Although this site is GNER branded you can purchase tickets for any UK rail service and there’s no credit card surcharges or booking fees. As well as Visa, Mastercard and Maestro this booking engine also accepts Solo and Electron which are not currently accepted by thetrainline or in most ticket offices. The only downside is American Express does not seem to be supported, if you want to pay with this card then you’re stuck with thetrainline or GNER’s excellent telesales department.

The main problem the thetrainline is the time taken to load each page, if you’d like to look for later trains or change any other details it takes a while for the pages to load up. This is because this site hasn’t changed much since launch and does not take advantage of AJAX to selectively load portions of the page.

The new GNER website is definitely web2.0 buzzword compliant, but more importantly the changes made make booking train tickets quicker and easier. It starts when you enter the station name, it will automatically show an autocomplete drop down showing the station options, this also supports the 3 letter station codes should you know them.

Once you select the departure and arrival stations as well as the dates of travel the web site will load the fares and train times into the main section of the window, as this is done via AJAX the full page does not need reloading, this means that you see the results faster than before. Along the top of the screen you see a list of possible fares for this journey, along the bottom is a list of times you can choose from.

If you choose a fare it will grey out the journeys that are not valid for that fare so you can then select a time that suits your budget, alternatively if timings are more important to you then you can select a service first and it’ll show the fares available for this service. If you select the ‘i’ icon next to a service it will show you details of the service including train operator (e.g. GNER), facilities available on the train (e.g. buffet, restaurant, first and standard class), journey time and ultimate destination. Clicking an ‘i’ next to the fare description will show the full terms and conditions of the fare.

Once you select your fare and the trains you wish to travel on (this step is optional if buying a flexible ticket) it will load a new page where you can select additional options. This site offers a great deal more choice over your seat selection than thetrainline, you used to be only able to select forward or backward facing, with the new site you can select a seat in the quiet coach, restaurant (only first class can reserve here, standard class can use if space available), window, aisle, near the toilets, etc. It also allows you to reserve space for bicycles and request assistance for disabled travellers, none of this is available on thetrainline.

Another useful addition to the GNER site is the ability to buy useful additions to your ticket such as GNER buffet vouchers (to save money on food and drink purchased on-board) or London travelcards. You can choose the regular delivery options, I’d recommend collection at the station if the option is available at your station, there’s also the option of regular mail (free) or special delivery at a fee.
The next page is the payment page, if you’ve registered before you can enter your username and password at this point if you’re not already logged in, if you’re not registered you can simply complete your details on this page and choose a password, you don’t need to navigate to a different page to create an account. Once you’ve entered your payment details you’ll be taken to the appropriate card verification page if appropriate and once payment has been authorised then your transaction is complete and you will be given your reference number.

I tried the site under Firefox 2, IE7 and Safari 3 and all worked fine. Due to its heavy reliance on AJAX you may be better off with thetrainline if you have to use an old browser at work for any reason, however, if you’re using any web browser made in the past five years you should be fine with this new site and it’s a big improvement to what else is available.

The bug only appears when using IE and therefore it doesn’t affect users on other platforms such as Linux or Mac. The bug in the Firefox code was caused by Windows shell integration (making it possible for other applications to launch Firefox if it is the default browser). Basically IE should have validated the URL before passing it to another application, any quotation marks and other special characters in the URL should have been escaped. Although Firefox was used as an example, it’s possible that other applications will be vulnerable to the same issue, the best way to prevent this is for Microsoft to fix the underlying issue. Firefox does not escape blame though, it should not run potentially dangerous commands from untrusted sources.

Although Microsoft is claiming it is not a bug with their URL handling, the Mozilla patch was produced and checked in to the Mozilla codebase the same day as the bug was discovered. It is currently available in nightly builds for testing and will be made available to the wider public in Firefox 2.0.0.5. Hopefully Microsoft will eventually fix their side of the issue too, otherwise other applications may still be vulnerable to the same issue as well as future applications.

Currently, it’s a Safari 3 public beta that is available for Mac and Windows. The user interface will not look native to Windows but is more of a pseudo Mac look similar to iTunes for Windows.

What will be interesting is whether they will create special Windows versions of keychain (password manager) and the spell checker, both are part of OS X natively and are used by Safari and most other native Mac apps.

I’m not sure what Apple are hoping to achieve by this, it will be indeed a great benefit to web designers who want to test in Safari and also those that prefer Safari and have to boot in to Windows occaisionally. However, I know of quite a few companies that will at least invest in a token Mac or two for Safari testing and now with a Windows version they may not bother.

It’ll be interesting whether there’ll be any major differences in rendering between the Windows and Mac version. Presumably they’ll use the same Apple Webkit core.
I’m not anywhere near a Windows PC at the moment but will take a look at this as soon as possible. Looking at the description it seems to have feature parity with Safari on the Mac.

A number of improvements in this release are making it a serious contender for my default browser under Mac OS X.

• Spell checking - unlike Firefox the spell checking functionality used is the one built in to Mac OS X, this means no need to worry about managing a separate dictionary for this application.
• RSS feed detection - this puts the browser on a par with Firefox and Safari, a familiar icon will appear in the URL bar indicating a feed is available.
• Session saving - the ability to restore a session after a restart or crash. This feature is also available in Opera and Firefox.
• Improved annoyance blocking - due to the lack of extensions, the Camino team have combined some of the better annoyance blocking features that are seen in Firefox extensions such as ad blocking, flash blocking as well as pop-up blocking.
• Improved tab browsing, including a single window mode adds tabbed browsing features familiar to Opera or Firefox users.

More info on the features page and release notes. The main thing that kept me using Firefox as default on Mac OS X was the lack of advanced tab controls in Camino (particularly single window mode), now this feature is in Camino it is worth a try.

Although I tend to promote Firefox as my browser of choice it still has some problems on the Mac platform which Camino addresses. The Mac look and feel is entirely different to Windows and the look of many window managers under Linux so getting a cross platform app to feel Mac like is difficult. Mac OS X also has built in features that on other platforms need to be implemented by the application, the most important to a browser are Keychain (password management) and form field spell checking. Unlike Firefox, Camino integrates with the built in Mac services giving a more consistent experience.

Work is ongoing to make Firefox more Mac friendly and in future versions it will be possible to integrate with Keychain and the built in spell checker, once this is done they need to make the default theme more Mac like (only on Mac of course) and a few minor look and feel bugs. But in the meantime I suspect Camino will be the best option for most Mac users.

Should Dell ship Firefox? Let them know your opinion.

Personally I think Firefox will be a great addition to the Dell install. Dell sell PCs to a wide demographic of home users from newbies buying their bargain of the week up to powerful desktops for gamers. It’s the newbies that are unlikely to know about alternative browsers and will benefit from the inclusion of Firefox. Unlike most of the additional software Dell install, Firefox is not crippled in any way so will make a usefull addition to the base install.

Would this make me buy a Dell? Probably not, Apple hardware suits my needs fine these days. Losing the ability to run Mac OS X far outweighs any savings made by buying a Dell. However, I’d be more prepared to recommend a company that is open to promoting choice over one that only pushes what Microsoft tell them to.

It gives us a great excuse to party.  Turn up to Amsterdam on 30th April which is the Dutch national holiday, Koninginnedag (Queens Day). The whole city turns into one huge street party with all traffic banned from the centre. Turn up to the centre of Amsterdam wearing something promoting Firefox, Opera or your alternative browser of choice. Or be more adventurous, dress up in a Firefox costume, use your imagination.

OK, it’s just really a reason to have a great time while giving a plug to alternative browsers. But sometimes it’s good to have an excuse to do something.

Getting to Amsterdam is easy from the UK. KLM is currently running a 4 day sale over this weekend offering up to 20% off. Then there’s also a number of other airlines flying there from the UK including easyJet, BA, BMI and Jet2. From mainland Europe there’s plenty of flights and train services.

I fly out from London City on the morning of the 30th and return on May 1st. A free drink to everyone I see promoting an alternative browser. Google Ad revenue has been good this month and more than covered the hosting fees - thanks to the Zune 360 April fools gag that delivered over a million hits in the space of a few days

UPDATE: Had a great time but didn’t see anyone else with a Firefox/Opera shirt around. If you did come over leave a comment and let us know how your day has gone.

If there’s interest we can organise a proper event next year with more planning.

My initial thoughts were that Vista was better than Windows XP but still not worth the upgrade price unless you needed it for testing. Now after using Vista as my primary Windows OS for the past few months I have to say that it actually seems to get more irritating with day to day use. Despite being delayed in development it just seems so rushed with a number of rough edges and features that don’t work quite how you’d expect.

The lack of overall quality control of this product makes it obvious that each component of the product has been designed by different committees, each one having little communication with the other. This is actually the same complaint that I had of early Linux desktops, as the apps were written by different people with different ideas of what made a good interface you’d get an inconsistent experience. Now Linux distributions are actually getting better in this regard, the main barrier to entry is application support now. Linux is a more than capable OS for those who don’t need any specialised commercial applications or games. I’d like to see in particular Internet cafes moving to a distribution like Ubuntu, they’d be able to offer a safe browsing experience for their users without any licensing issues.

For many the Microsoft habit is hard to break. But now there’s the possibility that Microsoft has made Windows Vista so frustrating it’s going to either make more people hold onto XP for longer or maybe even try alternatives.

Ultimately, this is not going to stop Windows being the number one installed OS, and eventually through more new sales Vista will be the number one Windows release. Most people will take what looks like the ‘latest and greatest’ rather than taking the tried and tested XP. Microsoft did need a modern replacement to XP, I’ve been annoyed for years about how it lacked features that Linux or Mac OS X can offer but somehow Microsoft made an OS that annoyed me even more than XP.

Let’s hope that MS is working hard on addressing the irritations for Service Pack 1, I’ve got a legal licence to run this product and so I’d rather run it as my primary OS for Windows applications rather than just running it on VMware for testing purposes only.

Now on my PC I’m running the latest Ubuntu as the primary OS and XP/Vista are accessible via VMware. As my laptop is a Mac I do use Mac OS X most of the time though. It’s just so much easier to work on a laptop.

BadVista.org is in the top ten search results for Vista on Google. They’re trying to discourage people to buy Vista for its support of DRM. However, I’ve not had much luck explaining to non technical people why they should not support DRM media. I think the general shoddiness of Vista will do a lot more to encourage people to avoid it.

The problem with so many prompts is it’s more likely to annoy the user to the stage that they become blind to the alerts and just blindly click OK or if they know how to they may turn these off. The IE blog shows another example of how Vista is defective by design, as you probably know by default IE opens Notepad as the ‘View Source’ editor (shouldn’t the menu item really be ‘Edit Source’), now as IE 7 (quite rightly) runs under a protected mode in Vista meaning the app has limited access to OS level functions however Notepad does not run under protected mode so as the IE blog shows it pops up a warning everytime you want to view the source.

The IE blog entry states “Before launching applications like Notepad that weren’t designed to work with low privilege, Protected Mode displays the following prompt to get your permission. This prompt is designed for the worst case security scenario, which is a malicious webpage trying to silently elevate out of Protected Mode by launching an application or reusing one that you’re launching. For example, in the scenario where you select View Source, a malicious webpage could try to silently pass its content to Notepad instead of the webpage’s source code. This could be a dangerous scenario if there was vulnerability in Notepad”. Their advice to fix this problem is to turn the alerts off by selecting the ‘Do not show me this again’ option.

If it’s not possible to run Notepad in restricted mode when being passed content from IE then they should do what other browsers do and display the source within the application itself.

Improving the security of Windows was very important but they’re going the wrong way about it. Apple are using these annoying prompts to their advantage. Take a look at their advertising campaign if you’ve not already (it’s the one labelled security).