If you are a programmer and still think of JavaScript as of a tiny dirty and overall useless programming language designed exclusivelly for simple web-effects I have a cure for you.

Check out Douglas Crockford’s website, which explains in a very well written manner why JavaScript is the world’s most misunderstood programming language and tells you how to use its power to develop complex systems efficiently.

The information on Douglas’s website is especially useful for professionals (unlike most of other JavaScript resources apparently targeted to amateurs) and recommended to everyone.

Oh, I almost forgot to mention but it is the thing that should convince you to really take a look at that site.
Doug is Yahoo!’s leading JavaScript Architect.

Internet Explorer 7.0 is out.

New IE features will sound familiar to Firefox users:

• Tabbed browsing
• Improved security
• Simplified UI
• Built-in rss
• Plugins support — not really a new feature but the way it’s offered is kind of new. Compare it to this to see what I mean

You can now imagine IE team boss at Microsoft screaming: “Do whatever you want but you HAVE to make it not worse than the Firefox is!” Well… he had a good reason to put it that way.

The history of Microsoft’s web browser is pretty illustrative. It was not the first product on the market and it took seven years of “browser wars” from IE 1.0 in 1995 (nobody knew it existed at that time) till IE 6.0 in 2002 (when Explorer’s share hit 96%, which practically meant it was the only browser out there).

Microsoft’s success could be easily explained by its monopoly in OS market and the fact that the product was free and included with every copy of Windows (you had to pay for Netscape). Free product made by Microsoft beats non-free product made by a small company… period. There is more about it. In 2001 Internet Explorer 5.5 was actually the best web browser available. IE still has more features that one can imagine – VML support, DirectX filters and transitions, more built-in extensions than any other product. None of these features are standards but why care about standards in your market share is 96%? You are the standard then.

I just checked this website logs and here is what we have now: Internet Explorer – 54%, Firefox – 40% and 6% is the rest of the crowd. Wow, Microsoft’s share dropped from 96% in 2002 to 54% now. Read it again. Microsoft, a giant corporation, the monopoly lost 40% of the market to open source browser. It seems that from ninty-five-plus-percent-market-share position they missed a very important point – users and what they want. Tons of proprietary features grown during “the war” were quite a bad investment. If you are making e-commerce site then you can’t afford loosing even 5% of users due to “IE only optimization”. Professional web developers who came to the scene at the time of IE peak knew this very well and have been committed to cross-browser code as opposed to “Best viewed with IE 4.0” features. The plan of holding the web in proprietary hands didn’t work.

When Firefox was released last year it offered some important things people needed (primary better security and tabbed browsing for casual public; better standards support, plugins, built-in rss, which was well accepted by Web 2.0 people). Overall it was the best product on the market at that time and it was free. New versions of Firefox are released almost weekly and it gets pretty annoying sometimes but it keeps changing and changing along the direction pointed by users, which seems to be the only way to keep leadership in the modern software world.

Now Microsoft has the second chance to hit back with 7.0. The Browsers War II is coming and it’s going to be interesting. Microsoft is still the same powerful monopoly and their product looks pretty good at the moment. Will this be enough to beat a liquid “always beta” style of Firefox development? I don’t know but if it won’t then we can tell that a serious paradigm shift in software developement, which has been happening recently, passed the point of non return and everybody who don’t realize this will need to leave the train.

Update: Right when I was writing this post Mozilla released Firefox 2.0 as apparent response to Microsoft. Now it’s Redmond’s turn again.

Metalink celebrates its 4th anniversary this week!

We had a good year and better yet to come. Thanks to everyone who has been with us through all that time — our customers, their users and our great team. Everyone who ever been a part of the team is invited to join us in the “Tolstiy fraer” pub near to the office (contact Marina for details and to reserve your beer).

Congratulations are welcomed; gifts are accepted but not required
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Skype is without doubt one of the best modern examples of consumer market application done right. Anyone who develops for the same market segment can definitely learn some good practices from it.

Let’s start from the beginning (and often the most critical part of conversion funnel) – software download process. There are numerous approaches to this problem from plain download link to auto-installing activex downloaders. You can take a look at Skype’s implementation here. Wow, it’s that simple. The process is structured in steps with pre-requisites first, then download button with release details below, then download process illustrations, then setup wizard instructions, then “how to start it and see that it’s running”.
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