conormulligan.com / blog

Source: Ars Technica

When asked to respond to the availability of Safari on Windows, Mozilla’s vice-president of engineering, Mike Schroepfer, expressed his desire to see Apple supporting open standards for the web:

“It’s hard to predict what will happen with market share but we are excited to see the resurgence of interest in browsers. The availability of Safari on Windows reinforces the importance of browsers as critical components of today’s Internet experience. Mozilla’s mission is to promote an open, interoperable and participatory Internet. We encourage Apple to put their weight behind open standards and the open Web to help ensure all browser users, regardless of operating system or browser, can enjoy the best possible Web experience.”

Microsoft’s Kevin Kutz, a Windows business director, has this to say:

“With hundreds of millions of Windows users, it’s not a surprise that a company that makes web browsers would want it to work with Windows. We’re glad our customers have a choice in browsers, and we think that Internet Explorer 7 is the best available.”

I think one digg user summed it up best:

Mozilla: *YAWN*
Microsoft: *YAWN*
Opera: “Why didn’t anyone ask us?”

Today the Irish Green party voted to enter into a coalition government with Ireland’s largest political party, the center-right Fianna Fail. This is the first time the Greens will serve in Government since its foundation 25 years ago.

Other Green parties in Europe have served in government, in countries such as Finland, Sweden, Italy, France, Germany and Latvia (who even elected a Green prime minister), with parties of various ideologies, both left and right-wing.

Negotiations between the two parties took place over several days during the past two weeks, and almost collapsed when the Greens halted talks at one stage over frustration with Fianna Fail’s unwillingness to compromise on key issues. Nevertheless, a program for Government was agreed on late on Tuesday and the Green Party leadership organised an emergency convention for its members to vote on the proposal, which passed by a overwhelming majority of 86%. Following the vote, the party’s leader Trevor Sargent stepped down because of a pre-election promise that he would not lead his party into coalition with Fianna Fail. Despite this, he is fully supportive of the parties decision, and will likely serve in the cabinet as a junior minister.

Not all members were pleased with the deal however, an emotional Patricia McKenna (MEP) told RTE news that she was devastated at the decision, citing the continued use of Shannon Airport by the U.S. military in the Iraq War as something her party should not have compromised on; while the party’s founder Roger Garland has called the deal a betrayal.

Although the Green party could not persuade Fianna Fail to adopt major positions on areas like health and education, they did make significant progress in environmental policy, political reform (something very high on the party’s wish-list for some time now), and public transport.

I’ve been a supporter of the Green party in Ireland for a couple of years now, and have been a card carrying member for about 9 months. Unfortunately I could not make it to the vote today, but I fully support the decision to enter government with Fianna Fail.

Here’s why:

• It Makes Sense: In a parliamentary style of government, the opposition never gets to implement their policies at a national level. The Green party has been around for 25 years, it’s about time we started making some real change. It’s fair enough that some members are arguing that entering into government with Fianna Fail is selling out and betraying the party’s roots, in a sense they are correct. But it’s time to get real: we need to make changes, and we need to do it now, it that means selling our collective souls, so be it.
• We Can’t Wait: We can’t afford to wait another five years for the opportunity to serve in government. Putting aside the fact that climate change requires immediate action, the country is in desperate need of real reform in social services such as health and education. Five years will be five years to late.
• The Party’s Future Requires It: There is only so long a party can sustain itself without actually serving in government. For people to start taking the Greens seriously, we need to show them what we are capable of achieving given real power and influence.
• We Can Handle It: Many members and political commentators seem to think that serving with Fianna Fail will destroy the Green party, as has happened to other parties who formed a coalition with them. I say we’re made of sterned stuff: our policies are sufficiently different that the electorate will know what we are and are not responsible for, and our core vote is extremely loyal.

Only time will tell how the Green party will fare in government. But I have high hopes.

Apple recently released a version of their web browser Safari for Windows (XP and Vista) as a public beta, in an apparent attempt to nab some of the browser market away from Internet Explorer and Firefox (at a paltry 5% it certainly has a lot of work to do, although admittedly its share has, until now, been ceilinged by the Mac’s limited market share up).

I’ve been trying it out all day, so I thought I’d document my initial impressions:

• It looks identical to the Mac version; the only noticeable deviation from the theme is the Windows buttons in the top right of the window.
• The Apple site claims it renders 75% faster than IE but I haven’t noticed any speed advantage over IE7, Firefox 2.0 or Opera 9 (It should be noted that my impression is based on my use of a 3mbit broadband connection, users on slower connection speeds may indeed experience faster browsing).
• Automatically imports your other browsers (IE, FF and Opera) history and cookies. Also supports bonjour.
• Alt-Enter doesn’t open a new tab by default. Annoying. In fact none of the standard IE/FF keyboard shortcuts seem to work (this can be changed).
• Text looks funny, like cleartype on steroids. It looks nice at first but destroys your eyes after a while. You can turn it down in the preferences but it still looks funny to me.
• Uses OSX widgets in webpages (something Firefox doesn’t do on the Mac apparently, this will change in 3.0), which is interesting but irritating if you like a consistent UI.
• Has a nifty bookmark manager, although features nothing you can’t do with a few Firefox extensions.
• Performance is less than satisfactory, but it doesn’t suffer from memory-leaks a la Firefox.

Anyway, it’s not a bad browser, but it’s nothing we haven’t seen or done before. I can’t see it catching on with regular Windows users, unless they buy into the iPhone thing. Anyway, a least it’ll make testing sites on multiple browsers that much easier.

Welcome to my blog! It’s still under construction, in particular the theme; I’m new to Wordpress theming and so am still learning all the function calls and best practices. It’s remarkably easy though, and quite fun. A great resource is the official documentation found at codex.wordpress.org if you’re interested in coding a theme.

The XHTML and CSS is taken almost verbatim from a site I designed for my father (paulmulligan.com), with some minor changes to the sidebar and symantics (primarily to integrate nicely with Wordpress’ use of lists for everything.) The last I checked the markup was valid XHTML, but that could have changed; if you notice anything funny going on email me.

Anyway, enjoy the site; leave comments and all that jazz.