FireFox 3

Today I did something surprising: I made FireFox 3 my default browser. Like nearly everyone else I know, I stopped using Netscape nearly twelve years ago, when IE 3.0 came out. Since then, I've taken a peek at other browsers on a regular basis, but none of them has ever offered me a compelling reason to switch. Up until the last year or so, this was because (in my opinion) IE maintained a comfortable lead in features and performance over its competition. Over the last year, as IE's lead in features and performance slowly dwindled, it's mostly been because the majority of websites were written around IE, and FireFox just didn't work as well.

All that has changed with the impending release of FireFox 3.0. For those of you who haven't been paying attention, FireFox 3 has been in beta for some six months or longer, and during that time it's progressed from being a fast and capable alternative, to being the fastest, most capable browser around. I've used Opera, I've used Safari, I've used IE 7 and IE 8 – and there's nothing like this latest Mozilla incarnation.

My own subjective experience with FF3 is borne out by the testing that Adrian Kingsley Hughes has been doing over on ZDNet. His testing shows that that FF3 is almost 10 times faster than IE7 on the same benchmarks:

What's more interesting, however, is what this indicates about Microsoft's declining ability to develop quality software. The earliest public beta of FF3 was already more stable than IE 7 after a year and a half of patches. The earliest beta of FF3 was faster than its predecessor; the first beta of IE8 is a bloated, unstable monstrosity that somehow manages to be even more slow and unstable than IE7. Every FF beta was released simultaneously on dozens of platforms; IE7 runs on XP SP2 and Vista, and under the hood is almost a different browser on each platform.

There are currently two use cases that I still need IE to support: Outlook Web Access (which supports FireFox, but only by degrading very ungracefully), and uploading batches of pictures to Picasa through the browser (rather than through the Picasa client). So I'll keep IE installed. But I plan to use it as little as possible.

Something has gone very wrong with Microsoft. Their stock hasn't been doing very well anyway – but I'm still of the mind to sell it short.

The Promise of Future Revenue

I couldn't have said it better myself: Except that there are ways to be fairly compensated for creative efforts now, of course. YouTube isn't one; but Zango is. It's all about the content economy, baby.

Deconstructing Socially Generated Knowledge in Realtime

It's been a fascinating couple of days. I've been too busy to post to my blog much recently, but I just couldn't help myself on this one.

A couple months ago, I wrote about "The Limitations of Socially Generated Knowledge", which dealt with the tendency of Internet communities to arrive at conclusions that, to speak colloquially, "just ain't so."

This last week, I've observed another highly inaccurate consensus developing in realtime – and again, while from a philosophical point of view it's fascinating, it's rather frustrating from a business (and accuracy, reality, and truth) perspective.

On January 2, security vendor Fortinet posted an advisory, warning users of a "Facebook Widget Installing Spyware". I will grant that the title of the advisory is at least 50% accurate: the advisory does indeed describe a Facebook widget. (Hint for those of you following along at home: the widget doesn't install anything, and Zango is no more spyware than the Google toolbar is.) If you ignore the title, and actually read the advisory, I have to believe that the bare facts described in the body were likely correct: after the "Secret Crush" Facebook widget was added to a profile, the next Web page in the process showed ads, one of which (for the reasons discussed in more detail below) could very well have been for a Zango application.

I should note that the security team at Zango, after much trying, wasn't actually able to reproduce the scenario Fortinet describes. Nor, best I can tell, has anyone else – including Fortinet. But that's not surprising. To understand why, I need to back up and explain more about how Internet advertising works.

If you visit a site (say, http://entrepeneur.com), you'll typically see a variety of different ads for a variety of different companies, goods, or services. Now, where do those ads come from? It would be horribly inefficient for a small website to maintain a sales force to sell its advertising inventory directly to advertisers – and it's just as inefficient for advertisers to directly place ad buys with thousands of small websites. People figured this out very early in the days of the Internet, and thus was born the idea of an "ad network" (e.g., DoubleClick, ValueClick, Right Media, DrivePM, and so forth). Webmasters who want to show ads on their sites sign up with ad networks, as do advertisers who want their ads to be shown. The ad network takes a cut and automatically places ads from advertisers on websites from publishers. They typically give advertisers some control over where and how they want their ads to be displayed, but it's limited, if only because the ad network ultimately has to trust the web publisher, e.g., not to put anything inappropriate on the page displaying the ad. And of course, it doesn't stop here, with just one intermediary: for many reasons, too complicated to go into right here, there are often lots of intermediaries between the advertiser and the final website.

So, this is how Internet advertising works. Zango, like nearly all companies that do their business online, purchases display advertising through some of these advertising networks, and our ads are displayed on thousands of different sites. And like other online companies, Zango can find it complicated to control exactly where those ads are shown. (Just ask any airline whose ad has shown up next to a news article on the latest airport disaster.) Don't get me wrong: we have standards, and it's against our code of conduct for any of our partners to display Zango ads on a social networking site that prohibits such ads. We do our best to enforce those standards, but our advertising networks have partners as well, and when it comes right down to it, they don't always know where the ad is being displayed. This isn't something nefarious about Zango: it's just how the Internet advertising industry works. Ask anybody.

The end result is that even though our security response team wasn't able to document it, it's not at all unlikely, a priori, that an ad for a Zango application may have been displayed by a Facebook widget. But of course, if a user clicked on the Zango ad, he or she would have been taken to our website, where we have sophisticated mechanisms for ensuring that every user receives appropriate notice and consent before installing the Zango software that provides free access to the Zango application. No user installed Zango who didn't have the opportunity to be very well informed about what he or she was installing. Period.

So these are the bare facts: some individual creates a "Secret Crush" widget that, like many Facebook widgets, is better at getting people to install it than at doing anything interesting or useful. Since this widget happens to displays ads, he hooks up with an advertising network to select those ads for him, and one of the ads randomly displayed was for a Zango application. Unless you have a blanket objection to all advertising in principle (an objection I can at least understand), or have an aesthetic distaste for silly Facebook widgets (a distaste I fully share), it's hard to see anything particularly scandalous in this. It's the way Internet advertising works, and there's absolutely nothing newsworthy about it.

But take a quick look at how this bare set of facts has been repeated and distorted, first in the original Fortinet posting and thereafter throughout the web and blogosphere. Here are just a few examples culled from literally dozens and dozens of posts, articles and conversations, nearly all reiterating (and some exacerbating) the same mistakes:

• 'Installs Spyware.' As I've already mentioned, the original Fortinet posting claims that the widget "installs spyware". It should be clear that the widget didn't install anything – the user did, if and only if he or she wanted to do so. Nor does it make the slightest sense to call Zango "spyware". If Zango is spyware, the term has no meaning. There is such a thing as spyware. But Zango isn't. I should also note that this one advisory aside, Fortinet acknowledges as much: their own security applications classify Zango as adware, not spyware.
  
• 'Adware Distribution Scheme.' Matt Hines, of InfoWorld, calls it an "adware distribution scheme", and later lumps Zango in with "badware". Throughout the article, he implies that the makers of the widget were specifically out to install Zango, which, so far as I can tell, is absolutely incorrect. (It certainly seems like the widget maker just wanted to show some ads and arranged to do so via an ad network; one of those ads happened to be for a Zango application.) Hines also goes on to confuse the Facebook widget with the Zango download, by saying:

  "The Secret Crush program also tries to lure people who download the file to pass it along to other Facebook members they know, according to Fortinet's research."

    That's not true, nor even what Fortinet's research said.

• 'Spyware' with weak notice and consent. Thomas Claburn, of Information Week, repeats the "spyware" charge and implies that Zango has weak notice and consent policies. (If he'd perhaps bothered to install Zango's software, he would have been made aware of his mistake – he doesn't appear to have ever done so.)
  
• 'Notorious' malware. InternetNews follows the original (spurious) Fortinet claims, adding that Zango is a "notorious adware distributor" and calls the application itself "malware". Like the original posting, this one fails to recognize that what's being described is nothing more than a widget showing ads; and it fails to acknowledge that any install of Zango software promoted in any rotating ad shown by the widget absolutely followed our strict and thorough notice and consent policies.
  
• And more silliness.
  
  • ITbusiness.ca calls the episode a "hack", an "attack", and a "threat".
  • The Malware Adviser blog calls it a "backdoor".
  • TechnoSocial calls it a "worm".
  • The Happy Geek calls it a "security threat" and a "worm".
  • AppScout calls Zango "an undercover malicious spyware program" and a "virus", and implies that 4% of all Facebook users had installed it.

And I could go on, but it gets boring. All this effort, all this indignation and pontification for . . . an ad? Wow.

It would be amusing how quickly the Internet arrives at a consensus if that alacrity wasn't so scary. This is admittedly a pretty minor issue in the big scheme of things – but take a few moments and ponder how the same dynamic is at work for much more important questions.

I have to add, as a postscript if nothing else, that PaperGhost alone seems to have recognized the insanity generated by Fortinet for what it is:

They [Fortinet] also posted up a screenshot that seems to show the application merely showing randomly selected adverts - not just an advert for Zango.

If that's the case, then this whole thing just puzzles me because it immediately looks more like

Install application > application opens popup advert > popup advert calls adspace purchased by companies to display random advert and less like:

Install application > GET JACKED BY ZANGO, LOL

...so, once and for all, can anyone who played with this thing - because I haven't - set the record straight?

In it's original incarnation, did this application

A) open a box for Zango and only Zango every single time it was tested, or

B) did it just happen to randomly show a Zango advert (out of a big pile of other things it could have displayed)?

Chris: Because nobody (at Zango or elsewhere) has been able to replicate the scenario Fortinet describes, I can't say definitively how the widget functioned when Fortinet did its testing. But, internally here at Zango, we can tell that the URL referred to in the Fortinet posting was for an ad network, not for a publisher, so the answer is almost certainly "B". In other words, Zango had no relationship with the Secret Crush widget maker, and he or she had no incentive to see Zango software installed.

The Mainstreaming of Desktop Advertising

Part of me would really like to highlight Microsoft's recent filing of a second adware patent (after the first, here) as evidence that desktop advertising is going mainstream. But honestly, I would be several years too late. AOL's IM client has shown popup ads for years now, and every other serious IM client makes money from embedded banner ads. IAC's Fun Web Products division (aka SmileyCentral) accounts for a very large chunk of the $700MM annually that IAC's "Media & Advertising" brings in. The industry number that gets tossed around is that Google makes about $12 on each install of their toolbar. Miva's Direct division (owner of ScreenSaver.com) accounts for more than a third of Miva's $120MM in annual revenues.

The only frustrating thing about this is the ongoing double-standard across the industry. Everybody in the world would hate it, but it would prove my point exceedingly well, if the scanning apps suddenly started removing every piece of advertising-supported software that didn't abide by the same level of opt-in and consent that Zango does. Just so we're clear, this would include every single company and application that I mention above. It would drive home to a whole bunch of folks, very quickly, just how hard Zango has worked to make sure that users who get our software really want it.

This goes back to what I said in my last post, about the need for all "socially generated knowledge" to eventually bump up against reality. It will, eventually. But it sure takes a long time, sometimes.

H.R. 1908: The Patent Reform Act of 2007

I'm no patent lawyer (or lawyer of any sort), and I admit that I quickly feel out of my depth when it comes to discussing patent law. But as an interested participant (at minimum) on technical matters at a fast-moving Internet company for almost a decade now, and as an interested observer for much longer, I remain quite frustrated with what I (and others) think are obvious flaws in our patent system. Let me repeat the disclaimer: patent law is quite complex and I'm no authority. Nevertheless, I have opinions and this happens to be my blog, so I'm going to share them.

My starting point is the idea that patent law is based on utility, not morality (or its close cousin, natural law). This, it seems to me, is different than most laws. Lots of folks like to say, "You can't legislate morality," but that's nearly the opposite of the truth. In fact, it's quite difficult to legislate anything besides morality. The law says "You can't kill someone" because, well, we all agree that it's immoral to do so. But morality doesn't really enter into patent law. You can't own an idea the same way you can own a car or a laptop or a wallet; similarly, you can't steal an idea the way you can steal somebody's wallet. If I have a wallet, by definition you can't have that wallet, and any attempt to split the wallet between us destroys that wallet or, at least, lessens its value. In contrast, if I have an idea, that has zero bearing on whether you can have the same idea; indeed, my idea becomes more powerful if I share it with others. Thomas Jefferson noted this as far back as 1813:

That ideas should freely spread from one to another over the globe, for the moral and mutual instruction of man, and improvement of his condition, seems to have been peculiarly and benevolently designed by nature, when she made them, like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point, and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement or exclusive appropriation. Inventions then cannot, in nature, be a subject of property.

His conclusion, then, is that patent law is not based on inherent ideas of ownership, but on whether it improves society:

Society may give an exclusive right to the profits arising from them, as an encouragement to men to pursue ideas which may produce utility, but this may or may not be done, according to the will and convenience of the society, without claim or complaint from any body.

So that's the first thing about patents: their point is not to ensure ownership, but rather to improve society by encouraging innovation: utility, not morality. It's a mistake to argue for strong patent laws by saying, "This idea is my property and by rights it should remain mine." Ownership of ideas doesn't work that way. Patent law should encourage innovation and precious little else; and if it doesn't do that, it should be changed.

This leads me to my second point: in many situations, our current patent system does not in fact encourage innovation; and it should be changed.

As the co-founder of a medium-sized Internet company, I've had the opportunity to observe first-hand how patents are used. And at least in this field, my impression is that if it were to become more difficult to obtain a patent, more difficult to enforce one, and rather less profitable to do either, these changes would foster innovation and not discourage it. The reason is simple: at least in the Internet space, I've seen patents used far more often to bully other companies than to protect legitimate innovation. Zango has often fought-off competition and, judging by the fate of our chief competitors, has fought it off fairly well. But although we've done much that is patentable, we've yet to feel the need to aggressively use patents to bully our competitors: our business moves too quickly, and we're innovating too fast, to make such a slow, expensive and blunt weapon particularly useful. The converse, however, is not true, and the patent challenges we've spent time and resources rebuffing have distracted us from our efforts to provide value to consumers.

I'm excited, therefore, to see that the House has just passed a reasonable patent reform measure (H.R. 1908) and that the bill is on its way to the Senate. As it turns out, I don't think that the bill goes quite far enough. As one of the comments on Google's blog posting pointed out, the real problem with our patent system is screwed up is excessively broad patentable subject matter: stuff gets patented these days that simply shouldn't be patentable. The bar for "non-obviousness" is set too low and the scope of potential subject matter is expanded too broadly. Unfortunately, HR 1908 doesn't address either of those two problems.

That said, the 2007 Patent Reform Act is better than nothing. It makes some technical changes to the law that all seem to point (perhaps somewhat vaguely) in the right direction. It makes it a little easier for people to challenge stupid patents. It makes it a little harder to claim absurd, astronomical damages. It makes it more difficult to shop for a favorable venue. In short, it's limited. It won't fix the problem. But it will make it somewhat better. And even that's enough to give me hope. At least we recognize there's a problem.

Oh, and Caedmon just peed on me. Apparently he's not a fan of patent law either.

 

Whining about Vista

Over on ZDNet, Ed Bott has posted a defense of Vista that amounts to damnation by faint praise. He rightly points out that XP had roughly the same problems in its introduction that Vista is having right now: not enough drivers, buggy third-party drivers, minimal support-by-Google-query. I think he's missing the point, though. Vista was supposed to be better than XP, and as an operating system, it's nothing short of disappointing.

There are two things I actually like about Vista: integrated desktop search, and reasonably cool photo management. XP doesn't come out of the box with either of them, but MSN Desktop Search is a reasonable substitute for the former, and Picasa is a pretty good substitute for the latter. On the whole, I do prefer Vista to XP. But not much. A little. I suppose. So if Vista is a mildly improved OS, why did we have to wait five frigging years for it? Yes, I know that they rewrote the whole thing underneath. I'm very pleased. But it doesn't actually help me in any interesting way.

Like I said in an earlier post, MS needs to be careful. There's a real opportunity here for Linux here – and given the recent popularity of everything Apple, an even bigger opportunity for OSX.

And I'll be damned if my brother doesn't think the same thing. Scary, that.

Oh, and on a side note: my Pocket PC phone successfully synchronizes with my Vista desktop about 10% of the time. It's probably because all the relevant software is written by different companies that never talk to each other. (Hint #1: it's all written by Microsoft.) Or because it's a 1.0 release and MS hasn't had a chance to get everything figured out. (Hint #2: MS released the first version of ActiveSync eight years ago.) Or because Microsoft doesn't have enough resources to troubleshoot these sorts of problems. (Hint #3: MS has ~$50 billion in cash reserves.) Or because this isn't a very popular configuration. (Hint #4: Almost every professional I know has a Windows CE-based phone.)

Sigh.

Open Vistas

I've been using Vista as my primary OS, and Office 2007 as my primary productivity suite, for over a year now. My initial take, after a month or so of exposure to the betas, was that MS had made a fairly serious strategic mistake with both of them. Over a year later, that first impression has settled into a firm conclusion.

I will say, there are things to like about both platforms. Vista's Aero interface has some nice eye candy. I like the built-in search, and its photo and multimedia organizing capabilities. Outlook 2007 has some nice UI tweaks. Word 2007's blog integration isn't perfect, but it's the best alternative to composing it all in HTML that I've found.

But these are minor pleasantries, and they come with some serious annoyances. Apart from being buggy, which is kinda expected, they both have significant performance problems. The graphing engine in Office 2007 makes some nice looking charts, but it's astonishingly slow. Chart-heavy spreadsheets that would refresh sub-second in Excel 2003 take 10-15 seconds to refresh in Excel 2007. Even after I've figured out where everything sits, I still hate the new ribbon interface. I'm a heavy keyboard user, and although you can still do most things through the keyboard, Office 2007 requires more keystrokes, and significant pauses between those keystrokes. I've got a dual proc, dual core Xeon desktop, and it still takes so long to refresh the ribbon on each keystroke that I could swear MS put the delays in on purpose.

With regard to Vista: I can't say enough how much I hate User Account Control. Yes, of course, I can turn it off – and I would, in a second, except that our software has to run well on Vista with the default settings. And of course, tons of software that I need to run still doesn't work right with Vista. It was only a couple days ago that I finally got my hands on a version of Cisco's VPN client that worked consistently. Zango's network team had to completely redo our wireless infrastructure to allow Vista laptops to connect. My PolyCom video-conferencing software still doesn't work right.

The biggest problem with Vista, though, is simply that it's underwhelming. From a user's perspective, there's a little bit to like about it, but nothing that makes it interesting or revolutionary. It's light years away from what MS originally promised. I've got it running here at work, but I can't figure out why I would spend the money to upgrade my home desktop.

I'm hearing pretty much the same thing from lots of different sources. I do know a few people who like the new ribbon interface – God help them. But I don't know anybody who's excited about Vista. I don't know anybody's who's purchased it, and trust me, I know lots of geeks of the must-have-it variety. Friends I've known for years, friends who upgrade automatically to the latest beta/service pack of anything, are still running XP. If this sample set is any indication, Vista inspires nothing so much as apathy. Nor does anybody seem to care about the next version of Windows. Why should we, if the delta between XP and Vista (three steps forward, two steps back) is any indication of what awaits us?

And here's where Microsoft's missteps might cost them. I've actually started getting interested in Linux. I've got Ubuntu running on a second desktop in my office, and when I replace my current home desktop, I'm planning to switch my old machine over to Linux as well. I've even been wondering about whether Macs might be any better. I'm not ready to make the switch yet, but you'd have to know me to understand just how revolutionary it is for me to be getting tired of Microsoft software.

It's worth nothing that I still don't think Linux is quite ready for mainstream use, even compared to Vista. Open Office is OK, but Evolution can't replace Outlook. (For starters: if it knows that an email has been deleted, why the **** does it still list for browsing? And why does it hang every time I try to delete an email from Exchange?) But the thing is, Linux doesn't have to be that good. For most purposes, honestly, it just has to be good enough to run FireFox and a mature version of Google Gears. With those two, and the services that Google already offers, I could get 90% of my daily work done, as easy or easier than with Vista.

And Microsoft definitely needs to be worried about that. I'm not switching, not yet. But the fact that one of their most loyal customers is thinking through what it would take to make that switch should make Microsoft very nervous indeed.

Microsoft’s Strategic Adware Initiative

In my last post, I questioned how MS was planning to leverage its investment in extensive web service API's, otherwise known as the "Cloud OS". Along those lines, I've been perusing the Windows Live SDK, and noticed, oddly enough, that MS included the adCenter API as a part of it. That seems like an odd place to put it, given that adCenter's focus is a completely different audience than Windows Live (and the rest of the Windows Live SDK). Unless, of course, MS planned to make advertising a key part of their web services initiative.

In other words – shocker – it sure looks to me like MS is planning to use advertising to make money off of their web services.

Nothing terribly revolutionary there: advertising has always been the way you make money off of services people won't pay for. But the hard part about making advertising money off of web services is the ad format. How do you make money off of a bare API call?

There are three ways I can think of to do it, none of them mutually exclusive:

1. Include advertising elements in the objects returned from the API call, and require or encourage their use. Microsoft's Virtual Earth UI controls don't do this yet – but there's no reason they couldn't. Or you could also give websites that consume MS web services special breaks if they also become adCenter publishers. Or you could just say, "If I don't see 'x' number of ad impressions or clicks resulting from 'y' API calls, we'll shut down your access."
   
2. Use the database of information gathered from these API calls to compile behavioral profiles on users, and target advertising based on past behavior. See #1.
   
3. Build advertising into the base OS, so that API calls (and the data riding in them) become just another monetizable context, the way that URL's often are today.

Then a friend pointed out a Slashdot posting on an MS patent application recently made public. This patent application outlines an architecture for "an advertising framework [which] registers context data sources and advertising display clients". And this "advertising framework" is specifically mentioned as being "a part of the OS, an application, or integrated within applications".

In other words – shocker – at least one way MS is thinking about monetizing its server-side investment is through client-side, desktop advertising. "Adware", in so many words.

No wonder MS was so interested in Claria back in 2005.

Partly Wrong About eBay

The AP is reporting that eBay is back running advertising through Google. Turns out my hypothesis must have been at least partly wrong. My latest explanation, for whatever it's worth, is that the pricing is still better on the Tier 2 networks, but that they don't have enough traffic at this point to satisfy eBay's voracious appetite.

Google's too big to ignore, apparently. (Perhaps that point was obvious to everyone except me – and eBay.) eBay's spokesman was quoted as saying that they were still pulling back a "significant" part of their spend from AdWords, but that smells like so much PR spin. Absent any real definition of "significant", chalk up a win for Google.

Google vs. eBay

Lots of folks have commented recently on eBay's highly publicized decision to pull their ad spend from Google, after Google equally publically kicked eBay in the nuts over the PayPal/GoogleCheckout fight.

Here's the interesting bit, for me at least. I have a theory that because of Google's huge mindshare, and because their tools are so easy to use, that it's just easier for an advertiser to use Google than to use any of the dozens of alternatives (whether first, second or third tier). In other words, Google's dominance is a classic example of a market inefficiency; and as anyone with a smattering of economic theory knows, market inefficiencies equal money. I suspect that there's a lot of profit to be picked up on the second tier PPC providers, for anyone who's willing to overlook the herd mentality Google has found it so profitable to cultivate.

So eBay's decision to pull their spend from Google (and presumably push those dollars to other networks) will be an interesting test case. If my theory is correct, and pricing pressure is excessively high on Google's network, eBay will be able to get the same clicks for a lot cheaper on these other networks. And of course: eBay is a big enough customer that this switch will help these networks pay more out to their publishers – resulting in more volume running through these networks: a classic virtuous circle.

That's my hypothesis, at any rate. The alternative is that eBay will discover that these other providers aren't as sophisticated as Google, and that a click in their networks isn't worth nearly as much as a click in Google's. (Some of that will happen in any scenario: Google is pretty darned sophisticated.) The next couple of weeks will be interesting. If eBay switches any substantial portion of their spend back to Google, that will be a Very Bad Sign for tier two providers who are struggling to compete against a reasonably ruthless 800 pound gorilla.

Blog Editors

I'm trying to figure out if it's just me, or whether, in fact, the Blogger editor sucks as badly as I think it does. Every time I try a fairly simple use case -- inserting a picture, say -- it totally screws up the look and feel of my post, and I have to spend 10-15 minutes working through the HTML to clean itup. Behind the scenes it tries to do all sorts of bizarre things like inserting tables and what-not that apparently confuse the editor very badly. I've tried several alternatives -- the "blog" feature in Word, Google Docs, etc. -- and each of them have troubles. I'm writing this particular post in Google Docs, and if a core of software development is the "principle of least surprise", I have to say, it fails miserably. The simple use case of inserting a link to another site does some very strange and bizarre things to the document that I don't understand in the slightest. Perhaps it's the result of using IE7 on Vista, but I would have assumed that's a fairly standard configuration. I'd be very curious to hear what other folks have managed to use successfully.