for users looking for an alternative
to Microsoft’s Internet Explorer
browser. Firefox stood for quality,
openness and strong standards support.
But, during the last couple of
years, Firefox has faced new challenges. Emerging competitors,
including Google Chrome and
Apple Safari, could also lay claim
to being innovative, open and, most
importantly, a viable alternative to
Internet Explorer. Even Microsoft
itself released a version of IE that
in many ways compared favorably
to Firefox. Firefox was starting to
look relatively old and was being
perceived as a slow and unstable
Web browser.
So, in some ways, Version 3. 5 of
the Mozilla browser was one of the
most important releases since the
very first Firefox. Firefox still isn’t
the fastest browser out there, but
with Version 3. 5 Mozilla has gone
a long way toward improving the
speed and stability of the browser.
Standards support has also been
boosted, including enhanced support for HTML 5.
Significantly, Firefox 3. 5 offers
one of the first and best browser
implementations of offline support
and desktop integration. These are
key features that point toward the
future of the Web, where Web-based
applications can also offer many of
the benefits of desktop apps.
—Jim Rapoza
☛
tinyurl.com/lymr25
‘Nehalem’ Family of
Processors
I reviewed many servers this year
based on the Intel Xeon 5500 processor family, otherwise known as
Nehalem.
In fairness, AMD server processors have had a memory architecture
Windows 7 was certainly one of the biggest tech
stories of 2009, so why didn’t it
make our Products of the Year list?
Simply put, none of e WEEK Labs’
analysts—myself included—was
enthusiastic enough about the new
Microsoft OS to put it there.
While Windows 7 may prove to
be the best overall operating system
Microsoft has delivered, in our tests,
it provided only incremental improvements over a highly unpopular predecessor—many of the critical improvements in Windows 7 were actually
included first in Windows Vista.
Windows 7 also has a curious
lack of continuity and logic across
features that lead to a seemingly
inexhaustible set of questions.
Do administrators really need the
added complexity (security, management and licensing) of a second
operating system to support legacy
applications, as XP Mode requires?
And if XP Mode is so critical, why
won’t it play nicely with Microsoft’s
latest communications technologies,
such as DirectAccess? And if we
really still need to run a legacy OS in
a virtual machine, do we really need
Windows 7 at the base to run the
hypervisor? Why not run all Windows-craving line-of-business applications
in an XP VM on top of a lean, modern
Linux distribution? Isn’t that alternative at least worth considering?
On a personal level, I was pretty
disappointed with Microsoft’s stance
on security with Windows 7. The OS
could have been all about secur-
ing data and the user experience,
but instead Microsoft sacrificed that
objective on the altar of usability and
profitability—toning down the pro-
tections afforded by UAC, limiting the
availability of hard disk and removable
drive encryption to the most expensive
SKUs, and even replacing and limiting
a security feature once available to all
business SKUs (Software Restrictions
Policies) with a similar one available
only to the Enterprise and Ultimate
SKUs (AppLocker).
Despite all this, I expect Windows
7 will likely gain significant traction
with enterprise IT—not because of
Windows 7’s greatness, but rather
because Microsoft alternatives are
not up to snuff and IT implement-
ers need to do something soon.
Windows XP, which still lives on
the vast majority of enterprise cli-
ent machines, is on its last legs of
commercial viability—with creaky
support for the latest hardware
and 64-bit architectures, as well
as Microsoft’s unsurprising lack of
commitment to its ongoing security
development. And Windows Vista
had too many perceived problems
and detractors to ever get off the
ground as a viable alternative.
Indeed, Windows 7 betters its
forebears in most of the ways a new
Windows should, but is it really the
right solution for the way people
compute today, given the increasing
viability of mobility and cloud-based
services in the enterprise? Do enter-
prises even need a fat client on the
desktop anymore?
I expect most Windows shops
will opt for Windows 7. And for many,
that’s fine. It’s familiar, it’s solid, and
it’s the path of least resistance.
Customers just need to ask
themselves if it’s the right choice
for today and tomorrow.
