We at Frogfoot love technology, we love Open Source, we love doing things properly, we love a lot. But there are things that make us cry. Microsoft is responsible for a lot of those things, with my personal tears being shed specifically for Internet Explorer 6. It takes all the good vibes we try and collect and kills them like a rainbow unicorn drowning in quick sand. (You get the point right?)

Internet Explorer 6 was released in 2001, almost 8 years ago. It has its own psychopathic way of deciding how to render HTML (the “program code” behind how websites look) which drives all web developers nuts, it doesn’t support transparent PNGs (an image format newer and better than GIF) and is also slow and insecure, probably responsible for most of the viruses and spyware that’s lurking in the world today.

For all the tears I have shed for Internet Explorer 6 there is a blanky of love and security that is Firefox.

Firefox is the Open Source poster child. Many of you might remember a company called Netscape. Back in the day (the wild west 90s) Netscape made a web browser called Netscape Navigator. It was the web browser and dominated 90% of the market share in the early 90s. Then Microsoft came along and in 1995 started bundling Internet Explorer as part of its Windows 95 Plus Pack.

Thus began the browser wars. A small software company against the ruthless giant of Microsoft, willing to do anything to get its way. Both companies released feature after feature, trying to outdo each other. Ultimately it was Microsoft’s decision to bundle all its successive operating systems with Internet Explorer than rung the death knoll for Netscape… it was just too hard for a small dedicated company to compete against a relatively good (for that time) web browser that was already on people’s computers. By 2005 Netscape’s dominant 90% had dropped to less than 1%.

Though Netscape took Microsoft to court, labelling their “bundling” practice as anti-competitive, and ultimately winning various antitrust court cases, Netscape was never going to rise again. But its ashes were only smouldering… and we all know what rises from the ashes. Foxes?

Eric S Raymond is a hippie. He’s possibly the biggest hippie in the Open Source, Free (as in freedom) Software world. He is also a right wing fundamentalist nut. But we love him like we love our eccentric uncle who runs the orphanage and feeds the poor. He is such a big influence that his books are viewed by some as the “sacred texts” of Open Source.

One book in particular is held as being the cornerstone of “why-open-source-works”. “The Cathedral and the Bazaar“, published in 1997 was so ground breaking with its theories that it could be compared to someone saying “The world is not flat” in a world where everyone still believed it was. In this book ESR explains how hundreds (thousands even) of workers, working together (in their spare time) towards a common goal can produce something as brilliant and robust as a cathedral, faster than the so-called “real builders”… and how the idea of the source code being free, and available to everyone, would be enough of a motivation for people to get involved.

In 1998 while the ashes of Netscape were busy smouldering the big wigs in the company were reading Eric’s book. In something akin to the last scene in the action movie where the dying hero fires a single (silver) bullet at a leaking gas tank causing a huge fireball and killing the evil villain, the Netscape bosses decided to release all their source code to the world, to peruse and improve.

The resulting project was called Phoenix… but there was another company called Phoenix so they called it Firebird… but there was another project called Firebird so eventually the settled on Firefox. All of this happened under the umbrella of an organisation called “Mozilla”.

Which brings us back to why Internet Explorer 6 is so incredibly rubbish. Remember how Netscape died, leaving Internet Explorer as the king of the hill? Well, since they were the undisputed king of the hill Microsoft decided that the web browser didn’t need to improve, and since they’d been funding the war for so long, and had now won, but had also set the precedent that the browser was a “free” application there was no reason to improve it (even just a face lift) because they wouldn’t be able to make any money out of it. Well, from 2001 till late 2006 Microsoft rested on it’s laurels with Internet Explorer 6. There was no competition so no reason to improve their ageing, insecure, steaming pile of, erm, software.

Simultaneously though, the Firefox project was gaining momentum. In 2002 the open source project, run almost entirely by volunteers, had released their first version (this was back in the Phoenix days). Mozilla Firefox slowly captured the hearts and minds of the people and slowly but surely, more and more people converted.

Eventually something woke the sleeping giant (Microsoft). Perhaps it was when Forbes magazine called Firefox the best browser in 2004, or when PC World named it their “Product of the Year” in 2005. Or perhaps it was when various foreign governments suggested that Internet Explorer 6 was insecure and that government employees should switch to Firefox.

Firefox now enjoys a healthy global market share which, depending on who you ask, ranges anywhere between 15% to 25%. Certain European countries (especially those who love Open Source) have percentages over 50%. And proof that our customers are intelligent, educated individuals is that on this website, over 70% of the people visiting are using Firefox.

And then of course there are the geeks. If you know someone who calls themselves a geek but doesn’t run Firefox (or one of its derivatives) they are probably not geeks. Geeks love Firefox… Geeks paid for a double page spread in the New York Times to advertise Firefox. Geeks love their friends and families so much that they install Firefox on their computers and hide the Internet Explorer menu items (you can’t uninstall Internet Explorer, it is *that* evil)

At the end of 2006 Microsoft finally released it’s competitor into the ring. Internet Explorer 7 is better than Internet Explorer 6, but it is still a snot-nosed kid when compared to the awesomeness that is Firefox.

So, what’s this about tough love? Well, if you’re still running Internet Explorer 6; an 8 year old web browser, complete with insecurity, bad adherence to standards and crappy PNG support, and you visit our website, you get a nice little badge, suggesting that your life might be better if you were to upgrade your web browser. Our site looks a little Junk in IE6 because we use this newfangled image format called PNG, which was released in 1996 and whose implementation Microsoft repeatedly messed up until 10 years later with Internet Explorer 7.

And even if you are running Internet Explorer 7 you’ll be interested to know that in 2006 PC World compared Internet Explorer 7 and Firefox and concluded that Firefox was still a better browser. A bunch of part time open source hippies made a browser that was better, faster and more secure than anything Microsoft could do. Makes you smile doesn’t it?

We sincerely hope you’ll give Firefox a try. We guarantee you won’t go back!

Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a way Frogfoot could notify you when we add new content to our blog?

There is a way. Our website’s ATOM feed gets updated as we update the site and allows you to quickly and easily check for new content. You can read more about Web Feeds on Wikipedia.

You’ll need a feed reader. I use a Firefox plugin called Sage, but there are many others.

Next, click on the big orange feed icon under ‘Feed The Frog’ in the right-hand-nav to subscribe to the Frogfoot feed. Happy feed reading.

ps. Frogfoot also has a Noticeboard feed to inform clients of general network status events.

Hot of the press Pirate Radio Soundtracks. Three of the hottest cds to be released this year! Get them all now!

To celebrate the launch of our new website, we’ve designed a Pirate Radio t-shirt.

We are giving away 10 of these groovy geeky fashion items.

We’re looking for comments, feedback and constructive criticism of our new website and blog. What are the things you would change? How could we improve it? How do you like the design and structure?

Post a comment or even better, create a pingback/trackback by linking to this post.

We’ll review all the feedback by Friday the 18th and select the best ones.

I updated the Hotspot page. It’s now a bit shorter, simpler and more to the point.

You’ll notice there are now three Frogspot options:

• Frogspot Access Point
• Frogspot ADSL – 384Kbps
• Frogspot ADSL – 4Mbps

Get a Frogspot today, be a part of Frogtropolis…

This is the second part of a 9 part look into the secret headquarters of Frogfoot Networks. Lets peer into the bosses’ office as well as check out the board room.

Frogfoot was awarded the Entrepreneurial Company of 2007 award by Frost & Sullivan after we participated in their South African Broadband market survey.

One more award to hang in our reception area.

This is the first part of a 9 part look into the secret headquarters of Frogfoot Networks. The kitchen is always a good place to start a tour, so grab a cuppa coffee and lets start exploring.

Frogfoot loves Open Source Software — Pretty much everything we do is powered by it, including this website.

When we first decided to redo our website we chose to build it on top of the excellent Wordpress publishing platform. The reason for this was simple… Wordpress is both user friendly and powerful. We didn’t *need* Wordpress, but it makes the daily management of the website very easy… we like easy.

The biggest gripe with Wordpress is that most of the sites developed on top of it end up looking like, well, blogs… and often they look like one of the popular Wordpress themes that someone has modified.

Frogfoot is unique… we have our own style.

Once we had a design it was time for me to program the theme. Even though the site appears to use three different themes (Consumer, Business and Blog), it’s actually all one theme that I put together from scratch.

But the real magic here is the things we take for granted because they “just work”.

The site is running on a virtual server called a Xen box… What is a xen box I hear you asking? Xen is, as with all good things, Open Source. Xen allows Frogfoot to run multiple virtual servers on one real server. Each one of the virtual servers is completely independent of its “parent” and “siblings”. Which basically means that you can have complete control of your own Xen box on one of our servers… it’s like having your very own server for a fraction of the cost. We run our website on a Xen server with the exact same configuration and performance we sell to the public.

Running on our Xen server is Linux. Linux powers Frogfoot! On this particular server we’re running our standard Debian Etch Distro.

The web server is the amazingly powerful Apache web server running with PHP5 and the database is powered by MySQL 5. We get direct live access to the server by mounting directories with sshfs, a neat way of mounting directories on servers on the other side of the internet. I use The GIMP graphics editing program.

Here in my office I’m running Ubuntu Linux (Gutsy) and the best web browser around Firefox with a host of other open source tools that we all use constantly.

We hope you enjoy the site and check back regularly to read our blog.

We’ve recently received some emails, and phone calls, from our customers about SPAM. We really know how you feel, SPAM wastes a lot of our time. In a general 24hr period the Frogfoot mail servers handle roughly 87000 messages, we reject about 65000 messages of which about 2000 contain viruses. Only about 20000 make it through. That means that more than 75% is unwanted mail. It gets quite technical but we’ve drawn up a really cool diagram that illustrates exactly how our SPAM filtering works. Check it out if you’re looking for a deeper understanding of the process.

You should know that even with statistics like that there is presently no effective way to avoid 100% of all SPAM. It is, unfortunately, a fact of life in the 21st Century a bit like the petrol price and more recently load-shedding.

To avoid it all together we could configure our SPAM scanning systems to be much more aggressive but then the chances of us flagging an important email as spam increase exponentially. This very uptight approach to SPAM is not effective. You see while computers are super intelligent they’re not as perceptive as people. Sometimes the SPAM is so well crafted that they can’t see the difference between it and a real message.

Obviously our primary concern is to make sure you get all your important email so we had to ask ourselves the following questions; is it better to ensure that you receive no SPAM but also end up losing some vital email? Or is it better to get all your mail and occasional receive an inappropriate SPAM message that includes one-liners like “dreaming of a bigger love stick”?

We decided that it was better for you to receive all your emails and deal with the frustration of SPAM than miss out on anything because our filtering methods were too stringent.

You can also help in the battle by using an intelligent email client, like Thunderbird, to flag any SPAM that slips through the woodwork. This method, coupled with our SPAM filtering methods, is the most effective way of dealing with the few last bit of SPAM that find their way into your Inbox.