Mike Brittain

There’s no denying that I’m a staunch supporter of the Mozilla Firefox browser. In fact, you may have seen my name in the New York Times. But I’ll say it anyway: I’m not at all excited about the upcoming release of IE7.

Sure, I’m going to install it as soon as possible, check out the new interface, and see what’s different. But from everything I’ve read, there’s nothing new about this browser. Everything sounds like a repeat of something I’ve had in my browser for nearly a year now…

• Tabbed browsing: Zzzzzz…..
• Search tool bar: Zzzzz…..
• Simplified user interface: Zzzzz…..
• Web developer toolbar with DOM inspection: Zzzzz…..
• More security for Active X: Huh? Well it’s about time that Microsoft did something about that. We’ve only known for a few years that this is a problem.
• RSS feeds: Zzzz…. hhckk hhckk? Wait, maybe something interesting there.

Again, I have not checked out the new beta yet, but if RSS feeds are identified in IE7 in such a way that they are actually easy to subscribe to, then maybe IE has made some decent progress. The only native subscription to RSS feeds that I know of in Firefox are “live bookmarks”, which are incredibly inadequate. RSS is probably the most poorly implemented feature in Firefox. I have faith that this will improve.

The fact is, however, that these new features in IE7 are all goals that the creators of Firefox set out to accomplish in version 1.0. They did such a good job that they caused Microsoft to change direction midstream. IE7 was originally only going to ship with Vista, until the new OS became so delayed that there was no choice but to face the fact that Firefox was gaining precious ground in the marketplace.

Whatever. Maybe my biggest problem is that I’m going to have to listen to people in my office (who don’t know any better) go on and on in the coming months when IE7 is finally released about how great it is, when they’ve never even experienced these same features in Firefox. Inertia is a tragedy.

One parting thought, however. I was looking over the developer checklist for testing sites with the new browser. I found it funny that “Get the developer toolbar” came after the bullet point that discussed what to use the toolbar for. I would have thought it more appropriate for those to be reversed.

I just returned from my annual snowcat skiing trip in British Columbia. The snow was insane. Chi-Chi was able to join us this year at Baldface, hanging out on the snowcat, hiking, and relaxing at the lodge. I met a fantastic group of skiers and snowboarders from New York, Connecticut, California, and Hawaii.

I have posted some photos and video from the trip for your enjoyment… or maybe just mine.

Last weekend I took my favorite jetBlue flight from New York to Denver over the weekend. I got two days of skiing in at Copper Mountain and Vail. One of the guys along with me was Josh, who displayed some incredible balls in trying to throw a 360 from a small lip that we found in the trees.

When I lived in Summit County, I attended the annual Oktoberfest party in Breckenridge. It’s a time honored tradition of German heritage, oompah music, and drinking large quantities of beer from mugs the size of your head.

Two years ago, there was one of those inflatable games where two people get strapped to large bungee cords and race down a track. Technically, I think it was there for the kids, but two of my buddies got into it after having a few rounds, and… well, the results were really enjoyable. Two of the races are linked below:

• Race 1
• Race 2

Chris is racing on the left, and Will is on the right.

I certainly won’t claim to be the only one who has ever written one of these Array prototype methods, but Dustin Diaz has listed my inArray JavaScript method among his Top 10 most useful functions of all time. Thanks for the mention!

This method as originally listed with some other pieces of code that were posted to EmbiMEDIA Labs.