But like everyone else I've been just staring at Google for the last six months (or six years) with my jaw slapping against my chest. Where are the smoke and mirrors? This kind of company comes along just once every computer generation (17.6 years, of course). Google is slathered with hype these days, and I don't want to add to the bubbly press party that's gushing over it. But, dang, it's hard not to be a tad awed. Two twenty-something guys whose Stanford University project is now worth roughly the same as Ford and GM combined. They also have probably the most successful IPO of the 21st century, they're personally worth billions, and they have so many new irons in the fire that you know they're just getting started.

But it's not the money that impresses me. Well, it's not the only thing, anyway. It's the ideas, the ambition, and the cojones. These guys are the new Microsoft. They're going after Microsoft very quietly, very shrewdly. Google Desktop, as humble as it is, is a step squarely into the desktop space. Microsoft is caught because, while it can react ruthlessly to Google's subtle moves, that just makes it appear to be more ruthless. Google is oh-so quiet and unassuming. That's not just guile, it's part of the corporate culture. Microsoft has a right to be "paranoid."

Yahoo and the rest of the Internet search companies ... who are they again? Yahoo is the only other one that'll survive. Google laid them to waste. And it did so with nothing more than smart technology and the simplest of interfaces. Google search just works. Microsoft has marketing campaigns with the same ideas behind Google's giant, raging whisper campaign. That only happens when your product or service resonates perfectly with what the market wants, like, say, the IBM PC and Microsoft Windows 3.0. The right product at the right time.

Google has soaked into Internet advertising the way Amazon sucked up Internet retail. This is what Internet companies were supposed to be about. This is the promise Wall Street tried to buy in 1999 and 2000. On the day that AOL bought Time-Warner, most of us knew we had entered an altered universe that couldn't last. But Google is the real deal.

Knock, knock. Hello corporate America (uh, make that corporations the world over)? This is your wake up call. Barring the worst, the year 2005 is the year when big business can (and I think will) wake up from the bad dream and start investing in growth. Tap your heels three times and repeat after me: "There's no place so lucrative as the Internet. There's no place so lucrative as the Internet. There's no place so lucrative as the Internet."

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If you are a Firefox user, I recommend checking the website version of the review. But even though there are many new details and insights about Firefox in the review, one thing that didn't change was my strongly positive conclusion about the new browser. In fact, I'm an even more confirmed Firefox user today than when I mailed the last issue of the newsletter.

In this issue I'm offering insights and links to a long list of installable extensions and user-configuration tweaks to Firefox that provide literally dozens of improvements to the program. With this story in hand, you can vastly improved your Firefox installation, quickly and easily, and you'll be doing so with changes I've personally vetted and tested in advance.

One last point before I get to the good stuff. I'm creating a "living" version of this Customizing Firefox content in a place other than the website version of the newsletter. It makes it easier for me to update it that way. This is the link for that page:

Why are the other extension sites so important? Mozilla.org doesn't list all the available extensions, including some of the best ones out there. In order to get the most out of Firefox, you need to peruse these other sites occasionally. Take a look for yourself:

SessionSaver by Pike, Rue
SessionSaver is a highly useful older extension that saves all open browser tabs in the event of a crash. It also lets you save and name sets of tabs, and recall them at will. I recommend the 0.2d2 nightly23 build of SessionSaver. Note: Mozilla.org doesn't list this extension, probably because it has not been updated in quite some time. Nevertheless, I have tested it with Firefox 1.0, and it works fine.

Tab Clicking Options by Twanno
Double-clicking any blank area of Firefox's tab bar opens a new tab browser. But by default, double-clicking any existing tab has no effect. Tab Clicking Options let's you configure functionality for keyboard and mouse-click combinations related to Firefox's tabs. For example, you can configure it to close any open tab by double-clicking the tab label. And Ctrl-double-click on any tab might duplicate the tab and its contents. The program is easy to install and configure, and well worth a couple of minutes to get it going.

miniT(drag+indicator) by Caio Chassot
Provides for drag-and-drop movement of Firefox browser tabs.

Undo Close Tab by Dorando
After you install Undo Close Tab, you'll be able to backtrack from problems like this one: You're in the middle of long forum post. You double-click the tab bar to open a new tab to check a Web page for some fact. But by accident, you click the Close Tab icon on the right side of the tab bar, which closes the tab window containing your unsaved forum post. With Undo Close Tab installed, just right-click the tab bar and choose "Undo Close Tab." Poof, your tab is back! (Also, consider removing the close button from the tab bar.)

Note: To truly fix all aspects of Firefox's tab-browsing functionality, I also recommend the four customizations under the Tab-Browsing Tweaks heading in Firefox Customization Recommendations section below.

DeskCut by Evan Eveland
Lets you right-click anywhere on an open Web page and choose Create deskCut from the pop-up menu to place a Firefox bookmark on your desktop.

Resize Search Box by Nathar Leichoz, Awan Afuqya
Creates a drag-and-drop resizable version of the Google (or other search engine) search box on your Firefox toolbar.

IE View by Paul Roub
IE View adds a context-menu item that lets you open in Internet Explorer any Web page currently displayed in Firefox.

FirefoxView by Alex Sirota
This unique Firefox extension is sort of the reverse of IE View. It installs in Firefox, and from there, offers the ability install and uninstall a modification to Internet Explorer that lets you right-click any open Web page in IE and choose the option "View this Page in Firefox."

UserAgent Switcher by Chris Pederick
The Opera browser has a nice feature that allows it to identify itself to Web servers as a browser other than Opera. Some websites will only display properly to Internet Explorer. UserAgent Switcher adds the same functionality to Firefox.

Stop-or-Reload Button by Caio Chassot
Combines the Stop and Reload buttons into a single button/read-out that smartly shows the functionality that's available at any given time (like Apple's Surfari browser).

Ext2Abc by Eric Hamiter
Alphabetically sorts the list of extensions shown in the Extension manager window.

Word Count by Eric Hamiter
While it might only have strong interest for writers and editors, Word Count emulates Microsoft Word's Word Count feature for use with Web-based content and does its job well. It counts the number of words in a highlighted body of text displayed in Firefox.

ChromEdit by Chris Neale
Adds the "Edit User Files" menu item to Firefox's Tools menu. When you open the program, it provides access to the four files Firefox provides for user customizations - user.js, prefs.js, userChrome.css, and userContent.jss.

Sage RSS/Atom Reader by Peter Andrews
Very nice light-weight RSS Reader that I find myself using more and more.

ForecastFox (was WeatherFox) by Richard Klein, Jon Stritar
ForecastFox is a weather display program powered by Weather.com. It displays current and forecast temperatures at a glance in the Firefox status bar. It's highly configurable and gives you quick access to detailed weather information localized to your zip code.

The big argument going on in many Firefox circles is, which tab-browsing extension is better, Tab Browser Extension or Tabbrowser Preferences? A third answer is the right one: Neither. I like a lot of things about Tab Browser Extension (also known as TBE and Tabbrowser Extensions). It's a very rich program with gobs of interesting functionality, but it also has serious issues: It's buggy. The functionality is not well labeled or explained so it's very hard to control (or in other words, it's confusing). And it's so large and ambitious that, according to Mozilla.org, it takes liberties with your Firefox installation. Even TBE's author appears to agree with that last statement. I prefer the single-purpose UI-fixing tab-oriented extensions like SessionSaver, Tab Clicking Options, and miniT.

Thanks to Scot's Newsletter reader T. Antani for pointing out this thread on the MozillaZine site. There's a post there that offers a variation on the tip for removing the Close button. Add these lines to the userChrome.css file instead:

/* Remove tabs close button */
#content .tabs-closebutton {display: none ! important;}

I've tested this and it works perfectly. It removes the Close button from the tab bar, while leaving it in place on all the sidebar elements.

A word of warning. There's a lot going on in about:config, and it would be a mistake to make random changes to this page. Educate yourself first. Mozilla.org offers a help page that explains How To Modify Hidden Preferences Using about:config. Even more importantly, these additional documents explain individual about:config settings:

The second one is an older document that's really aimed at earlier Mozilla browsers, but it offers slightly more detailed information. There is not a perfect 100% overlap between previous Mozilla browsers and Firefox on the about:config page. But the majority of the options are the same. One way to handle this is to use the first link as your reference, and use the second link to check for any additional information about a specific setting.

There's only one about:config-based tweak that I'm currently recommending (although I expect to add others in the near future). This recommendation really only applies to people who have fast Internet connections or those who are Webmasters, news junkies, possibly online gaming, anything where it's mandatory that clicking the Refresh button always shows you the very latest information on that Web page. If that describes the way you need or want to work, you can configure Firefox to work the same way Internet Explorer's check for website updates on "Every visit to the page."

To make this change, find this entry in about:config:

browser.cache.check_doc_frequency

The default setting is represented by the numeral 3, and corresponds to "when appropriate/automatically." To change it, simply double-click the browser.cache.check_doc_frequency entry. A small dialog box will open. Type the numeral 1 to change it to "Each Time" and press OK. Here's a description of the available options for this particular setting:

0 = Once per session
1 = Each time
2 = Never
3 = When appropriate/automatically

Some other about: screens that you might want to explore include:

about:cache
about:plugins

There are others too, but several of them aren't very useful. About:config is the one to master.

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I spent two hours over the weekend putting Microsoft AntiSpyware through its paces with a test machine that, conveniently, has been cruising the Internet almost daily for six months without spyware protection. I downloaded the latest versions of Ad-Aware SE and Spybot - Search & Destroy, since they're both free and in wide usage. Here are my conclusions.

Microsoft AntiSpyware offers a real-time monitor, automatic spyware-signature updates, and provides an optional peer-based exploit-detection data-sharing mechanism to help protect against fast-breaking new spyware woes. Microsoft AntiSpyware has an Internet Explorer anti-hijack feature. It can quarantine or delete spyware it disables on your machine. It has the ability to optionally save a Windows restore point. It gives you a way to access to Internet Explorer BHOs (Browser Help Objects), ActiveX apps, startup programs, IE settings, IE toolbars, and other trouble spots that tend to be the areas where spyware latches on. Microsoft AntiSpyware has a rich feature set for a program you can download for free. It also has an absolutely excellent user interface.

Unlike Ad-Aware, Spybot, and Pest Patrol (the latter wasn't tested for this story), Microsoft AntiSpyware completely ignores "tracking cookies." In its Tracks Eraser, found in the Advanced Tools area, it offers a function that erases all your cookies, but it doesn't display standard advertising cookies on its scan-results screen. Frankly, I find this refreshing. In most cases, so-called tracking cookies, while not exactly beneficial, don't threaten any significant aspect of your privacy. They support Internet advertising, but not in invasive ways. It might be possible for a tracking cookie to be used in conjunction with a truly nasty spyware program, but I suspect Microsoft AntiVirus would be on top of that sort of thing. Deeper testing would be required to be sure.

Like every other spyware test I've ever run, the test subjects each found threats the others didn't. I'll spare you the details, but when you strip out the tracking cookies, Ad-Aware didn't find jack, Spybot found the ever-popular DSO Exploit (but since this PC's version of Internet Explorer is completely up to date, it's probably protected from DSO), and Microsoft AntiSpyware found the MySearchBar adware and MySearchBar browser plugin. Of the three, I would have to give a D to Ad-Aware, a C to Spybot, and a B to Microsoft AntiSpyware. All three of these tools should have found MySearchBar, though. Only the new Microsoft utility did.

In our tests, AntiSpyware's very rapid Quick Scan found the exact same list of problems found by its very slow Deep Scan. Unlike Spybot and Ad-Aware, AntiSpyware's deep scan appears to scan every file on your computer. It takes significantly longer than the other two products — about as long as Pest Patrol's scan took in tests I ran a couple years back. The AntiSpyware scan is configurable, and it operates more like Ad-Aware's scan than SpyBot's. AntiSpyware's results screen also provides a good deal of information, something that's always been a Spybot weakness.

All in all, I'm impressed with Microsoft AntiSpyware at first look. I intend to use it on a long-term basis, and if it makes sense to, I'll come back and review it in more detail later.

Lately I've been hearing from a number of people that this spyware package or that spyware package is the only one to use. Which anti-spyware tool do you find to be the most effective? Drop me a line and let me know about it. A URL to the product home page would be a help.

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Interesting statistics: Of those 120,000 messages, 83% were spam. (Note: I have all ISP/server-based spam controls disabled from my various mail hosts.) POPFile has generated 100 false positives (messages incorrectly identified as spam, but less than half of those false positives were messages I cared about. Probably fewer than 20 were mission critical to me. And most of the false positives came in the early going.

I said this back in October and I'll say it again: POPFile is the most accurate mail-classification tool I've ever tested. It's also the most accurate spam-detection tool I've ever tested. There are other products on the market that use very similar technology, such as SpamBayes, that I have not tested but that I believe are in POPFile's league. Both POPFile and SpamBayes are proxy-server-style products that aren't just anti-spam products; they're both mail classifiers that'll work with most any mail client. And there are others too. I may test these products in the future. In the meantime, I'm interested in hearing from people who use SpamBayes for Windows or other Bayesian solutions for Windows.

Catching spam isn't the only thing POPFile does well. I have been using it to classify types of mail, and have come to rely on it to do that. It's not just unsolicited messages that POPFile classifies so accurately. This hidden ability, used in conjunction with an email program that has solid rules or filters to route classified mail to a specified folder, can significantly boost your email productivity. I was skeptical of POPFile's ability to do this in a way that I could learn to rely on. I was wrong to skeptical. POPFile is an extremely powerful email-management tool. Advanced email users, in particular, will accrue major benefits from exploring POPFile's full functionality.

Nothing's changed about the POPFile's downsides for me. I still greatly crave tight integration between anti-spam operation with my email package of choice. In my case, that's still Eudora Email 6.2.x. Bottom line: I want to be able to manually classify mail with a keyboard combination in my email package. In other words, while I'm reading a message that was not tagged as spam, click a button on the message's toolbar, or type something like Ctrl-J, to send it to the spam folder and retrain the mail-classifying engine in one fell swoop. POPFile does have a client-integration tool for Outlook called Outclass. So far as I know, Outlook is the only email program that has a client-integration solution for POPFile.

The process and interface for managing and reclassifying specific messages in POPFile is pretty frustrating. POPFile's built-in mail viewer won't even display HTML mail, and there a lot of clicks and waiting involved to see and process a single message. My colleague and friend, Mitch Wagner, who works with me at TechWeb and who is an ardent POPFile supporter, points out something that's very true: POPFile is so accurate that after the first couple of months, you don't have to manually retrain messages very often. I have a hard time abiding a bad interface though. I will actively look to replace any program that annoys me in use. (It's probably worth noting that I've been actively trying to replace Eudora for three years.)

I mentioned several minor downsides to POPFile in the October review. There's a multi-user version of POPFile due out in the next month or two that could help with one of my issues, the fact that POPFile is a proxy server running on a client machine, something I'd prefer to avoid.

I chose not to include to describe a small problem with POPFile for Windows in the October review. Since that problem has not been fixed, I'll explain it now. There's an acknowledged bug in the Windows version of POPFile: POPFile's System Tray icon can cause the program to freeze. You'll find a one-paragraph description of this bug under "Known Windows Issues" in the POPFile Release Notes. I've had this problem since the first day I installed POPFile. If your mouse passes over this icon while your email program is sending/receiving email, POPFile freezes. You can exit and restart both your email program and POPFile to back out of the problem (under Windows XP). But it's still annoying. Generally speaking, this only happens to me when I double-click the tray icon to open the POPFile client window. The problem is almost certainly worse for me than most people because every 8 minutes, Eudora checks about a dozen different mail servers, and all those server checks take a couple of minutes to carry out. That means that on my desktop, Eudora is in the state of sending/receiving about 35% of the time. As a result, the likelihood that I unthinkingly go for the POPFile tray icon while Eudora is in the midst of sending/receiving is higher for me. The Release Notes say that the bug may be video driver related, but the video card and drivers have been changed out during the POPFile test period. The new card is from a different video card manufacturer. But that change had no effect on the bug.

So, for me, POPFile is imperfect overall. But when it comes to trapping spam and cleaning up your inbox, POPFile is virtually perfect. And then you have to factor in the powerful mail-classification features. If I were setting up a comparison review of anti-spam products, and I wanted to rate each product on several criteria (say, factors like ease of use, installation, stability, client integration, support, accuracy, overall value, and so forth), I would give "accuracy" a weighting of something like 60%. And with over 99% accuracy, there's not a lot of room for improvement there.

Spamnix 3.0
Eudora users are in the minority among this newsletter's subscribers, so all of you who use Outlook, Outlook Express, Gmail, Lotus Notes, or anything other than Eudora, please skip ahead. Spamnix is an anti-spam utility for Eudora that I've covered in the past.

Now, for all the Eudora users who are still with me — especially those of you who opted to install Spamnix after reading my earlier Let's Fight Sp@m coverage of Spamnix — there's some news about this product. Program author Barry Jaspan has released an early alpha version of Spamnix 3.0 that dumps the SpamAssassin rules-based email-content-filter technology (which I've been critical of in the past). You might expect that Barry is using Bayesian technology instead, right? Well, Spamnix already had some Bayesian functionality.

Spamnix 3.0 is instead based on Bill Yerazunis' CRM114. For more on CRM114, see Paul Graham's Bill Yerazunis: Better than Human, which claims that CRM114 has in one instance delivered 98.87% accuracy. An essay written by Paul Graham in August of 2002 called A Plan for Spam almost single-handedly kicked off the Bayesian anti-spam thrust a few years back. Another Graham article is equally seminal, Better Bayesian Filtering. Both of these articles reference CRM114.

The fact that Spamnix 3.0 is in "alpha" means that it's not ready for most people to install. Alpha comes before beta, and most developers use the term alpha to mean that the product is not feature complete and may also be unstable. So, Barry Jaspan still plans quite a bit of development on Spamnix 3.0 before he releases it generally and I'm not aware of any stated release date. There's no link to the 3.0 version on the Spamnix website. However, if you just have to get this thing, you can try signing-up for the Spamnix-Testers List.

So, that said, I just installed Spamnix 3.0.1 alpha and have so far encountered no stability issues, but I've also had no chance to mess with it and check it out. I'm very interested in CRM114, though. The thing that I'm really happy about it is that it's possible to use POPFile and Spamnix at the same time ... ;-)

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The newsletter accepts ads, but I don't actively sell them at all. (In fact, I'm a terrible salesman.) There are no paid ads now and haven't been for a while. The website has Google AdSense ads, which bring in a small amount every month. I'm a little long on content and short on revenue, as it were.

I ask that you take a moment to send what you can afford. I'm especially looking for people who have never contributed to do their part. There are two ways to send me your contribution. You can send it via cash or check through the regular mail. Or you can send it electronically via PayPal:

Thanks in advance for your help.

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Anyway, it's not the camera I was intending to write about. It's the website where I've been learning a lot about it (and its competition): Digital Photography Review. This little British-based site is edited by a small squad of dedicated staffers and frequented by an enthusiastic community. It's well designed and stocked with in-depth reviews packed with insight. I've haunted this place on off-times over the last six weeks or so. If you're interested in digital cams, check it out.

I also have to credit the winner of last month's Link of the Month, Mike Elgan, editor of Personal Tech Pipeline and Mike's List, for turning me on to DP Review.

Have you discovered a relatively unknown Windows or broadband related website that's a little amazing? Please send me the URL so I can check it out and let everyone know about it.

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Scot's Newsletter is a monthly e-magazine. My aim is to deliver each issue of the newsletter on or before the first of each month.

You can always find out when the next issue of Scot's Newsletter is expected to appear by visiting the Scot's Newsletter home page.

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