No doubt you’ve seen this ridiculous “Get the Facts” browser comparison chart put out by Microsoft last week.

It’s insulting and misleading, IMO.

Of course they are comparing the brand-new IE8 and Firefox 2.0.7, which is not even the current version.  Guess they are figuring that people are really that stupid.

Here are some comments on each thing in the grid:

• Security – Let me guess — more user access control prompt nonsense built right in on whether accept ActiveX on a site by site basis?
• Privacy – Yeah, Chrome and Firefox 3.5 have both of those.
• Ease of Use – Blah, blah, blah about the Accelerators, Web Slices and Visual Search.  People don’t really care about that stuff.  The interface of IE6 was more intuitive than IE7 and IE8, in my opinion.  I still don’t understand why they moved the home button and buried the Tools and Internet Options
• Web Standards – Firefox is open source and has consistently done a better job complying to web standards that IE for years.
• Developer Tools – Uh, OK.  Who cares if you have add Firebug to Firefox?  Oooh, that’s really hard.
• Reliability – Yeah, nice try.
• Customizability – IE and Chrome can’t beat Firefox add-ons.   Yeah, but the add-ons I’m using in Firefox are features that aren’t currently in even IE8.
• Compatibility – Really??  IE is compatible??   As a web developer that’s had to code around IE bugs for years, spare me.
• Manageability – Microsoft controls the desktops in most companies.  Of course, it has better manageability. Not only that but IE8 is a critical Windows Update.
• Performance – Chrome is snappy. Firefox 3.5 is just as fast.

Like a wise Lifehacker commenter said:

IE8 is pretty reliable. It finished downloading Firefox without a single crash.

UPDATE: Here’s a funny parody site.

I use vi a lot at work.  It really became a lot more useful when I figured out how to copy and paste blocks of code.

All of these are done in command mode:

shift-v =  select a line
ctrl-v = select a rectangle
Y = yank selection to buffer
P = paste from buffer before cursor
p = paste from buffer after cursor position
dd = delete a line (this also moves the line to the buffer, so you can still paste it)

Here are some other handy ones:

u = convert a selection to lowercase
u = undo previous action (if nothing is selected)
ctrl-R = redo an action
gg = go to the top of the document
G = go to the end of the document
###gg = go to line number ###
:%s/blah/whee/gc = replace “blah” with “whee” globally with confirmation
:%r~/whee.txt = insert text into the current document from a file (~ = your home directory)

I use Google Reader…a lot.  It’s really where I read most things on the web.

I share articles I find interesting.  My shared items get automatically get sucked into Facebook and into Twitter (via Twitterfeed).  I star content to revisit at some point.  I e-mail things I think people might find helpful.

Regarding e-mailed items, it’s annoying that those e-mailed items don’t get filed under your Gmail sent-items. There is a remedy, however. Google has several special URLs for accessing all sorts of interactions that you’ve made. Here’s the or viewing posts that you’ve e-mailed:

http://www.google.com/reader/view/user/-/state/com.google/tracking-emailed

You can find the entire list here.

Here’s my shared item feed, if you’d like to subscribe.