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It didn't even cover Apple.

They had some articles on apple and even linux.

It didn't even cover Apple.

They had some articles on apple and even linux.

The stats for MagPortal.com (should be fairly unbiased) are not showing a drop in MSIE of that magnitude. Here is a comparison going from the last week in May to the first week in July:

MSIE: 66.10% -> 64.34%
Firefox: 25.71% -> 27.41%
Safari: 5.90% -> 5.61%
Chrome: 2.29% -> 2.65%

I don't know where they get their stats from, but if I check the webserver logs for magportal.com (a fairly generic audience), I see 0.77% of unique IP addresses having "Linux" in the user-agent string over the past week.

They probably incorrectly labeled all Linux Firefox users as Windows Users ... Firefox has a global 25% share (probably in excess of 90% linux browser share)

For the Linux count to be off by a factor of 100 due to not counting Firefox, Firefox would need 99% market share among Linux users. A quick and dirty analysis of a very small sample of the logs from MagPortal.com gives the breakdown (unique IP addresses with "linux" in the user-agent string [case insensitive]):
FireFox: 53%
Gecko (FireFox + Seamonkey + Minefield + etc.): 72%
Konqueror: 11%
Opera: 2%

Those numbers could easily be off by a fair amount, and I haven't excluded things like Wget or Java from the total count when computing percentages, but I would be surprised if Konqueror would come out below 1% of Linux users on a better sample.

We have been using INetU for 6 years and have been very happy with them. We are hosted on FreeBSD/Apache, but INetU offers Windows/IIS too. Tech support has always been very responsive (usually can get someone on the phone immediately) for FreeBSD, and the machines have been very reliable.

For what it's worth, here are the statistics for MagPortal.com (excluding search engine spiders and other browsers) for December 2005 compared to December 2004:
MSIE 6.0: 81.35% (down from 83.39% in Dec 2004)
Mozilla/5.0: 15.17% (up from 8.82% in Dec 2004)
MSIE 5.0 + 5.01 + 5.5: 2.75% (down from 7.22% in Dec 2004)
Mozilla/4.0: 0.75% (up from 0.56% in Dec 2004)

They think there is something to patent here? Seems like there should be prior art all over the place. At MagPortal.com we have been using software to repair our links to articles for years.

1. Cross-platform - application runs on Linux, Windows, etc.
2. Easily parse XML data, making it work very nicely as a client in a client-server application passing XML.
3. Uses technologies that are familiar to web developers (XUL/XML, JavaScript).
4. Easily integrate HTML rendering into your application if you need it.

OK, you won't use it, but I did recently write a Mozilla application for MagPortal.com to allow our editors to work remotely. We are a Linux shop and our editors mostly use Windows, so it had to be cross-platform. Mozilla/XUL was used for the client application to provide a nice GUI interface (more sophisticated than what you could achieve with normal HTML -- uses widgets like <tree> and transfers data in a way that reduces latency for the user) that transfers XML back and forth across the Internet to the web server for storage. It works very nicely and is quite professional. I am somewhat surprised that you don't hear more noise about companies building custom applications like this with Mozilla.

McFarlane's book was my primary reference for the project. It is a very useful book, but I do agree with the reviewer that the index needs some work. Additionally, make sure you keep an eye on the errata page. I was a bit disappointed that the book didn't talk about how to parse generic XML in your application (look at the parseFromString() member function of DOMParser).

I seem to remember hearing long ago (I don't remember where from, so it could be completely wrong) that the subscription fees that people pay for print magazines typically just cover the printing and delivery, and the cost of the actual content is covered by the advertising. If that is the case, why can't online publications be profitable without needing to charge subscription fees? The cost of running a website should be much lower than printing and distributing paper copy (assuming you aren't blowing outrageous amounts of money on an overkill content management system). So, why can't online advertising cover the cost of content production? A few ideas:

1. Banner ads etc. don't pay as well as print ads. If this is the case, is it because the medium is inherently inferior, badly utilized (too many garbage ads like "You have 1 new message!" ruin the reputation of the medium), or are people overpaying for print ads relative to online (perhaps because it is hard to measure the effectiveness of print ads)
2. Do websites not get enough traffic to cover costs? There are certainly a lot more websites than print magazines. Maybe this diversity spreads the consumer base across too many content producers causing it to be too hard to get enough users to cover a site's fixed costs. Maybe as some sites switch from free to subscription their competitors will pick up enough audience to become profitable.