfortunately filled my sites with lots of adverts.
• Remember when you used to have a guestbook? I had one which was always full of lots of spammy compliments which I naïvely believed!
• Remember when you tried to make a form for the first time? I do, and I remember wondering why it didn’t work. If only I realised I needed formmail, and a button why simply said ’submit’ wouldn’t do unless I made it POST.
• Remember when, after giving up making your own form, you turned to a site like Bravenet? I do. I remember using Bravenet for everything from site search to polls to guestbooks. The amazing thing is that Bravenet are still about, but now they call these ‘widgets’. How very 2 point oh of them.
• Remember when you used to use Blogger? Perhaps not, if you’re a blogger who started on WordPress.com, but I remember Blogger. Amazingly, it was probably much more flexible than WordPress.com but even self-hosted Blogger didn’t compare in flexibility to self-hosted WordPress. In all honesty, a CMS with pretty much no support for anything dynamic is bound to fail. I remember detesting Blogger’s comment system, as it had no Gravatar or TrackBack support, so I had to turn to HaloScan. Poor Azhar still uses it.
• Remember MovableType?
• Remember your first comment? Honestly, I can’t and my comments were lost in my MovableType to WordPress switch
• Remember when TLA worked? Before nasty Google started to penalise?
• Remember using blogging traffic exchanges, like BlogMad and BlogExplosion? A bit embarrasing, I know, but I came across Azhar, Paul, Danette and Sarah there… so it isn’t all bad! In all honestly, traffic exchanges gave me the initial readers I needed.
• Remember when some of the top blogs around were members of 9rules? Remember when Mashable, Rev2 and Paul Stamatiou were?
• Remember Solution Watch, which at one point was one of the most prestigious Web 2.0 blogs online?
• Remember when you used a desktop blogging client? For some reason, I thought it would be wise to do this until only a few months ago. Looks like I wasted $20 on ecto.
• Remember when you tried to get OS X running on your PC… back when Macs were PowerPC based.
• Remember before OS X existed and it could be argued that Macs were inferior to PCs?

Please excuse this awfully punctuated post, but if you have any similar memories feel free to add them to the comments.

One of my favourite vodcasts embarrasingly has to be Revision3’s ‘Internet Superstar’. They often bestow the great honour of internet superstardom on guests on their shows, but what exactly is an internet superstar?

Wiktionary defines a superstar as ’someone who has accumulated a vast amount of fame and wealth.’ Very few people have accumalted a vast amount of both fame and wealth online, those who have are the likes of Larry Page, but many have received quite a bit of ‘fame’ or ‘wealth’.

It’s my opinion that superstardom is when you are so famous in your field, you’re known to people widely beyond it. How many non-YouTubers will have heard of, for example, Tay Zonday? Not many, yet apparently he’s an internet superstar.

An internet superstar doesn’t yet exist. Plenty of internet celebrities, who are well-known but only in their field (the Internet), exist.

The BBC reports that ICANN are going to vote on Thursday whether or not to open up top level domains, allowing more. This would means many more suffixes than the 281 top level ones (e.g. .uk, .org, .biz, .com, .int) we currently have.

I dislike this move. Why? It would remove the nice way domains are categorised, make domains even more open to intellectual property use and to be honest and create far too many suffixes for it to be convenient to use.

The beauty of domain names to me is what they were intended to represent. .com was supposed to represent a commercial entity, .org was supposed to represent a non-profit, .co.uk to represent a commercial British entity, .int to represent an international organisation and .su to represent the Soviet Union. A key problem with domain names is that ICANN is American-dominated, which messes up this nice system. .com is informally accepted as the US suffix whilst .gov and .mil are officially American; which is surely not ‘right’ due to the international nature of the Internet.

As time went on, domain name categorisation has grown even more polluted. Is there really a need for .name, .aero or .museum? The only reason obscure domain categories like these are introduced is surely to make money. Such obscure suffixes aren’t user friendly; which is easier to remember: www.co-operative.coop or www.co-operative.com?

Some registries polluted the system even more, by advertising their domain for something which wasn’t its original purpose. A famous example of this is .tv, which the Tuvuluan registry designated to be used for television shows. Other examples of ‘domain hacks’ which pollute this system are .at, .fm and .me.

I see no purpose in opening it up. It will confuse people more and make the system more susceptible to abuse (if people register domains for the same reasons they register .info). ICANN describe opening it up as ‘the process of opening up new real estate’ and I guess it is, in a way. In a Superman Returns fashion, they are terraforming to form this real estate. By providing this real estate, there will be more trademark disputes, domain squatting but I guess there will be more money for registries and registrars, but domains themselves will be less valuable.