PC makers keep Windows XP alive

Microsoft's recent announcement that they will officially remove Windows XP from sales by end of June, has done little to deter PC makers from continue to sell XP with their products.

Dell, Lenovo and HP have found various loopholes in Microsoft's licensing terms and are exploiting these to continue selling Windows XP after the cut off date at the end of June.

Windows XP is gradually being phased out by Microsoft in favour of Vista, but it is mainly because Vista has received a lukewarm welcome from buyers and many are opting to stay with Windows XP.

PC manufacturers are using a clause in the conditions for Windows Vista which lets PC manufacturers provide XP under the terms of a "downgrade license" for the Business and Ultimate versions of the new operating system. With all these cases, the PC's are basically being sold as Vista machines with the unused option of upgrading to Vista.

Microsoft boss, Steve Ballmer, however had some positive news at a press conference in Belgium. He said that if customer demand was large enough for XP, they would consider extending the life span.

Windows XP SP3 due in two weeks?

Every time Microsoft was asked about the launch date of SP3 for Windows XP, they would simply respond with the official answer, “first half of 2008”.

However, the guys at Neowin somehow got there hands on an internal Microsoft memo and according to them we can expect SP3 on the 29th of April. This news is quite significant to many IT managers and users world wide.

Firstly, for many who were deciding whether to move over onto Vista, for its supposedly superior performance, the answer now would be a simple, NO. Many early performance tests that were done on SP3 revealed that it would increase the performance quite significantly above that of Vista's. And to make the news even sweeter, Vista's new SP1 is said to slow the current performance.

Secondly, Microsoft announced a few weeks ago that they would be extending XP's life span by two more years and with the news last week that Windows 7's launch date will be much earlier than anticipated, most people can find comfort with the knowledge that they now can entirely skip Vista.

Pass Vista and wait for Windows 7?

We haven't even considered switching over to Vista and already there is speculation that Microsoft's latest installment of Windows might be arriving as soon as next year.

The IT industry was bowled over last week when Microsoft CEO, Bill Gates announced that we might be receiving Windows 7 much sooner than expected.

Speaking at the Inter-American Development Bank, Microsoft's big boss told the audience: "Sometime in the next year or so we will have a new version".

While some early adopter's might be fuming at Microsoft for releasing the new version so early, most IT managers have welcomed the news.

Vista has been plagued from the beginning with various bugs and short comings and has never lived up to the high expectations of the IT masses. Even the much anticipated SP1 couldn't do much to improve the Vista package and was even criticised by many as worsening the problems associated with Vista.

IT managers worldwide, who have been reluctant to adopt Vista, say that Windows 7 will be what Vista was supposed to be. While overjoyed by the news, they have cautioned Microsoft not to repeat the same mistake they made when developing Vista. Instead of pushing for launch dates, they should rather focus on what Windows 7 must be able to do and make sure that it does that perfectly.

Will we adopt Vista now or in the near future? Even though it's being forced upon us when purchasing new laptops and PC's, I doubt that we will even, so much as, think about it. Rather wait a year or two for Windows 7 and hope that it will be what Vista isn't.

The only question now is, will history repeat it self with the launch of Windows 7?

Firefox development ploughs on with Beta 5

Firefox 3 beta 5 was released yesterday hopefully bringing it one step closer to finally being released. And now the news coverage coupled with my increased frustration with Firefox 2 hanging and crashing finally made me switch to using the new beta in the hope that it would solve these problems and improve my life.

Well as I waited about a minute for Firefox 3 to load I was getting sceptical - it didn't seem to load any faster than FF2 - although to be fair it was loading for the first time. However, once it had loaded, it was quite impressive. It's actually quite a lot prettier in many subtle ways, and it really does seem much smoother.

One of my main worries was that none of my favourite extensions would be support. However it does seem that since FF3 has now been in beta for a while, most of the most popular extensions are in fact supported. Although the (arguably) most useful developer tool, Firebug, remains unsupported. I hope this will change soon.

So I would recommend that anyone who is constantly frustrated by Firefox actually do switch to the new beta. It doesn't install over Firefox 2, so you can in fact keep both on your computer, although you can't run both at the same time.

Here is a feature list for the new beta of FF3. Enjoy.

JavaScript Libraries

JavaScript has recently become the world's most popular programming language. And so, with more and more people using it, the question of which is the best JavaScript Library is now more important than ever. So here, without further ado, are some of my (almost certainly biased) opinions.

JavaScript

JavaScript is most commonly used as a client-side scripting language for browsers - bringing web pages to life with online delights such as animated menus and sliding text - and it can certainly be a frustrating beast to use.

This is because each different browser (e.g.: FireFox, Opera and of course the infamous Internet Explorer), and in some cases even different versions of the same browser, parses the language differently, so code that works in one browser will not necessarily work in another. Which in turn means that without outside help you end up having to pretty much write your code several times over - once for each browser.

Enter JavaScript libraries!

JavaScript libraries

JavaScript libraries cater for this by providing a new set of functions and controls which take care of the different implementations for you, providing a useful abstraction layer and meaning you only have to write your code once.

There are many different libraries out there and each works in a different way and provides a different set of functions. Very few of the libraries extend or collaborate with any of the others, so as a JavaScript developer you have to choose which one you like best, which can be a daunting prospect considering the number of different options.

Recommendations

I am now going to give my opinions on which are the best. These will not be entirely fair. I haven't looked into each library in depth, and a lot of my opinions will be based on something I heard once somewhere, so they shouldn't be taken as gospel. That said I have been fiddling around with different JavaScript libraries for a while now and JavaScript for a lot longer so my opinion may still be worth something.

Libraries that didn't quite make the grade

Yahoo Interface Library's is well written but the namespacing and separate files are cumbersome, and in any case it's been superseded by Ext 2.0. Ext 2.0 is extensive and fast but huge to download and not so good for facilitating development, and so only really suitable for intranets or people with very fast internet connections. Dojo is quite well spoken of, but once again it seems quite cumbersome to implement its many different packages.

Prototype is very popular, but I read somewhere (although haven't checked myself yet) that it doesn't follow good DOM principles and I really am one for principles, so that was out the window.

Rico seems outdated by many accounts, and MochiKit seems fine but not quite as good as my favourites. The other libraries just haven't been mentioned enough to really catch my attention.

So, on to my favourites.

My favourite libraries

jQuery is the library I recommend for the casual JavaScript user or any JavaScript beginners:

It seems to be very quickly gathering momentum. There are now a huge amount of sites using it, most notably Google Code. It has a huge development community and many contributed modules and it is well documented and easy to use. It also tries its best to be usable with other libraries.

MooTools is my recommendation for the more advanced JavaScripter (I would say if you are at the point of actually creating objects in JavaScript you fall into this category). It's very small and light but covers all the bases to build applications from that I can think if. And does that pretty solidly. Its Class class is extremely useful, and I have found everything it does to be impressively robust and well thought out. It has very strong programming principles, which are clear in the way the library is designed to encourage good programming practice.

Despite singling out these two libraries as the best I do have suggestions and criticisms of both, which I will cover in my next article (coming soon): Criticisms of jQuery and MooTools.