Chris Messina’s take on Opera Unite is a good read. “Now, it might sound ironic coming from me that I think Opera was wrong to paint their pitch with the paint of libertarian ethos, but if they’re going to succeed, they have to go beyond “owning your own data” to talking about why owning your own data is better or easier.” I thikn this nails it. Opera Unite is the anti-cloud computing. And the people who are almost certainly the most interested in that are the free software activitists who also want to live online. But then, they are not going to be using Opera in the first place.

“The licensing wars should be a thing of the past. The question is how to drive participation while building businesses that improve as participation increases.” Curious argument this. For one thing, I suspect that fixing licensing issues around patents and especially trademarks may help to energise open source businesses. For another, it is silly to knock Richard Stallman down as a leading figure in the “open source” movement, as he roundly rejects the label, and has been saying for years that he is not interesting in creating wealth, but preserving freedom.

The Add-Ons team released Collections, and with many things around Firefox, it can often be a surprise just how rapid the uptake is. Although maybe it is not that surprising that a blog like Duct Tape Marketing would apprecite the (what they might call) “sticky” aspect of having people subscribe to one’s colection.

Interesting, most especially for former employees at Sun. (And it is Jabbar, not Jabber). The comment about greed killing the company was interesting – I recall that the runaway success of the E10k product created a huge expansion at Sun, created an organistion that felt it had a proprietary cash-cow to protect (i.e. close) and instituted a massive amount of complexity in the company that was geared to selling expensive and complex products, not the simple, horizontally scaling white boxes that the market (lead by Google), realised it wanted. Well, that’s my take.

“if Mozilla and Opera Software want Microsoft to offer the user a choice of browser when they start Windows for the first time, when will we be given the opportunity to choose our search provider when we first start Firefox and Opera? After all, both currently default to Google because the two companies have deals in place with the search giant, who pays for search queries generated by the search box in both browsers.”

Not sure I agree with all the logic. But anyway, you can change the default search in Firefox with a single click at first run and with a single click on any subsequent search. This has been available in Firefox for years already.

“2008 has really been the Year of Firefox.” It’s true: the number of Firefox users in Europe has just about tripled in 2 years.

Curious story of IE8 updates causing Windows to fail to boot. Anyone else heard about this? It seems extraordinary.