Well... not yet. It spun out as a humor piece late last night and built rather quickly. Even I was excited, but delayed the mass email until I knew it for sure.

I just read a pretty good article discussing how IT professionals tend to blame Lusers ('lousy users') rather than face up to badly written software and poor implementation. The article does a great job comparing the IT world to other businesses involved with development:

Yep, Microsoft is handing out free software. No not IE7, because most of us wouldn't want it anyway. MS is giving out an express version of its Office Accounting 2007 product. They hope that you choose to upgrade to the full version which is not free.

Here is a great overview site of various alternativess to windows explorer. Many of them are free and the article includes screenshots for a quick review.

15 Windows Explorer alternatives compared and reviewed

Here is a chart with direct links to the site's review

This an a great and very thurough review of current speed tests for internet browsers on Windows, Linux and OSX. I do mean very thurough.

Some key summaries:

"Internet Explorer on Windows was either as fast as - or faster than Mozilla and Firefox for most tasks, with the exception of scripts, where it took over twice as long."

"So overall, Opera seems to be the fastest browser for windows. Firefox is not faster than Internet Explorer, except for scripting, but for standards support, security and features, it is a better choice."

The results alone won't make me switch browsers but it is an interesting view on where browsers are going. Personally I use FF 1.5 for everything I do and then have IE7 as a back up browser. I upgraded to IE7 to try out the tabs but the reviews are correct, Internet Explorer's tabs are immature and look more like an alpha than a real release.

In Internet Explorer 7 I can only open a new tab and nothing else. What happened to making IE 7 easy?

Okay so I installed Internet Explorer 7 today. Why? Tabs. I cannot stand having 20 browsers open okay? Now first let me explain a few of my positions on the IE and firefox debate. Plenty of people like it one way or the other. NO sweat, I totally understand. I have MS Windows on all of my computers and only a couple of Linux versions available. I am a big fan of MS Office. I believe in using the best tool for the job. That said I abhore having to use Internet Explorer. I won't rant about all of my frustrations but secutity and features are the two biggies.

I have listed below some of my favorite tools. The best part is that they are all free! Sure there are plenty of expensive tools that do amazing things, but when I find a free piece of software that makes my life easier, that is truely something that I cherish.