ReadWriteWeb

Last week Microsoft launched its Internet Explorer 6 Countdown website, celebrating the dwindling use of the decade old browser.

But as we've reported, there are a few reasons that IE6 persists in the enterprise: the cost of upgrades, mission-critical legacy applications that aren't compatible with newer browsers and, oddly, social control.

Are you still stuck with IE6 in your workplace?

Amid the hubbub over new iPods and iTunes' LPs announced at last week's annual Apple event, one feature that was a little under-hyped was the new "anti-phishing" protection built into the iPhone's Safari web browser. The added feature, available via an iPhone software update, warns users when visiting fraudulent websites using Safari. This sort of technology is already commonplace on the web, but is rarely seen on the mobile platform.

Unfortunately, there seemed to be a problem with the new security feature: it wasn't working...or at least, so it seemed. As it turns out, the problem was that users weren't informed as to how to properly activate the anti-phishing protection, an issue that points to a poor implementation of what could and should have been a major breakthrough in mobile computing technology.

When Adobe AIR was first released, we were in love. These glorious rich internet applications let us interact with web services outside our browser. In many ways, AIR apps were revolutionary. More complex than simple desktop widgets, these programs delivered the web to us in beautiful little packages. Almost immediately, we were updating Twitter, streaming video, reading feeds, editing photos, and so much more using various apps built for this new platform.

But recently, we've begun to question AIR's longevity. Now don't get us wrong - many of our favorite apps (TweetDeck, Tumbleweed, Yammer, etc.) are built using Adobe AIR. However, there's no reason why these apps couldn't just run in a browser instead...and that might even be a better place for them. 

At next month's Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas, two HP researchers are going to demonstrate "Veiled," a new type of darknet created within a web browser and built exclusively for the purpose of secure, anonymous web surfing and online communication. The darknet, created using just PHP and JavaScript, works with any HTML-5 browser allowing its users to avoid web monitoring and online censorship.

A few days ago, the social web browser Flock released version 2.5 of their software, integrating Facebook Chat, improving Twitter functionality, and adding a new broadcasting feature called "Flockcast." As we evaluated the upgrade, a thought occurred to us: this browser should be the epitome of everything we love about the social web and yet the company has seen only moderate success. Flock has been downloaded 7.5 million times but has just 1.1 million active users. (Compare that to Firefox's 270 million). Is Flock doing something wrong here? Or is the product just too niche to ever see mainstream success?