On Daring Fireball this morning, there was a link to Matt Asay’s CNET feature Google and Apple should join the Firefox party, which in a nutshell suggests Google and Apple should ditch WebKit and instead ‘invest in Firefox’. As someone immersed in the web design industry for much of my life, whether it’s in designing sites or writing about the process of designing sites, Asay’s suggestion made my head spin. Here are some reasons why he’s wrong:

Consolidation reduces software innovation

We see this everywhere, and notably in the creative industry. When Adobe bought Macromedia, it removed the bulk of its competition. Since then, it’s grown fat and lazy. This would likely happen if it was IE vs Frankenstein’s Monster Firefox.

All the competition has rising market share

Asay’s main argument for consolidation is that it’d smack Microsoft hard. He claims splintering efforts is less effective than a solidified counter attack. That must be news to Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox, each of which continues to chip away at Microsoft’s lead. Sure, it’s a slow process, but it is steady, and I haven’t seen too many ‘IE market share rises by five per cent’ headlines of late.

WebKit is often superior to Gecko

Firefox and its Gecko engine might be the runner-up to IE, but WebKit is smaller, sleeker and more efficient. If Apple knifed Safari, the Gecko equivalent would be more bloated and unsuitable for iPhone.

Ownership enables optimisation for own services

Google didn’t make a browser because they thought it’d be a fun jape—Chrome exists to be a solid runtime environment for Google’s online apps. Similarly, Safari is a browser but its core is a major component of Mac OS X and iPhone, accessible to developers. Ditching these components would be a crazy decision by either company, just to try and batter Microsoft’s market lead in an area that Apple and Google are only superficially interested in anyway.

IE’s competition is compliant and fast to react

The main concern from a design industry standpoint is standards compliance. When building a typical website, you can be reasonably sure that whatever you do will work fine in Safari, Firefox, Chrome and Google. It’s IE that’s the problem.

Asay argues that “common investment in Firefox […] would leave the industry better off”, but I’d say precisely the opposite is true. It would shackle Google and Apple’s development, leave Opera out in the cold (unless they too threw in their lot with Firefox, thereby obliterating their entire organisation in a single moment of madness), and provide no benefits to the end user.

That all said, there is one argument I’ll make for consolidation: I’d like to see IE9 bin the Trident engine and Microsoft base its browser around Gecko, WebKit or Presto. That way, IE’s odd quirks would be consigned to history, we’d have three competing but excellent rendering engines, and Microsoft could get on with providing a decent Windows-like interface for its users to access the web with. And for all those sites that would explode should that happen, just retain the irksome ‘compatibility mode’ for a couple of versions of IE, but make it a literal ‘engine switch’ to the last version of Trident.

If you’re in the UK, the MP expenses row sparked by the Telegraph can’t have escaped your notice. My current highlight: an MP who claimed for two packets of Tampax for himself. One wonders what a male MP could want with Tampax in order to do his job, but then it’s probably best to stop thinking about that rather quickly.

What grates right now is the typically weaselly manner in which most politicians are addressing this problem, using typical ‘politician speak’. At best, this is insulting; at worst, it’s showing they’ve learned precisely nothing (which is probably unfair—I’ll bet they’ve learned that in future they need to be a hell of a lot more cunning regarding fiddling expenses). So, in time-honoured tradition, here are some helpful hints for our lovely MPs:

When asked about the expenses scandal, don’t look all mournful or forthright (depending on what you think will get more sympathy) while rattling on about how “the system is broken” and how “the system must change”, unless you’ve never made what amounts to a remotely dodgy claim. If you knew the system was broken and you were exploiting said system, you were involved in what’s tantamount to fraudulent behaviour. The correct answer is not that the system needs to change—it’s that MP attitudes need to change.

When asked if you feel guilty about your conduct, have the integrity to provide a straight answer, using one word: ‘yes’ or ‘no’. Either you did or you didn’t do something wrong. Don’t spin the response to say “every MP should say sorry”. You are not every MP. I’m looking at you, Alan Duncan MP—and, believe me, I’d rather be doing something else… anything else.

When considering making claims in future, here’s a handy tip: when working in a job, you claim what’s required to do that job. It’s really quite simple. When I worked in a design agency, I claimed for a graphics tablet and some software. When I did client visits using my car, I claimed for petrol. Things I didn’t claim for, just to pick a few items at random: having an aga serviced, cat food, horse manure, and having a piano tuned. (On the last of those, I’ll forgive the MP in question if they make a total arse of themselves doing a live performance, tinkling the ivories on prime-time television.)

Also, when considering claims in future, bear in mind that since you’re earning at least £64,766, and no doubt have your fingers in lots of stodgy business pies, you can probably afford to pay from your salary for things like a quiche flan dish and a Vileda supermop. It might shock you to understand that not only do most of your constituents earn significiantly less than you do, but they also don’t get to claim for things like a toilet brush holder (unless they clean toilets for a living, and although MPs plumb the depths are are often surrounded by sh*t, that’s usually only in a figurative sense).

Of course, the real way to deal with this scandal is for all you MPs to stop being conniving, manipulative, shallow, lying, cheating, self-serving arseholes (perhaps learning from the rare odd exception lurking among you), but, hey, you’re MPs, right? Good luck in figuring out your replacement expense plan and working out how to use that to exploit the masses!

Love and kisses,

The general public

I run an iPhone reviews website called iPhoneTiny, driven by a Twitter feed, and I also write for various iPhone and Mac publications. This means I see a lot of iPhone apps and games, and regularly cull dozens of the things from my iPhone, to set up the next ‘batch’ of reviews.

The upside is that I’m convinced iPhone is a fantastic platform for all manner of things that people would never have believed just a short while ago. Apps like Bento and Things are great from a productivity standpoint, and myriad excellent games have significantly changed my viewpoint since writing Why iPod touch will never be a major gaming platform for Cult of Mac.

The downside—aside from a continual stream of press releases that direct me to an app’s store page rather than promo codes—is that iPhone has created a consumer group that has absolutely no understanding regarding value for money.

One of the first apps I bought for iPhone was Dropship. The game is essentially an update of Thrust, a 1986 arcade game from Firebird that itself riffed off the wonderful Gravitar coin-op. Dropship improves on the classic 8-bit release with dual-thumb controls, beautiful graphics and downloadable levels. More surprising was the price—I bought the app for £1.19. To put that in perspective, that’s 80p less than Thrust cost on cassette tape for the C64, way back in 1986.

Unlike other people, my problem isn’t so much that App Store titles are so cheap, but the fact buyers don’t seem to understand the sheer value of the items on offer. Recently rummaging around the US store, I found reviews for Power Toppler, a remake of C64 cult classic Nebulus. Like the original, the game is absurdly difficult, but it’s fairly good and worth persevering with, and at £1.19 (or $1.99 on the US store), I’d say that’s pretty good value—especially when you consider that’s roughly a third of the cost of the original Nebulus on Wii Virtual Console. Sadly, a recent review on the App Store stated that the game wasn’t worth two bucks.

iPhone owners need to take a step back and understand what they’re getting. Sure, some games are cheap and simple, but even they can be fantastic value. Witness Flight Control, which cost me just 59p, and yet provided more game time than about half the DS games I’ve bought over the past few years—and for considerably more than 59p. However, when you look at the likes of Frenzic (effectively iPhone’s Tetris, but just £1.79) and Eliss (a beautiful and unique touchscreen puzzler that sells for £1.79, but that would fetch £15+ if a DS version was possible), it’s clear too many iPhone owners are looking a gift horse in the mouth and then gobbing in it.

All the recent excitement about The Pirate Bay dragged uncomfortable arguments to the fore. Yes, The Pirate Bay was rather flagrant about its enabling access to copyrighted material. But when it boils down to it, The Pirate Bay is merely a search service for finding torrents—torrents that can also be legal, such as videogame demo downloads.

A whole bunch of people noted that The Pirate Bay was being singled out, in an attempt to provide a high-profile casualty and scare similar sites into shutting down. But much larger sites also provide access to torrents, notably Google (via a ‘filetype:torrent’ query).

The logical upshot of this was The Pirate Google, available from thepirategoogle.com. This site merely provides a front-end to a torrent-specific Google search, in the same way thousands of other sites provide access to Google Custom Search. The point is to show that Google’s functionality isn’t, in some cases, a million miles away from The Pirate Bay’s.

Google, apparently, thought differently. At the time of writing, Google’s blocked access to The Pirate Google. I’ll bet the official reasoning is down to the site’s name, in suggesting there’s some link between ‘piracy’ (bootlegging) and Google. It’ll be interesting to see if Google does the same if someone decides to create an identical site with a less controversial name.

Microsoft’s latest advertising campaign is a slightly odd one in many ways—it thrusts dollars into the hands of normal people (well, actors acting out the role of normal people) and gets them to buy a new computer. Obviously, they look at Macs, spit on them and grab a PC. At the same time, Microsoft continues to crow about the so-called ‘Apple Tax’.

Aside from the obvious danger in an advertising campaign that puts forward the argument that the only benefit your product has is price, the Apple Tax argument is one that holds little water when explored fully. Unfortunately, it’s often hard to put into words a succinct argument why the Mac side is typically better, and therefore why someone can justify spending more on what many people initially see as the same thing—‘just a computer’. Phrases like “it’s just better” and “you won’t get it until you try it” only work when someone has tried it and then tries to convince someone else to ‘cross over’ at a later date.

One of the better attempts of recent times arrived yesterday, courtesy of Harry McCracken in his article Eight Reasons Your Next Computer Should Be a Mac. He says: “Next time I encounter a Microsoft executive tsk-tsking about the onerous ‘Apple Tax’ imposed by a Mac’s needless glitz, I’m tempted to ask him what car he drives—and whether he chose the model with the cloth seats and hand-cranked windows, or one with a few creature comforts.”

The thing is, even this argument often falls on deaf ears, which makes me ask the following question: why are computers still considered dreary, strictly functional devices to so many people? When consumers have the money, they want a flash car with nice stuff, a decent mobile phone with bells and whistles, a good-looking television, and a sparkly watch. They don’t want the near-junked car with manual windows, the mobile phone that barely manages to make text messages, a TV from the dark ages, and a 1980s Casio digital watch.

With computers and the internet becoming near ubiquitous in so many people’s lives, it’s strange that so many people, as Stephen Fry put it when I interviewed him, “spend their lives in front of a screen […] in a Windows environment, the equivalent of a ‘sick building syndrome’ office, with strip lighting, ugly furniture and no freshness, sexiness or imagination in design. People are dragging out their lives in the computer equivalent of a sink estate and no-one questions it.”

I regularly question it, but I still haven’t found any answers.