Lets be honest, Internet Explorer 6 is certainly not very popular amongst the media/social networking giants of the Web 2.0 world.

First it was Digg that hinted at cutting support for the browser, and now it looks like Google’s YouTube is starting to phase out the browser also. The screenshot taken by a Internet Explorer 6 user pretty much concludes that the time for the browser is up.

Following the trend Digg is setting, it looks like YouTube will also prefer spending more time on optimizing their site for newer and better browsers rather than paying attention to the old Micsrosoft browser.

I totally agree with this move and wish allot of more sites would follow this trend.

Yesterday afternoon I decided to install a nifty plugin called Flagfox, this plugin displays a flag next to the url corresponding to the country the site is hosted in. So this morning while having my first cup of coffee and browsing my normal blogs like iMod and 2Oceansvibe I noticed that non of these site are actualy hosted in South Africa.

This made me think, what classifies a site as a local site? Is it simply the co.za domain? Or perhaps the fact that the author lives in South Africa? Maybe its because the content is only geared towards local people.

For me what makes a site local is a combination of almost all of the factors above. Personaly the 1st thing I look at when classifying a website as local is checking where it is hosted, and then obviously the content.

This brings me to the local blog aggregators Afrigator and Amatomu, how do they specify if a blog is South African? Do they actualy check if site is relevant to South Africa or is it up to the author of the blog to decide whetere his site is local? As previously stated for me for a site to be a local site it needs to be hosted localaly and content must be relevant to South Africa, the first can be debatable on if the content is realy relevant to South Africa. Now take Carblog as an example, I could be wrong but just a quick visit to the blog released nothing realy local to me, just posts about cars being released with price tags in pounds. Now is this a local site cause it has a co.za domain or because the author resides localy as the content is not realy relevent to South Africa and the site is hosted in USA.

Sure everybody has their own views of what makes a site local and I would like to have your views on this, as 8 out of the top ten 10 South Africa blogs on Amatomu (Afrigator was down at the time I wrote this) are not hosted localy and some of them has content not relevant to South Africa.

Please give me your views on what you think makes a site local.

First Google took on the browser arena with their Chrome Browser and now they are ready to take on the Operating System arena with their new OS called Google Chrome OS.

Google Chrome OS is an open source, lightweight operating system that will initially be targeted at netbooks. Later this year Google will open-source its code, and netbooks running Google Chrome OS will be available for consumers in the second half of 2010. Because Google is already talking to partners about the project, and they’ll soon be working with the open source community, Google wanted to share their vision now so everyone understands what they are trying to achieve.

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. Google is designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. As Google did for the Google Chrome browser, they are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

Google Chrome OS will run on both x86 as well as ARM chips and we are working with multiple OEMs to bring a number of netbooks to market next year.

Google Chrome OS is a new project, separate from Android. Android was designed from the beginning to work across a variety of devices from phones to set-top boxes to netbooks. Google Chrome OS is being created for people who spend most of their time on the web, and is being designed to power computers ranging from small netbooks to full-size desktop systems.

Google still have a lot of work to do, and they’re definitely going to need a lot of help from the open source community to accomplish this vision.

Google Chrome OS seems to me like another entrant specificly for the netbook arena and I for one would like to see a better lightweight operating system than the current popular Limpus Lite. Not only do I think it will perform well but with a name like Chrome it should probably have the nice look of the Chrome browser.

If you are a true geek then there would be no need to worry as you probably are not running Internet Explorer on any of your machines, for those of you that do use Internet Explorer a very crticial security vulnerability has been discovered in Internet Explorer without any fix for it.

The exploit can hijack a computer remotely by the victim simply visiting a compromised website. The attack allows hackers to exploit a hole into the victims computer through Microsoft Video ActiveX Control.

The exploit only affects Internet Explorer users running Win Xp and Win Server 2003. A patch for it could take months to ready, but for now a temporary work around has been posted on Microsoft’s support website under the “Fix it” feature (Click Here). Users can enable or disable the work around through Microsoft’s web site.

Mircosoft has adviced Windows Vista and Windows Server 2008 users to take these steps as a precaution. Internet Explorer 6 and 7 users are at risk but not Internet Explorer 8 users.

Hopefully you have already downloaded and installed Firefox 3.5 on your PC, if not do yourself a favour and download it here. Even if you are a regular Firefox user am sure you do not know all keyboard shortcuts for all possible options. So to make your life easier, I present the complete list of all keyboard shorcuts in Firefox 3.5.

Here we go,

Navigation

• Back – Alt+Left Arrow, Backspace
• Forward – Alt+Right Arrow, Shift+Backspace
• Home – Alt+Home
• Open File – Ctrl+O
• Reload – F5, Ctrl +R
• Reload (override cache) – Ctrl+F5, Ctrl+Shift+R
• Stop – Esc

Current Page

• Go to Bottom of Page – End
• Go to Top of Page – Home
• Move to Next Frame – F6
• Move to Previous Frame – Shift+F6

Page Info

• Page Source – Ctrl+U
• Print – Ctrl+P
• Save Page As – Ctrl+S
• Zoom In – Ctrl++
• Zoom Out – Ctrl+-
• Zoom Reset – Ctrl+0

Editing

• Copy – Ctrl+C
• Cut – Ctrl+X
• Delete – Delete
• Paste – Ctrl+V
• Redo – Ctrl+Y
• Select All – Ctrl+A
• Undo – Ctrl+Z

Search

• Find – Ctrl+F
• Find Again – F3, Ctrl+G
• Find As You Type Link – ‘
• Find As You Type Text – /
• Find Previous – Shift+F3
• Web Search – Ctrl+K, Ctrl+E

Windows & Tabs

• Close Tab – Ctrl+W, Ctrl+F4
• Close Window – Ctrl+Shift+W, Alt+F4
• Move Tab Left (when tab is focused) – Ctrl+Left Arrow, Ctrl+Up Arrow
• Move Tab Right (when tab is focused) – Ctrl+Right Arrow, Ctrl+Down Arrow
• Move Tab to Beginning (when tab is focused) – Ctrl +Home
• Move Tab to End (when tab is focused) – Ctrl+End
• New Tab – Ctrl+T
• New Window – Ctrl+N
• Next Tab – Ctrl+Tab, Ctrl+Page Down
• Open Address in New Tab (from Location Bar or Search Bar) – Alt+Enter
• Previous Tab – Ctrl+Shift+Tab, Ctrl+Page Up
• Undo Close Tab – Ctrl+Shift+T
• Select Tab (1 to – Ctrl+(1 to
• Select Last Tab – Ctrl+9

Tools

• Bookmark All Tabs – Ctrl+Shift+D
• Bookmark This Page – Ctrl+D
• Bookmarks – Ctrl+B, Ctrl+I
• Caret Browsing – F7
• Downloads – Ctrl+J
• History – Ctrl+H
• Clear Private Data – Ctrl+Shift+Del
• Error Console – Ctrl+Shift+J

Miscellaneous

• Complete .com Address – Ctrl+Enter
• Complete .net Address – Shift+Enter
• Complete .org Address – Ctrl+Shift+Enter
• Delete Selected Autocomplete Entry – Del
• Toggle Full Screen – F11
• Help – F1
• Select Location Bar – Alt+D, F6, Ctrl+L
• Select or Manage Search Engines (when Search Bar is focused) – Alt+Up Arrow, Alt+Down Arrow, F4

Hopefully you know most of these already and have learned a few along the way.

Great news for those of us on the last few days of the month without international cap. Some guy, name still unknow, has come to the rescue to our problem by offering a local web proxy service called ZA-Portal.

ZA-Portal is not only a web proxy but they offer other services such as rappid leech, a type of rapidshare service, aswell as mirrors to some sites and even script based games all on local bandwidth.

The question on everybodies lips now is will this service be offered for longer than a month or two without shutting down like previous attempts like this. Users ons the MyBroadband forum reports that speed on the proxy service is exceptionaly good and I can speak for it aswell after testing it out. The owner of ZA-Portal also announced a 2nd and 3rd proxy in the pipeline as demand is very big at the moment.

All and all I would say this is great news for us local users and only time will tell if the service will be either suspended or change into a paid for service, although the owner of ZA-Portal said that would never be the case.

Good luck ZA-Portal, we hope you stick around for long.

Wanna see how many users are downloading Firefox 3.5 right now?

Mozilla launched http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/ so users can see in real-time how many downloads are happening of the new Firefox 3.5 release. What it does is display the amount of Firefox 3.5 downloads per second happening, grouping it by country aswell. It also shows the total amount of downloads completed per country.

By the time I posted this entry there was already 747000 downloads completed, from which South Africa contributed 1300. Not bad considering the download is only available for a few hours now. Go check out the live stats at http://downloadstats.mozilla.com/

Firefox 3.5 was released today. Firefox 3.5  is based on the Gecko 1.9.1 rendering platform, which has been under development for the past year. Firefox 3.5 offers many changes over the previous version, supporting new web technologies, improving performance and ease of use.

Some of the noteable features are:

• Support for the HTML5 <video> and <audio> elements including native support for Ogg Theora encoded video and Vorbis encoded audio. (Try it here!)
• Improved tools for controlling your private data, including a Private Browsing Mode.
• The ability to share your location with websites using Location Aware Browsing. (Try it here!)
• Support for native JSON, and web worker threads.
• Support for new web technologies such as: downloadable fonts, CSS media queries, new transformations and properties, JavaScript query selectors, HTML5 local storage and offline application storage, <canvas> text, ICC profiles, and SVG transforms.

I have been running the beta version of Firefox 3.5 for some time now and have been very impressed to date, especialy performance wise. So if you’re a Firefox fanboi go ahead and download the Firefox 3.5 now. Download available here or locally here.

Seacom the new undersea cable bringing afordable bandwidth to Africa’s launch has been delayed.

Acording to the Seacom blog the reason for the delay is due to cautionary for pirates as the cable runs through pirate infested waters where there is still some work due to be done before the cable goes live.

The launch date has been pushed from 27 June 2009 to 23 July 2009, for more info visit the Seacom Blog.