Andy Hedges’ Tech Blog

It seems as though Google is definitely up to something. They have been hiring fairly agressively recently. According to a New York Post article they have recently hired Joshua Bloch of Java fame and four people from Microsoft responsible for the abomination that is Internet Explorer.

Also of interest is that registration of gbrowser.com by Google.

Personally I wish Google would concentrate on their core competency - search. For instance when are they going to do something about all the shopping aggregators cluttering up their search results? What about Google bombs - slowly, I believe, Google are losing their users goodwill.

It seems as though Firefox adoption is starting to reach critical mass. Judging by the stats on my various websites the user base is doubling month on month and has done for the last 6 months (I might get around to publishing some stats if there is interest). If you aren’t using Firefox already you should be, you can download it here.

Some reasons to use Firefox:

• It has a far better security record than Internet Explorer
• It’s skinable, you can make it look how you want
• It’s extensible, there are many extensions you can download to make your browsing experience better
• Excellent (if not the best) standard support, including CSS2, PNG and XHTML
• A really sweet intergrated RSS reader
• Other stuff I can’t think of right now

Hannah and I went down to Wandsworth Townhall yesterday to give our Notice of Intent To Marry so it’s, literally, official. They ask a few questions like age, occupation then put them into a computer system and that’s it (oh they ask you if you are already related!).

Funnily enough we opened a bank account with Barclays later in the day and the questions they now ask are far more probing that the ones that the Registrar did. I suppose it is a reflection of what our society feels is more important.