Wandering electrons... but not too far

The BBC published an article today on Opera and it's strange difficulty penetrating the American market: Opera browser bids for America

I'm a huge fan of the New York Times and was interested to see this headline:

Browsers Are a Battleground Once Again

"Cool! thought I, they're going to compare Opera 9.5 beta with Firefox 3!"

Over 1000 words later, can you believe that they did not even mention Opera?!

Not even once.

This was especailly angering when I read:

Early versions of Firefox introduced features like a built-in pop-up blocker to kill ads, and tabbed browsing, which lets users toggle between Web windows.

To your emails Opera defenders! :

[NYT] NEWS DEPARTMENT
To send comments and suggestions (about news coverage only) or to report errors that call for correction, e-mail nytnews@nytimes.com or leave a message at 1-888-NYT-NEWS. To contact a reporter, click on the byline of one of his or her articles to access the reader e-mail form.

Remember though: respect and intelligent aurguments. Opera is the smart people's browser!

Update 07:41 p.m.

Since I put up this post, the New York Times has changed the title of the article. It is now "An Upstart Challenges the Big Web Browsers". Did they see the errors of their ways? I'd like to think so. But even if they've thus avoided the Opera challenge bullet, they've also made me snicker a bit, referring to Firefox as an "upstart".

The 9.5 beta continues to impress people everywhere.

H3RALD.com has published an article that warms the heart of all us Opera fans...

A Firefox Lover's Guide to Opera

Be sure to check it out and especially recommend it to your friends still in Firefox mode.

It'd be great to "digg"(etc.) it also!

The New York times published an article today by Noam Cohen entitled,

"Will Success, or All That Money From Google, Spoil Firefox?

Your thoughts and comments?

Here's something that makes Minority Report seem so 20th century.

I stumbled upon this in an article at Wired.com entitled "Perceptive Pixel’s Multi-Touch Wall Now Available for $100K". They've inserted a YouTube video, but you can see a better quality video at the Perceptive pixel website -->

click here to go directly to it.

As they pointed out in the Wired.com article you can get it today from Neiman Marcus for a coooooool $100,000.

Oh, hold on, STARTING at 100k.

Personally I'll hold off until the price comes down to something reasonable, like, oh, I don't know, 70k

But what do you think? Are interfaces like this the future of Information Technology? One thing you'll notice when watching the video is that there is a type of cyber-keyboard that can be called up, and that's where I start wondering a bit. I mean, whatever we do, the written word is, and will continue to be, the main tool available for going beyond the 1000 words that a picture is worth. Can we come up with a more efficient tool for writing than the keyboard? (If you say, "yeah, a pencil", that's just the proof that you never learned to type correctly.) This is especially so when we're writing something that we intend to share with others using I.T. This type of interface is spectacular to look at, but will it be an efficient working tool? You'll notice that the people manipulating the device spend most of their time pushing, pulling, stretching and squishing pictures. That gives a good show, but is this thing going to be advantageous when I have to get that project off to the client before tomorrow morning?

I'll let you express yourselves, but one thing we can't deny: This is really going to impress the neighbors!