The two main browsers, Firefox and Internet Explorer, are both releasing major upgrades very soon. Firefox 2.0 is due to go live this coming Tuesday afternoon and IE7 is not far away from go-live also. Both browsers have near-final versions available for download currently, so there's been no shortage of discussions about their relative merits. Read/WriteWeb's browser expert Alex Iskold reviewed both FF2 and IE7 this week.
In our Firefox 2.0 Review, Alex noted that it is "a solid release" - but wondered if it will be enough to gain significant market share on IE. Check out the extensive comments for discussion on this. See also How Firefox 2.0 Will Be Marketed, in which I responded to Chris Messina's excellent post about the challenges of marketing Firefox to the masses. Included in the post is an excerpt of an interview I did with Chris Beard, Mozilla's vice president of products. The rest of that interview will be published early this week.
]]> Alex followed up his Firefox 2.0 review with a review of Internet Explorer 7. He concluded that IE 7 is a huge improvement over IE 6: "There is evidence of really good effort and innovation here - but there are also traces of the old IE that just do not fit."One of the more enjoyable interviews I've done lately was with Garrett Camp, Chief Architect of StumbleUpon. In this post, Garrett describes StumbleUpon as a "personalized content discovery" service and outlines how it has grown to the million plus users it has today. Interestingly, he says that nearly half their user base is outside the US and more than a third are over the age of 35!
On a similar topic, check out guest blogger Emre Sokullu's Personalized News: A Market Overview. In this post, Emre reviews services such as Reddit and Spotback. There pearls of wisdom in the comments too.
This week we reviewed two Web Office systems: JotSpot's Hybrid Wiki/Office Suite and SocialText 2.0 (including an interview with CEO Ross Mayfield). This is a very interesting space right now, so Read/WriteWeb is committed to profiling it for you.
Earlier this week we profiled the Product (RED) campaign - for each (RED) branded product or service sold, a part of the profit goes to the fight against AIDS, Tuberculosis and Malaria in Africa. There was some vigorous back and forth in the comments to this post, on the merits or otherwise of (RED). Personally, I still believe it's a great cause and they are making excellent use of the Web too.
For some reason last week there were a lot of 'version 2.0' releases. Apart from Firefox and SocialText, others we covered were Pageflakes 2.0 and Tailrank 2.0.
While not quite at 2.0 yet, Movable Type Enterprise 1.5 also launched - Read/WriteWeb interviewed Anil Dash (SixApart VP) and Chris Alden (EVP and GM of Movable Type) about the upgrade and to discuss the future of Movable Type.
That's a wrap for another week. Roll on the new week! p.s. I haven't yet figured out how to do a special RSS feed for the Weekly Wrapups, so apologies to those of you waiting for it.
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