Sorry, couldn't resist the combination of Microsoft and throw in one sentence.

This will also put an end to piracy in the eastern part of the Indian ocean, when all ships between Europe and Asia go the northern route. Time to get a decent job?

Same here in the Netherlands. I tried to update yesterday (10-10) and today via the Update Manager, but no luck yet. I'll try again in a few days.

On my Motorola Milestone with Android 2.1:

• Default browser startup 1s, Newspaper m.volkskrant.nl 3 s.
• Firefox 4b startup 8s, Newspaper m.volkskrant.nl 3s.

Especially for a mobile browser, that's a slow start as it is more likely to be started multiple times per day,rather than burn the batteries by being on or in the background.

Furthermore I had to throw out a lot of applications to make room for the apk file. It's huge, and it needs to slim down considerably.

Conclusion, although I'm a Firefox fan, is that they need to work on install size and startup speed before I will use it as my first choice.

A little bit closer to their region and experience is Laurence of Arabia. He defeated the Otomans by concentrating on taking out locomotives. It halted the logistics completely and forced the withdraw.

Just like the current focus on fuel transport will cause enormous problems that cannot be solved by any of the (long-term) solutions here (today there was another large-scale burning of fuel trucks).

Houston, we have a problem...

It's the least we can do. You liberated us (I'm dutch) 65 years ago, let us now liberate you.

Monsanto has a long, and fortunately well-documented, history of deliberately poisoning our world with first their herbicides, then genetically modified plants that withstand larger quantities of their own herbicides, and further infertilizing that crop, so that you have to buy new seeds every year.

Couple that to an army of lawyers to sue the environmentally consious people and innocent bystanders who had their natural crop infected with blown-over genetically modified seeds from Monsanto, and anyone can conclude that Monsanto is EVIL.

If I was granted 1 wish, I wish that Monsanto would stop operating and invest their accumulated profits into undoing the damage that they did worldwide.

I support the intranet for a 7000 person company, and put up a help page telling them to use OGV (for Firefox on Windows. Linux and Solaris) and WMV (for IE).

<video src="filename.ogv" autoplay="true" controls="true">
...code for IE7 users...
<video>

Firefox reads the video tag and ignores the inside of the video container, and IE7 ignores the video tag and reads the 10 lines of WMV code.

Voila, no more flash.

I feel embarrased that a dutch university spent time on this obvious fact...

And proud because the dutch girls are pretty enough to cause this effect, ;-)

Disclaimer: I'm dutch.

My site kayakfun.info (dutch-language site about whitewater kayaking, so no tech-bias) runs Webalizer stats so I only see the top 15 agents, amid lots of bots, but here is the summary from feb 2009 to jun 2009:

• IE total went from 44% to 37% (-19%)
• Moz 5 (Fx and Safari people explained above) went from 12% to 18% (+50%)
• Opera 8.5 went from 0.9% to 2.5% (+170%)
• IE6 dropped from 13 to 9%
• IE7 dropped from 30 to 23%
• IE8 went from 1 to 5%

So "collapsing" ? No, IE total is just slowly degrading for evolutionary reasons, most likely asymptotically approaching zero after a long time. I sincerely hope IE6 and 7 drop out of the top15 really soon, IE8 is not that bad.