Google Versus Microsoft

Google is changing the computing paradigm. Their release of applications such as Gmail and the Google Desktop Search Tool, coupled with their purchase of companies such as Blogger and Picassa, show their intent to render the operating sytem irrelevant. The message: you can get all of your work done on any kind of PC. A Google alliance with Mozilla Firefox further erodes the erstwhile Microsoft dominance.

Associated Press
Google Muscles Into Microsoft's Turf
Monday November 22, 1:54 am ET
By Allison Linn, AP Business Writer Google Muscles Into Microsoft's Turf, Rolling Out New Products, Including Computer Desktop

SEATTLE (AP) -- Not too long ago, Google Inc. seemed little more than a pesky insect to Microsoft Corp.'s 800-pound gorilla. No more. As Google rapidly rolls out new products, the company best known for its wildly popular search engine is muscling into the software giant's turf, including its stronghold: the computer desktop.

Analysts say Google's aggressive ambitions could pose a formidable threat to Microsoft because it gets to the heart of what drives Microsoft's dominance: its control of the user experience through the Windows operating system.

If successful, Google could help refashion computing, making people less reliant on storing information on the Microsoft-powered PC on their desk and more dependent on free Web-based e-mail and search functions that can be accessed anywhere from any device regardless of the operating system.

Under such circumstances, the risk for Microsoft is that the computer desktop as we know it could cease to exist, said David Garrity, an analyst with Caris & Co. The question, Garrity said, is whether computer buyers may one day decide that they no longer even need a Microsoft operating system.

The two companies are already battling it out on fronts including Web search, free e-mail and better ways for searching individual computers. Analysts say that's evidence Microsoft should -- and likely is -- taking Google much more seriously.

"They'd be mad not to," said Niki Scevak with Jupiter Research.

Marissa Mayer, Google's director of consumer Web products, said the company's goal is to organize information and make it universally accessible, and that goes far beyond search.

But she downplays the suggestion that Google's tools could eventually overtake Microsoft's ubiquitous software, saying the company doesn't currently have such plans but "it's hard to speculate" what the future might bring. Chief executive Eric Schmidt has, however, ruled out developing a Google browser to compete with Microsoft's dominant Internet Explorer.

The Google-Microsoft competition is good news for consumers because it means more choices and better products.

For instance, Google's expansion into e-mail already has forced Microsoft and others to dramatically increase free storage. Analysts say it's also prodding Microsoft to improve products customers have long complained about.

As it became clear that Google and other search engines were increasingly gaining control over people's time online, Microsoft's MSN online division rapidly began developing its own search technology. Microsoft had previously outsourced that job.

Web search isn't the only place where Microsoft is playing catch-up. In June, Microsoft launched an Internet browser toolbar that blocks pop-up ads and enables search, years after Google had created its own.

And after Google announced plans for Gmail, a free e-mail service touting massive amounts of memory, Microsoft said it would boost free memory on its Hotmail accounts. Adam Sohn, a director with MSN, said to expect more Hotmail improvements soon, but he wouldn't provide details.

Microsoft also has promised its own system for searching desktop computers, responding to frustrations over how difficult it is to find things like e-mails and family photos on increasingly cluttered computers. Google launched its desktop search product last month and said users should expect more improvements to that product.

Then there is ad delivery, where Microsoft recently extended through June 2006 a contract for Yahoo Inc. to place relevant ads alongside its regular search results. Ad placement alongside search results is Google's main cash cow.

David Smith, a vice president with Gartner Inc., says the chain of events illustrates that Google is proving to be customer-driven while Microsoft tends to be more driven by competitive threats.

Microsoft denies that Google has been the impetus for improvements in its products. Sohn says the company is simply responding to customer feedback. He also downplays the Google competition, saying Microsoft has always faced plenty of foes.

"There's lots of innovation and competition, and it's way bigger than just Google, who I think everybody's excited about and focused on because they're a little bit newer," Sohn said.

Google, meantime, has signaled that it will fight Microsoft's moves into its turf. The day before Microsoft launched a test version of its Web search engine, Google said it had nearly doubled the size of its search engine index. And this week, Mountain View, Calif.-based Google opened an office in Kirkland, not far from Microsoft's Redmond campus.

Mayer said the goal is to attract employees who don't want to leave their hometown.

Asked if that meant the company was recruiting Microsoft workers, she said: "Not in a specific or targeted way, but we are looking at technical workers in the Seattle area who are interested in working for Google."

Still, Scevak said it's still too early to say if Google will ultimately be able to pull off a massive shift in allegiance. While many people turn to Google for search, he says plenty of others could see no reason to leave Microsoft products, such as Hotmail -- especially if Microsoft is willing to match Google's improvements for free.

And while Google has been the first to desktop search, he says many users may still prefer to wait for Microsoft's more familiar product.

"It's a very, very early stage," Scevak said.

Browser Hijacking

Surrendering your browser to a hostile program can be a drag. It is irritating, dangerous and often difficult to remedy. This article outlines some steps you can implement to prevent browser hijacking in the first place.

washingtonpost.com

For Windows Users, 'Browser Hijacking' Is Only the Latest Threat
By Rob Pegoraro

Sunday, February 29, 2004

The ongoing Internet-security freakout for anybody using Windows keeps getting worse. Every other week yet another part of the online world gets a warning label slapped on it -- downloads, e-mail attachments, instant-messaging file transfers and now Web pages themselves.
"Browser hijacking" is as bad as it gets: Like the Blaster worm, this form of trickery can take over your software silently and invisibly.
Typically, users discover what has happened only after the actual hijacking: Their Internet Explorer home page and Web searches have been switched to strange sites, a flock of pop-up windows follows them around, their lists of favorite sites have become a catalogue of porn purveyors -- and none of these changes can be undone without tedious debugging.
These attacks differ from "spyware" invasions, which can have similar effects, in that victims never took the conscious step of downloading a program and then running its installer.
In some cases, the only mistake a user made was to click an "OK" button to allow what they thought was a change in home-page settings or an addition of a Web toolbar -- not knowing that the site would do much more than that.
This can be an understandable error when you look at the ways sites attempt to fool users; the sleaziest sites won't include a "no thanks" button in their pop-up alerts and will prevent users from closing these windows. (If that happens to you, hit Ctrl-Alt-Del, select Internet Explorer from the list of active programs, and click the "End Task" button to bail out.)
Often, though, the problem can be attributed to going online with an out-of-date copy of Windows, allowing a hijacker's site to exploit old vulnerabilities to worm its way into the PC.
(I've yet to see any reports of Mac or Linux browser hijacks.)
None of this has to happen. Beyond the usual precautions of running an up-to-date antivirus utility and firewall program and regularly downloading Microsoft's critical updates (windowsupdate.microsoft.com), two of the biggest security flaws behind browser hijacking can be fixed with a pair of quick downloads.
A third can be remedied by installing a newer, better browser, and your risk drops to nearly nothing.
Step one is to stop sites from throwing pop-ups at you in the first place. Not only will this make the Web vastly more pleasant, it will eliminate the ability of a would-be hijacker to badger you until you accept a software download or home-page switch.
The easiest pop-up blocker to adopt is the free Google Toolbar (toolbar.google.com); you do, however, need to run Internet Explorer 5.5 or newer to get this feature. Or install any other browser -- IE is the only one around these days that still lets in pop-ups. (I'll get back to this in a moment.)
Step two is to update the Java software on your machine. Java lets you run entire programs in a browser window and, when done right, it's not risky. Its developer, Sun Microsystems, designed it with tight limits on what a Web-based application can and can't do. But these limits must be enforced by a "virtual machine" program that runs on your own computer, and the one Microsoft developed contained a couple of bugs that hijackers abuse.
If you've been keeping your computer's software current with Windows Update, you should have a fixed version of this Microsoft virtual machine. But the better option is to download and install Sun's own, free Java virtual machine (www.java.com), which is both safer and more up-to-date than Microsoft's aging software.
Step three is to get away from something called ActiveX. Developed by Microsoft to compete with Java, it allows a similar sort of Web interactivity, but without any of Java's fail-safe limits: An ActiveX program in a Web page can do anything that a regular Windows program could do on your hard drive.
This can have legitimate uses. For instance, Windows Update uses ActiveX to scan for out-of-date components in your copy of Windows, and an ActiveX installer makes it easier to add Sun's Java software to Internet Explorer.
But ActiveX is exceedingly dangerous overall, since it relies on users to make the right call when they are presented with a "do you trust this publisher?" alert from Internet Explorer. Once they click "yes," the ActiveX program can do whatever it wants.
Updates to IE have limited ActiveX's reach, and an upcoming "Service Pack 2" revision for Windows XP will add still more restrictions. But it's wiser to use an ActiveX-free browser for everyday Web activity, reserving Internet Explorer for Windows Update and the occasional site that, because of its authors' inattention, works only in IE.
For most people, the best IE replacement is a free copy of Mozilla (www.mozilla.org), the descendant of Netscape. If you don't mind using a preview release, however, the faster, simpler and also free Mozilla Firefox will be a better fit (www.mozilla.org/projects/firefox/).
If your computer has already been infected, your antivirus program should clean it out. But you may need to resort to such specialized hijack-removal software as Hijack This! or CWShredder (both at http://www.spywareinfo.com/~merijn/downloads.html).
Whatever software you take with you on your Internet travels, you also need to bring some common-sense skepticism. Pushy salesmanship by a strange site deserves the same reception that an aggressive telemarketer would get in the real world: "No."

New Version Of AVG Available

A new and "improved" version of AVG is now available. The old version will function for two more months. Get the new free AVG here.

Firefox: Washington Post Article (11/14/04)

washingtonpost.com
Firefox Leaves No Reason to Endure Internet Explorer

By Rob Pegoraro

Sunday, November 14, 2004; Page F07

Internet Explorer, you're fired.

That should have been said a long time ago. After Microsoft cemented a monopoly of the Web-browser market, it let Internet Explorer go stale, parceling out ho-hum updates that neglected vulnerabilities routinely exploited by hostile Web sites. Not until August's Windows XP Service Pack 2 update did (some) users get any real relief.

And yet people found reasons to stick with IE -- alternative browsers cost money, were too slow, too complicated, or didn't work with enough Web sites.

No more. Tuesday, the answer to IE arrived: a safe, free, fast, simple and compatible browser called Mozilla Firefox.

Firefox (available for Win 98 or newer, Mac OS X and Linux at www.mozilla.org) is an unlikely rival, developed by a small nonprofit group with extensive volunteer help. Its code dates to Netscape and its open-source successor, Mozilla, but in the two years since Firefox debuted as a minimal, browser-only offshoot of those sprawling suites, it has grown into a remarkable product.

Firefox displays an elegant simplicity within and without. Its toolbar presents only the basic browsing commands: back, forward, reload, stop, home. Its Options screen consists of five simple categories of settings -- most of which don't need adjusting, since the defaults actually make sense.

One in particular should delight many long-suffering Web users: Firefox blocks pop-up ads automatically.

But Firefox's security goes deeper than that. It doesn't support Microsoft's dangerous ActiveX software, which gives a Web site the run of your computer. It omits IE's extensive hooks into the rest of Windows, which can turn a mishap into a systemwide meltdown.

Firefox resists "phishing" scams, in which con artists lure users into entering personal info on fake Web pages, by making it easier to tell good sites from bad. When you land on an encrypted page -- almost no phishing sites provide this protection -- Firefox advertises that status by highlighting the address bar in yellow. It also lists that page's domain name on the status bar; if that doesn't match what you see in the address bar, you're probably on a phishing site.

To keep Firefox current with any security fixes, the browser is designed to check for updates automatically.

A "Find" bar at the bottom of Firefox's window lets you search for words on a page without blocking your view of the page itself; as you type a query, the first matching item is highlighted in green. "Find Next" and "Find Previous" buttons jump to other matches, and a "Highlight" button paints all of them in yellow.

For searches across the entire Web, a box at the top right provides a shortcut to Google queries, and a menu lists five other sites, including Yahoo, Amazon and eBay. Downloadable plug-ins offer access to such resources as the Internet Movie Database.

What if that Google search yields four interesting sites? Hold down the Control key as you click each link, and they will open behind separate tabs in your existing window. This tabbed browsing -- a feature shared with almost all non-IE browsers -- is far more efficient and far less cluttered than the old one-page-per-window approach.

Busy readers can also use Firefox's built-in RSS (Really Simple Syndication) newsreader to fetch updates from Web sites that publish their content using this standard. This "Live Bookmarks" feature lacks the flexibility of a stand-alone newsreader, but it's also simpler.

Web addicts can customize Firefox to no end with browser extensions that add functions and themes that alter its looks. Find the Options window's settings too limiting? Type "about: config" into the address bar and you'll see about 600 preferences to tweak.

I've used Firefox as my default browser since February, and in that time I've found few Web sites that don't look right in it. Most of the time, it's the Web site's fault: Microsoft's MSN Video blocks all non-IE browsers, while SideStep's airfare-search tool employs ActiveX (an ActiveX-free version is in the works). In these rare cases, I will fire up IE -- it's not like I can uninstall it -- or, more often, vote with my mouse and move on to another site.

Switching from IE to Firefox is nearly painless. Download a 4.7-megabyte installer, run it, and let it import your existing IE data. Your plug-ins, bookmarks, browsing history and even cookies should transfer over (IE's home page and any saved passwords should be imported, but were not in my tests); you can then pick up in Firefox exactly where you left off in IE.

I think anybody using Internet Explorer should switch to Firefox today. Seriously. Even if you've loaded every IE security update, Firefox will give you a faster, more useful view of the Web. If you haven't -- or if you use a pre-XP version of Windows ineligible for Service Pack 2's security fixes -- it would be lunacy to stick with IE.

(If you're using Mac OS X or Linux, there's no such urgency; Apple's Safari, for example, is a fine browser in its own right and offers a few conveniences that Firefox leaves out.)

Firefox's story doesn't end with this 1.0 version. Some upgrades, such as a rewrite of its awkward bookmarks-management interface, are waiting for later releases. But the beauty of an open-source product like this is that you can participate in its evolution. Firefox's code is open for anybody to inspect and improve; you can browse a database of bugs (bugzilla.mozilla.org) and vote on what you want to see changed next.

All of these advantages may still not suffice to knock off IE anytime soon. But Firefox's development won't grind to a halt if it doesn't suit some company's marketing plans. Can you say that about IE?

Living with technology, or trying to? E-mail Rob Pegoraro at rob@twp.com.

© 2004 The Washington Post Company

Firefox: NY Times Article (11/15/04)

The New York Times
November 15, 2004
In the Battle of the Browsers '04, Firefox Aims at Microsoft
By STEVE LOHR and JOHN MARKOFF

Does anyone remember the browser wars?

In the rapid-fire pace of the technology business, Microsoft's successful, though illegal, campaign to thwart competition in the market for Web browsing software during the 1990's seems to be ancient history.

The corporate target, Netscape Communications, is all but a memory today, a tiny unit of Time Warner. And the last thread of the epic federal antitrust suit - a case focused on the browser market - fell away last week when a longtime Microsoft foe made peace with its old adversary.

The Computer and Communications Industry Association said it would not request a Supreme Court review of the remedies against Microsoft, which it had believed to be too lenient, and instead would welcome Microsoft as a member of the trade group.

Yet a few refugees from the original Netscape and a new generation of software developers believe that browser software - the gateway to information and commerce on the Internet - still matters.

They are the ones behind the freely available, open-source Firefox browser, which was officially released last Tuesday, and they are committed to providing competition in the browser market.

"This is really about taking back the Web and not having to rely on the technology and technology standards of one company," said Brendan Eich, a former Netscape engineer who is the chief software architect of the Mozilla Foundation, the nonprofit group that has coordinated the development of Firefox.

Firefox has won praise from some Internet experts for being more innovative than Microsoft's Internet Explorer and less susceptible to malicious programs that routinely attack the Microsoft browser.

Firefox, they say, is a compact, free-standing browser designed to display Web pages rapidly while blocking pop-up ads and other unsolicited windows. Downloads of the new browser were running at the rate of a million a day last week.

Before its official release, an estimated eight million people downloaded a preview version of Firefox over the past five months.

There are other non-Microsoft browsers, like Safari from Apple Computer and Opera, created by a Norwegian company, Opera Software. But the early enthusiasm for the preview version of Firefox is a big reason that Internet Explorer's market share has slipped more than 2.5 percentage points in the last five months, to 92.9 percent at the end of October, its first decline since 1999, according to WebSideStory, a firm that tracks Web traffic.

The release of Firefox 1.0 last week could put more pressure on Microsoft. "Firefox is a real competitor," said David M. Smith, an analyst at Gartner, a research firm. "Anything that is growing is a competitor, and it is growing at Microsoft's expense."

The incipient rise of Firefox, some analysts say, points to an inherent weakness in a fundamental Microsoft business strategy: tying more and more products and features to its monopoly product, the Windows operating system. Internet Explorer is tightly bound to Windows, a move that Microsoft says improves the browser's performance.

This strategy, the analysts say, means that innovation in much of the company's software tends to move in lockstep with Windows development, and that pace has slowed as the operating system has become larger and increasingly complex.

"Microsoft has not done any fundamental innovation in the browser for years," said Michael Cusumano, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Sloan School of Management. "It doesn't surprise me that there are openings for smaller, lighter products that are separate from the operating system like Mozilla's Firefox."

Firefox also has been given a lift by the security vulnerabilities of Internet Explorer. The United States Computer Emergency Readiness Team, a group overseen by the Department of Homeland Security, took the unusual step last summer of suggesting a switch to browsers other than Internet Explorer as one way to reduce vulnerability to computer viruses.

Microsoft's strategy of tightly linking its browser to Windows, computer security experts say, does not necessarily make Internet Explorer more vulnerable. But Bruce Schneier, chief technology officer of Counterpane Internet Security, a security company, said the added complexity of that design increases the risk of security flaws.

Microsoft says it is moving ahead with browser development and has a team of more than 100 programmers working on advances to Internet Explorer. Security, company executives say, has improved considerably with the release in August with an update to Windows.

Despite its huge market share, Microsoft has ample motivation to keep enhancing Internet Explorer, they say. "Browsing the Web is a core experience," said Gary Share, a director of product management for Windows. "And if we want people to continue to use Windows, we have to make sure the browsing experience is as rich and as secure as we possibly can."

The Firefox development is being led, said Mr. Eich, 43, by a "new generation of hackers," like Ben Goodger, a 24-year-old native of New Zealand. Mr. Goodger, the lead engineer on Firefox, is one of the Mozilla Foundation's full-time staff of 12 people, working from informal offices in Mountain View, Calif.

Mr. Goodger headed a team of more than 80 mostly volunteer programmers. His motivation, he said, was mainly the engineer's satisfaction of crafting tight, coherent code that others can build on and that is easy for ordinary people to use.

"People really like using software that is polished," he said.

For Mitchell Baker, a former Netscape lawyer and president of the foundation, the warm reception for Firefox carries a measure of vindication. "The Mozilla project has been characterized by a level of relentless, dogged passion," Ms. Baker said.

"We got through the dark days when people thought we were a failure," she added, "Now I have a lot of optimism."

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