Yearly Archives: 2004

Rory’s Right, Leave Scoble Alone

I know I’ve criticized Scoble here a few times, and truth be known, it has led to him linking to me a few times. In fact, I think sometimes Robert reinforces bad behaviour (okay, how can you tell I’m the dad of a toddler?) with his willingness to link to those who criticize him. But it sure does more for his credibility than anything else he could do or say on his blog.

But, I just wanted to link to Rory Blyth’s post regarding the latest Scoble media player scuffle. I think Rory hits the nail on the head – Robert’s doing his job, and well. Leave him to it.

Cheers, Scoble!

New MSN Toolbar Beta Tells Users to Use IE

Ugh, Microsoft. Why can’t you just admit that Firefox has you beat at the moment, and leave people alone about their personal browser choice?

From beta.msn.toolbar.com when viewed with Firefox:

Warning! Your browser does not meet the minimum system requirements. You are recommended to use the MSN Toolbar Suite with Internet Explorer 5.01 or later.

I’m not saying that you should give up the fight – I’d love to see a good browser come out of Redmond – but right now you are asking your users to use an inferior, less secure browser. I can’t trust you when you do that. Integrating desktop search into my browser is not a big deal to me, when I can put a search box on my taskbar with any of the major desktop search vendors.

Just lay off the IE pressure. Internet Explorer sucks right now, plain and simple. Yes, even the SP2 version. Here are the three strikes against IE:

<li>It's slower than Firefox</li>
<li>It's more vulnerable than Firefox</li>
<li>It's less usable than Firefox - no tabbed browsing!</li>

I’m sure you’re working on it, and eventually it will be better, but right now it just sucks. And I don’t recommend that anyone use it.

MSN Desktop Search Beta

At Buzz’s prompting in an email this morning, I have downloaded and installed the new MSN Toolbar Suite Beta with desktop search functionality. Although I understand that this thing has impressed Scoble (not surprising) and a few others, it may suffer from the Desktop Search on training wheels that Google’s Desktop Search also suffer’s from, which is that there doesn’t appear to be any way to edit a list of known plain-text file extensions that the user would like to index. Both Copernic and X1 have this invaluable feature.

One feature that none of the desktop search companies seems to have figured out is that indexing when a computer is on battery power is a Very Bad Thing. Why can’t they check to see if a computer is on AC or battery power, and only perform indexing when on AC (or at least give users the option)? This just seems like common sense to me, but has been completely overlooked in all of the Desktop Search suites I’ve tried.

I have to say that my brief experience with this new MSN Toolbar hasn’t been wonderful. There’s no obvious preview functionality like both X1 and Copernic offer. For me, that’s two strikes already against it. We’ll see how long it lasts on my system. The one thing going for it is that Buzz says that hooks have been provided to allow ActiveWords to build an agent to allow ActiveWords to have unfettered access to the toolbar’s search capabilities. That intruiges me.

By the way, ActiveWords rules.

[Update] Marc’s mini-review of MSN’s Desktop Search sums up my thoughts perfectly. Decent enough beta, but not good enough for prime-time.