E-Musings Mon Immorata

Free Software Reigns Supreme Updated browsers, free download managers, and a mail client update keep Freeloader happy as a pig in clover This week the software drought seems to be over with at least 5 major software upgrades, as well as release of new applications. Most of the latter are in Beta, but show promising beginnings and if they remain free will add to Net wealth! First and foremost is MyIE2, now available in Version 0.9.13. Besides the usual bug-fixes and code enhancements, the new version add more features to an already rich feature set. Browsing between opened Tabs can now be done with a mouse gesture: hold down the right mouse button and scroll. The browser can also be used to launch external commands by piggy-backing on the Windows Command interpreter. Which means that M2 is no longer just a web browser. It can also act as a pretty good file explorer (as several of my colleagues use it so). I also welcome the new feature to backup your configuration files automatically. Every time I'd upgrade to a new build (when using the runtime installer), I'd need to first backup my configuration files, install the update then manually compare and update the configuration data: which was a time-consuming chore. Also new is a button to show the sidebar instead of using a keyboard sequence. Of course, the side bar is valuable. But is made more so after adding the History plug-in so you can view, and save your browser history as an HTML file. Do note that for now, this is restricted to the IE browser history and doesn't work if you also have the Mozilla ActiveX-powered alternate engine installed. I've tried to sow a seed in the lead developer's brain about M2 rendering pages using the Opera browser engine. The latter is available as a DLL but is supposedly restricted to authorized users, I'm sure the M2 development team will be able to hook M2 to Opera hook and allows legal Opera users like me to use one browser to view pages using 3 separate rendering engines. Opera browser engines are included with several WAP-enabled mobile phones. The second significant software released this week is Mozilla 1.6 for Windows, OS/2 and Mac. New are changes to Mozilla Mail that separate Recipient and Sender columns and support for vCards. In MailNews a user's signature can be automatically inserted above quoted text. A key development is a feature to selectively remove email from POP3 mail server accounts. However, this feature works only if you leave a copy of new messages received on the server. The browser includes a cross-platform NTLM authentication feature, and its search has been updated to also query the Ask Jeeves site. This version also includes "Translate Page" and View Source can reload a page. The ChatZilla IRC chat client has been merged into the suite and is no longer a separate standalone module. The Mozilla browser is a work in progress. And on the whole the Mozilla project appears to be in a state of partial suspended animation. Offerings like the Firebird browser and Thunderbird email client have passed their next release dates. And the Firebird 0.8 Beta too has serious bugs that either destroy older installations, constantly crash the browser and are nearly-incompatible with most add-in extensions! Microsoft seems to be taking the Linux threat head on. And their Windows Services for UNIX 3.5 (SFU 3.0) that once to cost $100 is now available for free. This version improves cross-platform inter-operability with better administration and management and allows access to UNIX applications with .NET. Other improvements include two-way password synchronization, user-name mapping, improved command-line features and more complementary tools and utilities. A unique Interix subsystem allows applications to be recompiled for Windows with greater ease. The product has been nominated as a finalist in the Best System Integration Solution category at 2004's LinuxWorld Product Excellence Awards. For more details click here. My favorite mail client Popcorn too has been updated to v1.60 final and the core difference between the final and beta builds is one additional bug fix. Overall I'm very pleased with PopCorn; even though I'm restricted to using just a single account in the freeware version. Of course my work around has been to configure multiple folders; each with one account and open them in turn. Tedious, but worth the extra effort. Of course, when time's short I use my older 1.5x freeware version. This week I chanced upon a really neat download utility: NetTransport which manages multiple thread-based file downloads from all kinds of web servers including secure ones. It's not a dedicated secure FTP client and shouldn't be used as one. I didn't have any issues when download files using HTTP, but often with FTP sites, NetTransport experienced frequent socket issues both when connected via DSL and on dial-up. I was also unable to use the File Explorer to FTP into web site and brows their content. I kept receiving an "invalid URL" error. When compared to my Fresh Download, my usual multi-thread download client NetTransport is more intuitive to use and occupies less system resources. And finally a neat but very basic file download client Sinner DL 1.0 Beta 4. This 12 kB file runs from a folder and saves downloads into that folder (for now). It supports multi-threaded downloads that are currently restricted to just 2 threads. You can minimize the app to the System Tray, but there are no configuration options available and the developer warns this is very much a work-in-progress. But this guy's developed other free software including CPU monitors and more. System Security Suite is a free cache cleaner that works with all versions of Windows. And can not only rid you computer of the usual History and typed-in addresses, but also IE's temporary files and even those generated by Windows itself. In addition, you can configure select folder paths to delete files from. As well as search, identify and remove BHO (browser helper objects) that commonly are inserted by spy ware. What I did find irritating when zapping temporary files is that the software requires a system restart. Click Here to Email Me