The "Seattle Times" reports that Bill Gates will very likely start blogging soon.

Now I wonder what it will mean to the blogging scene if Gates makes this threat real. Oh ok, you see I'm a bit negative about this. But why, you will ask. I'll tell you.

Before Bill Gates discovered the Internet it was a nice and cozy place for scientists, hackers and other nerds. Now the Internet is a big monster with viruses, trojans and spam and the one browser that dominates it: Internet Explorer. While I don't think that it would have prevented the Internet to grow if Bill Gates hadn't discovered it, I think that all those security holes in Microsoft's Internet products motivate virus programmers to write new viruses. You do have a choice between several browsers and e-mail-clients, but most of the after Bill-Gates-discovered-the-Internet time Internet users, don't care about security or don't know what they are doing ("Weird, every time I turn on my computer it shuts down by itself. Something must have got broken in there." - "You've got a virus!" - "Really? How did it get in there? Please, make it go away!!"). I wouldn't mind all those Internet Explorer and Outlook users to bomb themselves away if it wouldn't affect the performance of the net that much.

One other bad thing about Internet Explorer is that it is at least partly not conformant to standards. There are sites out there that only run on Internet Explorer and sadly I have to access some of them from time to time - such as "Windows Update". And as a developer you have to take care that the sites you develop can be viewed in Internet Explorer because although it is painfully outdated and some standards are just not implemented in it, most people and therewith many potential customers of a web site still use it.

So now back to where we started. Bill Gates discovers blogging. Do you think Bill Gates will use "Movable Type" or "Bloggar"? I doubt it. More likely Microsoft will come up with an own blogging application that is deeply intertwined with Windows and most likely you won't be able to read blogs created with it without using some obscure totally insecure application from Microsoft.

But who cares about some mummy-I'm-writing-about-my-last-vacation-with-ms-blogsnot blogs. None. Although maybe we should care about what Bill Gates will be writing about. Maybe he'll warn us about new plans early enough for those who don't like them to escape them.

Last week saw two highly anticipated releases - well at least highly anticipated by Mozilla geeks.

Firefox 0.9 was the first of the two releases. This release was long overdue. It was postponed several times due to heavy bugs (One of those bugs caused the Firefox installer to delete system files on computers running with Windows XP). But now all the severe bugs are fixed and Firefox is again in a usable state.

One of the big new features is the new handling of extensions. Extensions can now be uninstalled and there is an update feature that checks for new releases of the installed extensions. There is also a new default theme with new icons. Well, it's usable but every time I see it I say to myself that I have to finish that Squareness-Theme for Firefox - well, eventually I will do it. Damn, a day consists only of 24 hours, of which I have to sleep at least 7 hours to be able to go to work the next morning.

The release of Thunderbird 0.7 was quite surprising. First it was "No, we won't release it yet. There'll be another release candidate" and then out of nowhere - a day after the release of Firefox 0.9 - there was Thunderbird 0.7. First I thought it was a mistake, that someone posted the release candidate and just got the descriptions wrong. But no, it was the real and final 0.7.

The biggest feature for me is the addition of the GUI for the management of multiple personalities per account. I had to edit the preferences file with a text editor to add personalities before, but now it's very comfortable and not as error-prone as before.

I think I'm somehow a version number fetishist. Somehow it makes me happy to install new versions of the applications I like the most and to see that they still - maybe even better than before - work. And Firefox 0.9 and Thunderbird 0.7 work flawlessly up to now.

Ah well, Firefox 1.0b is planned to be released in July. So it won't be long before I can install a new version. Life is beautiful :)