Bugs in IE? Which browser should I use?

Internet Exploder has been hit by the cyber-criminals again. Yawn. Actually, this time it’s serious. It affects all versions of Internet Explorer since six, and it’s going to take Microsoft a while to fix it, and I suspect they won’t for earlier releases (anything less than version eight).

Continuing to use Internet Explorer in the mean time is risky, so using an alternative would be a good idea. But which one?

There are strong opinions as to which browser to use, more often related to the companies that produce them than to their technical merits. In the circumstances I thought a quick guide was in order.

Internet Explorer

Produced by Micro$oft and therefore beyond the pale. Actually, it’s pretty good although slow and cumbersome. It trails behind the others in innovative features. A lot of kid web designers specify that their sites are “optimised” for Internet Exploder, which is a reason to avoid such web sites – or use Internet Explorer. As it comes pre-installed with Windows, it’s the most common web browser out there and is therefore the one attacked most often by criminals. However, I’ve seen no evidence that it’s inherently less secure.

It’s Windows-only, and the current version requires XP SP2 or newer.

Download Internet Explorer if you must

Firefox

This one comes from the Mozilla foundation and is championed by the anti-Microsoft brigade. They claim that Internet Explorer is full of bugs, insecure and bad. Firefox is all of the above, but “good”. More bugs and security problems turn up in Firefox than IE, and it has very regular updates to fix them.

Firefox, like Internet Explorer is big and slow – and some of the versions will cause your PC to grind to a halt. The current release (3.5.7) seems okay, but the writers tend to break it too frequently for my liking.

However, Firefox is on the leading-edge of browser design and pushes forward with useful new features before Microsoft has thought of them. It’s also very good from a security perspective in dealing with encryption and suchlike, and is probably the professional browser of choice for this reason.

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Firefox is also cross-platform – available for UNIX, Linux, Windows, Macintosh and so on.

Download Firefox

Google Chrome

This is a wonderful, small, efficient browser from Google. It follows the web standards very well, which means web pages produced to work around problems with Internet Explorer will not look the same on Chrome.

It has one big weakness: it will remember web site passwords, but not in a secure way. Therefore don’t use Chrome for logging in to anything secure. I do hope they’ll fix this soon, but it’s taken a long time.

Download Chrome

Opera

If you like Norway, you’ll love Opera. It’s available from Windows, Mac, Linux, Nintendo Wii and various handheld devices. Its users seem to like it, although it doesn’t have a significant desktop market share except on the Macintosh. I haven’t tried the latest version as I’m happy with Firefox and Chrome, but it’s worth a look if you’re not.

Download Opera

Safari

This is written by Apple and only runs on a Macintosh (or iPhone &c). I would mention the fact it’s proven pretty insecure, but that would upset Mac aficionados, who don’t take such criticisms seriously anyway.

Summary

They’re all insecure. Take your pick. Just avoid IE for a month or so, and be careful if you have to use an earlier version as they might not get around to fixing it.

Why is Sage Line 50 so slow?

NB. If you want to know how to make Sage run faster click here for later posts, and read the comments below (there are a lot!).

As regular readers will know, I don’t think much of Sage accounting software, especially Sage Line 50. It’s fatally flawed because it stores its data in disk files, shared across a network using a file server. I suspect these.DTA files are pretty much unchanged since Graham Wylie’s original effort running under CP/M on an Amstrad PCW. There is continual talk that the newer versions will use a proper database, indeed in 2006 they announced a deal to work with mySQL. But the world has been been waiting for the upgrade ever since. It’s always coming in “next year’s” release but “next year” never comes.The latest (as of December 2009) is that they’re ‘testing’ a database version with some customers and it might come out in version seventeen.

In fact it’s in Sage’s interests to keep Line 50 running slower than a slug in treacle. Line 50 is the cheap end of the range – if it ran at a decent speed over a network, multi-user, people wouldn’t buy the expensive Line 200 (aka MMS). The snag is that Line 50 is sold to small companies that do need more than one or two concurrent users and do have a significant number of transactions a day.

So why is Line 50 so slow? The problem with Sage’s strategy of storing data in shared files is that when you have multiple users the files are opened/locked/read/written by multiple users across a network at the same time. It stands to reason. On a non-trivial set of books this will involve a good number of files, some of them very large. Networks are comparatively slow compared to local disks, and certainly not reliable, so you’re bound to end up with locked file conflicts and would be lucky if data wasn’t corrupted from time to time. As the file gets bigger and the number of users grows, the problem gets worse exponentially. The standard Sage solution seems to be to tell people their hardware in inadequate whenever timeouts occur. In a gross abuse of their consultancy position, some independent Sage vendors have been known to sell hapless lusers new high-powered servers, which does make the problem appear to go away. Until, of course, the file gets a bit bigger. Anyone who knows anything about networking will realise this straight away that this is a hopeless situation, but not those selling Sage – at least in public.

One Sage Solution Provider, realising that this system was always going to time-out in such circumstances, persuaded the MD of the company using it to generate all reports by sitting at the server console. To keep up the pretence this was a multi-user system, he even persuaded them to install it on a Windows Terminal Server machine so more than one person could use it by means of a remote session.

If that weren’t bad enough, apparently it didn’t even work when sitting at the console, and they’ve advised the customers to get a faster router. I’m not kidding – this really did happen.

The fact is that Sage Line 50 does not run well over a network due to a fundamental design flaw. It’s fine if it’s basically single-user on one machine, and I have clients using it this way. If you want to run multiple users, especially if your books are non-trivial, you need Sage 200/MMS – or a different accounting package altogether.

Dangerous killer still behind wheel

Yesterday Tracy Johnson walked free from a court after driving into two cyclists at a roundabout and killing one of them; mother-of-three Sharon Corless.

Newspaper reports make much of the fact she was driving a particularly expensive Chelsea Tractor and had just come off a mobile phone. You get the picture – totally irresponsible on all levels. However, her defence claimed that she might have fainted, and the prosecution couldn’t prove she hadn’t – although their medical examination had been unable to recreate the conditions.

David Porter described the events for the prosecution:

“For reasons that defy any reasonable explanation, the defendant’s vehicle began to accelerate towards the roundabout. The vehicle began to drift from the carriageway and then collided with the verge and drove along the vergeway(sic) with the near side wheels on the verge.

“It travelled along the vergeway for approximately 50 metres. Having collided with the verge the vehicle then collided with Mrs Corless who was dragged underneath the wheels of the Range Rover. She suffered fatal injuries and died later in hospital.

“Moments later there was a second collision with Peter Corless, who was thrown clear of the vehicle but nevertheless sustained serious injuries.

“The vehicle then carried on to the roundabout where it collided with a further vehicle – a Peugeot which was being driven by a young lady with her daughter.

“Fortunately they suffered no injuries. The vehicle then collided and came to a stop with a lamp post on the roundabout itself.

“Witnesses behind the vehicle said at no stage did they see brake lights come one; rather it appeared to accelerate.

“The defendant emerged from the vehicle in a shocked and dazed condition saying something along the lines of ‘what’s happened.’ Moments later she was asking for her mobile telephone, which she later said was to call her partner.”

Now, from what I’ve been able to read about the court case, it is certainly possible she fainted. However the family whose mother was killed have thus been denied a proper trial to prove this, and anyone wealthy enough to employ a good lawyer can just keep driving for a bit after killing someone and then claim they’d fainted in the knowledge that it won’t even go to court.

Either she’s lying, or she isn’t, and we won’t ever get to find out. However, one thing is telling – she was not banned for driving. This woman claims she’s prone to randomly losing conscious, and by all accounts, is still behind a wheel. Holders of a driving license have a duty to report various medical conditions to the DVLA, including anything that causes loss of consciousness, so that their license can be revoked.

Chelsea Tractor of type used (stock photo)

So anyone in Mrs Johnson’s home town of Warrington spotting her behind the wheel would do well to call the police – she’s driving with a medical condition that makes her unsafe. She said so herself in court.

It may be that Mrs Johnson has surrendered her driving license; this wouldn’t make everything aright but would stop her looking guilty. I’d be pleased to hear from anyone who knows this to be the case.

Snow cycling

Today I finally had a go at snow cycling, as there’s a thaw on its way. It had to be done, and I set off across the snow-covered fields behind my garden.

Now I know why snow cycling isn’t popular as an extreme sport. It’s boring. If you peddle hard enough you can get a bit of wheel spin, but you have to try. Normal knobbly mountain bike tyres gave me a surprising amount of traction, even on sheet ice. Once moving you’re as stable as anything – no sliding sideways at all. I wasn’t expecting that. Deviating from a straight line when on sheet ice probably wasn’t going to be easy, but I though I’d leave the laws of physics unchallenged.

However, cycling in snow is too much like hard work; like trying to cycle through dry sand. I had thought the wheels would squash the snow flat with no trouble at all in much the same way as a heavy boot punches through the powder, but it really slows you down. It’s probably twice as fast as walking if you can cope with the looks you get that say “What’s that idiot doing riding a bike in these conditions?”. Luckily this doesn’t bother me.

The highest speed attained was 8mph, down hill with the wind behind me. I dare say I could have got more speed on a hard surface, but I was cycling through several inches of snow.

Apparently you can get special studded tyres and even snow chains for riding mountain bikes above the snow line – at least in the USA. I don’t see studs being much use on snow, but they’re bound to make difference on sheet ice.

So, while there’s still some snow around, get out there. I can’t guarantee you won’t hurt yourself but it’ll be a lot more stable than you might think.