Pope Watch 2005

Well folks, another one of my mother's childhood hopes for her son is about to go down the drain. My mother always hoped for me to become the eventual pope. I guess the fact that being an Atheist at the time of the next papal election would pretty much exclude me from the runnings. Guess I'll just have to continue my quest to be Emperor of the World.

Netscape Comeback?

Last weekend I downloaded the newest Beta version of the Netscape browser. I'm one of the types of people who likes to reminisce about the early days of the Internet, when Netscape was king and Infoseek was the best search engine. But, in the current Internet era, Infoseek is a relic of a bygone era and Netscape is an also-ran behind the mighty Internet Explorer and the up-and-coming Firefox.

Really, if you're already a Firefox user like me, then you'll pretty much be familiar with Netscape 8.0, as it's just a skin over the current Firefox 1.0 with a few additional features. As you may know, Firefox was originally developed by a few disenfranchised Netscape programmers who disliked what their parent company AOL was doing with their beloved browser (and their adoption of the "evil empire's" Internet Explorer software for the newer AOL releases).

The new Netscape browser utilizes some of the better features of Firefox (tabbed browsing is going to have to be a requirement in all future browser releases), combining them with some cool features from the Time Warner media empire (scrolling news stories and weather reports), and of course, the dreaded synergy where you drag down a good product by grouping it with your "lesser" offerings (like the built-in search engine, which on Firefox you may choose from several providers, only allows for the crummy Netscape search). All-in-all, it's a prettier version of Firefox, but not an improvement on it. The benefit is that, I believe, this will be the start of a new generation of private development on Firefox's capabilities. Imagine Disney-owned ESPN developing a sports themed browser which will give you easier access to sports scores and fantasy stats, or for Yahoo! geeks like me who can have a browser built around what we use it for.

Random Thoughts

I'm getting ready to go see my future wife-to-be Jessica Alba in Sin City, so I'm going to wrap it up early today. But I'll probably be back later today or tomorrow with a full post. But there's just one other thing that I had to comment on.

• Google announced that their upcoming G-Mail is going to allow for 2 gigabytes of e-mail space for their users. 2 f'in gigs! Just a tad bit excessive. With my work e-mail, I keep many of my important e-mails, and I'm barely up to a quarter-meg. Let alone anywhere near the gig that Google offered and Yahoo! Mail is going to offer in the near future. And do you think this is all just a tricky scheme by Google to get their competitors to match their unprecedented space while they keep their G-Mail in "testing." I believe I saw them taking new requests for about a day or two a couple of weeks ago, but have once again shut off G-Mail to new users. Pretty sneaky, sis.

Today's post was for last week's "Woman I'd Stalk If I Weren't So Lazy," Bambi Francisco. See, I can write about tech stuff, too... We have so much in common. Anyways fellow minions, they'll be more to come soon (hopefully!).