STEPHEN FRY

Stephen on the crazy world of Ogg Vorbis, plug-ins and incompatibility, and the joys of using a smart electric toothbrush

There is fury in the web community on account of Apple and Nokia’s reported bullying of the W3 consortium, the body (headed by Sir Tim Berners-Lee) that lays down the standards for the web. The casus belli is this: in the same way that all browsers are capable of reading baseline picture formats .gif, .jpg and .png, so the latest implementation of the web language HTML 5.0, due out soon, had planned to incorporate a baseline audio and video format, or “codec”, to stop having to load plug-ins for QuickTime, Real, Flash, Windows Media, etc. This was welcomed by the developer community, whose preferred codec is Ogg Vorbis: this weird, Terry Pratchett-derived name signifies an entity of higher quality as an audio codec than MP3, and has the advantage common to all Open Source software of being free and available for development by everyone.

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We looked last week at changing Themes via Firefox’s Tools-Add-Ons menu. Themes are all very well, but it is extensions that offer the real powerhouse possibilities

Last week I showed how easy it was to change your browser to Firefox, a customisable, personalisable (mmm, such attractive words) web browser that offers much more control over your web life than the standard, bundled applications Internet Explorer (IE) and Safari, for Windows and Mac platforms respectively.

A little history might interest you: Firefox is the work of the Mozilla Foundation, which was founded years ago (in digital time) as part of an attempt to “kill” the first universally successful web browser, Mosaic (Mozilla is a portmanteau word derived from “Mosaic Killer”). The Mozilla design led to Netscape, the most popular browser of the late 90s, which was in turn killed by IE, the browser Microsoft cobbled together from bits of – you’ve guessed it – Mosaic source code. This internecine cannibalism led to all kinds of lawsuits and the ultimate demise of Netscape. Mozilla itself stayed alive, however, and three years ago came up with Firefox, the Third Way. There are others: Opera is carving out a niche on hand-held and gaming platforms, while various Gecko-based browsers follow the Firefox protocols. I don’t dismiss them, but we are concentrating here on the big alternative.

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Stephen Fry shows you how to enhance your browsing experience with a few simple alterations to your set-up. Technical types are free to look away and snort gently. Go on, take Firefox for a test drive.

Dork Talk will devote itself over the next two weeks to those of you who regularly browse the web but don’t consider yourselves in any way expert at techy, dweeby, geeky things. I want to show you how to enhance your browsing experience with a few simple alterations to your set-up. They don’t involve any kind of specialist knowledge and they are all reversible.

Technical types can look away and snort gently: this is aimed at – well, I have many friends who can, so to speak, drive around the web, but who have never thought much about the software vehicle taking them through the traffic.

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Despite being the frontrunner, Tim Berners-Lee is admirably modest.

Sir Tim Berners-Lee

Who is the greatest living Englishman? It would be hard to argue against the merits of Tim Berners-Lee, the sole begetter and inventor of the world wide web, an organism whose initials, www, have (in some languages, including our own) three times more syllables than the phrase they’re abbreviating, which is perhaps the only flaw in Berners-Lee’s grand design.

The story of how he devised the hypertext transfer protocol (http) and the entire language and structure of the web on a Steve Jobs NeXt computer at Cern in Switzerland in 1990 has passed into legend, though I would certainly recommend reading his own excellent and highly readable account, Weaving The Web. Sir Tim remains an idealist, passionately committed to an open, free and wholly public web as he guides the W3 Consortium towards an unknown future from his base at MIT in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

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